Can Seventh Generation's CSR lessons influence the mainstream?

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a publicist for Jeffrey Hollender, the Co-Founder and Chairman of Seventh Generation. Mr. Hollender was about to release his latest book on CSR and she wanted me to review a free proof copy and interview him as part of my series.

At 183 pages, the Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win is a quick read. While some parts of it read a bit like other CSR literature (Green to Gold came to mind), the book contained a number of stories that were entertaining and thought-provoking. The big surprise for me was the chapter on employee relations, which focused on Linden Labs, the company that created the online virtual world known as Second Life. Here are a few of my favorite points from that chapter:

1) The company has a web page called the Love Machine, which its associates can use to send notes of appreciation to colleagues (most associates reportedly use it about once a day) which are visible to all employees. Each employee picks his or her favorite ten Love Notes to go into their reviews and to be made public on an internal website.

2) Associates are given quarterly distributions (an equal percentage of profits) to allocate as they feel appropriate to anybody within the company except themselves through an online tool called The Rewarder. Data on top performers is visible to senior management.

3) Engineers are not assigned tasks. Instead, they select the tasks they want to perform from a database of projects.

4) The CEO issues a quarterly questionnaire to all employees asking if they think he still should be running the company.

Fun stuff. But with so many CSR books already on the market place, why should we pay attention to this one?

Mr. Hollender, who stepped down as CEO of Seventh Generation in June of 2009 (but is still Chairman) has a personal mission of influencing other businesses to take on sustainability as his company has done. He sees this book as distinct from others on the marketplace insofar it is neither a case study of an individual company nor a highly academic book one step removed from the process of actually running a company. He wanted to do so through stories, colorfully conveying how ideals could be translated into reality through business.

But are all companies in a position to embrace this agenda? We spoke at length about how few mainstream corporations that acquire sustainable companies succeed in disseminating the good CSR practices of the acquired company to other parts of the organization. The one exception Mr. Hollender cited during our interview was Danone, which owns a big chunk of Stonyfield Farm and has figured out how to incorporate many of the environmental technologies from Stonyfield into its core operations. Unfortunately, he views this as an anomaly, which is why he would like to see Seventh Generation become "a sustainable Procter and Gamble", offering small sustainable companies an alternative to sell to in order to achieve greater access to capital for their good work.

All this begged a question for me. Understanding that Danone is an exception to the rule, is it really feasible for mainstream corporations--- say Procter and Gamble, for example--- to gain the kind of inspiration from this book that Mr. Hollender had initially said he hoped for? The essence of his response: perhaps not completely, but this question leads well into the topic of the book he envisions coming next. Its subject: "how we need to make regulatory changes that make it more advantageous to do the right thing." But if we so urgently need the mainstream behemoths of this world to improve their CSR profiles, can we afford to wait for the sequel?

The Responsibility Revolution is available today at Borders and Barnes & Noble, as well as online at Amazon.com, Books-A-Million.com and 800CEORead.com.

Photo Credit: Seventh Generation