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Joel Makower has published an interesting article on the Triple bottom line Journal about the evolution of green business over the last decade. The author explores how far we have come and what remains to be done in the greening of mainstream business.

The idea of green companies appears to have extended beyond the true-blue, values-driven companies and the next tier of large leadership companies, to a third tier of companies that hadn’t previously been concerned about global warming or other environmental issues. Today, it’s hard to find a sizable company that isn’t talking the talk and, to some degree, walking the walk. Trying to be seen as green is now more the rule than the exception.

Joel is co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, Inc., which produces GreenBiz.com and its sister sites. He serves as co-founder and principal of Clean Edge Inc., a research and publishing firm focused on building markets for clean energy technologies. Joel is also the principle author of the annual State of Green Business report and co-author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, Strategies for the Green Economy. He also helps organize the Greener by Design conference.

 Read the complete article here.

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H&M’s Garden Collection, which features sustainable fibers throughout the line, hits stores on March 25. A bright green hang tang — including a 30-word description with a link to more information online — marks clothing made with organic cotton and linen, recycled polyester, and Tencel (an environmentally preferable organic fiber). The Garden Collection is in keeping with H&M’s wider commitment to organic cotton and sustainable fashion plans for 2010, and prices for the new line remain consistent with other H&M products.

In the past, companies have offered organic cotton clothing at a premium, hoping that customers would be willing to pay more for the reduced environmental impacts. This collection, along with similar shifts to organic cotton from other major apparel companies such as Nike and Walmart, demonstrates that organic cotton can be incorporated affordably, and in harmony with other lines.

Furthermore, H&M has also shown that consumer communication on sustainability has finally gone mainstream. Consumers now understand that they can and should ask questions about where there purchases come from and how they are made. They have also proven that they can understand and incorporate sustainability concerns into purchasing criteria.

More information here.

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Google recently announced its decision to shut down its Chinese-based search engine, google.cn. Aron Cramer and Dunstan Allison have posed some interesting questions about the company’s decision at The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com).

Cramer and Allison remark that “with this decision Google has won considerable praise from organizations concerned about its human rights record. This contrasts with the condemnation the company received when first entering the country in 2006.” But the authors highlight that Google’s decision again raises a question of serious interest to business, the public, and governments: When is it right to cut ties and leave a country on human rights grounds?

Aron Cramer is president and CEO of BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability and the coauthor of the forthcoming book Sustainable Excellence (Rodale 2010).Dunstan Allison Hope is BSR’s managing director, ICT Practice, and the coauthor of the forthcoming book Big Business, Big Responsibilities (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).

Read the complete article here.

Read Google’s announcement at the Official Google Blog here.

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The spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review contains an interesting article about the contribution of entrepreneurship to society, entitled “All Entrepreneurship is Social.”

The article’s author, Carl Schramm, points out that over the past decade the term social entrepreneur has become a fashionable way of describing individuals and organizations that, in their attempts at large-scale change, blur the traditional boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.

But, according to the author, there is a danger in overusing this new term: the use of the modifier “social” will diminish the contributions of regular entrepreneurs — that is, people who create new companies and then grow them to scale. In the course of doing business as usual, these regular entrepreneurs create thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed, the intertwined histories of business and health in the United States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship.

Carl Schramm is president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the United States devoted to entrepreneurship. He is also the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative and coauthor of Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism.

Read the full article here.

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Synopsis

Showing an interest in – and not just paying lip service to – Corporate Social Responsibility has become a must for anyone interested in business. Unfortunately, the profusion of studies and practical applications can lead to a triumphal and even uncritical treatment of the subject and we risk losing sight of the complex and problematic issues at the heart of CSR. It is crucial that we deepen and broaden our analysis and knowledge of the diverse ethical implications brought to light by current research into the CSR movement.

This recent book analyzes CSR’s ethical dimensions from the perspective of the Social Doctrine of the Church (SDC). The aim is to enrich the Church’s social doctrine by learning from the lessons offered by the CSR experience. The book also shows how, to be effective, CSR must be based on strong ethical and anthropological principles (just as for believers, SDC is based ultimately on an Ultimate Transcendent Reality).

You can find this title at IESE’s Library catalog.

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IBM (Technology), Intel Corp (Technology) and HSBC Holdings (Banks) top this year’s edition of the Covalence Ethical Ranking which covers 581 multinationals representing 18 different sectors.

The ranking measures qualitative data on 45 criteria including labor standards, waste management, social utility and human rights policy. And because it is a reputation index, the Covalence survey also incorporates media, industry and NGO documents into its evaluation.

For more information about this ranking, visit the Convalence website.

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They say that « money leads the world », but where to? After “Diversity” in 2007 and the “Protection of the Planet” in 2008, the 3rd edition of World Forum Lille took place on the 19th, 20th and 21st of November 2009 and was dedicated to “Sustainable Finance.”

The financial crisis has revealed also a crisis of meaning. The World Forum Lille has been a great opportunity to discuss the obsession with short-term gain; the ensuing multiplication of increasingly complex and impenetrable financial products; an “easy money” policy (encouraged by certain public authorities) pushing for excessive indebtedness; and a widening gap between the financial and speculative sphere, on the one hand, and the “real economy,” on the other. This spiral generated increased inequalities, which, in turn, have led to increased instability.

Is a more ethical world possible? Is a more responsible economy viable? Is a new financial order possible? The challenge for this edition was to convince companies that it is possible to adopt a different approach to finance without reducing one’s economic performance.

You can find out more about the event at the World Forum Lille online magazine.

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The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Georgetown University, has just published the report “Faith and the Global Agenda: Values for the Post-Crisis Economy.” The current economic crisis has warned us to fundamentally rethink the development of the moral framework and regulatory mechanisms that underpin our economy, politics and global interconnectedness.

The report is based on a public opinion poll on values of over 130,000 respondents from 10 G20 economies conducted through Facebook. Over two-thirds of respondents believe the current economic crisis is also a crisis of ethics and values.

The study also brings together the unique wealth of information that leaders of the world’s religions can offer on this topic, identifying the necessary values for a more just and sustainable post-crisis economy. The report’s final section provides an overview of the most important developments in the major religions and the global agenda in 2009.

The full report can be downloaded here.

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The Journal of Business Venturing this month published a special issue about ethics and entrepreneurship, edited by Jared D. Harris, Harry J. Sapienza and Norman E. Bowie.

As the editors say in the introduction to the articles, “A large number of excellent papers were considered for this special issue. In the end, the eight papers selected advanced through a difficult screening process that had its beginnings in the spring of 2006 at a targeted conference on ethics and entrepreneurship held at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.”

Among the articles featured is “Entrepreneurship in and around Institutional Voids: A Case Study from Bangladesh,” co-authored by IESE Prof. Johanna Mair and Ignasi Martí.  The report is an in-depth, qualitative case study of BRAC, a non-governmental organization, and its efforts to alleviate poverty. It provides a detailed picture of an ‘institutional entrepreneur’ as well as the resource-constrained environment in which it operates — an environment largely deprived of institutions typically prevalent in modern market economies.

You can read the table of contents of the whole issue here (PDFs are available to members of the IESE community).