Muhammad Yunus on Grameen Danone-a social business in youtube

Follow Professor Muhammad Yunus on Grameen Danone – a social business venture in youtube

Out to maximize social gains, not profit-Muhammad Yunus with NY Times

The following is an interview of Professor Muhammad Yunus given to New York Times way back to December 9, 2006 after Yunus associated himself with Danone in his venture of social business, I am specially impressed with his answer to the need of job for the Grameen graduates at the end of the interview:

It was March 2005 and Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, had just agreed — over a handshake during lunch at a Paris restaurant — to start a “social business” with the head of Groupe Danone, the French food company.

Muhammad Yunus’ Social Business-Saving the world with a cup of yogurt

Sheridan Prasso reports in Fortune magazine regarding his observation on Professor Yunus’ first vnture about social business:

Along a dirt road in Bangladesh’s green, fertile heartland, 140 miles northwest of Dhaka, workers in flip-flops are hauling bricks, pouring cement and hammering boards. The object of their labor: a small yogurt factory being built by Danone, the French food company, on the outskirts of Bogra.

It may not look like much, but the one-story building behind a wrought-iron gate is the epicenter of a Big New Idea – one that Muhammad Yunus, the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work on microcredit, thinks can revolutionize a world still being transformed by his first big idea.

Davos 2008: Bill Gates’ Creative Capitalism and Muhammad Yunus’ Social Business-Vivian Norris de Montaigu

Vivian Norris de Montaigu, writes in The Huffington Post on the closeness of Bill Gates’ Creative Capitalism and Muhammad Yunus’ Social Business:

The way it works is that instead of giving money away to a non-profit charity, you help create businesses — in fact new business models. As little as a $25 can motivate an entrepreneur in the developing world, by funding a microcredit organization such as Kiva.org, which gives out small loans. This process allows that money to grow and be reused and help create true sustainability, unlike the charity dollar which must be raised each year. Now try the same thing on the corporate level and you can begin to see that it is truly possible to create a “world without poverty”, and that poverty is indeed an “artificial construction.” These words have been stated time and again by Professor Muhammad Yunus’, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and they are put forth in his latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. Professor Yunus, also known as the “banker to the poor” is asking that the poor be poor no more and is inviting major international corporations to not make a profit off the poor, but actually create sustainable businesses which also provide a public service, be it in the areas of health, technology, infrastructure, communications, education, etc.

Bill Gates proposes ‘Creative Capitalism’

Bill Gates proposes his ‘Creative Capilalism’ in World Economic Forum
at Davos, Switzerland

Thank you for that welcome and for the privilege of speaking at this forum.

This is the last time I will come to Davos as a full-time employee of Microsoft.

Some of us are lucky enough to arrive at moments in life where we can pause, reflect on our work, and say: “This is great. It’s fun, exciting, and useful—I could do this forever.”

But the passing of time forces each of us to take stock and ask: What have I accomplished so far? What do I still want to accomplish?

Thirty years, twenty years, ten years ago, my focus was totally on how the magic of software could change the world.

I believed that breakthroughs in technology could solve the key problems. And they do—increasingly—for billions of people.

Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business-Reasononline

Reasononline that is for free minds and free markets describes a ‘Reason debate’ featuring Milton Friedman, Whole Foods’ John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor’s T.J. Rodgers:

Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The future Nobel laureate in economics had no patience for capitalists who claimed that “business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em�ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid�ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re�formers.”