The Devastators, an all-children’s Afro-American percussion band whose music is focused on combating AIDS and homelessness, and promoting world peace and environmentalism.
The Heifer Project, which provides agricultural animals to impoverished communities.
Worker-Owned Network, which mobilizes community resources for worker cooperatives.
The Women’s Institute for Housing and Development.
The company also, as mentioned earlier, donates 1 percent of per-tax profits to the “One Percent for Pease” organization, which encourages activities and education that Promote world peace, and is seeking ways of converting defense programs into ones that benefit civilians.
ORGANIC GREENING AT BEN & JERRY’S
Organic greening at B&J is based on a broad vision of the company, its environment and its notion of prosperity.
The company views itself as a business with social objectives. Its concept of the environment includes its stakeholders, associated communities, and the natural environment. Its concept of prosperity is one of shared benefits and long-term sustainability.
Environmental actions are an integral part of daily operations. They emerge from the informal and open decision processes of a voluntarily formed Green Team.
Environmental efforts are given focus and guidance through scientific and common sense analysis. Difficult problems are tackled with scientific and technological innovations, and simple problems with common sense.
The emphasis is on building environmentally positive linkages and partnerships within and outside the company. The emphasis is also on action and accomplishment, with limited resources given to measuring the effects of these actions.
Greening is a grass-roots effort by employees. The top management is not directly involved in either monitoring or guiding it. The company founders have made their support for environmental efforts explicit and empowered employees to act on their own environmental impulses.
CONCLUSIONS
The “linked prosperity” idea is apparent in B&J’s diverse array of business and social programs. The company has created a unique web of mutually beneficial and reinforcing relationships with its key stakeholders. This network provides the competitive advantage of dedicated, loyal, flexible, accommodating, and friendly employees and business associates. This is a great asset in the highly competitive ice-cream industry.
This description of the company’s environmental and social efforts is not to imply that the company is without areas for improvement. While its products are of high quality, they contain large amounts of fat and sugar. Both these ingredients are harmful when consumed in excess. The company realizes this and suggests moderation in consuming ice creams. Such moderation will be encouraged as the company provides more complete nutrition information on its ice-cream packages.
Another area for improvement is its human resources policies. The company is generous in giving good wages and benefits to employees. However, the tasks in automated ice-cream making are not very challenging. The company attempts to add to job satisfaction by encouraging employees to engage in community projects. By increasing such efforts and involving workers in decision making, the company can improve the motivation of lower-level employees. Its large-scale employment of women is laudable. Moving these women to top management positions and hiring more minority employees are areas for further improvement.
As B&J’s grows, it faces increasing pressures to adopt aggressive sales and financial tactics. It has been criticized for predatory pricing policies that stifle smaller competitors, much in the way that the company itself was stifled when it was small. The pressures to behave like large, established traditional companies will continue to mount in the coming years. B&J is now being challenged to find creative responses that maintain the integrity of its social, product, and economic missions.