7gen Bloc

At the registration desk, I got my goody bag. I peered inside and found a corporate responsibility report from ExxonMobil, a sponsor (believe it or not) of the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) annual meeting that took place last week in San Francisco. For a moment, I thought I had checked into the wrong event. ...

When a corporation gets it wrong and bad things happen, we've come to expect a fairly standard response. Public relations teams twist facts and logic. Blame is aggressively laid elsewhere. Innocence is strongly proclaimed, and not much changes. At best we get a fix or a settlement without any admission of wrongdoing, and business as usual is free to continue. ...

It's easy to think of pollution as a problem we all share. Bad air, dirty water, chemical contamination, and other challenges spread themselves out roughly equally. Or so we think. The truth is more complicated: Some places are more polluted than others, and the worst conditions tend to be in poor and minority communities. ...

Anand Giridharadas, in a Sunday New York Times piece entitled "Boycotts Minus the Pain," poses some wonderfully important questions about the role and limitations of ethical consumption. As a lifelong salesman of bath tissue and laundry detergent that aspire to be both sustainable and responsible, it's not surprising that I have my own point of view. ...

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to a group of Columbia University MBA students. The next day I received an interesting email, which asked: ...

In an unprecedented blitz on Washington DC, progressive business leaders met with 51 senators and talked with senior White House officials this week about how to move cap and trade climate legislation, now called The American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009, through the Senate. ...

It's a good question. Generally we hear about what not to eat -- beef that emits methane, palm oil that's grown on land that was a tropical rainforest, corn raised on petroleum-based fertilizers. But here's some good news for your diet: Terrestrial carbon sequestration (that's carbon that is stored in the soil) is the best way to buy time in a warming world. Cutting emissions will help, but not as quickly as sequestration. ...

Solutions Journal is an online and print publication dedicated to solving the mounting environmental, social, and economic problems of our time. ...

I'm headed back to Washington DC this week to represent responsible businesses who support the passage of the American Clean Energy And Security Act (H.R. 2454). We are scheduled to eat dinner with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and hold a White House meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on Wednesday morning. ...

Last week my good friend Otto Scharmer (co-author of Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society and author of ...