7th Gen Blog

Two weeks ago the Financial Times reported some impressive results from the Employee Ownership Index.

“In the UK in recent years, the Employee Ownership Index has outperformed the FTSE All-Share. An investment of £100 in the EOI in 1992 would have been worth £349 at the end of June 2003. The same amount invested in the FTSE All-Share would have been worth £161.”

Beating the FTSE index by over 100% is no small feat. And it supports prior related research that was reported in the Financial Times back on October 27, 2005 that noted that if you had bought stock in all the public companies in Milton Moskowitz’s survey ranking the 100 best companies to work for in 1998, when it was first published by Fortune magazine, and held it until 2005, you would have made twice the annualized return of the S&P 500 Index. If you had sold each year and reinvested in the new list, you would have made three times the S&P return.

Great news!

Last week’s Fortune magazine ran a most incredible story. It details a partnership between Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and Danone, the French food company, to build a yogurt factory in Bangladesh. What’s so amazing about the story is that Danone believes that profits are not necessarily “always” essential to creating shareholder value, that there are times when it is appropriate to deploy corporate capital in the pursuit of social benefit that will ultimately create additional brand value.

(Danone) can see social benefits, something (Danone CEO Franck Riboud) says may ultimately be reported on Danone's bottom line along with the revenue from its Dannon and Stonyfield yogurts and Evian and Volvic mineral waters. "We're saying that profit maximization is not going to be the only way to measure value," says Emmanuel Faber, Danone's former CFO, who now runs Asia-Pacific operations for the company and who arranged the lunch between his boss and Yunus. "There is a whole emerging area of picking stocks for social impact.”

The factory – and ultimately 50 more, if it works – will rely on Grameen microborrowers buying cows to sell it milk on the front end, Grameen microvendors selling the yogurt door to door and Grameen's 6.6 million members purchasing it for their kids. It will employ 15 to 20 women.

Danone estimates that it will provide income for 1,600 people within a 20-mile radius of the plant. Biodegradable cups made from cornstarch, solar panels for electricity generation and rainwater collection vats make the enterprise environmentally friendly.

What if we lived in a world where companies didn't measure their performance only in terms of revenue and profitability? What if pharmaceutical companies reported on their bottom lines, along with those familiar figures, the number of lives saved by their drugs every quarter, and food companies reported the number of children rescued from malnutrition?... That's the world Yunus envisages.

This is a real breakthrough, if we can harness the experience and financial resources of the world’s largest companies to address fundamental issues of equity, justice, and poverty, the future may be brighter quicker than I had imagined.

Way to go Danone! And a serious kudos to Fortune for bringing stories like these to corporate America.

The silence is eerie. After the intensity of Bombay, the endless noise of drivers who rarely remove their hand from their horn, as they literally seem to try and move other cars out of their way, the silence in Vermont is both a refuge and an oddity. In some way I feel as if I have been cast out into the wilderness, isolated from civilization.

The luxury of my home, the vast space, the huge number of possessions, the electronic equipment, is hugely disconcerting. We could comfortable fit some hundreds of people in our house in greater comfort than half the citizens of Bombay. It’s painfully clear how I, we Americans, consume an immensely disproportionate amount of natural resources. Consumption that is blindly unconscious. Blind because it is the norm, what others do. Yet compared to a family living under a plastic tarp of less than 20 square feet, with no running water or electricity, my comfort is slightly sickening.

Too much ain’t enough. I used to see a sign that said that almost every day in New York City. It sat on the roof of the old Lone Star Cafe at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. How true it is. The endless pursuit of more stuff, of a world filled with artifacts rather than value. How do we stop this madness, or at least slow it down? I fear that its familiarity has made it invisible, has caused us to feel all this stuff is essential. I used to believe I had more than I need, now it seems I have 10 or even 100 times more than I need.

The sun is out. The ground is filled with fresh snow. It’s peaceful and quite depressing.

Sorry, but that’s the way it looks from here.

The University of Vermont had the honor of hosting a talk led by Van Jones. Van Jones was one of the founding directors of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He is also very concerned with the environment. He is a member of many organizations such as, Rainforest Action Network, WITNESS, Bioneers, the New Apollo Project and the Social Venture Network. The University was very thankful fortunate to have such a passionate figure come and grace us with some of his knowledge.

The speech was titled “The New Dream” presented by “Reclaim the Future.” Van began by telling us we were part of the 3rd wave of Environmentalism. The first wave was conservation which began with the Native Americans. During this time a squirrel could climb up a tree in California and jump from branch to branch and make it to the Mississippi River. The second wave was Regulation which was started with Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Now in the 3rd wave called, Investment. The result of an investment is hoped and assumed to be a positive one bringing many progressive results to the investor. We are in a wave of hope and optimism.

The amount of money our Country is spending on alternative energy, green cars and green products is on the rise. We are currently spending $229 billion dollars a year on all of these materials. These are amazing numbers and they are only on the rise. However the most astonishing fact is that the Green wave is the most racially segregated economy in the United States. The work being put forth to encourage this Green wave is so that it will last forever. If it doesn’t include everyone, then we won’t last very long.