Guy Kawasaki links to an Interview of Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank. Yunus won the Nobel peace Prize for his work with micro-loans to jumpstart entrepreneurship and achieve financial self-sufficiency in 3rd world nations starting with Bangladesh.
Here's a brief quote from the interview:
AR: Now a lot of other people out there said, ok, well, I can understand why Professor Muhammad Yunus might win a Nobel Prize for economics, but why for Peace?
MY: I have been raising this question about poverty being a threat to peace, everywhere, not just Bangladesh. Because poverty ultimately is the breeding ground for violence, breeding ground for all kinds of political turmoil, breeding ground for terrorism. So this is the argument I made. I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future. So that has to be addressed in a broader sense, and poverty is one issue that kind of upsets the possibility of peace.
And read his description of how many players, parties, institutions, groups, individuals, what have you...tried to block his progress. All seemed threatened by his simple plan to eradicate poverty and the shackles on the poor, some of those shackles held by those parties most threatened by his solution.
We'll leave with this:
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business. And profit maximization is the mission of business. And I'm saying this is very narrow interpretation of human being. Human beings are much bigger than just making money. So I said, to be true to the human nature, we should include at least one more type of business, business to do good to people, without an expectation of making any personal gain out of it.
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