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A Empresa Social (2011)

by Muhammad Yunus(Favorite Author)

3.92 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Editorial Presença

review 1: I was really excited when I found the audiobook of this title on the shelf at Half-Price Books. I had an 8 hour drive coming up, and now instead of spending the time scanning for radio stations, I could listen to a book by the awesomely awesome Muhammad Yunus.I was psyched.Unfortunately, the book turned out to be quite disappointing. I was expecting something a LOT more rigorous from an economist. (Edit: I almost said, "from a guy who won the Nobel Prize in Economics," but then I looked it up and it turns out he actually won the Nobel PEACE Prize. Which makes a lot more sense now.) The book is just a lot of fluff. And not just fluff, but crazy utopian fluff that ignores even the most basic economics.Apparently, capitalism is great, but its one flaw is that it treats ... morepeople as if they are single-mindedly greedy and ignores their compassionate tendencies. Wait, that's a flaw? I thought that was, you know, the entire underlying principle of capitalism. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" and all that. But so it is, according to Yunus. And he has the solution: reform capitalism to include compassionate motivations. This also makes no sense. Capitalism is a theory that seeks to explain the behavior of people and businesses...you can't "reform" the theory of capitalism any more than you can reform the theory of gravity. It either accurately predicts outcomes, or it doesn't.In any case, Yunus's main idea is to develop organizations that function just as profit-maximizing businesses, only they seek to address societal ills and invest all "profit" into further expanding the service. For example, he discusses an initiative between his Grameen Bank and Veolia Water which is working to sell clean drinking water to a Bangladeshi village in such a way that its revenues balance all its costs. Any surplus they make will first pay back the initial investment (with no interest or profit); then the rest will be used to begin cleaning the drinking water the next village over, and so on.It's an awesome idea, and one day I actually hope to work on something like that, but the book does nothing back up the theory. What entices people to invest in social business? Answer: the compassion motivation in people is just as strong as the money-making motivation, if only they had a way to express it. (Yeah, right.) What will allow people to invest in social business in the most effective way, without any price signals? Answer: traders on the floor of the social business stock market will make their best judgments, and the aggregate of their guesses will be an accurate representation of which social businesses are doing the most good. But it's forbidden to make money on a social business, so all of these traders are just spending their entire lives researching the social indicators of social businesses in every different imaginable field, analyzing numbers of people served with clean water to numbers of people served with proper nutrition and comparing them to determine which is more "valuable" just so they can make money to...invest in more social businesses. Oh, and we will live in a utopia where your social status will depend on how "effective" your social businesses are, and government welfare programs will no longer exist because nothing bad will ever happen to anyone.I am...baffled. And disappointed. There's an interesting middle part where he talks about the examples of social businesses he has started through Grameen, and those are worth reading to hear about the challenges they faced and overcame. I just wish there was more to back this up as a truly viable method of poverty reduction other than wishful thinking. I am sure the social businesses that do exist are awesome, and I'm sure people will start mare, and in general, I am fully behind the concept. I just don't see it as the earth-shattering game-changer he wants it to be without a much more solid foundation.
review 2: Yunus admits at the end of this book that it's his ambition to dream big. In that context, it's easier to give credit for his idea of "social businesses". He says that our current method of capitalism creates poverty. As a result, he offers the idea of social business as a new sector of capitalism as opposed to the current methods we have to deal with poverty today such as social enterprise, non-profits, CSR intitiatives, etc. I give him the benefit of the doubt that since Yunus is a man of big ambitions and dreams, this is his way of delivering a constructive criticism of capitalism.Unfortunately, with so much focus on all things Grameen and all things Yunus, and with little focus on applications of "social business" outside of the Grameen umbrella, the book came off as a little egotistical to me. It tries to offer both a new economic theory of "social business" and a practical guidebook for how an individual could get involved in this new sector. In trying to do both at once, it falls short of doing either particularly well.I think it's a worthwhile read because Yunus' ideas are backed by the credibility of his accomplishments. I just think this book would have been better as an annual letter to Grameen stakeholders or a TED talk than an actual, for-profit book. less

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