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[SPEAKER_02]: How do you build one of the most iconic purpose-driven brands in the world and still lose control of it?
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[SPEAKER_02]: In sustainability, we'd love to hear about the success stories, but far less often do we talk about what happens after that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: On it shouldn't be this hard, we talk to business leaders, sustainability professionals,
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[SPEAKER_02]: and social impact entrepreneurs working at the intersection of purpose and performance, hosting lively, playful, and often provocative discussions around why sometimes it's so hard to do the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and do the right things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In this episode, we're going inside one of those original stories with Jeffrey Hollander, founder of seventh generation, professor at NYU Stern, and published author of the book, built for a better world.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Did you just mind starting by just introducing yourself and telling us who you are and what you've done?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So Jeffrey Hollander, I am a life-long social entrepreneur.
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[SPEAKER_00]: From the time I was about 19, and I dropped out of college, started my first business in Toronto.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've had about five different companies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've started all of which have been sold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And today, I am a professor at the Stern Business School at New York University, and I teach social entrepreneurship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I spend most of my time mentoring young entrepreneurs who were starting businesses to address the many challenges the environment and our society face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: With the belief that business can do something to help those issues move in a more positive direction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have written about seven books, I think I've written my last one with the one that just came out last week.
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[SPEAKER_03]: just in terms of your journey with with synth generation.
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[SPEAKER_03]: What was it like to spend 15, 20 years building probably one of the most well-known sustainability in purpose driven brands?
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[SPEAKER_03]: only to effectively realize that the company had eaten itself, fallen away from your initial vision and was taking an entirely different course.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Can you give any perspective on how you felt and in retrospect why that happened?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, getting fired from a company you started is no fun and it was a pretty horrific
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[SPEAKER_00]: painful experience that took many, many months, probably more than a few months, maybe two years to recover from.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I spent a lot of time trying to understand why that happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And to what extent I was responsible for that and to what extent the board may be a fault for making that decision.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a little bit of both.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I am an impatient person.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to get to where I'm going
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have a set of pretty strong moral beliefs and you don't want to cross them because I probably won't forgive you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was way out ahead of my board.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had not brought them along on the journey that I was on, a journey that was deeply committed to things like employee ownership, radical transparency.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And because of that, the board became
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[SPEAKER_00]: nervous and probably scared of me, and when they had the opportunity to have a much more traditional CEO who I took part in selecting, the end of the day they decided that they liked him a lot more than they liked me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly, they actually did fire him six months after they fired me because they came to realize that to a large extent I had
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[SPEAKER_00]: made a mistake and selecting this individual because, you know, lots of people wanted you good in the world, lots of people want to have responsible businesses, but most people really don't have any idea what it takes and how hard it is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the challenges that you're going to know encounter and doing that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so, like many people, he was attracted by the vision, but really wasn't deeply embedded in being committed to the process of how you get there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, other than that, there was a lot of disagreement about employee ownership.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We had given 20% of the company to the employees.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The board woke up one day and thought, wow, that delusion is gonna hurt me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's undo some of what we did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of said, over my dead body, we gonna undo employee ownership because I want to get to 30% not down below 20%.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was not something that was a happy discussion, so, you know, I think I take responsibility for not bringing the board along with me on the journey I was on and making sure they were on the same pages I was on, and to a certain extent because I took a lot of capital that was traditional private equity venture and hedge fund money, that was a mistake.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was trying to accomplish, and that's a bad situation to create.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, my fault I was growing so quickly, I was addicted to growth like you might be addicted to cocaine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was hungry to grow more and more and more, that takes more capital, and that means I made some bad decisions in terms of who I took money from.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that just really resonates with me as this whole being ahead and not taking people with you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Energy visionary, and you look ahead, then you can see the roadmap as how to get there, and you don't understand why it's not always clear to everyone else, or the values and the steps that you feel are important to make in making that vision possible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess you assume it's everyone, everyone gets it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I find that to get to where you want to go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not only about creating a plan of how to get there, but it often entails changing who you are and some level of personal growth and increased consciousness to be willing and eager to make those kind of changes, and that's not for everybody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody doesn't want to do that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it creates a whole new opportunity but challenge for people as well.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Taking those big leaps of faith is it gets the adrenaline going, doesn't it?
