There is no shortage of people who exemplify Peter Drucker's principles and practices -- a multitude of middle managers and top executives responsible for many millions, if not billions, of dollars in economic activity. Yet the most Drucker-like of all may well be a man who launched his enterprise with a series of transactions totaling 27 bucks.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microcredit -- providing the poorest of the poor with tiny loans to start their own moneymaking ventures -- is promoting a new idea these days. He calls it "social business," and in his just-released book, Creating a World Without Poverty, he contends that it promises to relegate destitution across the globe to where it belongs: inside a museum.

His notion is to foster a whole class of companies capable of competing in the marketplace but whose primary aim is to meet a clear social need, not to maximize profits.

These firms are meant to earn money. But they pay no dividends. Instead, explains Yunus, "any profit stays in the business -- to finance expansion, to create products or services, and to do more good for the world." (Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates recently shared a somewhat similar, though not identical, vision in Davos, Switzerland (BusinessWeek, 2/4/08), with his plea for "creative capitalism.")

And what might Drucker have made of all this?

Any business, he asserted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, "exists for the sake of society." In The Effective Executive, he added: "An organization is not like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment."

No Political Boxes

This is not to say Drucker pushed for corporations to focus specifically on the needs of the indigent as Yunus has. But I think he would have greatly appreciated Yunus' model, for it is an overt expression of Drucker's conviction that "psychologically, geographically, culturally, and socially," the business community must be part of the wider community.

Interestingly, it's tough to stick Yunus in any particular political box. His Grameen Bank "supports less government… is committed to the free market, and promotes entrepreneurial institutions," he pointed out. "So it must be far right." At the same time, Grameen is "committed to social objectives" and does not advocate a system of pure laissez-faire; rather, it would like to see policy incentives that encourage "businesses to move in directions desired by society." Yunus noted: "All these features place Grameen on the political left."

Surely, Drucker could relate, once suggesting that, as he sought out the proper balance between continuity and change in society, he could see himself "sometimes as a liberal conservative and sometimes as a conservative liberal but never as a 'conservative conservative' or a 'liberal liberal.'"

Motivated By More Than Dollars

Drucker, too, would have no doubt been sold on Yunus' basic premise: People are motivated by a variety of impulses -- not simply a desire to get filthy rich. The existing system, said Yunus, has "created a one-dimensional human being to play the role of business leader… We've insulated him from the rest of life, the religious, emotional, political, and social. He is dedicated to one mission only -- maximize profit."

Drucker -- whose own writing draws heavily on sociology and psychology, on history and art and religion -- once remarked that his work was likewise predicated on the belief that "people are diverse, often unpredictable, always multidimensional."

In the end, though, it is not just Yunus' theories Drucker would have admired; above all, it's his effectiveness. Two things are behind it.

Challenge Conventional Wisdom

The first is a willingness to punch holes in conventional wisdom. "Despite their importance," Drucker wrote in Management Challenges for the 21st Century, "the assumptions are rarely analyzed, rarely studied, rarely challenged -- indeed rarely even made explicit."

Yunus thrives on challenging assumptions. He's doing it now, as he tries to reframe what most people imagine a business can be. And he did it before when he established Grameen.

Indeed, had he listened to the many reasons that offering credit to poor people was supposedly a fool's errand, Grameen never would have grown from that first $27 in loans, made 32 years ago straight from Yunus' pocket to 42 Bangladeshi villagers, into what it is today: a financially self-reliant bank that has given $6 billion in loans to millions of Bangladeshis, boasts a 98.6% repayment rate, and has put a huge dent in that nation's level of poverty. (It also has become the centerpiece of a network of two dozen socially driven companies with interests in education, health care, apparel, telecommunications, and much more.)

Avoiding Lofty Philosophy

The second factor that makes Yunus so effective is that, even though there is more than a hint of idealism in his efforts, he consciously tries "to avoid grandiloquent philosophies and… take a pragmatic approach." To that end, Grameen backs its actions with sound market analysis, nurtures its employees, actively seeks out customer input, and continually improves its products and services.

This, of course, is classic Drucker. Despite "the romance of invention and innovation," Drucker advised, "'flashes of genius'" don't get terribly far. What does carry a business forward is "hard, organized, purposeful work."

See for yourself. Check out Yunus' new book and, if you missed it, his first: Banker to the Poor. Not only are they inspirational, they are highly informational -- fantastic case studies on how to manage a business the right way. Which is to say, the Drucker way.