Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.
Recent Posts
Biomimicry:
Innovation Inspired by Nature. Janine Benyus one of sustainability’s most brilliant minds developed the idea of Biomimicry. Biomimicry is the rather simple idea that if we can understand the way in which nature works to acquire and store energy, build bridges and...
Synchronicity
The Inner Path of Leadership Joseph Jaworski and Betty S. Flowers Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1998 “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...
Presence
Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty S. Flowers Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2008 This is probably the best and most important book I’ve read in the last 10 years! Over the past month I’ve been reading Presence by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer,...
Revolutionary Wealth
How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives Alvin and Heidi Toffler Currency/Doubleday, 2007 In their most recent book, the Tofflers describe a huge new and uncharted part of our economy as “prosuming.” Prosuming has two primary features. The creation of...
The Support Economy
Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals And The Next Episode Of Capitalism Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin Viking, 2002 This book articulates the growing divide between our aspirations and needs as individuals and the products and services most companies provide....
Creating a World Without Poverty
Social Business and the Future of Capitalism Muhammad Yunus PublicAffairs 2008 Economics professor and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize says he originally became involved in poverty not as a policy-maker, scholar, or researcher, but because poverty was all around...
Capitalism as if the World Matters
Jonathan Porritt Earthscan, 2005 Porritt is chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission; former chairman of the Ecology Party (now the Green Party); a former director of the Friends of the Earth UK; and currently runs the Forum for the Future, which aims to...
The Bridge at the Edge of the World
Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability, by James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 2008 James Gustave Speth, Co-founder of the NRDC, Yale University dean, and former White House advisor has written a great book that everyone...
Slower by Design, Not Disaster
Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster: Advances in Ecological Economics, Peter A Victor; Edward Elgar Pub (November 30, 2008) Managing without Growth, contrasts the idea of genuine progress with economic growth. Progress is about creating a world...
America Beyond Capitalism
Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, by Gar Alperovitz, published by Wiley & Co. There are voices speaking the words the world needs to hear. One belongs to political scientist Gar Alpervoitz. Alpervoitz has not hesitated to face up to the...
Creating a Game Plan for the Transition to a Sustainable US Economy
“The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common...
The 30 Year War on Middle Class America
In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the American economy experienced long periods of prosperity, in which GDP growth performed quite well. At the same time, inequality rose rapidly. Yet rather than seeking to correct the inequality through redistributive policies,...
Happy Holidays, America
“Exuberance made a comeback this year at Josh Koplewicz’s annual Halloween party. More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan, a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years. The open bar was...
Terminated by Seventh Generation
More than two decades ago, I founded Seventh Generation with the idea of creating a different way of doing business. Since then, the company has established new benchmarks for ethical and sustainable corporate behavior, grounded in the principles of employee...
The Global Implications of Our Ethical Decisions
Thomas Friedman wrote several weeks ago about our interconnected yet uncertain future. "In a world where our demand for Chinese-made sneakers produces pollution that melts South America's glaciers, in a world where Greek tax-evasion can weaken the euro, threaten the...
The Seventh Generation
We live in an endlessly interconnected world but every day all too many of us don't consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations yet alone the next six, five, four, three, two, or even one. Historians will write about ours as the generation of...
Some Big Steps Yield a Small One of Our Own
Here's a retailing truth: You can't be in the business of selling consumer products without thinking about Walmart. The merchandising behemoth sells so much of what so many North Americans buy -- from groceries to tires -- that to not seek it as a customer is like...
Getting the Sustainability Imperative Right
The Harvard Business Review has consistently tackled the many issues related to business and sustainability, and done it from a more deeply strategic perspective than most others. David A. Lubin and Daniel C. Esty's recent article on The Sustainability Imperative is a...
From Manual to Manifesto
When co-author Bill Breen and I wrote our new book, The Responsibility Revolution, we intended it to function as a how-to manual that would introduce the corporate community to the new brand of corporate responsibility that's now emerging at renegade companies around...
The Death and Life of Corporate Responsibility
Corporate responsibility—the notion that companies should include the public interest in all their decision-making—has never been so popular. Nor has it so often proved so phony. The evidence is all around us: *In 2008, General Motors rolls out a TV campaign for its...
Secrets of a More Just and Equitable World
"We want bigger houses and more cars, not because we need them, but because we use them to express our status. Material goods are how we show the world we're keeping up, and in a more hierarchical society that's more important. Status competition becomes more intense,...