One of the four books we had to read this semester in my PAF 9100 class was this one, Muhammad Yunus's inspiring narrative about how to create social businesses. If you have read any other of his publications, you may already be well aware of the Nobel Laureate's contagious positivism, and his unhuman ability of turning obstacles into beneficial opportunities. He is indeed an example of visionary leadership.
Mr. Yunus received Peace Nobel Price in 2006 for his Grameen Bank initiative, an institution that does microlending without collateral to the poorest of the poor. Now that Grameen Bank has spread to many countries around the world, Muhammad Yunus has taken on a bigger task. His book, Creating a World Without Poverty, proposes just what the title says, a shift in the way business are ran to abolish poverty worldwide. As idealist and impossible as this may sound, Yunus provides interesting examples on how it could be accomplished. More important than the technicalities of the proposal however, he has taken a wonderful idea and drafted a plan to implement it.
Mr. Yunus, like many of us MPA students, wants to improve the way the world is, and has found a way to do it. His leadership towards the noble goal of abolishing poverty is admirable. He has faced many obstacles, but always, one way or another, it works out at the end for the benefit of the initiative. Mr. Yunus is an excellent situational leader. An economist by degree, he seems to be also a great negotiator with high emotional intelligence.
I thought this would be a great example of an inspiring figure. If anyone would like more details about the book, you may click in the following link: Creating a World Without Poverty.
I agree that Yunus is a great situational leader. I do think that a significant factor in Yunus’ ability to implement the programs that he did was his emotional connection to the people and land. Yunus’ had the ability to reframe the objectives of business and the way the poor were viewed. Yunus’ was emotionally involved in the betterment of the Bangladeshi people, as being one of them and seeing the difficulties of the poor. I wonder how other leaders would act if they were being innately driven by emotion and not monetary incentives. For Yunus it provided him with new ways of viewing the problem of poverty and how it can be solved.
ReplyDeleteFarah
Muhammad Yunus is definitely a great visionary leader and a huge inspiration. The first time I learned about him was in a course that I took through the business school, MGT 9970, Entrepreneurship and Community Development. The course covered a significant amount of material on social entrepreneurship, and discussed individuals like Muhammad Yunus and Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America. If you're interested in social entrepreneurship, you may want to check out MGT 9970. You can take it as an elective if you receive permission from SPA. I've included a description of the course below.
ReplyDeleteDeanne
MGT 9970 Entrepreneurship and Community Development
3 hours; 3 credits
This course is designed to introduce students to the current and prospective roles of entrepreneurship in a communities economic development. It provides a guiding framework and common language for thinking about these roles and about appropriate and strategic interventions for fostering them. The course begins with an examination of current practices in community economic development regarding entrepreneurship, their attributes and their deficiencies. It then offers an alternative, systemic approach, viewing the communities economy as a pipeline of entrepreneurs and enterprises at various levels of skill development and companies at differing stages of the business life cycle. It explores how entrepreneurs and their businesses advance within this pipeline and the importance of maintaining a flow of entrepreneurial activity to community wealth building.
Corporation-Nonprofit Engagements
ReplyDelete"Yukiguni Maitake Co. Ltd. Plans to Form Joint Venture with Grameen Bank
10/13/2010
Yukiguni Maitake Co. Ltd. announced it will set up a joint venture with Grameen Bank to help improve the living standard of impoverished people in the South Asian nation. The two sides hope to provide new employment opportunities to farmers and women through the cultivation of mung beans, from which moyashi sprouts are grown. The joint venture, tentatively called Grameen Yukiguni Maitake, will be established in Dhaka in late October with capital of $100,000. It will be owned 75% by Yukiguni Maitake and 25% by the Grameen Bank group. Through the end of 2010, the joint venture will grow mung beans on an experimental basis on an 8-hectare farmland in Rungpur, some 35 kilometers north of Dhaka. It will expand the farmland to 500 to 1,000 hectares next year and later. The production of mung beans will be outsourced to 700 to 800 local farmers. The joint firm is set to employ some 100 people to sort the mung beans according to size. Yukiguni Maitake will purchase beans suited for moyashi production from the joint venture for exports to Japan." (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=7010013)
School of Public Affairs Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management's seminar, "Beyond Philanthropy: Cause Marketing and Corporate Sponsorships For Nonprofits" covered the same topic today. Participants emphasized the importance of the win-win situation that takes the place of just giving away of some money that corporations have in hand and want to use for a good public image.
They also pointed out the fact that in today's world of interdependence, power is equally distributed between corporations and nonprofit organizations that run a project together. Nonprofits have the freedom to choose which corporations to collaborate with or not.
Isil