Jeffrey Hollender Partners LLC offers
consulting on a variety of corporate
responsibility and sustainability
topics.
Consulting
Hollender Sustainable Brands LLC offers consulting on a variety of corporate responsibility and sustainability topics. Hollender provides clients with the unique ability to develop the business case for CSR & sustainability efforts from a strategic and systems-based perspective. This approach ensures that long-term value is created as each business enters and progresses through the journey toward providing increasing benefit to all stakeholders.
Hollender is uniquely able to provide a systems-based framework for developing solutions to businesses toughest challenges. The firm’s founder brings a proven track record that includes:
1. Having built, over two decades, one of the nation’s leading sustainable businesses; Seventh Generation that was sold to Unilever in 2016 for over $600 million. In 2011 ImagePower Green Brands Survey found that Seventh Generation was seen by consumers as the number one “green” brand in America.
2. Advising large multi-nationals including Wal-Mart, SCJohnson and Nike on their sustainability strategy.
3. Establishing deep relationships and credibility with global NGOs. Hollender serves as a Board member at Greenpeace US and was a board member of Veritee, the leading international advocate of workers rights.
4. Leadership within the corporate responsibility business community as the co-founder and current Board Chair of the 200,000+ member American Sustainable Business Council and a long term Member and former Director of the Social Venture Network.
Hollender is also the author of two best-selling books on corporate responsibility, What Matters Most and The Responsibility Revolution, as well as a frequent speaker at global CSR events from the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Social Innovation Forum to the Fortune Magazine Green Conference and the Businesses for Social Responsibility annual conference.
Please contact Jeffrey directly if you’re interested in consulting services: Jeffrey.hollender@gmail.com
While all consulting assignments are customized to the clients needs, some of the areas the practice covers include:
Strategy
Developing new strategic frameworks: The single greatest restraint to innovation, change management, problem solving, and conflict resolution are the hidden assumptions that limit our understanding and awareness. These hidden assumptions and beliefs prevent us from seeing and considering possibilities that lie outside of our framework. Over decades we’ve adopted beliefs that we no longer question and often are no longer able to see. We’ve been conditioned to think in a siloed and compartmentalized manner that limits our ability to innovate. Making these frameworks visible allows us to question them and develop new possibilities. This leads to a process of creating new intentionally designed frameworks that promote innovation and breakthrough thinking.
Business Strategy: Most business strategy fails to focus on the most important questions. Are we in the right business given future trends? Are we selling the right products in the right channels? How will major trends that are reshaping the business environment impact us? As weather related events disrupt supply chains; limited resources cause dramatic fluctuations in raw material prices; and social disruption impacts market stability, how does our business strategy anticipate and benefit from challenges that will put many businesses at risk?
Strategic Visioning: What does the world most need that our company is uniquely able to provide? What is the essence of our business? What non-financial imperatives should drive every decision we make? How do we build a strong and resilient consensus among senior decision-makers on the current sustainability risks we face? A strategic vision that builds on unique strengths protects reputational risk and integrates social values within the context of the strategic plan is essential for success in today’s highly competitive, global market.
Problem Solving
Every problem has a solution, often hidden in plain sight. How will the coal industry manage through regulation that imposes costs on CO2 emissions? What can the soft drink industry do as legislation threatens to impose the costs associated with obesity and diabetes? How can high cost manufacturers compete with products made in low wage countries?
Corporate Governance
Most companies use corporate governance as a tool to prevent the involvement of stakeholders from meddling in management’s affairs. Corporate governance usually limits participation, ensures secrecy, and perpetuates “traditional” ways of doing things. Today, many of these practices prevent the positive influence of committed stakeholders to participate constructively in adding value to the corporation.
Community Building
Stakeholder Engagement: Learn how to engage a broad group of stakeholders including supply chain partners, NGO’s, community representatives and regulators to foster solutions to complex issues. Leverage stakeholder engagement in to sustainability reporting, product development, corporate strategy and crisis management.
Creating a Culture of Sustainability: Employees at all levels must learn how to make the business case for sustainability initiatives; identify potential conflicts between corporate policy, communication and culture and sustainability objectives; and learn how to approach resolving those conflicts in ways that support and nurture a culture that respects and rewards a strategic commitment to sustainability.
Disclosure/Reporting
Transparency: Effectively increase the level of transparency you provide to employees, consumers, and customers. What are the risks and benefits, the legal issues, and the best communications mechanisms? Why has this been such a challenge for most companies? Which companies are the best models to consider emulating? Understand how greater transparency builds brands, customer loyalty, mitigates reputational risk, and creates shareholder value.
Marketing Communications
Crisis Management: Learn the best practices of how responsible and transparent companies manage challenges and crises when they arise. Learn how to use both traditional and social media, leverage stakeholder relationships, and why this dialogue has changed dramatically over the last decade.