Jeffrey Hollander

I'm happy to be here.

Great to see you again.

I felt great about it.

In some ways, it helped reconcile some unresolved issues.

And I think we both approached it with an openness to reevaluate what we thought we did right and wrong.

And so it was sort of a growing experience in a way, a bit of a healing experience.

So I'm thrilled that you gave us the opportunity to do that.

I wanted to try to gather together all the lessons that we learned running Seventh Generation as a business that put its purpose ahead of profit.

And I wanted other businesses who wanted to follow in our footsteps to learn from what we had learned and what I thought business needs to do in the future.

Responsible business has not fixed all the problems we're facing in the world.

And we need to make some dramatic changes if that is going to happen.

I can't understand why it looks like that, given what you read in the newspaper.

But

When I look at who's signing up for my class and when I talk to people, the enthusiasm they have for using business to try to solve social and environmental problems in some regards is growing, but it's not being talked about as much as it was before because people are scared, sort of stick their head up and say, hey, I'm doing this great stuff.

there is sort of this new language called green hushing, where people do sustainable things and they don't talk about them.

And part of it is the sort of political environment we live in.

And we have many aspects of responsible business like diversity and inclusion that businesses have a great business case for doing because it has a positive effect on the company, but

but it also comes with risks.

So people continue the practice, they just don't call it diversity and inclusion, and they don't really publicize it on their website in spite of the fact that they continue to do it.

And that's a confusing landscape, but we can't afford to have business take its eye off the critical nature of addressing social and environmental problems we have.