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[SPEAKER_03]: It goes to the very core of who you are, I'm guessing, and on what you believe.
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[SPEAKER_03]: and it's the clarity of vision it's able to see a better future which is the motivating force behind everything very easy to leave people behind and then get frustrated when they can't see the roadmap is clearly as you can.
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[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of chief sustainability officers or founders of social entrepreneurship based businesses that I'll start up from growing exponentially
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[SPEAKER_03]: What advice would you give to them to kind of help them just kind of almost kind of contain their passion a little bit and make sure they're building in the right the right steps and the right roadmap to to bring everyone along the journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It starts with who you hire and why they want to work for you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if there isn't great alignment there in terms of their motivation and values, you're going to have a tough time because you're hiring people that aren't going to
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[SPEAKER_00]: really be eager to join the journey and be part of the culture you're trying to create.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not easy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a big investment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We worked with a wonderful woman named Carol Sanfer for three years to help us sort of make sure we were embedding our values into the way we operated the business.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a challenging process because
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the people discovered that this wasn't really the journey they wanted to be on and you have to be willing to lift those people go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So be careful about who you hire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say get external help because I sure didn't know how to do this and leave this in a way that was going to be effective.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had not done it before.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it also takes a certain amount of growth and development on the part of the leader
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[SPEAKER_00]: that you're doing something that you don't necessarily really know how to do, and that you need to be open to learning and being open to growing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that was really part of that commitment was having a director of corporate consciousness at the company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Who's not was to help with that whole process.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was dedicated to raising the consciousness of all the people at the company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I've run across any other company that had such an individual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was available to anybody at any level, any time someone needed help, and he was such a giving and loving person that people felt comfortable coming to him and asking for help.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not everybody wants to ask for help and admit that they needed it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He made people feel incredibly comfortable about doing that.
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[SPEAKER_03]: particularly within the current economic and political climate.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think that something that companies should invest in more?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Because it feels to me like just having someone to go to safety valve that can provide clarity in distance and objectivity in a world that's spinning on its axis could be a really valuable thing to help reshape the purpose of business.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, but it's a first step and it's not enough.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because as you know, we've created a context and an environment in which business operates that very often doesn't encourage us to do the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We've been a world today, in my opinion, where it's perfectly legal to do things that are on ethical and immoral.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And people say, well, it's okay because it's legal in my opinion is not okay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not okay for large companies to not pay any taxes and contribute to the, basically, this society upon which they depend to operate in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It wouldn't happen if it wasn't for that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not okay as we well know for you to use child labor so that you can get lower cost for the things that are manufactured.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we learn that lesson decades ago, but people are still making that mistake.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you thought that that was over, we'd be sorely mistaken because there's many children working for companies all around the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a challenge, and it's a challenge because in many cases, you're almost encouraged to do the wrong thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're encouraged to externalize your negative impact on the society and the environment because it saves you money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it dumps that responsibility on to other people, but makes you more profitable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's terrible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't be doing that, but we allow companies to do that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, well, they're just doing what shareholders you want, and they're doing what they gotta do to make my money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, when you live in a world where the single objective is to make as much money you do possibly can make,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I said you would, but maybe your children wouldn't be very proud if they knew what you were doing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So far, this all sounds solvable.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Better hiring, stronger culture, more aligned leadership.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the reality is that's not where most businesses break.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They break when those internal values collide with external reality.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Because the system we've built doesn't just make sustainability hard,
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[SPEAKER_03]: But when you kind of founded 7th generation and you started on this journey, can you remember what was the first pivotal moment or what was the first creaseable moment when you realized that actually transferring purpose to profit was going to be really hard?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's more like a hurl race because there wasn't one barrier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a question of which one comes next, now we have to jump over today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an endless endless set of challenges and the more you grow and the more you push the boundaries of what other people find acceptable and the more risk you're willing to take.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My board didn't like the fact that I got a message and thrown in jail as a board member of Greenpeace.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They thought that was un-coming to a CEO.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I said,
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[SPEAKER_00]: customers cheer me on because we're leaving new values and we're doing what we believe in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it wasn't very comfortable for our board.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there's endless hurdles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They start with who you take money from to start the business, but they don't ever go away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why it's a journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, I have no idea where I was going to end up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I could only figure out how to
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[SPEAKER_00]: with really no clarity on where I was walking to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Luckily, there was a community of people trying to figure out the same thing at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were companies like Ben and Jerry's and Gardner's Supply and Patagonia that were trying to solve the same problem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And luckily, we shared those challenges with each other and helped each other figure out where we were trying to get to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And without that community, I don't think we would have been successful.
