Thursday, January 31, 2008

Social business and Work-life balance

Cover of Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism By Muhammad Yunus, Karl Weber Nobe prize winners Muhammad Yunus and Karl Weber in Creating a World Without Poverty ask us to use capitalism for social ends. The idea with social business is that it can be both profitable and socially beneficial. Ideally the social benefit increases with the profit, giving the business an incentive to act for the public good.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize outlines his vision for a new business model that combines the power of free markets with the quest for a more humane world--and tells the inspiring stories of companies that are doing this work today.

In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit.

In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social, and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet.

Creating a World Without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way--and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of ever human being.

From: Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, Product Description, Amazon, 2007


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