On his Esquire blog, John H. Richardson has a teaser up for a Wednesday story about ““Saving Capitalism from Itself”. If you don’t click over, you’ll miss a great cartoon explication of the benefit corporation:
… As a college student, [Jay Coen] Gilbert started a sports-apparel company called And One, which was worth $250 million when he sold it thirteen years later. When he and his partners sat down to plot their next move, they dreamed big.
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“We wanted to figure out how we could harness the power of markets to solve social and environmental problems,” Gilbert told me. “Our assumption was government and nonprofits are hugely necessary but insufficient to the task — business is three-quarters of the GDP. So we figured that trying to figure out how to remove some of the impediments that prevent business from being part of the solution would be a pretty useful thing.”
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To find practical solutions that would work in the real business world, they started talking to the leaders of civic-minded business like Shore Bank, Puravida Coffee, and Seventh Generation. “Out of 200 of those conversations, they told us there was infrastructure missing that would be pretty useful. One piece was around standards. The second was around legal corporate structure.”
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Since the economic crash of 2008, the B Corp momentum has intensified dramatically. “It’s accelerating on a couple of fronts,” Gilbert says. “We certified twice as many B Corps in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of ’09. That’s ripples in the pond — 330 ripples.”
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In order for those ripples to have impact, B Lab has been fighting to change America’s corporate laws…
Click the link for more inspiration. Can’t wait to see the full article!