Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Enjoyable read. Yunus explores both micro and macro solutions to poverty. His description of a 'social business' is in fact identical to the way I personally define a 'social enterprise' though he uses the latter to encompass a much broader sphere of operation. As such the idea does not appear particularly new, but Yunus more closely defines and operationalizes the concept than I have seen before, elucidating through the fascinating in-depth example of Grameen-Danone. His macro level arguments are less detailed and rigorous and reach more strongly into philosophy and idealism but are still interesting and inspiring to read.
The book has been written for wide readership and will be accessible to pretty much anyone. The downside of this is that the arguments are not always analytically rigorous or complete and are more based on strong, well formulated and articulated hypotheses and examples (though he does argue against the major counter-arguments for certain aspects of the social business model). However the purpose of the book is more to open the reader's mind to a non-traditional conceptualization of the way the world works and to inspire a different way of thinking - something which the book certainly achieves.

Convincing. After reading few sound bites about social business on blogs and short form essays, I came off a bit cynical about the ideology of an alternative structure for firms. I felt questions about the incentive system for social businesses remained unanswered, especially with the cheaper alternative (for the firms) triple bottom line structure. Creating A World Without Poverty showed and convinced me that a thriving and sustainable ecosystem of social businesses is attainable. My error in judgment arose from throwing the ideology behind social business into the same basket as charities, triple-quadruple bottom line ideologies and all other social enterprises. Yunus‘ ideas which evolved organically by trial and error clearly separates all these approaches to doing good. If you are a cynic like I was, I highly recommend that you read Yunus’ text.
Yunus was an economics professor who stumbled into his crusade by accident. Interestingly, to have come as far as he has (incredible Bangladesh poverty eradication statistics in the book), he had to jettison a sizable portion of the economic theories which he was trained to teach. Yunus also mentioned that none of the success of the Grameen Group would have been possible if he was a trained banker. Yet he succeeded as a banker to the poor by turning some economic principles on its head. This touches on one of my favorite topics. The burden of knowing, that is, how much does our formal education and training sabotage our chances of coming up with new ways of dealing with old problems.
I like the idea of a social mutual fund for the poor discussed in the book. The discussion on the tax structure for social businesses was also well presented. On the flip side, an alternative (cleverly woven tales), style of presentation could have resulted in a book with more mass appeal. Then again, Mr Yunus is an Economist.
Overall the book is illuminating and it contained some wild ideas, worth putting to test in other developing countries.

This book pushed my inspiro-meter's needle to red. It's a must read for anyone under the illusion that:

a) gargantuan problems like poverty are too big to do anything about;
b) laziness among the poor is a primary reason for the persistence of poverty; and
c) capitalism is evil by nature.

This work will disabuse you of all three notions. For those not familiar with Yunus, he won a nobel peace prize for having inventing "micro-lending". He runs a bank that gives tiny loans, without collateral and at low interest rates, to the poor, so that they can start small businesses for themselves. In turn, over the last three decades, the borrowers have managed to repay their loans on time at a rate that would put any 1st world western bank to shame. As a result, the bank has helped *millions* of people pull themselves out of poverty, and at the same time created extensive community structures among the poor that didn't exist previously. This fact serves as overwhelming evidence that poverty has in most cases little to do with laziness, and everything to do with a lack of discretionary capital. The poor are poor because they're poor.

The tactics that Yunus employs are pure capitalism, but the ends he to which employs them are different. Whereas most companies try to maximize profit, the businesses Yunus runs, starting with his bank, seek to achieve some kind of social goal. Importantly, he builds his "social businesses" to be financially self-sustaining, so that they don't have to rely on philanthropy or any other unreliable or riddled-with-outside-agendas sources of capital. Yunus, having successfully started many such businesses, has now written this book to explain how it all works and to exhort others to do it as well.

Yunus is a rare species: a keenly practical thinker with strong, selfless ideals. The only reason the book doesn't get five stars is I think it could've been organized a little better. But the content is 5 stars all the way: it's extremely rare that I find myself crying for joy, reading a book over breakfast, but I found myself having to take breaks to wipe the tears from my eyes reading this one.

