Daniel Grossman goes one step further. He doesn't even describe Wild Planet as a socially responsible company. "I'm very careful about saying, 'This is a socially responsible company,' because it's not," he says. "There are plenty of things, if you came here, if you looked at them, you could say, 'Is that responsible?' So all I can say is that we strive to be. We're public about it, and we assess our performance."
Wild Planet manufactures its toys in China, and even though it screens the factories it works with and has an office in Hong Kong, Grossman acknowledges that the company doesn't have the level of control over the manufacturing process that it would have if the toys were made in the States. "The reality is, if we're trying to create models that are sustainable, you're not going to have the control over every piece of the business, so you have to pick your places, and you have to be really clear."
In Wild Planet's early years, Grossman says, there was discussion about producing the toys in the United States. "But that would have meant that we'd end up selling probably to the top 5% of the market. And our mission was to provide these pro-social, if you will, toys to all kids, not just kids whose parents shop at FAO Schwarz. So we made that decision, we made that compromise."
Grossman applies that scrupulous honesty to matters inside Wild Planet as well. "I feel like we as businesses have obligations to our employees, and part of that obligation is to help everyone understand what the environment that we're operating in is like, to help everyone understand how our performance relates to that environment, and to make clear that the business is not a family. I think that's a setup, frankly," he says. "Sometimes people have to leave for reasons that are beyond our control. We talk about family style, but it's not a family. Anybody who's been in it knows that."
Forget the hype
For today's companies, social responsibility is not about marketing and image. In "Lost in Patagonia," a profile of the outdoor-clothing maker that appeared in Inc. in August 1992, Edward O. Welles wrote: " Image is a word that is liberally bandied about at Patagonia, and the concept serves as a key cog in the company's strategy." That's not the case in these new companies. They go about doing their socially responsible deeds quietly.
"When we first brought out our peppermint tea, our label didn't mention that we were sharing the revenues with the Crow Nation," says Goldman. "We didn't want people to think that was a gimmick." Mark Deutschmann notes that Village Real Estate Services concentrates primarily on marketing its services, not on publicizing its Village Fund, which owns 5% of the real estate business and is committed to the revitalization of urban neighborhoods.
CitySoft, too, focuses its marketing on its product and Web-development services. In fact, says Gleason, having a reputation for being socially involved could actually hurt his business. "Our whole company is focused on demonstrating the mainstream viability of urban talent, and so here's what happens if we get covered as a social story: we automatically become nonmainstream," he says. "Our goal is to have AOL want to hire us and have other companies replicate our hiring because they believe it will help them win in their business world. But if they view us as a social-service activity, not only will they be less likely to hire us and take us seriously, they'll be less likely to take the concept seriously, and they'll be less likely to do that kind of hiring themselves. Managing the messages and keeping people focused on the business is very important."
Of course, despite all the lessons that these CEOs have taken to heart, it remains to be seen how their companies will fare down the road. Many of the current crop of businesses are five years old or younger and post sales from $2 million to $8 million. Ben & Jerry's, by contrast, was acquired in April 2000 by giant Unilever for $326 million and had sales last year of some $248 million.
Still, this much is clear: the socially responsible companies of today, unlike their forebears, aren't driven by a cult of personality (read: Ben Cohen, Yvon Chouinard, Paul Hawken, Anita Roddick). The very lack of name recognition among the newer CEOs we discovered in our quest proves that point. Even more important, social responsibility for the recent crop of company founders -- at least at this early date -- seems to be not about them nor even about their companies. It's about the mission.
Thea Singer is an associate editor at Inc.
Anita Roddick
The Body Shop International, established In 1976
Roddick, like many social-venture entrepreneurs, never dreamed she'd run a public company someday.
"I think a lot of us would have slit our wrists if we ever thought we'd be part of corporate America or England," she says. "Big business was alien to me. What I wanted to do was create a livelihood, and I think women are quite good at that -- probably better than blokes. We mush up an interest and a skill, and that's a livelihood."
Roddick's company, the Body Shop, was arguably the most successful British enterprise of the 1980s and remains one of the best-known global brands to this day. But the company has taken its share of hits, both financially and emotionally.
In 1994 a journalist named Jon Entine wrote a magazine article about the Body Shop that suggested that the company was guilty of hypocritical marketing. At about the same time, the company's stock price on the London exchange plummeted amid a troubled North American expansion plan. Roddick says today that the Body Shop's problems were caused by poor hiring practices and some lousy mall leases foisted on the company by real estate brokers.
But some observers suggest that the company struggled because Anita Roddick, ever an outspoken crusader, was focused on being a social activist and was almost indifferent to her business's bottom line.
