Those who thought Muhammad Yunus would rest on his laurels after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, got it all wrong. Yunus and his Grameen Foundation are working hard to show us another lesson in making this world a better place, including a lesson in capitalism.

Basic idea behind Yunus’ next Big Idea is that capitalism does not work optimally because we see it too narrowly. Companies and their shareholders ought to measure their performance not only in terms of revenue and profit, but also in terms of social returns, of lives they saved or improved. We are not talking about another happiness index or a GDP alternative.

Like McDonough and Braungart’s worldchanging ‘waste=food’ philosophy which I blogged about last year, also Yunus’ philosophy makes economic sense to business people:

“It supports your brand, returns your capital, and you’re not going to lose money and you give your shareholders a vision of doing something good.”

Danone formed a joint venture with the Grameen Foundation to start the first ‘social business enterprise’:

“The yogurt Danone would make would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.

The factory – and ultimately 50 more, if it works – will rely on Grameen microborrowers buying cows to sell it milk on the front end, Grameen microvendors selling the yogurt door to door and Grameen’s 6.6 million members purchasing it for their kids. It will employ 15 to 20 women.

And Danone estimates that it will provide income for 1,600 people within a 20-mile radius of the plant. Biodegradable cups made from cornstarch, solar panels for electricity generation and rainwater collection vats make the enterprise environmentally friendly.

International organizations such as Unicef believe it may be such a revolutionary means of improving nutrition through a sustainable business model that it is watching closely – and may seek to replicate around the world.”

In an abstract sense, Yunus’ philosophy lines up nicely with the multi-perspectival approach often taken in integrative assessment and scenario-based futures studies (think: people, planet, profit). More practically speaking, it shows a win-win-win situation moving beyond the status quo.

BTW, Fortune magazine published another interview with the Nobel Peace Prize winner back in October.

Via Fortune Magazine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 22:31 and is filed under business, projects, society, sustainability, visionary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.