The Age of the New Entrepreneur
Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank Innovates Business
Suite101's debut Celebrity Writer for the month of March,
E-Myth guru Michael Gerber, profiles Nobel Peace Prize winner
Muhammad Yunus as an exemplary entrepreneur.
Identifying Business Opportunities
Some would suggest that the biggest business opportunities may lie on the Internet, in the health sector or in the software industry, but these are only a few of many. The fact is, business opportunities exist everywhere, as they did in the past, the trick is recognizing them and using imagination and innovation to realize this potential.
Nobody would have predicted the success of Starbucks, McDonalds or Walmart. They are creatively designed and intelligently executed ordinary businesses that became - because of their owners’ entrepreneurially intense mindset - extraordinary exemplars of well-expressed imagination in a field of mediocre competitors.
The biggest opportunity lies in creating a company that does something that traditional commodity businesses don’t do nearly as well, for a market that has grown tired of the status quo. An entrepreneur must spot the weakness and improve upon it in such a significant way that a brand is born. This new brand will become preferentially unique because it delivers results better, faster, cheaper than anyone else.
Today’s Socially- and Globally-Minded Entrepreneurs
But this is not a new concept. What is new, is that today’s entrepreneurs have adopted a fresh view of the world that empowers them to take on problems traditionally outside the business milieu. Because entrepreneurs possess the imagination, innovation, passion and skill to produce results, they are often more efficient than governments, charities, religious institutions and other not-for-profit organizations that have historically been responsible for proposing solutions.
Muhammad Yunis’ Grameen Bank
2006 Nobel Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, a 67-year-old PHD in Economics, exasperated with nations who justified poverty rather than eradicating it, applied his imagination and business acumen to the plight of poor women in Bangladesh and pioneered a system that offered ground up social and economic development by providing just enough capital to grant these women the means to support themselves and their children.
Yunus set up The Grameen Bank in 1976 with just $27 from his own pocket. More than 30 years later, the bank has 6.6 million borrowers, of which 97% are women. “Just enough capital” was a catchphrase that preceded today’s usage of the term now coined “micro-lending.” This notion inspired a transformational movement that now translated this vision into practical action for millions of workers in more than 100 countries.
Yunus tackled the problem of poverty the way any entrepreneur would, by laying bare the root of the problem and innovating solutions to overcome these core obstacles. Financial, political, religious and familial restrictions prevented these Bangladeshi women from running self-sufficient businesses that would produce the income they and their children needed. These deterrents appeared crippling at first, but they could be alleviated by the injection of small amounts of cash loaned on terms acceptable to them. Remarkably, 96% of these loans are repaid.
Yunus is a perfect exemplar of the New Entrepreneur, an individual who doesn’t look for traditional opportunities that suggest only personal gain, but rather who applies business sense to global problems for collective gain.
For more about Muhammad Yunus, read Banker to The Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty or Creating A World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. To learn about my own thoughts on the practice of writing - books and for online clients - read the first of this 3-part interview with Business & Finance Editor Lisa Manfield.
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