7th Gen Blog

Here are some words from intern Sophie, who asked me to post them here for her...

John Abrams (my father) is the founder and CEO of South Mountain Company, an employee-owned design/build firm on the island of Martha's Vineyard. South Mountain has a commitment to social and environmental responsibility. They do a lot of affordable housing work, renewable energy, and community work. John recently wrote the book The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place , about his adventures in business, and when he’s not in the office you can find him traveling the country doing talks and workshops or hanging out at Island Co-housing where he lives with his wife, Chris. He has two children, Sophie (that's me!!) and Pinto, and three grandchildren, Kalib, Silas and Axel Leroy.

Here’s his recounting of the the raising of a wind turbine on Martha’s Vineyard.

Yesterday, we raised the ARE 442 wind turbine, which was donated to the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School by a wonderful woman who succumbed to cancer before she could see it turn (see plaque). Sophie bore witness to the raising. She knows that it really did happen, even though all known forces conspired to prevent it.

Here is some more "speak" from Sarah A. from the floor of EXPO West at our new scent bar. That is Eva-Marie Lind from EM Studios Arome-Sensory Arts & Design Studio letting EXPOinians smell the new scents.

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.