Tuesday, May 12, 2015 by Tim Greiner
I highly recommend this insightful article by Jeffrey Hollender, Former CEO and Co-Founder of Seventh Generation and Founder and CEO of Sustain. He challenges businesses to chart a path that is net positive, restorative and regenerative. Sharing his experiences as CEO of a sustainable condom company, he highlights the work he and I did together to develop a "roadmap to becoming net positive" by developing a framework for tracking both positive and negative impacts in four areas important to Sustain's mission. It's a work in progress, but one that other companies can learn from and be inspired by.
Net Positive: The Future of Sustainable Business By Jeffrey Hollender | Apr. 29, 2015
Business efforts must become more sustainable and responsible to turn the tide on social inequity and environmental decay. Net positive is a new standard that can help ensure a resilient and regenerative world.
“Governments no longer govern the world, or even their little bits of it. The nation state—yes, even America and China—has been usurped as the pre-eminent unit of power. Save for extreme outliers like North Korea, all governments now share power in a shaky but so far relatively steady balance with the largest of the multinational corporations. No one has asked us, the public, whether we approve of this new arrangement; it happened while we were busy shopping.”—/TheRules, “One Party Planet”
Forum for the Future, WWF-UK, and the Climate Group have recently articulated a new vision that businesses should adopt to ensure that our planet and its inhabitants have a future that provides the best chance for common well-being. They have called this new standard net positive. While embracing this concept, I believe that we have yet to develop the operating principles and metrics required to fulfill this vision.