Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.
Recent Posts
Notes from the Economist Corporate Citizenship Conference
As should be expected, Jeff Swartz, Timberland CEO, opened the conference with a humble discussion of Timberland's accomplishments and his perspective on sustainability. Jeff's honesty, transparency, and personal passion was abundantly visible in every statement he...
I Want To Work At SAS, Too
SAS was just named the best employer in the U.S. by Fortune Magazine in its annual Best Companies to Work for survey. While the award is limited to very large companies, there's a lot we can all learn. A few facts: SAS is the world's largest privately held software...
Author’s Choice: Don’t Ignore the Transparency Imperative
Nell Minow, coauthor of Corporate Governance, introduces a lesson in corporate transparency from The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win, by Jeffrey Hollender and Bill Breen Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote...
Transparency, Equity, and Justice at Seventh Generation
In my new book, The Responsibility Revolution, I look at companies that conduct internal business with transparency. Seventh Generation is one of those companies, but a recent experience here made me realize that it is always easier to stand at the doorstep of someone...
America Beyond Capitalism
I was giddy with hope back in November 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidential election. Like many, I believed that we stood at the edge of potentially enormous positive change, an opportunity that surely arises only once in a generation. Today, a year later, I am...
Arthur Gray: Ode to a Man of Faith and Fortitude
On Monday, December 14th, Arthur Gray passed away. Arthur was a member of the board of directors of Seventh Generation since 1991. Arthur was a humble man, never one to boast or focus on his own accomplishments. Arthur was a man of principle, a man of conviction,...
Short Term Thinking Shorts Us All
There's been plenty said about Wall Street's incredible collapse and the byzantine practices and illusionary (some would say delusionary) financial products that almost brought down our economy. But not enough has been said about the pervasive mindset that caused all...
Environmentalism’s Dirty Secret
It's easy to think of pollution as a problem we all share. Bad air, dirty water, chemical contamination, and other challenges spread themselves out roughly equally. Or so we think. The truth is more complicated: some places are more polluted than others, and the worst...
Transforming Capitalism:
A Conversation About Creating a Regenerative Economy Last week my good friend Otto Scharmer (co-author of Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society and author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges) invited me to participate...
Meetings with Remarkable Men
Over the past two weeks, I have met with some remarkable men. I had dinner with Vice President Al Gore, who was in New York to complete work on a new book about global climate change due out in November. We ate at Blue Hill in the Village where Chef Dan Barber...
In Our Every Deliberation
Sometimes you think you have something important to say, and before you know whether you can convince anyone in the publishing community that it's of value, you decide that you're going to go ahead and write it anyway. That's how I felt two years ago when I sat down...
Returning from a Sacred Passage
Landing at the Denver airport on a flight from Alamosa, Colorado, I am confronted with hundreds of acres of concrete under which nature has been forever buried. Entering the terminal there are scores of people, all of whom seem to be either in a terrible rush or bored...
A Sacred Passage
I soon head off for 11 days to Colorado's celestial Sangre de Cristo Mountains on a sacred passage retreat. I’ll be on a vision quest, camping at altitudes between 8,000 and 12,000 feet, in the shadows of five towering, 14,000-foot summits. It’s a dramatic mountain...
Creating a Game Plan
Creating a Game Plan for the Transition to a Sustainable US Economy Over the last 20 years, we've had a lot of interesting weeks here at the company, but this week promises to be the most fascinating yet. Seventh Generation is hosting a landmark three-day summit of...
Will Radical Transparency Save the Earth?
Joel Makower and Daniel Goleman's debate in Joel's recent column on the likely effect of how "unfettered information about the environmental impacts of our world (will) smoke out the bad guys and help the good guys win," is a wonderful and critically important...
Restoring the Primacy of the Real Economy
I am at the 2nd Summit on the Future of the Corporation in Boston where I have been asked to speak about "Building sustainability from within: harnessing capital to drive long-term horizons." Here's what's on my mind… Seventh Generation has spent 21 years in pursuit...
Beyond Corporate Responsibility
On June 4th I gave a keynote address to the Vermont-New Hampshire Marketing Group. As is often the case, I never made it through my whole talk. In fact I only covered six of my 26 pages of notes. (Not that I should have ever had so many pages for an hour and fifteen...
My Wind Turbine: Part 1
For several years I have wanted to install a wind turbine to mitigate my impact on global warming even more. For the past 18 months, I waited patiently for our local alternative energy company, Earth Turbines, to ready their product for market. Faced with ongoing...
How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy
Thomas Geoghegan, writing in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine, puts forth a theory that at first glance seems almost too silly to voice, let alone take seriously. He argues that it was not derivatives, hedge funds, gambling insurance companies, or excessively paid...
Ever Wonder Where All That Money Went?
As the financial crisis continues to unfold, headlines increasingly focus on the pain and hardship ordinary Americans are suffering. Let us not forget that the wealth accumulated by a small handful of Americans, often at the expense of others, was obscene and remains...
What Design Principles Should Guide Sustainable Management?
The MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT, SPRING 2009 Review asked more than 75 global leaders and sustainability thinkers the question, "What will organizations need to be good at in order to thrive in the emerging sustainability economy?" This is the beginning of a wider ranging...