Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.
Recent Posts
Failing Our Children
Following up on my blog post titled “The State of America’s Children 2011,” I want to return to a little-noticed story from earlier this summer on college-readiness. Sharon Otterman, writing in The New York Times, reviewed the dismal data that the New York State...
Our Children, An Ever-Growing Crisis
Charles Blow of The New York Times recently selected some of the saddest and most depressing statics from the recently released “The State of America’s Children 2011” report, issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund. The report highlights the impact of the...
If I Wanted Someone to Talk About My Brand it Would be Alexandra Zissu
Many companies are slowly becoming more sustainable and toying with transparency in an effort to establish greater consumer trust and brand authenticity. And consumers are clearly interested in more responsible products from trustworthy companies. Yet, companies are...
A Visit to Mondragon: Innovation & Knowledge
Fred Freundlich, a native of the Boston area, moved to Mondragon for the first time in 1982, in his mid-twenties. He was fascinated by a business world that he believed was impossible to create. Corporations that value human dignity over profits were, in his...
A Visit to Mondragon: Training Board & Governing Council Members
“Trained people will build better companies.” -Director of New Member Training at Mondragon Cooperative Corporation- What if the board members of every US corporation were trained in the basics of corporate governance – before they took office? Imagine that kind of...
A Visit to Mondragon: Interview with Mondragon’s Director of Cooperative Dissemination
“This is a people society, money is only a resource” -Mikel Lezamiz, Director of Cooperative Dissemination at Mondragon- As part of a group of 17 people from the Co-Lab at MIT, we all had lots of questions during the initial orientation. Our guide and primary teacher...
A Visit to Mondragon: People Before Profits
This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be writing to describe my trip to the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, located in the Basque region of Spain. I’m compelled to start with purpose, mission and values. Whatever one might conclude about Mondragon, the single...
Mondragon: The History of a Movement
By Nicholas G. Luviene, from “Building a Platform for Economic Democracy: A Cooperative Development Strategy for the Bronx.” © 2010 Nicholas G. Luviene. (Note: This excerpt is republished with permission from Mr. Luviene.) Mondragon is located in the Basque region, a...
Coops, Italian Style: A Look at the Legacoop in Bologna
"That the Italian and Basque cooperatives have grown so large is somewhat a mystery since, unlike capitalist enterprises, cooperatives are not expansionist by nature…Capitalist enterprises tend towards growth because increased scale generally leads to greater returns...
The Mondragon Moment
(Note: This blog post is republished from the original, published on July 14, 2011, hosted by the MIT CoLab and accessible here.) It used to be that dissatisfied Americans looked for ways to fix the economy when it wasn’t working for them, using policy adjustments and...
Better Living is Possible: How Other Countries Put The US to Shame
A better way is possible. We spend more than $110 billion fighting wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but are plagued with a poverty rate of more than 17 percent. At 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births, the U.S. had the highest infant mortality rate among the high-income...
Room for Improvement: 72% See Sustainability Initiatives Exceed Expectations
A recent international survey conducted by Accenture revealed some pretty interesting statistics about the state of sustainability in the mindset of corporate leaders. Though a majority see the benefits -- namely in reputation and trust (cited by 49% of respondents),...
Put More Women in Charge
“The neglect of women’s rights means the social and economic potential of half the population is underused. In order to tap into this potential, we must open up spaces for women in political leadership, in science and technology, as trade and peace negotiators, and as...
A Time of Extraordinary Urgency – and Extraordinary Opportunity
We know that water, forests, soils – all the essentials of life - are becoming depleted and degraded at a dangerous rate. We know that our climate is changing at a speed and on a scale far beyond anything modern humanity has experienced. And we know that the hard...
The Cannibalization of Entrepreneurship in America
As if we didn’t have enough problems. Now we learn, through the Kauffman Foundation’s recently published research, that the ever-expanding financial sector is depleting the talent pool of potential high-growth company founders. While all entrepreneurs need capital and...
Celebrating Fair Trade With a Sweet Story
For some, the taste of chocolate is bittersweet. Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa comes from small-scale family farmers in West Africa, whose economy is critically dependent on cocoa (revenues account for more than 33 percent of Ghana’s total export earnings and...
In Chicago, Coal is the Real Crime
This post was originally published by Phil Radford to Greenpeace USA's blog and is accessible here. "A sad fact of living in an American city like Chicago is that every time we open a newspaper or switch on the local news, we hear of some senseless, tragic crime that...
Reflections on the 10th Annual Responsible Business Summit in London
Every year, Ethical Corporation, a magazine, organizes a summit to assess the progress that the corporate world has made on its journey toward sustainability. This year, I was invited to speak on the question, “Can a large company be sustainable and grow?” My answer...
Invest in Employee Wellness: Johnson & Johnson reports $250 Million ROI
$250 million is a big number. It’s even bigger when you consider that it’s the savings Johnson & Johnson reaped as a result of the company’s investment in employee wellness. While the company has had a very tough year with numerous and costly product recalls,...
Something Is Not Rotten in the Land of Tomatoes
Something remarkably progressive is happening in one of the more repressive work environments in the United States. Within the tomato business, an industry that has seen nine cases of slavery prosecuted in the past 15 years, workers’ rights are finally becoming a key...
In Their Own Words: Voices From the Next Generation of Business
Our economic future, though built by the architects of then and now, lies in the hands of the next generation. And that future looks bright, based on the strong ideals of some of the students coming out of undergraduate and graduate business programs nationwide. The...