Dr. Yunus and Social Business

Dear Colleagues

It is great that Dr. Yunus has put Social Business on the front page of newspapers, into TV news stories and much more into the mainstream of economic discussion. Dr. Yunus's accomplishment in building microcredit in Bangladesh and being recognized for this with a Nobel Peace Prize was remarkable ... and now broadening the development dialog to include social business is another incredible important move.

But as Dr. Yunus recognizes, talking about social business and actually being a social business are not one and the same. He points out that the system of accountancy and the analysis that is done in modern capitalist society assumes that people are very one dimensional ... that everything is about profit and stockholder value. In fact, this is far from the case, and almost everyone is very much more complex and value much more than monetary wealth. But the accountancy metrics being used do not reflect what is needed to assess performance of a social business ... or even to validate that the enterprise is, in fact, a social business.

The development of Community Impact Accountancy (CIA) originated with work done on the analysis of relief and development sector performance in the 1980s. CIA takes the basic logic of GAAP style corporate accounting, but uses the community as the consolidating entity, and uses social value as a component of the entity's balance sheet. This system will serve very well to provide performance metrics for social business and can be used in Dr. Yunus's vision of a Social Business stock market.

The CIA system has the potential for universal application as a means for the public to start holding economic entities accountable for their impact on society ... with CIA the public can now be heard as a stakeholder that matters.

Observations about this are welcomed.

Sincerely

Peter Burgess