Muhammad Yunus Might Be Coming Your Way Soon
Via our friends and allies at Grameen Foundation, I just learned of a book tour that Dr. Muhammad Yunus starts this Friday in Washington DC. After that, he’ll go on to visit seven additional cities across the U.S. while presenting his latest book Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs.
Always inspiring and thought provoking, Mr. Yunus is a speaker not to be missed. I’m looking forward to his new ideas around the concept of “social business”, an interesting alternative to the growing discussion around the use of enterprise and for profit investment for the benefit of social causes. He introduced the concept in his previous “A World without Poverty” and now builds on it with further examples and recommendations in the work that this tour presents.
This tour offers an opportunity as good as any to ask for your opinion on the future of impact investing. One option is that capital markets and the profit motive will thrive, as defended by Alvaro Rodriguez and Michael Chu of IGNIA. An alternative is social business, as advocated by Mr. Yunus.
Both leverage market forces and enterprise to address the needs of the poor. But what do you think? Is the profit motive a necessary imperative to drive this movement to the scale it needs?
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