A list of books by Jeffrey Hollender, featuring reviews from thought-leaders in the space of corporate sustainability. Plus, a hand-picked list of books that have inspired, challenged and taught Jeffrey through his years.
Books by Jeffrey Hollender
Planet Home
Jeffrey Hollender’s newest book, PLANET HOME: Conscious Choices for Cleaning and Greening the World You Care About Most, takes the reader through his/her world nook by nook, covering the non-toxic way to care for absolutely everything in the home with information that is imparted with quick tips, lists, sidebars, and illustrations. The book is co-authored with Alexandra Zissu, author of The Conscious Kitchen.
PLANET HOME addresses the reader’s world nook by nook with quick tips, useful lists, dog-earable sidebars, and helpful illustrations. Hollender goes from the tiniest corner in your closet to your kitchen and kids’ rooms, out to the backyard, and then into the community. From which paper towel to buy to what to make for dinner, from how to choose an insurance company to approaching and involving new neighbors, PLANET HOME offers a practical way to care for absolutely everything in and surrounding the home. With each everyday topic—even something as mundane as cleaning a toilet—Hollender tackles the deeper, concealed issues about our health, our environment, and our commitment to a better world.
Part encyclopedia, part self-help book, and part inspiration from one of our most experienced guides to healthy living, PLANET HOME is the definitive reference for reinventing domestic life.
The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win
How to create a company that not only sustains, but surpasses-that moves beyond the imperative to be “less bad” and embrace an ethos to be “all good”.
From the Inspired Protagonist and Chairman of Seventh Generation, the country’s leading brand of household products and a pioneering “good company,” comes a one-of-a-kind book for leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents everywhere. The Responsibility Revolution reveals the smartest ways for companies to build a better future-and hold themselves accountable for the results. Thousands of companies have pledged to act responsibly; very few have proven that they know how. This book will guide them. The Responsibility Revolution presents fresh ideas and actionable strategies to commit your company to a genuine socially and environmentally responsible business and culture, one that not only competes but wins on values.
The Responsibility Revolution equips people with the tactics, models, and mind-sets they need to compete in a world where consumers now demand that companies contribute to the greater good.
In Our Every Deliberation: An Introduction to Seventh Generation
You can’t grow your business without growing everyone in your business community. All real possibility and potential begins in our own hearts and minds. Our ability to create real and lasting value, attract and retain the best talent, provide innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and build successful business to benefit all stakeholders – starts and ends with the quality of the culture and workplace experience we create for our employees.
Our ability to use the power and potential of business to transform the world into a sustainable, just, and equitable place for all its inhabitants starts with our own consciousness of the role we are willing to play. This is a process that is not for the faint of heart.
Our journey at Seventh Generation is driven by the attempt to answer a question that business is not well-equipped to answer: “What does the world need most that we are uniquely able to provide?”
Naturally Clean: The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe & Healthy, Non-Toxic Cleaning
Did you know that your favorite cleaner could be making you sick? Compelling evidence now links the chemicals in household products to a whole range of conditions including cancer, asthma, allergies, multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, hormonal disruption, and reproductive and developmental disorders. Yet cleaning products are exempt from the full ingredient disclosure on product labels as required for food and personal care products and enter the marketplace with little or no testing for potential health risks. Naturally Clean explains the dangers of traditional cleaners and provides illuminating statistics that illustrate how the chemicals found in almost every home are known or likely to cause a host of serious health problems. A room-by-room guide provides tips for keeping your home healthier.
What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers Is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business Is Listening
Under what conditions can a business hope to deliver consistent financial results, inspire employees, protect the environment, and make the world a better place? The question gets to the heart of a set of fundamental questions: What is the purpose of a business? In what ways does a business create value, and whom does it really serve? Can a business promote social causes and yet remain robust, competitive, and profitable?
Jeffrey Hollender has run Seventh Generation, the world leader in creating environmentally friendly, nontoxic household and personal care products for more than 20 years. That the company’s success continued through the 90′s bubble attests to an unwavering set of principles and behavioral guidelines based on the premise that social responsibility is a viable, vital, and sustainable business strategy.
Outlining seven specific principles of corporate responsibility, What Matters Most shows you how to assess your company’s performance, address rising consumer expectations, honestly communicate your game plan, and embark on a path of long-term growth. For general readers, What Matters Most is bound to fuel the debate over the role of business in society and the limits to which it can drive positive change.
