Back in the Belly of the Jolly Green Giant

Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting It caught me off guard, even though I should have expected it. Seated in the front row of the Sam Walton auditorium, Lee Scott pacing in front of the room with a cordless microphone, dressed in grays and blacks, mock...

Reflections on Growing

Reflections on Growing to the Seventh Generation Community Sometimes I forget that my job is more about growing my self than growing others. It is – or at least seems easier to grow others than to grow me. I usually have a point of view about who you need to be or...

A Company of Owners

Last week the entire Seventh Generation staff headed to Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe Vermont for our annual two day retreat. (The Trapp family is the same one of Sound of Music fame.) The Lodge is a frequent destination for Seventh Gen meetings, it sits high upon a...

Labor Day Weekend

The remnants of a hurricane blow through northern New England leaving the sky cloudy and the ground damp. The temperature isn’t quite cool enough for a bath but I take several anyway to escape to that clearly defined warm space. The endless possibility leaves me at a...

The Inner Path of Leadership

“One of the most important roles we can play individually or collectively is to create an opening, or to ‘listen’ to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen…” Synchronicity, The...

My Brother Peter Would Have Turned 50 Today

My brother Peter would have turned 50 today. There would have been a huge party, around the swimming pool of a rented house near the beach. Loud music, beautiful people, too much to drink. But he didn’t quite make it to 44. He lived his whole life in half the amount...

The Jolly Green Giant

On July 26th Fortune Magazine released a cover story on Wal-Mart  under the banner “Wal-Mart Saves the Planet, well not quite…” Something is going on here that I’m not quite sure we understand. Whether you believe Wal-Mart is the devil incarnate or are a cheerleader...

Presence Part 2

“presencing constitutes a third type of seeing, beyond seeing external reality and beyond seeing from within the living whole. It is seeing from within the source from which the future whole is emerging, peering back at the present from the future. In these moments,...

Presence by Peter Senge

Over the past month I’ve been reading Presence by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Those of you who have come to know me – probably realize by now that I’m a pretty obsessive reader. Yet unlike most of what I read, Presence was...