Last night, the firm Smart Design hosted a salon in New York featuring Jeffrey Hollender, the co-founder of Seventh Generation and author of the new book, The Responsibility Revolution. For those unfamiliar with Seventh Generation, it is the leading brand of natural household and personal care products; founded more than two decades ago. These guys were doing green marketing long before green was in vogue.

 

It was interesting to hear Hollender, at one point in his presentation, talk about himself as a designer. He’s not trained as a designer, per se, but as he pointed out, his job is to design a company and a corporate culture that tries to balance various objectives and goals that are sometimes in tension with one another. Seventh Generation has an imperative to succeed as a business, obviously; but it also wants to make good products that serve the customer’s needs; and it wants to do so in a manner that is not harmful to the environment; and on top of all that, it wants to create a corporate culture in which employees are motivated and feel good about coming to work each day. It’s tough to spin all of those plates simultaneously, but the company really can’t afford to slip up on any of these challenges—because they’re all interrelated, and failure in one area will adversely affect the others. Which is why Hollender talks a lot about the importance of system-design.

 

To some extent, running a business has always been a system-design challenge, but never more so than today. As discussed in Glimmer, today’s companies can’t hide anything they do; everything is subject to scrutiny (and rightfully so). And that means companies must, in effect, design everything they do—considering the consequences of all their actions and behaviors, and designing a corporate system that works holistically.

 

Hollender and his team seem to be doing a pretty fair job of this at Seventh Generation. And his book, The Responsibility Revolution, looks to be a good handbook for companies that are trying to do the right thing (and I would argue that increasingly, “doing the right thing” is going to be a requirement for companies, not a feel-good option). Among other things, the book talks about the importance of transparency; about how companies can build communities; the importance of having a corporate mission to “do work that matters;” and the need to solve problems (in business and elsewhere) through mass collaboration.

 

One other nice point Hollender makes: Though his title uses the word “responsibility,” he thinks companies should move beyond just thinking in terms of “corporate responsibility,” and begin to foster what he calls “corporate consciousness.” Which is a good way to shift the discussion away from being all about burden and sacrifice; it’s really all about being smart, aware, and enlightened. And this kind of thinking must flow throughout the company, as opposed to being limited to one small and isolated department of the company.

 

This brings to mind a memorable quote from Bruce Mau, who says that when a big company sets up a tiny Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department, what they’ve effectively done is to create “an island of intelligence in a sea of stupidity.” As Mau and Hollender both know, that little island isn’t good enough anymore.