MD State Senator Jamie Raskin recently wrote an insightful blog post concerning the importance of passing Benefit Corporation legislation.  Jamie Raskin represents Silver Spring and Takoma Park, MD.  He introduced SB 690, which became, in April 2010, the first Benefit Corporation law in America. In his post, he states, “There is a structural cause for [...]

C. K. Prahalad’s death a few weeks ago caused some reflection on my “for-benefit” business education. Some may not have known the author of “The Fortune At The Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits,” and the man that Business Week called “a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, [someone who] may well [...]

Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector a coalition of charities and foundations, recently expressed her concern over socially minded corporations, like B Corps, being granted tax exemptions. In a video posted at Philanthropy.com, she notes that this may take resources away from nonprofits and weaken our nation’s budget. As the co-founders of B Lab, the [...]

Sanford Lewis, the attorney for Harrington Investments behind the recent Intel decision to include sustainability as a required consideration of a committee of its Board of Directors, posted this interesting piece on CRSWire. It is about different approaches to corporations adopting the Precautionary Principle to corporation risk management and governance. It is a great read, so check it out.

Over the past three years, we’ve had a lot of those late-night-over-beers conversations that ended with “wouldn’t it be great if there was a new corporate form built to enable social benefit and shareholder value? Yeah, we should work on that.” I’m not sure how clearly we believed it was a near term possibility, but [...]

The sentiment the grass is always greener holds true in my experience leading a national NGO to address local hunger & poverty, as well as working with a socially-minded business to transform the paper industry towards more sustainable practices. From my vantage point in the NGO world, I was envious of my peers employed in [...]