Co-founder and CEO of Yunus Social Business (YSB), Saskia Bruysten, is one of the world's most prominent leaders within the field of social business, which centers on both solving social or environmental problems and being financially sustainable. While YSB's social businesses showed steady progress for nearly a decade, the COVID-19 pandemic compelled Bruysten to intervene in ways she never imagined before. Her leadership showcases her ability to build an international coalition and advocate for YSB's global portfolio of social businesses. Beyond her efforts during the pandemic, she also works to make the business and social business worlds more inclusive for women globally. Bruysten's efforts throughout her career have garnered various awards and accolades, which have allowed her to have a seat at some of the world's most influential tables to promote her belief that social business should be the new normal.
TopNarrative
I think that social business is a concept that can be applied in any context. I think it can be applied everywhere where business can be applied and where there are problems. And I don’t think that there’s any society that doesn’t have problems. —Saskia Bruysten, CEO of Yunus Social Business, SensAbility interview (2014)
While Saskia Bruysten did not initially set out to become one of the world’s most prominent advocates for social business, she had an international orientation from a young age. With a German father and Canadian mother, she was able to experience living in Germany and North America during her childhood, with further travel fueled by her involvement in equestrian vaulting throughout her teenage years. This athletic endeavor set her up to be comfortable understanding the importance of working together and the value of calculated risk-taking, two factors she attributes to helping her in her entrepreneurial career years later (Cole, 2020). After working at Boston Consulting Group in Germany and later the United States, she decided to move to London to study in the Master of Science in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was there that Bruysten would pivot her career into the world of social business, which she defines as a “company that is focused 100 percent on solving a social or environmental problem but doing that financially self-sustainably” (Cole, 2020, 17’44”-17’52”).
Coming from the business world, she did not even know what social business was until she attended a life-changing talk by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus (Cole, 2020) at her university. She described her early-career mentality as seeing business, governments, and nonprofits in distinctly different silos: “While I liked the efficiency of the business world, I was interested in the topics that the governments and the NGOs were actually dealing with—global problems, like inequality, poverty, or climate change” (Cole, 2020, 15’03”-15’17”).
When coming away from Yunus’s talk, she realized that these areas could be combined with the orientations to solve grand challenges, like governments and nonprofits but using the efficiency and revenue-generation of the business world. It was an “a-ha moment” for Bruysten (Cole, 2020, 15’45”). As someone who had originally operated in that world, Bruysten had been exposed to conversations that centered on how to maximize profit for shareholders or those owning a share of a business. However, social business introduced the notion of balancing the profit focus with another—people—to create what is called the double bottom line, as commitments to the two Ps: profit and people, were not only valued but measured. The people dimension of the double bottom line refers to valuing the broader perspectives of all stakeholders, or those who have an interest in the company and its decision-making. Some organizations take this one step further to add another P, planet, to represent a triple bottom line. Those prioritizing the third P of planet are those with environmental sustainability goals, in addition to minding and measuring their profits and impact on people.