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[SPEAKER_03]: What's your take on why business doesn't necessarily seem to be stepping up and doing what it could be doing?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when you live in an environment where it is becoming increasingly dangerous to talk about doing the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we live in an environment where we have a government
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[SPEAKER_00]: that puts people out of business for doing the right things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think companies in the United States for the most part are continuing the journey to do what they can do for the environment, even though they're not talking about it because it's dangerous to do so.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we're losing quite as much ground as I think many people do, but we're still losing ground that we'll take in some cases decades to recover from.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that makes it even harder to do the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's challenging, and I think the opportunity today really lies in what you can do in a much more local community city state-based environment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have a challenging federal government, but we still have cities and states that are deeply committed to doing the right thing and create a wonderful environment for you to do business in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What you gotta be careful about the state you choose to live in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm scared, but I'm not optimistic about where we'll get to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will recover from this sad part of our journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Things will get better.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what I worry about is how much pain do we cause before we get back headed in the right track?
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[SPEAKER_02]: As if navigating sustainability within the corporate context wasn't challenging enough, because it's not just internal alignment anymore, it's external pressure, political, economic, cultural, and increasingly, whether it's even safe to talk about doing the right thing at all, which brings us to attention that sits at the very heart of almost every sustainability conversation today.
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[SPEAKER_02]: the gap between intention and action, between doing the right thing and actually doing the right things.
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[SPEAKER_03]: We often talk about the difference between doing the right thing and doing the right things.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And it often seems to come down to many, many particular larger C, let's say legacy brands or organizations, full of very well-intentioned people, all of whom seem genuinely committed to doing the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_03]: But that rarely, in many cases, seems to translate into doing the right things, and there seems to be a gap, some strange distortion or parallel universe between these two things.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Just based on your experience, Geoff, do you have any kind of wisdom or any observations to share from your own experience about why that might be the case?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we create a mindset in school and in business.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that almost is tunnel focused on one objective.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't see what the interconnection between the other things we're doing are.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We can't just decide that we're going to save water and forget about CO2.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We can't just decide that we're going to take great care of our staff and pay them very well, but make products that have toxic chemicals in them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what happens is, we pick a thing or a couple of things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When what we really need to do is understand the entire system within which our business operates, and all of the points that we have challenges, all the points that need to change.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And to do that, we teach everyone a seven-generation something called systems thinking, which help people see the unintended consequences of their actions and the interrelationship
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[SPEAKER_00]: of all the things that they are working on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a very different mindset.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a different mindset to create the kinds of products and services that the world really needs today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What we were trained to do, what we were taught to do, often takes us in the wrong direction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that education is one of the reasons that I'm a professor and I teach kids, is because I'm helping them and trying to figure out
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[SPEAKER_00]: So they can think differently and solve problems differently and solve problems not create more problems, which is what happens when you figure out, I'm gonna do this, but not that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is impossible to figure out what the most important thing you can do without understanding the entire system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Once you can see that system, you can say, okay, where is the greatest problem?
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[SPEAKER_00]: that we're creating by doing what we do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, it can be overwhelming, but it actually becomes much easier when you actually understand the couple of things that will make the biggest difference and focus on them first rather than doing what may seem like the most logical or easy thing to do, which is often not what's most important.
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[SPEAKER_02]: If there's a thread running through all of this, it's not that businesses don't care.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's that they're operating inside systems that make it seemingly impossible to act on that care in a meaningful way.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Misaligned incentives, disjointed decision-making, persistent pressure to grow faster, and a tendency to focus on what's better for optics rather than what's actually impactful.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Which begs the question?
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[SPEAKER_02]: If this is why sustainability efforts break, what does it actually take to build a business that can hold?
