Overview of the book
Yunus, Muhammad, and Karl Weber. Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. Print.
The book was authored by Muhammad Yunus. Yunus is the founder of the Grameen Bank, which is a microcredit institution. Through his economic policies, Yunus made an immense contribution to the fight against poverty and through his economic paradigm; he manages to espouse an economic model that places humanity at the heart of polling resource together for positive potential. His efforts in the promotion of social business enabled him to win the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, which he co-shard with his Bank, the Grameen bank. There is no individual who has done a lot to revolutionize economic and social development around the world more than Muhammad Yunus. In his book “Building social business” he provides a blueprint for the type of company that can help eliminate poverty among the world’s poor and to enable them to make money.
Introduction
In his book, Yunus offers a genuine insight into the global poverty and also provides a unique perspective on ways that social business can exist and thrive with traditional businesses or order to eradicate poverty and to better the lives of the general citizens of the world. According to Yunus, social business is all about joy. He narrates of many undertaking that bring hope to many people. He provides a lot of ideas, together with nuts and balls as well as practical advice to those people who are willing and ready to take the plunge into the lucrative world of social business. He predicts that, in the coming years, social business will be the economic structure to that should be followed to alleviate the world from poverty and which will change the lives of most people.
Yunus is very quick in dismissing the notion that working for social business amounts to lowering one’s standards; to him this is wrong. He posits that social businesses provide employees with good salaries and benefits. To him social business implies not benefitting from the poor. Yunus explains how he believes social business, and enterprise can redeem the world from the failed promise of free-market economy and the main solution is giving the poor people the main resources to help themselves. With his economic ideas, Yunus provides people with valuable information that just a plate of food. In his books, Yunus, invokes new type of capitalism where social business has a great potential to alter the failed promise of free-market economy.
Summary of the subject matter
The book is only dedicated to the concept of social business; its importance, maintenance and implementation. Social business is considered as an innovative business model that aims to foster the idea of advancing business as a measure of addressing various social problems that affect the modern societies, as opposed to maximizing profit. The book exposes social capitalism as an alternative to traditional capitalism that can truly serve humanity and their pressing needs such as poverty. In the book, every social business creates employment for the local population, enhance the working conditions of the local labor and more so address the social ills that afflict the society as good nutrition, education and health.
In the perspective of Yunus, social business is a non-loss investment and a non-dividend company that is dedicated completely to realizing a social goal. In a social business, the investor obtains back his investment money, though the investor will not get the dividend that is more than his ploughed money. Yunus takes his Grameen bank as a perfect example of social business. The bank’s borrowers were the shareholders (Schwartz 1).
Several entrepreneur, social activists and corporations all over the world; to him the main idea behind social business is to create a self-supporting and a viable commercial enterprise with the ability to stimulate economic growth and to produce goods and services to meet the needs of humanity. Through his social business model, Yunus demonstrates, and puts into practice, the reasons why it is viable, and holds a lot of potential to redeeming the failed promise of the free market-economy (Yunus 1).
Yunus captures a win-win economic situation. This is a fundamental economic idea whereby both parties expect to succeed and to gain something from the voluntary exchange. This principle is evident in the economic paradigm of Yunus. In the Grameen trade model there is voluntary trade exchange that every party benefits and it does not interfere with the basic functions of the economic system. Through the book, Yunus wades off the misconception of the basic elements of economic facts that Americans are against. He also dispels the notion by the American public that profits in business account for a third of the commodity price. This makes people embrace social business as the best and alternative economic model (Baumol and Blinder 5).
Summary of the book
Yunus, in his book, explicates a new dimension of capitalism; he calls this capitalism social business. It is an enterprise that involves harnessing profit making energy towards the objective of satisfying human wants. Yunus demonstrates how social business has moved from being just a theory to an inspiring practice that has been adopted by various stakeholders in various parts of the world from Asia and America to Africa and Europe. He provides a practical example on how social business has helped in transforming the lives of low class people; and provides a practical ideas and guidance for people who wish to venture into social business to better their own lives. He also provides an explanation on how corporate and public policies should adapt in order to accommodate the social business model. He also demonstrates why the social business model holds the potential to alleviate the society from the free market capitalism that, according to him, has failed to address the economic needs of the society.
In the book, the author portrays social business as a form of capitalism that serves the pressing needs of humanity. Social business is a typical manifesto of those people who have the deep care and motivation to solve the wicked problems bedeviling the society as illiteracy, global warming, poverty and malnutrition. Economic commentators have described social business as throve of creative ideas and a good business model. The author posits that he was motivated by his plans and desire to create a sustainable solution towards bettering the lives of the poor people in the world and hence help eliminate global poverty (Yunus Centre 1).
Yunus builds a case that demonstrates the fact that very many businesses would be the powerful addition towards the prevalent cases of poverty; he considers microfinance as the only weapon to fight poverty and economic inequality in the world. To justify his assertion, Yunus shares the story of his experiments that have involved the creation and the running of new companies that are aimed at alleviating several social and economic problems that touch on extreme poverty, diseases resulting from walking barefoot, unemployment among women and girls and malnourished children. He managed to craft his social business model by partnering with International Corporation such as Intel, Viola, Danone and Adidas (Yunus and Alan 24).
The message by Yunus is that of hope, he points out sensibly that if the society is driven by greed and profit, we will not have churches, synagogues and mosques, schools or museums and that there would be not charities or non-profit organizations. Yunus has several ideas on how several social businesses can be established in various parts of the world. He also provides a chapter that provides guidelines on how an interested person can create a successful social business. To him, it involves making several adjustments. The author believes that if the dream of social business is actualized as the poverty free society weapon, using the tools provided by free market economy like social business and microfinance and if we leverage on the power of science and technology, poverty will be curbed in the world (Yunus and Karl 6).
Conclusion
Through his social business model, Yunus serves the humanity by satisfying the most pressing needs. The author comes out as an excellent rendition on how people in poor countries invest while guaranteed of modest return and doing well to other people. According to him, profit motive or profit maximization has been proved to be a model that does not yield good results because the majority poor in the society do not afford high prices. He mentions that this model is practiced in United States of Americ,a and that is why he established branches of Grameen in Queens and Brooklyn in New York. Yunus build a model that involves him guaranteeing loan to the poor and also acts as an intermediary. This will make the banks too willing to lend money due to the strong guarantee. The main reason behind the program was to alleviate poverty among the general population, built a sustainable economy while having a strong return on investment. When the loans are paid back, the profits obtained are returned back to investment. This is as opposed to other models where the profit is retained as a form of earnings.
References
Yunus, Muhammad, and Karl Weber. Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. Print.
Yunus, Muhammad, and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle against World Poverty. Sydney, N.S.W.: ReadHowYouWant, 2010. Print.
Leonard, Devin. Microcredit? To Him, It’s Only a Start. Web. 17th March 17, 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02shelf.html?_r=0>
Schwartz, Rodney. socially responsible business, hear, hear for profit. Web. 17th March, 2014. <http://www.ssireview.org/book_reviews/entry/building_social_business_muhammad_yunus
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Yunus Centre. Building Social Business: The New Kind Of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs. Web. March 17, 2014. <http://www.muhammadyunus.org/index.php/for-test-only/580-building-social-business-the-new-kind-of-capitalism-that-serves-humanitys-most-pressing-needs >
Baumol, William and Blinder, Alan. Macroeconomics: Principles and Policy (12th edition). 2011. Print.
