Bill and Mohammed

Loving Bill
One of the biggest privileges of being at Harvard is the myriad of opportunities to listen to extraordinary individuals speak about their experiences in business, politics, and social ventures.

A few weeks ago I drove out to Lowell (MA) with a group of politically-minded HBSers to attend a Democrat rally for Nikki Tsongas. It was two weeks to election day and her rival, Republican James Ogonowski, was gaining on her in the polls. The Democrats decided to wheel out the big guns to energise "the base" in the final days of the campaign and get the vote out. And for Democrats there is obviously no bigger gun than 42 himself: Bill Clinton.

The President was running late. An hour and a half late to be precise. His jet had broken down somewhere down in New Jersey but rather than pull out, he had hopped in a car and was bombing up I-97. The organisers played for time and brought numerous nobodies onto stage to keep us amused. We knew Bill was close when they introduced Deval Patrick (current Governor of Massachusetts). Patrick's staccato eloquence was forceful and electric, but it was no match for Bill's fireworks.

The President ambled onto stage in a dark suit, white shirt, and gold tie. Larger than life his perfectly coiffed white hair framed his slightly beet face. The crowd was on it's feet, hooting, shouting, cheering, clapping, thumping. Eventually, he waved his hand and the cacophony subsided. He ambled over to the podium, took a sip of water, and began.

It was a low energy performance; he looked tired, a bit crumpled, and a little harried. He started out in a quite cadence, his folksy drawl enmeshing us in a subtle rhetorical embrace. It was intimate, as though he were having a one-on-one conversation with each person in the hall. He wandered through a random collection of anecdotes recounting stories of people he'd met and places he'd visited. I wondered where he was heading, but slowly it dawned on me that he was weaving a critique of America since 2000. As he saw it, since 2000 America had undergone a great ideological experiment which favoured radical theories over pragmatism, and sweeping revolution over incremental change. The administration had cowed its people with fear of terrorism, nannied them with a bulging and inefficient state, and mismanaged everything from the economy to the environment. Whilst I didn't agree with all his analysis entirely, I was compelled to listen.

He penchant for mixing wit and charm made it captivating. At the end, he told us it was up to us to demand change. The crowd was ecstatic. They were on their feet; they obviously loved it. Or did they just love Bill and all that he stood for?

Amazing Mohammed
Not long after seeing Bill, I went to see Mohammed Yunnis, the legendary founder of Grammen Bank and 2006 Nobel Prize winner, speak at the Kennedy School of Government. He held forth for over an hour about how to construct a new world of social businesses. His thesis: humans all over the world are entrepreneurs and innovators with huge potential. All that they need is the opportunity to unlock that potential and they will break free from poverty.

He began with the tale of how he started Grameen Bank in 1974 in the midst of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. His first loan was just $27 to a group of villagers who lived next to the university where he lectured on economics. "How is it that we teach all these fancy theories," he asked his students, "when they are meaningless to the villagers starving on the other side of the wall?" It's a question he continues to ask and tries to answer on a daily basis.

For over an hour he inspired us to create a different world where businesses are harnessed to deliver social ends. It's a unique blend of philanthropy and business: investors in social businesses are asked to lend interest-free capital to get the business off the ground and once it's up and running, the investors are paid back and all profits are reinvested in the business. "People ask me how you could get anyone to invest in such a crazy idea. I tell them that people are even crazier than that. I say, well each year these same people are giving millions to charities and they know they will never see their money again. I'm only asking them to give me a few dollars for a couple of years, and then I promise to give it back to them."

There was no limit to his ambition and vision: he has convinced Intel to form a social business with Grameen to deliver IT to rural Bangladesh, he set up a joint venture with Danone to sell nutrient-rich yogurt to Bangladeshi kids, and he wants to set up a social stock market to allow millions of ordinary people to invest in this new form of venture philanthropy. Given his charisma, charm and conviction, it's hard not to believe that even his most crazy-sounding ideas have a good chance of success.