- Image by eschipul via Flickr
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.
