Bill Gates on Creative Capitalism

Davos, Switzerland. This winter sports area is famous as the host to the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of global political and business elites. The closest that I could physically get to this destination of the rich was last year when 'Eurailing' aboard Glacier Express from St. Moritz to Zermat. The scenary view was spectacular along the Alps of beautiful and snowy Switzerland. We, Ratih and my 5-year old Rafi that kept on moving around, were the only one, I suppose, that looked far, far less wealthy among those passengers in the first class car serving a good lunch meal aboard this slowest fast train in the world.

That's it. The gap between the rich and the poor. Craving for $1 a day, unable figuring out how much zeros are there in $1 million a day in local Indonesia or Peru currency. At WEF 2008 in Davos last month, Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, was talking about Creative Capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.

The great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy get the least -- in particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. There are roughly a billion people in the world who don't get enough food, who don't have clean drinking water, who don't have electricity, the things that we take for granted. Diseases like malaria that kill over a million people a year get far less attention than drugs to help with baldness.

We need a system that would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives of those who don't fully benefit from today's market forces.

A very noble intent. Although qualifying Capitalism with 'creative' or any other words would not create a new school of thoughts as to establish a new set of economic system. Some critics even say that Bill Gates miss the point on 'creative capitalism'. It's something like branding corporate social responsibily with a new word, as similar to 'caring capitalism'. They said that corporations already provide money to communities and charitable causes, and the world does not get any far better.

I would say that the critics miss the points as well in focusing more on charity aspects. Business could not grow bigger and bigger beyond the limit that can be financially afforded by purchasing power of the community. You can not sell more and more cars in a town that the people can only buy a bike. Anyway, we would not be getting trapped into pros and cons arguments. We would embrace and support the ideas of making the world a better place to live for everyone. And if it comes from a Diva of Software Industry like Bill Gates, it would become more real and make things happen.

"It's Bill", commented Erik Renaud, GM Enterprise & Partner Group, Microsoft Asia Pacific, in our lunch at Pacific Place, Jakarta today. "He likes big things. He still wants to change the world".

Well, we shall be wellcoming Bill Gates in May 2008 here in Jakarta. Probably, someone could manage to steal his time to introduce the concept of "zakat" and "ekonomi syariah", a completely different thinking that might inspire him to do more..... as John Lennon with Imagine, inspired after he spent some time inside India.