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we get into in part two of this conversation.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So make sure you're following, it shouldn't be this hard wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube at it should have been this hard.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So you don't miss out on part two.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and if this conversation resonates and you're trying to figure out how to actually do the right things for your brand or business, visit ground.world to explore how we can help because it shouldn't be this hard.
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[SPEAKER_02]: How do you build one of the most iconic purpose-driven brands in the world and still lose control of it?
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[SPEAKER_02]: In sustainability, we'd love to hear about the success stories, but far less often do we talk about what happens after that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: On it shouldn't be this hard, we talk to business leaders, sustainability professionals,
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[SPEAKER_02]: and social impact entrepreneurs working at the intersection of purpose and performance, hosting lively, playful, and often provocative discussions around why sometimes it's so hard to do the right thing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and do the right things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In this episode, we're going inside one of those original stories with Jeffrey Hollander, founder of seventh generation, professor at NYU Stern, and published author of the book, built for a better world.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Did you just mind starting by just introducing yourself and telling us who you are and what you've done?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So Jeffrey Hollander, I am a life-long social entrepreneur.
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[SPEAKER_00]: From the time I was about 19, and I dropped out of college, started my first business in Toronto.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've had about five different companies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've started all of which have been sold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And today, I am a professor at the Stern Business School at New York University, and I teach social entrepreneurship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I spend most of my time mentoring young entrepreneurs who were starting businesses to address the many challenges the environment and our society face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: With the belief that business can do something to help those issues move in a more positive direction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have written about seven books, I think I've written my last one with the one that just came out last week.
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[SPEAKER_03]: just in terms of your journey with with synth generation.
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[SPEAKER_03]: What was it like to spend 15, 20 years building probably one of the most well-known sustainability in purpose driven brands?
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[SPEAKER_03]: only to effectively realize that the company had eaten itself, fallen away from your initial vision and was taking an entirely different course.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Can you give any perspective on how you felt and in retrospect why that happened?
02:30.924 --> 02:32.146
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
02:32.166 --> 02:37.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, getting fired from a company you started is no fun and it was a pretty horrific
02:37.846 --> 02:44.873
[SPEAKER_00]: painful experience that took many, many months, probably more than a few months, maybe two years to recover from.
02:44.913 --> 02:49.057
[SPEAKER_00]: And I spent a lot of time trying to understand why that happened.
02:49.197 --> 02:57.065
[SPEAKER_00]: And to what extent I was responsible for that and to what extent the board may be a fault for making that decision.
02:57.105 --> 02:59.668
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a little bit of both.
02:59.748 --> 03:03.551
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I am an impatient person.
03:03.571 --> 03:07.195
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to get to where I'm going
03:08.322 --> 03:13.991
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a set of pretty strong moral beliefs and you don't want to cross them because I probably won't forgive you.
03:15.292 --> 03:20.240
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was way out ahead of my board.
03:20.420 --> 03:31.036
[SPEAKER_00]: I had not brought them along on the journey that I was on, a journey that was deeply committed to things like employee ownership, radical transparency.
03:31.076 --> 03:36.945
[SPEAKER_00]: And because of that, the board became
03:37.330 --> 03:54.313
[SPEAKER_00]: nervous and probably scared of me, and when they had the opportunity to have a much more traditional CEO who I took part in selecting, the end of the day they decided that they liked him a lot more than they liked me.
03:54.333 --> 04:04.266
[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly, they actually did fire him six months after they fired me because they came to realize that to a large extent I had
04:05.495 --> 04:17.910
[SPEAKER_00]: made a mistake and selecting this individual because, you know, lots of people wanted you good in the world, lots of people want to have responsible businesses, but most people really don't have any idea what it takes and how hard it is.
04:19.032 --> 04:24.018
[SPEAKER_00]: And the challenges that you're going to know encounter and doing that.
04:24.799 --> 04:34.371
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, like many people, he was attracted by the vision, but really wasn't deeply embedded in being committed to the process of how you get there.
04:35.768 --> 04:43.037
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, other than that, there was a lot of disagreement about employee ownership.
04:43.117 --> 04:46.121
[SPEAKER_00]: We had given 20% of the company to the employees.
