 I'd like to welcome everyone here to this session, an idea, an insight with Professor Muhammad Yunus. My name is Rana Faroohar. I'm the assistant managing editor of Time Magazine in charge of business and economics and it's a real pleasure and an honor to be here with Professor Yunus today who I've interviewed before and I know what a wonderful speaker and thinker he is. So Professor, I'm going to let you jump in right away and describe your idea for us and then we'll speak a little bit about how you came to it and what the conclusions are. Well I've been talking about it because all the problems that we see in the economic world right now is emerging for many, many years but now it came to a kind of peak. All the unemployment, eurozone problem, financial crisis, energy crisis, food crisis, poverty and all those. What I'm trying to promote or explain that the existing mechanism, existing structure and the concept that we have is not going to deliver the result that we will somehow get over all these things and near world will emerge. In order to new world to emerge, we need a new structure, new conceptual framework so that we can get it done. One of the suggestions I'm making, the basic problem that I see within the system, overwhelming concentration on making money. Everything that we do in the business world is focused on making money. That's what the indicator that you try to assess, how successful we are. In the business world there is nothing else. So that kind of squeezed out all kinds of social orientation of human life and human activity and that's not a tenable situation and that untenable situation is created by the structure that we have. I said business doesn't have to be always money-centered, always self-centered, always or many times obsessed with money. Because human beings are not always about money. Human beings are much bigger than just money-making machine. We are not robots. We are human beings. We take care of ourselves individually. At the same time we take care of everybody else. We take care of the planet itself. And business world doesn't have that orientation. So at the moment we can do that. We can create a different kind of business which is not money-centered, which is a solution-centered, which is a business, but is a business to solve problems in a sustainable way so that the money can remain within the system and continue the company. I am calling it social business. Social business is about solution of the problems and it runs as a business, but the profit stays with the company, no dividend. So it's a non-loss, non-dividend company to solve social problems. And young people like it because young people don't want to inherit this creaky sex structure. It's a crumbling structure. That's not a good start for young people. They want to build their own. And that's what young people come in the picture. And they are a very powerful generation. This is the most powerful generation ever had in the human history because of the technology in their command. A seven-year-old has much more technological power than a 60-year-old today right now. So that's the power he or she grows with. And enormous speed, enormous way to do things. And he wants to do things for the world. And let's use that power to make that change. So this is the time to address that issue. Tell us if you can, if you can define precisely a little bit more what you mean about social business. And how is the social business different than these things? How is it different from a well-run NGO? Well, NGO by definition is not for profit enterprise. When we talk about social enterprise, it's enterprise which also makes money, dividends and so on. It's orientation towards social goals. So we have no quarrel with any of this concept. But we are trying to position a different piece of concept. This is a concept where it's a non-dividend company. That's the distinction between social enterprise and social business. Social enterprise could provide dividend to the owners. There's no bar to it. But within social business, there's absolute bar. Because this is totally 100% focused on solving problems. And all profits go back to the business. All profit goes back to the company. Because we create, as an investor, as a promoter, I create this to solve problems, not for making money. Tell me a little bit about how you think the current system came to be broken. Because it seems like that's an important thing in informing what social business should be doing. All the crisis, some of the crisis came with obsession with money. The great thing making money is the purpose of the life. Purpose of life is not making money. Purpose of life is to make oneself happy and the rest of the world happy. But that purpose is forgotten. So we have to reinvent the purpose. What is the purpose of our life? That's what the young people are looking for. Human life is about creativity. About doing things so that it becomes a legacy, build a legacy for yourself. That's not what we do in business. In business, we have a big stack of cash, and that's why we say goodbye. We have the capacity to change that thing. Nobody should be unemployed. Nobody should be poor for the same reason. We are capable. Nobody should be welfare dependent. Are you getting a lot more interest in these last few months and over the last year as there's been such a growing debate about the role of business? What should business do in society? Should it be just for profit-making? The Occupy movement, all of these things we've been bringing in the news. Is that a turning point, do you think, and are you getting a lot more queries now? It's very important. Like, look at the Occupy movement, it's a frustration, it's anger. People are angry. What are you doing with us? Why should I be unemployed? In some countries in Europe, unemployment among the youth is as high as 46%, 47%. It's a shameful thing to happen. Why the young people should go out of jobs? They are capable. They want to do things, contribute, add to the society, and that is a cutoff. So this is a kind of a totally unacceptable proposition for a young person to remain unutilized with all the creative capacity, unlike, for example, 50 years back of unemployed youth, today's unemployed youth, you are denying that capacity 100 times much more capacity than we did before, and tomorrow it will be much more capacity that we reject. So we have to... I get it. We said there's a kind of invisible hand, we'll take care of it, you're wrong. We take care of ourselves, not the invisible hand. We decide where we want to go, we design how we want to live, and we'll make it happen. So listen up, Adam Smith. Yes. Well, all right, we've heard about the idea, so let's move on to the insights section of this discussion. Tell us, for people who would like to get involved with a social business over companies, multinationals or small entrepreneurs that would like to create one, what's the roadmap? What are the steps that you see? Very simple. They can invite us, we can explain if they're looking for ideas, we can help them design, and many already have designed, every year we hold a social business summit, bring all the CEOs, all the universities, their students, business designers