At Vanderbilt B-School, the God Squad and the Money Gang Are Finding Common Ground
Friday, June 29, 2007 / KW
A rather fascinating article from the Financial Times (link via the World Business Council for Sustainable Development website) describing a new program at Vanderbilt University in which students from the MBA program and the divinity school are joining forces to explore how business can help combat global poverty.
Dubbed the Project Pyramid Global Poverty Alleviation program, the course is housed in the Owen Graduate School of Management and was originally proposed by two MBA students, Rehan Choudhry and Bobby Deneen. It's not a fluff course: In March, the students traveled to Hyderabad, India, where they visited the business school, a Microsoft campus, and local villages where they observed how microcredit is affecting the local economy. They will also participate in a business-plan competition, and two of the students have already launched a company that uses the Internet to provide artisans in Uganda with access to a world market.
The Vanderbilt course takes its inspiration largely from two figures: Grameen Bank founder and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (himself a Vanderbilt grad), and C.K. Prahalad, the leading guru of "bottom of the pyramid" business. (Full disclosure: I am currently working on a book with Yunus, which will describe his concept for what he calls "social business," a topic I'll write more about on this blog in the weeks and months to come.)
What's most intriguing to me are the reports that students on both sides of the MBA/divinity school divide say they are learning a lot from one another. The business students are discovering that government and philanthropic programs can play an important and useful role in expanding economic opportunities, while the divinity students are learning that business can be about much more than the rapacious pursuit of profit.
We in business like to talk about "thinking outside the box," but sometimes we behave as if that just means borrowing ideas from whichever management guru happens to be hot this month. The Vanderbilt course is a true experiment in cross-fertilization between widely differing worldviews, something we can certainly use more of in our all-too-compartmentalized world.
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Add a comment - Dubbed the Project Pyramid Global Poverty Alleviation program, the course is housed in the Owen Graduate School of Management and was originally proposed by two MBA students, Rehan Choudhry and Bobby Deneen. It's not a fluff course: In March, the students traveled to Hyderabad, India, where they visited the business school, a Microsoft campus, and local villages where they observed how microcredit is affecting the local economy. They will also participate in a business-plan competition, and two of the students have already launched a company that uses the Internet to provide artisans in Uganda with access to a world market.
The Vanderbilt course takes its inspiration largely from two figures: Grameen Bank founder and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (himself a Vanderbilt grad), and C.K. Prahalad, the leading guru of "bottom of the pyramid" business. (Full disclosure: I am currently working on a book with Yunus, which will describe his concept for what he calls "social business," a topic I'll write more about on this blog in the weeks and months to come.)
What's most intriguing to me are the reports that students on both sides of the MBA/divinity school divide say they are learning a lot from one another. The business students are discovering that government and philanthropic programs can play an important and useful role in expanding economic opportunities, while the divinity students are learning that business can be about much more than the rapacious pursuit of profit.
We in business like to talk about "thinking outside the box," but sometimes we behave as if that just means borrowing ideas from whichever management guru happens to be hot this month. The Vanderbilt course is a true experiment in cross-fertilization between widely differing worldviews, something we can certainly use more of in our all-too-compartmentalized world.
Labels: Base of the Pyramid, Muhammad Yunus, Vanderbilt University
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