04:46.161 --> 04:51.247
[SPEAKER_00]: The board woke up one day and thought, wow, that delusion is gonna hurt me.
04:51.287 --> 04:54.952
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's undo some of what we did.
04:55.012 --> 05:04.223
[SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of said, over my dead body, we gonna undo employee ownership because I want to get to 30% not down below 20%.
05:04.996 --> 05:34.716
[SPEAKER_00]: That was not something that was a happy discussion, so, you know, I think I take responsibility for not bringing the board along with me on the journey I was on and making sure they were on the same pages I was on, and to a certain extent because I took a lot of capital that was traditional private equity venture and hedge fund money, that was a mistake.
05:35.050 --> 05:39.580
[SPEAKER_00]: I was trying to accomplish, and that's a bad situation to create.
05:40.121 --> 05:45.533
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, my fault I was growing so quickly, I was addicted to growth like you might be addicted to cocaine.
05:46.194 --> 05:55.033
[SPEAKER_00]: I was hungry to grow more and more and more, that takes more capital, and that means I made some bad decisions in terms of who I took money from.
05:55.250 --> 06:00.478
[SPEAKER_01]: that just really resonates with me as this whole being ahead and not taking people with you.
06:00.518 --> 06:15.460
[SPEAKER_01]: Energy visionary, and you look ahead, then you can see the roadmap as how to get there, and you don't understand why it's not always clear to everyone else, or the values and the steps that you feel are important to make in making that vision possible.
06:15.500 --> 06:18.804
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess you assume it's everyone, everyone gets it.
06:19.005 --> 06:21.949
[SPEAKER_00]: I find that to get to where you want to go.
06:22.739 --> 06:40.879
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not only about creating a plan of how to get there, but it often entails changing who you are and some level of personal growth and increased consciousness to be willing and eager to make those kind of changes, and that's not for everybody.
06:40.939 --> 06:42.402
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody doesn't want to do that.
06:43.259 --> 06:48.349
[SPEAKER_00]: and it creates a whole new opportunity but challenge for people as well.
06:48.891 --> 06:53.500
[SPEAKER_03]: Taking those big leaps of faith is it gets the adrenaline going, doesn't it?
06:54.181 --> 06:59.412
[SPEAKER_03]: It goes to the very core of who you are, I'm guessing, and on what you believe.
06:59.392 --> 07:13.569
[SPEAKER_03]: and it's the clarity of vision it's able to see a better future which is the motivating force behind everything very easy to leave people behind and then get frustrated when they can't see the roadmap is clearly as you can.
07:13.589 --> 07:22.800
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of chief sustainability officers or founders of social entrepreneurship based businesses that I'll start up from growing exponentially
07:22.780 --> 07:36.822
[SPEAKER_03]: What advice would you give to them to kind of help them just kind of almost kind of contain their passion a little bit and make sure they're building in the right the right steps and the right roadmap to to bring everyone along the journey.
07:36.842 --> 07:40.287
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts with who you hire and why they want to work for you.
07:41.128 --> 07:50.543
[SPEAKER_00]: And if there isn't great alignment there in terms of their motivation and values, you're going to have a tough time because you're hiring people that aren't going to
07:51.451 --> 07:56.016
[SPEAKER_00]: really be eager to join the journey and be part of the culture you're trying to create.
07:57.497 --> 07:58.358
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not easy.
07:58.619 --> 07:59.880
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a big investment.
07:59.960 --> 08:11.953
[SPEAKER_00]: We worked with a wonderful woman named Carol Sanfer for three years to help us sort of make sure we were embedding our values into the way we operated the business.
08:13.574 --> 08:16.918
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a challenging process because
08:18.029 --> 08:26.281
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the people discovered that this wasn't really the journey they wanted to be on and you have to be willing to lift those people go.
08:26.301 --> 08:29.185
[SPEAKER_00]: So be careful about who you hire.
08:29.225 --> 08:36.816
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say get external help because I sure didn't know how to do this and leave this in a way that was going to be effective.
08:37.176 --> 08:38.478
[SPEAKER_00]: I had not done it before.
