Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.
Recent Posts
What is it they still don’t get?
Yesterday the Financial Times reported “Nuns shocked at being on Wal-Mart's list of threats. A community of Benedictine nuns based in Texas has called on Wal-Mart to give further details of how they came to appear on a list of potential threats to the world's largest...
The Annals of Spin
This weeks New Yorker Magazine (4/2/07) features a long negative story about Wal-Mart’s effort to “co-opt liberals.” This is another in the series of good news/bad news stories that both helps and plagues the company. After nearly a year of this endless seesaw one...
Retreating
I spent two days this week doing something I haven’t done for five if not ten years – going to a retreat to explore who I want to be in the next iteration of my life. The retreat was led by Peter Senge and the Shamballa Institute outside Boston on bright, crisp sunny...
Does Employee Ownership & Satisfaction = Better Performance?
Yes! Two weeks ago the Financial Times reported some impressive results from the Employee Ownership Index. “In the UK in recent years, the Employee Ownership Index has outperformed the FTSE All-Share. An investment of £100 in the EOI in 1992 would have been worth £349...
How Generous Is the Bill Gates Foundation?
I once heard George Soros explain or rather rationalize his investment in a company that produces land mines while his charitable organization worked to remove them from locations they had been planted and end their use. He explained that someone was going to reap the...
India Diary
New Delhi – Sunday February 18, 2007 One wonders if there is anything to say that has not been said before. This is a city of extreme contrasts drawn together by sights and smells that all can enjoy and none can avoid. A delicate smoke fills the air, coloring the sky...
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 Inner...
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...
Celebrate the 4th of July with An Inconvenient Truth
I just saw Al Gore’s movie. I know why he named it an inconvenient truth. Because much of what we can and must do is in fact inconvenient. The movie left me deeply saddened and depressed since so much of what I can and must do I have left undone. I have been...
How Much is Enough?
There was no shortage of complaining about the $147 million that Lee R. Raymond, retiring CEO of Exxon Mobil departed the company with. Exxon shareholders didn’t seem to mind. Why would they when large company CEO’s make on average 300 times what the average worker...
My Being Needs a New Iteration
Life is in a constant state of change whether we like it or not. Who I was last year – even last month is not who I need to be tomorrow. This is true of everyone who is committed to their own personal growth & development. If you are running a business or...
The Illusion of Happiness
We, (me included) chase with great and even desperate passion – more and more and more – stuff. A bigger pay check, a nicer house, a cooler car, new clothes……. Now – we sort of know better, we know that we can’t have both a sane and sustainable world with all that...
The Misuse and Abuse of the Word Sustainable
Where ever you go – what ever you do – people have begun to misuse the word sustainable! That’s both good and bad news, it’s great that it’s in everyone’s mind, but unfortunately – most people have so little idea of what the word actually means – that they can be of...
Watching Wal-Mart
Last Thursday Andy Grossman Executive Director of Wal-Mart Watch (URL) headed up from Washing DC – center of what some people think of as the political universe – to our headquarters in Burlington, VT – what we like to think of as the center of another universe...