A great get for the Decatur Book Festival and Agnes Scott College!

According to Daren Wang’s Verb.org, the two Decatur orgs, along with Coca-Cola, will be hosting a free event on Wednesday, August 25th at 8pm with Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Microfinance, at Agnes Scott’s Presser Hall.

Yunus will be discussing his new book Building Social Business, which details his new initiative which the New York Times summarized back in May thusly…

In “Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs”, [Yunus] calls for creation of an alternative economy of businesses devoted to helping the underprivileged.

The way he envisions it, these companies would be run as efficiently as the for-profit variety. Unlike charities, they would make enough money to be self-sustaining. However, they would invest leftover money in expanding their humanitarian efforts rather than paying dividends to shareholders.

People “will be delighted to create businesses for selfless purposes,” Dr. Yunus predicts. “The only thing we’ll have to do is to free them from the mind-set that puts profit-making at the heart of every business, an idea that we imposed on them through our flawed economic theory.”

Intriguing.