08:39.479 --> 08:47.631
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it also takes a certain amount of growth and development on the part of the leader
08:48.016 --> 08:56.485
[SPEAKER_00]: that you're doing something that you don't necessarily really know how to do, and that you need to be open to learning and being open to growing.
08:57.166 --> 09:05.014
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that was really part of that commitment was having a director of corporate consciousness at the company.
09:05.795 --> 09:09.378
[SPEAKER_00]: Who's not was to help with that whole process.
09:09.418 --> 09:14.884
[SPEAKER_00]: He was dedicated to raising the consciousness of all the people at the company.
09:15.235 --> 09:18.840
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I've run across any other company that had such an individual.
09:19.261 --> 09:33.463
[SPEAKER_00]: He was available to anybody at any level, any time someone needed help, and he was such a giving and loving person that people felt comfortable coming to him and asking for help.
09:33.483 --> 09:36.287
[SPEAKER_00]: Not everybody wants to ask for help and admit that they needed it.
09:36.347 --> 09:39.572
[SPEAKER_00]: He made people feel incredibly comfortable about doing that.
09:39.822 --> 09:43.508
[SPEAKER_03]: particularly within the current economic and political climate.
09:43.568 --> 09:48.055
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think that something that companies should invest in more?
09:48.115 --> 10:02.879
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it feels to me like just having someone to go to safety valve that can provide clarity in distance and objectivity in a world that's spinning on its axis could be a really valuable thing to help reshape the purpose of business.
10:03.280 --> 10:06.285
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, but it's a first step and it's not enough.
10:07.312 --> 10:17.489
[SPEAKER_00]: Because as you know, we've created a context and an environment in which business operates that very often doesn't encourage us to do the right thing.
10:18.751 --> 10:25.182
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been a world today, in my opinion, where it's perfectly legal to do things that are on ethical and immoral.
10:26.003 --> 10:31.412
[SPEAKER_00]: And people say, well, it's okay because it's legal in my opinion is not okay.
10:31.814 --> 10:42.447
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not okay for large companies to not pay any taxes and contribute to the, basically, this society upon which they depend to operate in.
10:43.148 --> 10:45.030
[SPEAKER_00]: It wouldn't happen if it wasn't for that.
10:46.252 --> 10:55.864
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not okay as we well know for you to use child labor so that you can get lower cost for the things that are manufactured.
10:56.519 --> 11:00.604
[SPEAKER_00]: And we learn that lesson decades ago, but people are still making that mistake.
11:00.684 --> 11:09.015
[SPEAKER_00]: If you thought that that was over, we'd be sorely mistaken because there's many children working for companies all around the world.
11:10.156 --> 11:17.906
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a challenge, and it's a challenge because in many cases, you're almost encouraged to do the wrong thing.
11:17.926 --> 11:24.855
[SPEAKER_00]: You're encouraged to externalize your negative impact on the society and the environment because it saves you money.
11:25.291 --> 11:30.659
[SPEAKER_00]: and it dumps that responsibility on to other people, but makes you more profitable.
11:31.219 --> 11:32.181
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's terrible.
11:32.241 --> 11:35.185
[SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't be doing that, but we allow companies to do that.
11:35.806 --> 11:42.135
[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, well, they're just doing what shareholders you want, and they're doing what they gotta do to make my money.
11:43.116 --> 11:55.213
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, when you live in a world where the single objective is to make as much money you do possibly can make,
11:56.240 --> 12:01.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I said you would, but maybe your children wouldn't be very proud if they knew what you were doing.
12:02.606 --> 12:04.888
[SPEAKER_02]: So far, this all sounds solvable.
12:05.669 --> 12:09.092
[SPEAKER_02]: Better hiring, stronger culture, more aligned leadership.
12:09.112 --> 12:12.595
[SPEAKER_02]: But the reality is that's not where most businesses break.
12:12.615 --> 12:16.498
[SPEAKER_02]: They break when those internal values collide with external reality.
12:17.199 --> 12:26.027
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the system we've built doesn't just make sustainability hard,
12:26.783 --> 12:43.901
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you kind of founded 7th generation and you started on this journey, can you remember what was the first pivotal moment or what was the first creaseable moment when you realized that actually transferring purpose to profit was going to be really hard?
