Building Social Business

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus looks more deeply into the concept of social business, an alternative to unfettered capitalism that channels the best energies of capitalism while addressing pressing human needs, by showing how the theory and practice of this idea is growing in the business, academic and philanthropic worlds. Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and, with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his bold new concept that promises to revolutionize the free-enterprise system: social business. Designed to fill the gap between profit-making and human needs, social business applies entrepreneurial thinking to problems like poverty, hunger, pollution, and disease, creating self-supporting, self-replicating enterprises that create jobs and generate economic growth even as they provide goods and services that make the world a better place. Partnering with some of the world's greatest corporations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have already launched several social businesses that are addressing challenges like malnutrition, lack of potable water, and endemic illness in Yunus' homeland of Bangladesh, and other organizations around the world are developing their own experiments in social business. In this book, Yunus traces the development of the social business idea; explains its lessons for entrepreneurs, social activists, and policy makers; offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own; and, shows why social business holds the potential to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise.