Power of unreasonable people

Bill Gates’ call for “creative capitalism” opens windows of opportunity as well as a box of paradoxes. A humanized version of capitalism seems like a friendly, win-win no-brainer. But this idea converges with trends that glimmer with the potential for a deeper, even subversive, transformation.

One of these trends was highlighted by the celebration of unreasonable people at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF). Delegates at Davos found their welcome kit included a book, The Power of Unreasonable People. These are innovators who refuse to adapt to standard formulas of profit maximization and instead forge new kinds of value creation. The overt focus of the book, written by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan and published by Harvard Business Press, is on helping mainstream business understand and work with social entrepreneurs who are creating markets that change the world. But the subtext has larger implications. A truly changed world would mean the end of business as usual, whether Microsoft et al are ready or not.

As Muhammad Yunus has said often enough, “The future of the world lies in the hands of market-based social entrepreneurs.” Yunus favours business as a form of freedom which opens unlimited opportunities for expansion and replication—that can work for the rickshaw puller and marginal farmer who have otherwise appeared on the world stage merely as “the poor”. It is from this vantage point of identity that Yunus says, “We can create a powerful alternative to the orthodoxy of capitalism—a social-consciousness-driven private sector, created by social entrepreneurs.” Yunus’ example inspired WEF founder Klaus Schwab to set up the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 1998.

Since then, the term “social entrepreneur” has become mainstream and this is not merely because Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. The big push has come from the global proliferation of diverse kinds of social entrepreneurs tackling everything from health and education to soil regeneration. It has also been fuelled by strategic interventions by some of those who have made it big in the old style capitalist way. As eBay’s co-founder Pierre Omidyar says, “I have learnt that if you want ...a global impact you can’t ignore business. (Not) corporate responsibility programmes, but business models that provoke social change.”

“Doing well by doing good”, a controversial idea even five years ago, has now become conventional wisdom. The business of business is no longer just business as big corporations agree they must actively engage with solving the world’s big problems. “Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave,” shuddered The Economist in a recent issue.