A light, informal conversation hosted by Time Magazine between Bill Gates, C.K. Prahalad, John Mackey (another one of my heroes, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods), Ogilvy & Mather chairman Shelly Lazarus, and Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the International Center for Research on Women. None of these people are dummies. It's a short, fun read. If, after reading this, you just can't get enough of Bill Gates, try these other Time Magazine articles: The Audacity of Bill Gates, by Michael Kinsley, and Making Capitalism More Creative, an essay by Bill himself.
This was a project carried out by UNDP in 2004. The full
title of the final report was "Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making
Business Work for the Poor;" the link above is to the homepage for the
Commission on the Private Sector & Development. This commission was short-lived
(as far as I know) but included some pretty cool people. It was cochaired by
Paul Martin, former prime minister of
The link above takes you to a website put together by Kirk
Magleby. He's a freelance guy, out on his own as far as I can tell, located
right down the road from me in
Another great organization trying very hard -- and with some success -- to balance itself in both worlds at once: trying to be smart about helping poor people, and at the same time, smart about business. I have a lot of respect for these folks. Always interesting, reading their materials. Part of their mission is to stay closely allied with the parent corporation, Shell Oil, drawing on the obvious deep business know-how and resources inside a multinational, to advance the foundation projects. Their fundamental idea is, if it's not good business, it's not going to scale and grow, and it's not going to be much help. I really don't know any other nonprofit organization that quite reproduces their flavor. Very interesting.
Just click the link and you'll see what this is -- the most lively discussion area I know of on the subject. The place-to-go to hear buzz on what's happening right now in the field of Social Entrepreneurship and Base-of-the-Pyrimid business: "Our goal is to identify and discuss sustainable business models that address the needs of the world's poorest citizens." Also, unfortunately, a great place to go and see a lot of smart goodhearted people all wound up about the needs of the poor, but too-often clueless about the needs of business if it is to survive in these markets.
"Foreign assistance has an indispensable role to play. But is it the $70 billion of foreign assistance that's going to solve this problem, or is it more likely to be the $90 billion of remittances, the $200 billion of private foreign investment, the $2-3 trillion of developing country exports, or the $2-3 trillion of developing country savings channeled into productive investments in their own countries?"
I would add to this another piece of simple math: divide that $70 billion in aid money by the number of poor people it purports to serve, you get about $20 per person, per year. Donor-based aid really just isn't capable of very much, especially when you factor in the logistical difficulties of delivering that $20 in an effective way, on the ground. I've always found this math to be quite convincing. It shows why profit-driven solutions, such as the historical method that the people of the United States themselves used to pull themselves out of poverty over the last couple centuries, are the only solutions that can really scale up to meet the size of the problem, and truly help a number as big as 4,000 million.
“Naturally, if companies are going to get more involved, they need to earn some kind of return. This is the heart of creative capitalism. It's not just about doing more corporate philanthropy or asking companies to be more virtuous. It's about giving them a real incentive to apply their expertise in new ways, making it possible to earn a return while serving the people who have been left out. This can happen in two ways: companies can find these opportunities on their own, or governments and nonprofits can help create such opportunities where they presently don't exist.”
“In the West we establish companies to solve our problems. When they are not appropriate, we establish non-profits. But in developing countries people refer to the same type of organizations as non-governmental organizations. Why is that? Perhaps because in developing countries they think the government is the most suitable body to tackle a problem in an organized way. But look at the wealthy countries. There, entrepreneurs, investors, employees, consumers – collectively, citizens – have the power to require their governments to be supportive of their productivity. But in poor countries, the state has too much power. The best way to change that is to strengthen the hands of the citizens.”