It is very interesting that Grameen (rural) bank is a unique bank in the way that it works, developers of micro finance to the poor but have added other Grameen projects that provide training, renewable energy and information technology, just to name few.
They have also incentives that promote health and education to the families of its clients.
This is really a road map to leave poverty behind.
Remember also that this is mainly in Bangladesh and more the 90% of the loans go to women in a country that is mainly Muslim (before Grameen bank, it was very rare that women were given loans) and you never hear of radical Muslims incidents from Bangladesh.
As he well said in his Peace Nobel Prize lecture "Poverty is a Threat to Peace" ... thus getting out of poverty is the way to achieve peace.

Using Profit Maximizing Business (PMB) as a model, Yunus advocates the idea of a Social Business, which would have two sources of motivation: maximization of profit and doing good to people of the world. Yunus offers a new perspective on the world we live in with idealistic, yet very inspirational, objectives to strive for. The success of Grameen Bank in his native Bangladesh and the spread of micro financing around the world have proven that many of these objectives can be achieved in our lifetime, - the fact that makes this book very appealing to anyone interested in the broad concept of development.

Yunus is one of those rare big thinkers who sees not just the world as it is but also it should be, and as it can be if we make it so. I really enjoyed the detailed description of the Gramene Danone partnership. I did find the book to be a tad repetitive in places. In general, the book does a fine job to lay the foundations of social business and distinguish it from other organizations working to help the poor. Still, several questions about social businesses remain unanswered (a point that Yunus acknowledges). For instance, I would like to hear more about whether governments can and should incentivise corporations to launch social businesses by providing them preferential access to for-profit markets. Also, the tenant of no dividends seemed to be undermined by Danone's insistance on a (modest) dividend for the yogurt JV. This seems to indicate that the limitations Yunus described for CSR initiatives also applies when social businesses are sponsored by for-profit corporations. Yet the separate Danone social fund looks promising: get investors to voluntarily contribute to the social business, which takes the pressure of management in sponsoring such initiatives.

I could have done without the overly long section on Grameen and its history, but other than that it had some really interesting ideas to share.

This is one of the most important and inspiring books I've ever read. It could have used a better editor (the first and last 40 pages are the real meat). And more detail about how to bring these ideas into the real world would have been nice. But I think Yunus knows he can't possibly have all the answers. I saw this book as his attempt to inspire younger generations to pursue change in creative ways, while providing a broad framework (social business) which has a good chance of becoming a driving organizational paradigm of the 21st century.

That such an influential global figure had the courage to dream society-transforming dreams and share them with the world is a rare treat at a time when the "theology of capitalism" is so unquestioned in our mainstream discourse.

A lot of the criticism I’ve heard about this book revolves around Dr. Yunus’ perceived idealism regarding business as a “social enterprise”. His critics miss the fact that he is, in general, a pragmatic practitioner; simply look at the success of his Grameen Group of companies. Dr. Yunus has always advocated sustainability in social organizations which is why Grameen Bank’s loans, instead of being subsidized, yield market competitive interest rates. Instead of relying on the goodwill of donors and charitable organizations, his organizations are able to grow organically and therefore have a larger positive impact on the poor in Bangladesh. His models in the 1970s have influenced the design and operation of thousands of microfinance institutions across the world. While I agree that the design of social business will not operate exactly as Dr. Yunus describes, I do believe that we could continue to see more partnerships and collaboration between multi-national corporations and microfinance institutions at a grassroots or regional level, similar to the Grameen-Danone Group model. I do agree with Dr. Yunus that modern economic theory presupposes the one-dimensional “profit-maximizing” individual, but I also believe that social business will require some sort of an economic incentive, however minimal, in order to be successful. Recall that Danone Group did require a 2 percent return on their investment in order to convince their shareholders of the value in a partnership with Grameen Bank. Overall, it is better to have the vision of someone like Dr. Yunus in mind, despite how improbable the outcome seems. I'm sure the very thought of providing loans, savings, and other financial services to the marginalized poor appeared outrageous to the formal financial sector fifty years ago.

Yunus has fascinating ideas, and I admire his spirit and tenacity. That said, the book is not well written and very redundant in parts. He has a tendency to say "People *will* do this," and then doesn't back up his statements, which is frustrating because I'd like to hear a better argument in favor of a lot of his ideas in order to promote them more widely.