In a small village in Bangladesh, a woman who literally had nothing was able to buy a cow with a loan from the Grameen Bank. Within a year, she repaid the loan by selling the cow’s milk, and was able to buy a calf, too. Having a cow—much less two—was beyond her wildest dreams. At the end of the second year, she took a second loan to buy another cow, until suddenly, she was the proud owner of four head of cattle.

Her success encouraged her to do the impossible: she took yet another loan, this time to build a house. And not just any house, but a house with a tin roof, a physical representation of the solidity with which she could now live her life. Her next goal is to buy a cell phone.

Who’s the man who made this possible?

Muhammad Yunus, father of the microcredit movement, founder of Grameen Bank, and breaker of all the rules of traditional finance. He is driving social change one rupee—or one taka—at a time, inspired by his deep belief in the potential of all human beings, building communities of lenders who are mutually interdependent, enhancing their self esteem by ensuring that systems are in place to allow them to succeed, and applying those learnings in other cultures to build whole nations of doers. “I’m not a businessman,” says Yunus, “I’m just using business to achieve a social objective.”

Despite overwhelming odds, and begun in the poorest of nations, employees and recipients of loans from the Grameen Bank produce striking results, including a 98 percent repayment rate. In a world where having committed people and achieving results is vital to business success, we can learn from a country with a traditionally impoverished, unempowered population that has successfully—if somewhat nontraditionally—applied basic principles of empowerment, accountability, and teams.

Expect a lot

“We’re all capable of doing much more,” notes Yunus. It is institutions and concepts that limit us and keep us down. We’re almost like a bonsai tree, a tiny plant kept tiny because of the way we’re planted. If we had a better place, we would be tall and moving toward the sky. Institutional arrangements and concepts like collateral are real obstructions to the blooming of people, especially poor people.”

“We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions, like banking institutions, our policies, and our concepts. Poverty isn’t created by the poor, nor sustained by them. If we’re looking for one single action that will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit. Credit is a fundamental human right,” he says.

“All human beings are basically entrepreneurs,” says Yunus. “People want to solve problems, take on challenges, discover their talents. It’s just a matter of opening up the environment and giving them opportunity,” he notes. Yunus sees capability in even the poorest and most disenfranchised of people. Coming from one of the world’s poorest nations, he’s still an inveterate optimist who realizes that if this great success has occurred in Bangladesh, it can happen anywhere.

“Poverty,” says Yunus, “is simply a lack of options. Credit unlocks those doors and provides those options.” He’s tested his theory in the most difficult of environments, where paying back loans is essentially counterculture. “And in Bangladesh,” he says, “giving money to women is unheard of.” Even in a culture where the deck is stacked against him, Yunus’s innovative approach succeeds.

“We wanted to lend to the poorest first, which in many cases were the women. That’s why our borrowers are more than 94 percent women. When they succeed, their families benefit, the ‘wealth’ trickles down.”

Internalize and Socialize the Pressure

Grameen Bank takes the idea of a high-performance team seriously. They require their borrowers to organize themselves into groups of five. Instead of requiring collateral, the lenders guarantee one another’s loans. In effect, they become their own human collateral for one another. All are cut off if one of those five borrowers defaults. They meet every week to make loan payments and critique one another’s business plans to make sure that doesn’t happen.

It’s not Yunus or the bank managers who put pressure on the borrowers. Rather, and much more effectively, they’ve inserted that sense of accountability inside the heads of participants and in the spaces between people on these collateral teams. They self-motivate as a result, accounting for the phenomenal success of the program.

Success Breeds Success

“We have started believing the unbelievable, namely that the elimination of poverty is feasible. There is no reason whatsoever why anyone should remain poor on this planet,” says Yunus. He builds systems to make sure that happens sooner rather than later.

Grameen lenders repay their loans on a monthly basis, receiving incremental reinforcement that creates even more momentum and develops their self-confidence. “Success breeds success,” says Yunus. “We make sure that people can succeed, that they can repay their loan, that their group doesn’t suffer.”

The success of the Grameen Bank is being replicated in over 50 nations. How can Bangladesh, an extreme country of abject poverty, provide a viable model for the rest of the world? “Sometimes we try to take an idea across borders by making it like TV dinners,” acknowledges Yunus, “just open and serve, very mechanical. And you lose the spirit of the thing, because Grameen grew out of the necessity of Bangladesh, out of the place where we were working. We weren’t even thinking of replicating it elsewhere.

“But even as it grew from local necessity, we knew that it had global application because financial institutions the world over had created a caste of ‘untouchables’ that they deemed un-creditworthy. Our borrowers subscribe to The 16 Decisions of Grameen, tenets that we ask them to live by that are very specific to the Bangladeshi condition. If you’re doing this in the U.S. and just copy those tenets, people will laugh. That’s why each location must adapt those principles, like they’ve done in Chicago where they have something called the 15 Guiding Principles. Each culture has to find out what the ‘cow’ is in their context.”

But Yunus isn’t content with cows. His business plan to fight poverty includes much more than livestock. His GrameenPhone, begun in 1997, was launched to build a state-of-the-art cell-phone network in Bangladesh. “This,” says Yunus, “isn’t the first crazy thing we’ve done.” He wants the woman with the cow to have a “village phone” that she can purchase with a loan from the Grameen Bank, then sell service to fellow villagers and use the income to repay the loan. “I want every rickshaw driver in Dhaka to have a cell phone in his back seat so passengers can rent the phone while they’re riding with him to their next meeting. When you combine access to credit with access to information,” Yunus says, “you change the game for the rural poor.”