together, discuss it for over three days, and have a special session for the young people, a special day for the young people. This is one forum where we can discuss, and all the people who are already doing social business, they bring their merchandise, show how they do it, how they market it, what benefit it generates. So this, every company has a core expertise, so how do you use your core expertise to solve problems? They have enormous capacity, enormous creative capacity inside of the company, but this is all used for making money. They never thought this can be used for solving problems, so we are saying this is it. So what would you say to critics who say, okay, this is all great, but in a way it's letting the state off the hook, that these are services, you know, delivering water, providing nutrition, these are things that the state should be addressing, and that it's a concern if multinational companies do that, whether or not it's helping people or not. What would you say to that? Government is not different from the citizens. Citizens make a kind of institution so that on their behalf they can take care of certain common things. So it's not a question of we dump everything on the shoulder of the government and say, oh, let's go busy ourselves with making money. That's not a good solution because individuals have much more capacity, creativity, and utilized for social solutions. So citizens should not be sitting on their hands and let government do things. Citizens can do together with government, and government is a supportive role, provide framework for legal framework, regulatory framework so that all the citizens can express their ability and potential in a meaningful way to solve the problems so that the whole nation or the whole country becomes much better in terms of solving the issues of social nature and other kinds of things, environmental issues. In general, would you like to see the private sector taking on more of these problems? I'm saying every citizen can do that. When you say talk about individuals, that's private sector. That's not government. So there are some overlap between the government and the civil society sector. I'm not using the word private sector because private sector indicates money making sector. So I was very careful on that. I call it citizen sector. Citizen sector can do that. And citizen sector includes the private sector too. They are not different people. As an individual, as a CEO is an individual too. He lives in this country or in this planet. He has a responsibility. She has a responsibility. And why don't we use that responsibility together? You have the machine, the company. And that machine can be used to solve these problems. Where do you see the most innovation coming from geographically, for example, in terms of social business? Do you see ideas coming from developing countries? Because the need is greater? And are there different ways of implementing this? I would put it this way. I would say the more desperate you are, more likely that you will come up with those ideas. Because you are in desperate situation. If you are not desperate, you are not using your mind in that direction. So desperate situation are in poor countries, in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, because they are desperate. So they are young people when they become educated because they are now globally connected young people. They are not the old kind of letter writing, pen pals, and so on and so forth. They are text messaging, and Facebooks, and everything else that is coming. And God knows what is coming tomorrow, much faster, much easier, and so on. So they will be using the technology power to address this problem. And then we need the support who have the expertise sitting around and utilized in that direction. Going back to your own history, micro-fiance is obviously a great idea that came out of a developing country. What lessons have you learned from micro-fiance that could be applied to social business? And also looking at some of the challenges that micro-finance has faced, what are the pitfalls? And what lessons could be learned? One way I would say, when we did the micro-finance, we kind of defied the system. Sometimes I explained, what is micro-finance? I said, I just look at the conventional banks, how they do it. Once I learn how they do it, I do the opposite. And it became micro-finance. It's very easy. When it comes to business, the business world is a money-making business. We said, let's deal link with profit, deal link with dividend. We created social business. So we reversed the system. What this new model tells us about the path ahead and how to fix capitalism, which is sort of the big question, how do you think that social business can fix the problems in the current system? Why don't we design a system which will take us to the place that we want to go, a place where there will be no unemployment, a place where there will be no poverty, a place where there will be no unnecessary debt, a place where the planet will be safe. After we put what is our requirement, what is our destination, then we work backwards how to get there. That's what the system is to be. So it's fixing this one will waste of time for a while, then crash again. So this is not going to take us very far. The distance between possibles and impossibles is shrinking. Very soon, very few items left which you can call impossible. Why don't we make that list of impossible and make it possible today? Because we have the power to do that. You touched on something important about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. And that's a big topic in business right now. How do we create more long-term thinking? How can social business help with that? Every business can have a parallel business called social business. It will improve their own performance. It will improve the morale of their own employees, excitement that, yes, we not only make money, we change the quality of life of these people because we have it. We can do that. What questions should businesses that want to create a social enterprise within their companies or beside their companies ask themselves about what kind of mission they should be addressing? Where should they be putting their efforts? One of the things they can discuss what are the problems of the world? Can we do something about any one of them in a tiny little way? Social business doesn't have to be a big mega business. It could be tiny little business. So every business had that core expertise. To address themselves, what is that we can do? Can we reduce the problem on employment? Every business can create business to reduce unemployment. Not for making money by doing that, but simply saying that we want to create this company to employ 20 people so that they have decent living for themselves. We are not asking for dividend out of this company. All we want to let it turn by itself so that I don't have to dish out money every year. Every company can come up with beautiful ideas one after another and excitement of doing that will touch everybody. Thank you for being here. Thank you all for joining us. And we're going to close the session now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.