April 2004 - What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers Is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business Is Listening
In 1989, Jeffrey Hollender raised $850,000 to relaunch a catalog of water and energy conservation products. His venture, Seventh Generation, ultimately blossomed into an estimated $25 million manufacturer and distributor of nontoxic and biodegradable detergents, cleansers, and paper towels - and, as Hollender writes, a company with "a well-developed vision of what it means to be a responsible business and a good corporate citizen."
Now Hollender, with boyhood friend Stephen Fenichell, has written a loving history and appraisal of the modern corporate citizenship movement. What Matters Most, this month's Fast Company Readers' Choice, dwells on a generation of enlightened entrepreneurs who have seeded such influential consortia as the Social Venture Network and Business for Social Responsibil-ity. Among them are well-known business activists such as The Body Shop's Anita Roddick and lower-profile movers like Joshua Mailman, a New York social investor.
Hollender's take: This network has established models of corporate responsibility that bigger corporations are increasingly embracing. The argument is optimistic, of course, but also intelligent and convincing. Good corporate citizenship, he writes, "has become a new way to be a fundamental part of the paradigm within which all business in the future is bound to evolve."