12:44.281 --> 12:48.105
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more like a hurl race because there wasn't one barrier.
12:48.846 --> 12:54.732
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a question of which one comes next, now we have to jump over today.
12:56.011 --> 13:07.644
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an endless endless set of challenges and the more you grow and the more you push the boundaries of what other people find acceptable and the more risk you're willing to take.
13:07.704 --> 13:13.851
[SPEAKER_00]: My board didn't like the fact that I got a message and thrown in jail as a board member of Greenpeace.
13:13.871 --> 13:17.675
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought that was un-coming to a CEO.
13:18.276 --> 13:20.398
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said,
13:20.868 --> 13:26.535
[SPEAKER_00]: customers cheer me on because we're leaving new values and we're doing what we believe in.
13:26.595 --> 13:27.557
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
13:27.577 --> 13:29.659
[SPEAKER_00]: But it wasn't very comfortable for our board.
13:30.220 --> 13:31.942
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's endless hurdles.
13:32.543 --> 13:39.913
[SPEAKER_00]: They start with who you take money from to start the business, but they don't ever go away.
13:39.933 --> 13:42.236
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why it's a journey.
13:42.596 --> 13:46.541
[SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, I have no idea where I was going to end up.
13:46.561 --> 13:49.525
[SPEAKER_00]: I could only figure out how to
13:49.910 --> 13:52.593
[SPEAKER_00]: with really no clarity on where I was walking to.
13:53.573 --> 13:59.039
[SPEAKER_00]: Luckily, there was a community of people trying to figure out the same thing at the same time.
13:59.319 --> 14:07.086
[SPEAKER_00]: There were companies like Ben and Jerry's and Gardner's Supply and Patagonia that were trying to solve the same problem.
14:07.106 --> 14:15.234
[SPEAKER_00]: And luckily, we shared those challenges with each other and helped each other figure out where we were trying to get to.
14:15.314 --> 14:18.617
[SPEAKER_00]: And without that community, I don't think we would have been successful.
14:18.682 --> 14:28.361
[SPEAKER_03]: What's your take on why business doesn't necessarily seem to be stepping up and doing what it could be doing?
14:28.762 --> 14:36.837
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when you live in an environment where it is becoming increasingly dangerous to talk about doing the right thing.
14:37.519 --> 14:40.825
[SPEAKER_00]: And we live in an environment where we have a government
14:41.648 --> 14:44.592
[SPEAKER_00]: that puts people out of business for doing the right things.
14:45.272 --> 14:55.825
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think companies in the United States for the most part are continuing the journey to do what they can do for the environment, even though they're not talking about it because it's dangerous to do so.
14:55.845 --> 15:06.458
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we're losing quite as much ground as I think many people do, but we're still losing ground that we'll take in some cases decades to recover from.
15:07.163 --> 15:10.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And that makes it even harder to do the right thing.
15:10.468 --> 15:22.126
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's challenging, and I think the opportunity today really lies in what you can do in a much more local community city state-based environment.
15:22.907 --> 15:33.643
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a challenging federal government, but we still have cities and states that are deeply committed to doing the right thing and create a wonderful environment for you to do business in.
15:33.877 --> 15:37.922
[SPEAKER_00]: What you gotta be careful about the state you choose to live in.
15:38.743 --> 15:43.349
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm scared, but I'm not optimistic about where we'll get to.
15:43.409 --> 15:48.135
[SPEAKER_00]: We will recover from this sad part of our journey.
15:48.936 --> 15:50.198
[SPEAKER_00]: Things will get better.
15:50.758 --> 15:57.707
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I worry about is how much pain do we cause before we get back headed in the right track?
15:57.873 --> 16:22.564
[SPEAKER_02]: As if navigating sustainability within the corporate context wasn't challenging enough, because it's not just internal alignment anymore, it's external pressure, political, economic, cultural, and increasingly, whether it's even safe to talk about doing the right thing at all, which brings us to attention that sits at the very heart of almost every sustainability conversation today.
16:22.814 --> 16:28.680
[SPEAKER_02]: the gap between intention and action, between doing the right thing and actually doing the right things.
16:29.341 --> 16:34.727
[SPEAKER_03]: We often talk about the difference between doing the right thing and doing the right things.