How to Make the World a Better Place: 116 Ways You Can Make a Difference
Think of all the problems in the world, in the city or town where you live, on your own block: pollution, violence, children who can’t read, housebound elderly people, litter in the street, the homeless. If only somebody would do something about these things…Why not you? Why not now?
You don’t need to be a high-profile social activist to effect positive social change. How to Make the World a Better Place, in this updated and expanded edition, shows how just one person can make a difference in solving global, national, and local problems. Whether you’re interested in feeding the hungry, protecting the environment, helping the homeless, or making your community a safer place to live, you’ll find the means to get started in this book.
Jeffrey Hollender’s Must Reads
These books have inspired me, challenged me and taught me – I hope you find them as enjoyable as I have. The list includes the books I’ve read over the past few years that have most profoundly shaped my frame of reference on the world, the challenges we face and where the most promising opportunities lie.
The Inspired Protagonist’s Reading List:
- Presence, by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty S. Flowers
- The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Riane Eisler
- America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy by Gar Alperovitz
- Slower by Design, Not Disaster: Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster: Advances in Ecological Economics by Peter A Victor;
- The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability, by James Gustave Speth
- The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse
- Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathan Porritt
- Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yunus
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals And The Next Episode Of Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin
- Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives by Alvin and Heidi Toffler
- Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership by Joseph Jaworski and Betty S. Flowers
- A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober
- Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus
- Creating Wealth, Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies Gwendolyn Hallsmith & Bernard Lietaer
- Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.
- Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
Classic Books on Sustainable Business and Best Practices:
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins October 2000, Back Bay Books
Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Herman E. Daly, Paperback, August 1997 Beacon Press Books
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies; Collins, JC and Porras, JI, Random House 1995
Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, John Elkington, Capstone1997, Can capitalism be sustainable? Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
The Chrysalis Economy, How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation; John Elkington, Capstone Publishing Ltd.; London; 2001.
The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship; Simon Zadek, Earthscan Publications Ltd.; London and Sterling, VA; 2001.
Corporate Citizenship; Malcolm McIntosh, Deborah Leipziger, Keith Jones and Gill Coleman, Financial Times and Pittman Publishing; London; 1998.
Cradle-to-Cradle: Putting Eco-Effectiveness into Practice by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Wisdom on designing products, companies, and systems that embrace true sustainable thinking, from two of the leading practitioners.
Value Shift: Why Companies Must Merge Social and Financial Imperatives to Achieve Superior Results, Harvard Business School Professor Lynn Sharp Paine’s groundbreaking 2002 book.
Book Reviews from my Blog
Healing hunger, poverty, war, climate change–with enlightened self-interest
Let me share a note from my friend Shel Horowitz, who co-authored two Guerrilla Marketing books with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson. Shel is quite an interesting guy. Last time I googled for him, I got more than 100,000 hits. I've always thought of him as...
Planet Home: living green
Planet Home is a guide to going green, but this book goes a step further and challenges readers to think deeply about how our actions and purchases are part of a much larger planetary system than we may be aware of. This book was written in 2010, but it is just as, if...
The Best Advice You’ll Ever Get
Many of you know David Brooks, the reasonably conservative, Republican-ish, op-ed columnist of The New York Times. The first and only time I ever attended a TED conference, Brooks was there, speaking to promote his latest book at the time. I found him arrogant and...
How Multi-National Business Holds the US Economy Hostage
In Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, The Price of Civilization, he states in no uncertain terms that the US economy is held hostage to a narrow group of corporate interests. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and...
The Startup Playbook
Fantastic new book out today that I highly recommend by entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author David S. Kidder called THE STARTUP PLAYBOOK: The Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups From Their Founding Entrepreneurs. Kidder shares the raw experiences of...
Creating Good Work
Cheryl L. Dorsey, the president of Echoing Green, notes in her forward to Ron Schultz’s latest book Creating Good Work that it arrives at a critical time in the relatively short history of the social entrepreneurial movement. As Jeff Trexler points out in his...
Reinventing Fire: A Solution to “Peak Everything”
This blog post was originally posted on the Seventh Generation "7Gen Blog" by "Inkslinger" on February 20, 2012. We've all heard about peak oil – when petroleum production hits its all-time high and then declines forever after. It's a fact that supply experts...
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...
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...
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...
Think You’re Good? Think Again
I recently finished reading a remarkable book by Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. It makes an unusually tough-minded assertion: I am immoral. I already know that in a world where so few have so much and so many have so little,...