The author, who gives full credit to C.K. Prahalad, has been a co-author with Prahalad and they are both credited with this brilliant vision for a new kind of moral capitalism that addresses the needs of the five billion poor.
This book should be viewed as a valuable distinct contribution in its own right, read read with Prahalad's book as well as a third book from Wharton, The Next Global Stage: The Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World As I edit this, I am also remined of Paul Hawkin's Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, and the forthcoming book by Medard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires, with a preview here at Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening … consultant.: An article from: The Futurist
It also complements Yale Dean Garten's book, The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders which calls on business to be more responsible about the state of the world. All of these books contrast remarkably with William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions and and John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The math is quite clear. Business had been focused on high profit margins from the top one billion, with disposable incomes on the order of $20K or so. The bottom of the pyramid, five billion people, with disposable incomes on average of no more than $10 a year, represent a four trillion dollar marketplace.
Where business has gone wrong is in being bureaucratic, immoral, corrupt, and focused on outputs for profit rather than listening for solutions that can be profitable (with low profit margins, very high volume, and transformative effect).
I believe that these two individuals could one day win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work, which could literally save the world. As Jonathan Schell tells us in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People there are not enough guns on the planet to keep these four billion dispossesed from impacting on us negatively. We can help them create indigenous stabilizing wealth in their home countries, or we can die with them as we all suffer the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, and the rise of pandemic disease.
This author is an extraordinary talent, equal to Prahalad. It merits comment that Wharton appears to have displaced Yale as a phenomenal publishing house. For me to find three world-class books on this topic, and for all of them to be from Wharton, is noteworthy.
