Creating A World Without Poverty

On our return trip from India and Nepal I was able to polish off this book by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Yunus is mostly known as the founder of Grameen Bank and the inventor of the micro-finance industry. I have previously blogged about his first book, Banker to the Poor.

I was delighted to ready early on in Creating A World Without Poverty that Yunus' central premise is an idea that largely correlates with my new non-profit business. The book, subtitled Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, puts forth the idea of a new business model that marries the idealism of non-profits with the efficiencies and incentives of capitalism. That's exactly what I'm trying to do with my new endeavor, Gone Reading, Inc.

Yunus' brand of "social business" is a little different than my vision, however. While I'm focusing on a business that harvests profits from the developed world to fund work in the developing world, Yunus proposes to harvest profits from the the developing world itself. Although I'm not pursuing his model right now, I like the thinking. Much of the book centers around one such partnership between Yunus' organization and Danone Group (the global foods consortium), which produces and markets a brand of high nutrition, low-cost yogurt to help the poor of Bangladesh. The partnership is in its infancy, but the model is convincing.

Unfortunately, the last third of the book drifts into theoretical ideas about how to cure, seemingly, all of the world's problems. He drones on about the evils of Western capitalism, the U.S. in particular, to a degree that is counter productive. For a book about ending poverty he spends an incredible amount of time postulating about how to cure the environment, and he does so unconvincingly. Where the first part of the book is rooted in case studies and facts, the later part of the book is based on pure speculation. He should have stopped about 75 pages earlier.

Still, Yunus' credibility on the subject of "how to change the world" is truly impressive. I'm thrilled to seem him endorse a business model similar to my own. Let's hope it translates to real world success.