Paul Ben­nett is a busi­ness inno­va­tion con­sul­tant who goes to cor­po­ra­tion board­rooms to give them cre­ative ideas. For inspi­ra­tion, Ben­nett recently vis­ited Bangladesh and Pro­fes­sor Muham­mad Yunus. Ben­nett not only wanted to talk to to Yunus about Grameen Bank, but also on their coop­er­a­tion with Dan­non Yogurt.

Yunus and Dan­non cre­ate a vit­a­min packed yogurt at a low price that even the poor chil­dren of Bangladesh can afford. Dan­non and Grameen run the com­pany so that all prof­its go back into the com­pany to max­i­mize the ben­e­fit to the peo­ple of Bangladesh.

In his essay for the Finan­cial Times, Ben­nett says there is a lot to be learned from this cooperation.

Prof Yunus talks about scale in the con­text of poverty: “To me, poor peo­ple are like bon­sai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flow­er­pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is noth­ing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil base that is too inad­e­quate. Poor peo­ple are bon­sai peo­ple. There is noth­ing wrong in their seeds. Sim­ply, soci­ety never gave them the base to grow on.”

Grameen Bank gives tiny, collateral-free loans, mainly to women,along with huge amounts of trust that they will reli­ably pay the loans back. Small local branches are run by the “Grameen lad-ies”, who take pride in mak­ing their own and their cus­tomers’ loan repay­ments — treat­ing every­one well and behav­ing, frankly, more pro­fes­sion­ally than many bank professionals.

Then there is the Grameen-Danone col­lab­o­ra­tion, which started after Frank Riboud, chief exec­u­tive of the French com­pany, met Prof Yunus in 2005. Again, scale is an over­whelm­ing theme: a tiny, “cute” fac­tory (as Prof Yunus describes it), a 10th the size of a reg­u­lar Danone plant, which makes a batch-produced, nutri­tion­ally com­plete yoghurt prod­uct, using local milk, col­lected jug-by-jug in rural vil­lages — as I saw for myself. It is sold door-to-door by Dan-one’s yoghurt ladies and mar­keted clev­erly by a man in a Danone-branded lion suit teach­ing chil­dren the value of a nutri­tious diet.

The phrases “business-to-business” and “business-to-consumer” are bandied about end­lessly. This was bet­ter: this was person-to-person. It is a “big idea”.

I can hear you think­ing: “This is all well and good, but does it make money?”

My learn­ing from the trip is that Grameen is not just a bank, but an engine of learn­ing, mean­ing and pur­pose. It makes money but it also ignites employ­ees’ pas­sions and teaches them new ways of work­ing. In its col­lab­o­ra­tion with Danone, this phi­los­o­phy is reap­ing more ben­e­fits for both than the purely financial.

Like

Unlike