Social Businesses Instead Of Profit-Maximizing Businesses

To make the structure of capitalism complete, we need to introduce another kind of business - one that recognizes the multidimensional nature of human beings. If we describe our existing companies as profit-maximizing businesses, the new kind of business might be called social business. Entrepreneurs will set up social business not to achieve limited personal gain but to pursue specific social goals.

To free-market fundamentalists, this might seem blasphemous. The idea of a business with objectives other than profit has no place in their existing theology of capitalism. Yet, surely no harm will be done to the free market if not all business are profit-maximizing businesses. Surely, capitalism is amenable to improvements. And surely the stakes are too high to go on the way we have been going. By insisting that all businesses, by definition, must necessarily be profit-maximizing businesses and by treating this as some kind of axiomatic truth, we have created a world that ignores the multi-dimensional nature of human beings. As a result, businesses remain incapable of addressing many of our most pressing social problems. 

~ Muhammad Yunus