16:35.748 --> 16:51.825
[SPEAKER_03]: And it often seems to come down to many, many particular larger C, let's say legacy brands or organizations, full of very well-intentioned people, all of whom seem genuinely committed to doing the right thing.
16:52.042 --> 17:05.002
[SPEAKER_03]: But that rarely, in many cases, seems to translate into doing the right things, and there seems to be a gap, some strange distortion or parallel universe between these two things.
17:05.923 --> 17:13.555
[SPEAKER_03]: Just based on your experience, Geoff, do you have any kind of wisdom or any observations to share from your own experience about why that might be the case?
17:13.956 --> 17:18.623
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we create a mindset in school and in business.
17:19.413 --> 17:23.338
[SPEAKER_00]: that almost is tunnel focused on one objective.
17:24.479 --> 17:32.088
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't see what the interconnection between the other things we're doing are.
17:32.668 --> 17:37.274
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't just decide that we're going to save water and forget about CO2.
17:37.994 --> 17:47.125
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't just decide that we're going to take great care of our staff and pay them very well, but make products that have toxic chemicals in them.
17:47.695 --> 17:51.419
[SPEAKER_00]: And what happens is, we pick a thing or a couple of things.
17:52.040 --> 18:03.573
[SPEAKER_00]: When what we really need to do is understand the entire system within which our business operates, and all of the points that we have challenges, all the points that need to change.
18:04.535 --> 18:16.909
[SPEAKER_00]: And to do that, we teach everyone a seven-generation something called systems thinking, which help people see the unintended consequences of their actions and the interrelationship
18:17.345 --> 18:20.349
[SPEAKER_00]: of all the things that they are working on.
18:20.950 --> 18:22.812
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a very different mindset.
18:22.892 --> 18:29.501
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a different mindset to create the kinds of products and services that the world really needs today.
18:30.602 --> 18:35.268
[SPEAKER_00]: What we were trained to do, what we were taught to do, often takes us in the wrong direction.
18:36.089 --> 18:47.284
[SPEAKER_00]: So that education is one of the reasons that I'm a professor and I teach kids, is because I'm helping them and trying to figure out
18:47.568 --> 18:59.547
[SPEAKER_00]: So they can think differently and solve problems differently and solve problems not create more problems, which is what happens when you figure out, I'm gonna do this, but not that.
19:00.068 --> 19:08.001
[SPEAKER_00]: It is impossible to figure out what the most important thing you can do without understanding the entire system.
19:09.744 --> 19:14.892
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you can see that system, you can say, okay, where is the greatest problem?
19:15.327 --> 19:18.272
[SPEAKER_00]: that we're creating by doing what we do.
19:18.332 --> 19:36.964
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, it can be overwhelming, but it actually becomes much easier when you actually understand the couple of things that will make the biggest difference and focus on them first rather than doing what may seem like the most logical or easy thing to do, which is often not what's most important.
19:37.484 --> 19:42.031
[SPEAKER_02]: If there's a thread running through all of this, it's not that businesses don't care.
19:42.892 --> 19:50.343
[SPEAKER_02]: It's that they're operating inside systems that make it seemingly impossible to act on that care in a meaningful way.
19:51.085 --> 20:03.323
[SPEAKER_02]: Misaligned incentives, disjointed decision-making, persistent pressure to grow faster, and a tendency to focus on what's better for optics rather than what's actually impactful.
20:03.742 --> 20:04.804
[SPEAKER_02]: Which begs the question?
20:05.645 --> 20:11.754
[SPEAKER_02]: If this is why sustainability efforts break, what does it actually take to build a business that can hold?
20:12.596 --> 20:15.140
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we get into in part two of this conversation.
20:15.380 --> 20:22.531
[SPEAKER_02]: So make sure you're following, it shouldn't be this hard wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube at it should have been this hard.
20:22.832 --> 20:25.075
[SPEAKER_02]: So you don't miss out on part two.
20:25.055 --> 20:37.107
[SPEAKER_02]: and if this conversation resonates and you're trying to figure out how to actually do the right things for your brand or business, visit ground.world to explore how we can help because it shouldn't be this hard.
