This Month’s Recommended Book: The Responsibility Revolution
This Month’s Recommended Book: The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win, by Jeffrey Hollender and Bill Breen
Do you think you can learn some lessons from a company that has totally integrated social responsibility into every aspect of its operations, from day one—and even more than 20 years after its founding, continues to grow as much as 51 percent annually? And that particular year was the recession year of 2008, a time when you’d expect a company that sells organic personal care goods and does not attempt to compete on price to be suffering.
That company is Seventh Generation, the sustainability-oriented company that Jeffrey Hollender started in 1988. True to their values, however, Hollender and Breen (a co-founder of Fast Company who serves as Seventh Generation’s Editorial Director) wait until the last chapter to tell a piece of Seventh Generation’s story—specifically how the company brought in a strategic consultant who worked with them on not just identifying their values, but inculcating the core mission so thoroughly into the company DNA that every employee understands and participates in the wider mission to change the world of business, and use business to change the world. That decision is directly related to the company’s phenomenal growth n recent years: 45 percent in 2007, 51 percent in 2008, and an undisclosed but still positive number in the economy-wide traumatic year of 2009.
First, they tell the stories of some other great companies that are making a difference, including some very well-known brands: IBM, Nike, British department store giant Marks & Spencer, Patagonia, and others—each story framed around central lessons within each chapter, and typically two or three companies highlighted in a chapter.
Some of these companies, in particular Nike and Marks & Spencer, came to the sustainability sandbox after deep and stinging criticism by advocates of environmental and social responsibility, but took the message to heart and embraced the mission to reinvent their companies as sustainable.
For others, like Organic Valley and Patagonia, sustainability was hard-wired into the corporate DNA from the beginning, and that provided a platform to ask hard questions, expose and then reform their own questionable practices, and come through this high-risk process even stronger.
The Responsibility Revolution is crammed with great take-aways, many of them focused on authenticity, transparency, interrelatedness, and yes, profitability. Both numbers and stories make an effective case for embracing environmental and social sustainability as a path to financial sustainability.
When sustainability is really part of the corporate DNA, it opens up vast new markets. In Seventh Generation’s case, the sustainability decision is very strategic: In Hollender’s words, it “helps us define, over the next three to five years, what sustainability will look like in the home care and personal care business.” Thus, the company is able to take the lead and market its innovations before others catch on.
And yet the company wants to get others on board, even at the cost of that marketing advantage. After discovering how commercial palm oil plantations destroy rainforests, contaminate workers with pesticides, and spew carbon into the atmosphere, Seventh Generation didn’t just switch to sustainable palm oil (a major ingredient in many of its cleansers)—but also began pressuring the industry to switch (even backing legislation that would force this). The company was thrilled when SC Johnson, makers of Raid, Windex and Glade, among other products, came on board. Seventh Generation knows that it can continue to innovate, to raise the bar, to claim credit for sparking this wider movement, even while it can no longer claim to be the only company using sustainably grown palm oil.
With more of a focus on operations than on marketing, this wonderful book is an excellent complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’d advise reading both.
