To be a success, Social Business requires integration of 3 challenging solutions into one organisational design:

If you are successful in focusing invention, sustenance and open replication of a Social Business, you will be involved in integrating one of the most purposeful organisational systems in the world. However micro your organisation: aim to become a market’s or a network’s centre of gravity capable of wholly attracting communal pride. Just do it by truly connecting individual passions to make a difference - web weaving together the future of people’s productive lifetimes.

FREE MARKETING OF END POVERTY

HI-TRUST FLOWS

The quality of communal trust needed to flow through a social business organisation cannot be built in a day. Entrepreneurial revolutions capable of exponentially progressing humanity’s lot usually take many years of iterative development by a small team who are prepared to learn by doing. Dr Yunus’ first social business emerged from 7 years of social action teamwork. When the founding team of four, who still work together at Grameen, started providing loans to poor women in 1976, they never imagined that they would build a bank let alone the worldwide’s happiest networking system –for more on that see: what is microcredit?

What Grameen’s founding team did from the outset was to plant village centers for 60 poorest women borrowers at a time to communally voice their needs :

· to develop themselves as successful business people

· to prioritise collective actions

· to honour micro investments in taking their community out of poverty by ensuring the highest repayment rates banking has ever seen

From these members’ dialogues and communal choices, we can map the DNA of Grameen’s gravity of “banking for the poor” and so the compass of investment and innovation responsibilities of what has become the collaboration world’s favourite brand.

Grameen’s double-loop support for poor women is designed to lovingly and relentlessly interconnect :

· Empowerment of their own peer to peer self-confidence in becoming microentrepreneurs

· Designing vital service franchises whose sustainability and economics gains from open communal replication instead of individual reinvention of the wheel.

Grameen’s catalogue of social business franchises provides an exciting record of how to sustainably map thousands of parallel communities out of poverty through a third of a century’s search to end poverty. In Bangladesh, social business modelling is the core organisational typology for 25000 Grameen employees, and thanks to BRAC and other energising social business networks more than 100,000 grassroots community servants of sustainability and micro-investment.  (See Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business, Future of Capitalism, by Muhammad Yunus 2008)

Alongside the famous microcredit, Grameen’s mature social businesses, each grounded in at least 14 exciting years of exponential-up sustainability, include:

- DIY village homes with rainproof roof and pit latrine (whose health advantages won an early prize Aga Khan award for architecture)

-Fish farming taken over from the government – once poorest local villagers had partial ownership of ponds, 10 times more fish production was possible as villagers guarded the pond from thieves and others disturbing breeding seasons

-Developing the brand “Grameen Check” to empower fair trade village textile production

-Mobile village telephone ladies whose connections across the 100000+ village centres (Grameen banks grassroots knowledge hubs) have become the worldwide benchmark for ending digital divides

Collaboration networks have even more to celebrate when we see heroic social business innovations motivated by responding to the most desperate of prospects. Among 100+ million people nations, Bangladesh has the most to be concerned over the risks of global warming. Its low lying lands are likely to be the first to be washed away. So it was natural for Grameen Bank to assign its number 2 social business entrepreneur to solar, biogas and other carbon-zero services. Since 1996, the Grameen Energy teams have been developing a sustainability exponential with ever greater excitement. In 2008, they installed more solar units than the whole of the USA. By 2012, they intend to have created 100000 green jobs for villagers. We can race towards thriving carbon negative economies if we treat the knowledge these social businesses have openly systemised as a collaboration gift to the world. If your nation has sunshine, why reinvent the wheel of green job creation when yes we can make a fast start by seeing Bangladesh as the collaborative developing nation that wants to help take network economics way above zero-sum games.

PRICING PUZZLES

End-poverty practitioners like Dr Yunus, and academics like CK Prahalad, have found that serving a vital need to the bottom billion peoples may involve continuous innovation of an organisational system that offers the same basic standard of safety that rich citizens are used to demanding but at 10 times lower cost. That takes deeply caring relationship understanding to compound collaboration goodwill flows between service workers, customers and societies as you unite to determine the future of what is possible through true sustainability investment. 

Thriving social businesses from community banking, to ending unnecessary blindness by providing cataract operations, have found that one key to staying low cost is to base all communal exchanges on trust – no lawyers fees taking an ever bigger and more complex slice of every transaction.

There are many other interesting pricing puzzles to work through such as asking different customers to pay for what they can afford as well as for what level of personal customisation they demand. Moreover, the social business franchise often finds a way to vocationally train the most disadvantaged people to create lasting jobs in the community. This helps to explain why the social business employee continuously enjoys seeing the lifetime difference she or he is capable of making through dedicated work.  The first time I met a Grameen villager she said: have you met a Nobel prize winner before, and held out her hand. Such is empowerment’s true meaning when it comes to the social business of microcredit branding.

Over time the consequence of social business transparency is a hi-trust organisational system –or network of goodwill partnering organisations - where people employ their discretionary energies to serve and love their work with a zest for productivity that only communally purposeful Micro’s entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs get to measure, as well as serve, learn and know. 

RECOMMENDATIONS

Seeing is believing. Go and visit Bangladesh particularly if you are young enough to have time to intern on a social business project.