Proposals surrounding poverty alleviation are greatly affected by the ways in which we think about people living in conditions of extreme poverty. The success or failure of those proposals, when operationalized, depends upon our mental models and the ways in which we calibrate and then integrate the narratives we encounter. While others have envisioned a role for multinational enterprises (MNEs) in alleviating global poverty, these schemes lack the catalysts of moral imagination and systems thinking necessary to modify MNE mental models toward sustainable solutions that also create board-based stakeholder value. We will outline the parameters of the challenge, explain the elements of the ‘profitable partnerships’ approach, illustrate it via an example and distinguish it from alternative approaches.