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Innovate for Impact & Profit will Follow: 10 Lessons from the Social Innovation Summit

  What do the captain of the gold medal US Olympic women’s gymnastics team Aly Raisman and polar explorer Robert Swan have in common? On an afternoon in Palo Alto this week, their shared mission was to inspire. Not nascent gymnasts nor endorphin junkies, but venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, corporate executives and foundation heads gathered for […]

A Primer in Company Culture from a Fool, a Soap Maker, and a Grocer

When corporate culture junkies gather around the fire, we tell stories and recount legendary figures in our mythos like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, who offered to competitors all details of his business knowing that without Southwest’s culture–the focal point of its business–competitors would never gain traction. Drawing us around the fire […]

Conscious Capitalism Conference: Life Altering? It Was for Me

I flew up to Boston for the Conscious Capitalism® Conference last year out of curiosity, not with the expectation that two days of speakers and conference hobnobbing would shift my work and life. But it did. It offered up a community, framework, and lexicon that were both inherently natural and alluringly new. This year’s conference, […]

Atypical Partnerships Lead to Breakthroughs in Global Health–with Barbara Bush

Global Health Corps was born from frustration alchemized into opportunity. It was the gripping frustration that despite sufficient knowledge and treatment, millions of people continued without care, which left Barbara Bush looking for solutions–solutions she found, in part, in a growing cohort of educated graduates and young professionals keen to confront the problems they saw. […]

‘Love needs to come out of the closet’: 10 Takeaways from the Conscious Capitalism Conference

With support from Axialent and the Conscious Capitalism Institute, I attended the Conscious Capitalism Conference last month. For two days, I immersed myself in learning and in true, unabashed conversations on topics I had felt, but hadn’t yet developed the vocabulary for or a real awareness of. The teachers ranged from CEOs of publicly traded […]

15 SXSW Panel Picks for Social Impact

This year attracted a record number of proposals (3,283) for sessions at SxSW Interactive. Listed below are some of the topics I hope to see brought to life, hashed out, revered and questioned at the festival next March. As they primarily (although not all, black market innovations and digital nomadism made the list) relate to […]

Have a Sustainable Start-up? Ready to Accelerate? Take Note.

Exposure. Credibility. Funding. New ventures need some combination of these to move from burning passionate idea to market success. Sustainable Brands Innovation Open, a business plan competition for sustainable enterprise, will offer up all three to one winning start-up. I don’t often plug competitions, but Sustainable Life Media, Sustainable Brands Innovation Open’s parent organization, has […]

Come See Me at SXSW

    Doing good is a business strategy, here’s how to start and how to do it better. That’s the flag I’ve been flying for three years and 250 blog posts. Next week, I’ll be speaking with a group of entrepreneurs and employees practicing varying levels of social sustainability (and, I hope, some who dismiss it […]

Ticket Giveaway to Conference on Investing In Women & Entrepreneurship

Every March the world takes a closer look at women–how many own property, are employed, run businesses, have bank accounts, are literate, or have clean drinking water. The list is long and diverse, and while these issues deserve attention throughout the year, March serves as an annual review of the progress made toward women’s livelihood. […]

Corporate Social…Inauthenticity

The opening remarks at the recent Global Conference for Social Change, joint venture of the Foundation for Social Change and the United Nations Office for Partnerships, went something like this: “Let’s take a look at this phrase corporate social responsibility. Let’s take away social. Now let’s take away corporate. What we’re left with responsibility, which is defined […]