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Stakeholders expect-and the Web's sprawling influence demands-that values-driven companies reveal their shortcomings and engage the outside world on how best to fix them
Any organization that aspires to be sustainable must have the courage to publicly bare, for all to see, its good, bad, and ugly impacts on society and the environment. Stakeholders expect-and the Web's sprawling influence demands-that values-driven companies reveal their shortcomings and engage the outside world on how best to fix them. We were recently reminded of the "see-through" imperative when our company, Seventh Generation, was greeted with a nightmarish collection of headlines:
"Seventh Generation Battles Carcinogenic Chemical Controversy"
"'Organic'" and 'Natural' Consumer Products Found Contaminated with Cancer-Causing Chemical"
This past March, the Organic Consumers Association released a report showing that 47 organic- and natural-consumer products contained detectable levels of the contaminate 1,4-dioxane. Seventh Generation's dish liquid was one of the brands named in the study, a revelation that spread over the Internet as fast as the flu. It didn't matter that the product had the lowest dioxane levels of any dish liquid tested, or that the FDA deemed those levels "safe." All that mattered was that we failed to reveal the problem.
Over the years, we held many meetings on how to completely purge dioxane from our products. But we never thought to open those conversations to the outside world. Had we shared our dioxane dilemma with everyone who wanted to weigh in or question our progress, we might well have cracked the conundrum and avoided those breathless headlines. But viewed another way, dioxane presented us with a rather extreme opportunity to absorb the new rules around transparency.
Jun 23 2008, 09:56 AM