Justmeans

JustMeans

Posts by This Writer

3 weeks 2 days ago

Guest blog by Cheryl Heller Founding Chair of MFA Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts, New York City

Why give a damn:

The days of lone heroes and quick fixes are over, and never were what we hoped they would be. Our problems are too complex to fix quickly, and too big to fix alone. For everyone trying to change the world on a deadline, give it up.

We needed the Slow Food movement to remind us that meals can heal us through their rituals of connectedness and their nourishing substance. We need the Slow...
1 month 2 weeks ago

Guest Blog by Michael Vaughan, CEO, The Regis Company

(3Bl Media/Justmeans) - Business owners and managers today face a myriad of challenges—a tight market with strong competition, workforce issues, slimming margins and the need to keep pace with technological advancements to name a few. Add to these a rapidly changing environment and a barrage of noise generated from the Internet, smartphones, television, and other media.
 
How do owners and managers stay in step with daily competing priorities and deadlines, filter...
2 months 2 days ago

Interview: Lucy Marcus, TV host of “In the Boardroom with Lucy Marcus,” board director, and columnist, by Timothy Nixon, Managing Editor, Thomson Reuters Sustainability 

Nixon: How should a business leader understand the over-used term sustainability?  What is it? What isn’t it in a business context?

Marcus: There was a time when “sustainability” was looked upon as a greenwashing exercise for corporate marketers. It has evolved significantly to denote things that are fundamental to how successful...
2 months 3 days ago

Guest Blog by Matt Ellis, Founder and CEO, Measurabl

We all know the jargon: Sustainability. CSR. Shared value. Triple bottom line. Green. They all land somewhere between ephemeral concepts and a color. How did we manage to detach something so important from its twin value propositions of risk mitigation and cost reduction? More puzzling still is how the value of sustainability got so turned around at a time when regulation, investor pressure and consumer demand for accountability and transparency are more real and impactful than ever.

The answer is we’ve been misled into thinking sustainability – the idea...
2 months 1 week ago

Guest Blog by Cheryl Heller, Founding Chair of MFA Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts, New York City

In February of 2008, in the midst of election fever, Jim Giles wrote an article in the New Scientist in support of growing evidence that political leanings are biological. ”According to an emerging idea, political positions are substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason. ‘These views are deep-seated and built into our brains. Trying to persuade someone not to be liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to...
2 months 3 weeks ago

Guest Blog by Joe Keefe, President and CEO of Pax World Management LLC and Pax World Funds

The federal government in Washington, DC is at an all-time low in public esteem. This has to do with a lot of things, from intransigent right-wing ideology (e.g., debt ceiling debacle) to bureaucratic incompetence (e.g., Affordable Care Act website), to partisan gamesmanship (e.g., gerrymandered congressional districts), to outright, willful ignorance (e.g., climate change deniers), to a campaign finance system that produces policy makers held captive to the very special interests they are...
3 months 1 week ago

Guest Blog by Michael Townsend

Founder and CEO, Earthshine Solutions, and author of A Journey in Search of Capitalism 2.0

Capitalism is at the crossroads. Since the onset of the worst financial crisis in living memory, capitalism is suffering a crisis of liquidity, reliability, and confidence. It is facing accusations of failing to create shared wealth, of neglecting the planet, of generating an ever-widening gap in our societies, and even in failing its primary allies – the shareholders.

Our system of commerce is naturally undergoing a wise degree of introspection: Can it survive, will it evolve...
3 months 1 week ago

Guest Blog by Cheryl Heller

Partner, CommonWise,Chair; MFA Design for Social Innovation, SVA

The traditional purview of design in business is the making of objects and other artifacts. The traditional view of designers is as talented but narrow experts who are guided by their own personal vision when determining (dictating when they can) what the world, or the company, needs next.

Now there’s a new design emerging that works from inside a community and at a systems level, impacting human relationships instead of things. It emerges from the new...
3 months 2 weeks ago

Guest Blog by Stephanie Schwartz, 2014 MBA Candidate, Society & Business Lab Fellow, and former BSR intern

Patagonia’s fall 2013 catalog opens with an essay, “The Elephant in the Room,” in which mountaineer, adventurer, and Patagonia Vice President of Environmental Affairs Rick Ridgeway described being surrounded by global executives during a forum on corporate responsibility. As the leaders discussed their companies’ progress on environmental issues, Ridgeway leaned over to a Google executive and pointed out that despite these efforts, “...
4 months 5 days ago

Guest Blog by Solitaire Townsend, Cofounder, Futerra

Earlier this year at the GRI Conference, BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer and I launched a debate looking at the emerging world of social media in CSR reporting. Since then, in preparing for our BSR Conference session on the subject held in November, we met global brands and dug around online, and we’ve noticed that when it comes to social media, not all sustainability reports are created equally. In fact, they come in three species: the Pigeon, the Peacock, and the rare...

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