The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Speaking of Muhammad Yunus, I see that Business Week has just named him one of its Thirty Greatest Entrepreneurs of All Time, alongside such icons as Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton. At first glance Yunus might seem a surprising choice, since many people think of him more as a humanitarian than a business person. But his Grameen Bank is a self-supporting, profitable business, and Yunus's mission in life has been to expand the benefits of the free market to poor people who are currently excluded from full participation in the capitalist system.

In this respect, Yunus is very much in the mold of Ford, Walton, and others on the BW list. Like them, he has innovated by developing accessible products and services that are creating whole new classes of consumers and multiplying the life options enjoyed by millions of people.

If the entrepreneurial frontier in Henry Ford's day was made up of millions of working-class Americans desperate for mobility, today it includes billions of people in the developing world eager to enter the mainstream economy.

Labels: Base of the Pyramid, Muhammad Yunus, Personal Musings