BiF-4 Insights – Jeffrey Hollender – Seventh Generation

“We are making things less bad.”

New venture – New Chapter (Vitamin company sourcing from Costa Rica)

Would it be possible to make shampoos that when flushed into the oceans, they might help make the oceans better?

In the financial crisis, will sustainability be the first thing to go?

• Pepsi just announced layoffs of 3,300 people including the head of sustainability

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart hasn’t pulled back their commitment to sustainability

• We are now going to sell thru Wal-Mart
• I may have said we never would do this, but the fact is that it helps us help more people to do less bad
• Wal-Mart is taking many positive steps ahead of other retailers:
• Wal-Mart influenced laundry soap manufacturers to cut half of the water out of their liquid products
• Intentionally becoming the largest seller of compact flourescent lightbulbs ahead of the curve
• Exploring green energy for stores
• Exploring fuel efficiency improvements for its fleet of trucks
• Changing price of salad & water meal in their store canteens to match the price of pizza & soda meal

To create a productive workforce you have to create the ability for people to grow.

We have one day a month devoted to learning some far out things:

• Training on raising consciousness
• We’ve been helped by Carol Sanford as the architect of this

Every six weeks I also sit down with employees and answer all their questions.

We were forced to talk about a chemical being in our products that we were working to remove, but wasn’t gone yet, because we were not yet being transparent.

As a result, we started to publish transparently what’s wrong with our products, which may seem dangerous, but competition does not capitalize because they do not want to answer the same questions about their products.

For more information on the talk, go here.