World Inquiry

Featured Stories

 

  Interface's Back To Nature Carpet Creates Big Profits  
 
The Orchid
Interfaces believes that Mother Nature does know best and uses the concepts of bio-mimicry to guide some of its carpet designs. Entropy Carpet, which mimics the forest flooring patters, is the best selling carpet tile in the history of company.
 
     
  Project Shakti: Growing the Market While Changing Lives  
 
The Orchid
Jella Sujatamma is part entrepreneur, part health care advisor, part hygiene specialist and part mother in the many villages in India she visits each week as Hindustan Lever's most successful Shakti Amma. Project Shakti is a pioneering, bottom-of-the-pyramid, corporate effort to create livelihoods for rural women by providing critically needed additional income.
 
     
  One World Health: Non-Profit Brings Life Saving Drugs to Developing Countries  
 
The Orchid
A conversation with a New York taxi driver from West Africa inspired Victoria Hale to leave her career as a pharmaceutical scientist and launch the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical firm fighting the most deadly parasitic diseases in tropical and developing nations.
 
     
  The Orchid, an eco-hotel in Mumbai  
 
The Orchid Where The Orchid treads, it treads lightly leaving limited footprints on the environment in its wake. Billing itself as "the Hallmark of Environmentally Sensitive Hotels", The Orchid is a 245-room "ecotel" or Eco-Hotel located in Mumbai, India.
 
     
  Rethinking Business at Unilever  
 
All indicators point to the fact that Unilever's aligning of human and financial resources with the larger needs of humanity has had a transformative, positive impact on its organization.
 
     
  Daimler Chrysler is Reaching Out to HIV/AIDS Infected Employees  
 
Daimler Chrysler South Africa's Workplace Initiative on HIV/AIDS has been working to combat acquired immune deficiency syndrome and for the social integration of HIV-positive persons at its headquarters just outside Pretoria.
 
     
  The Equator Principles: Changing the Face of Financing Construction Projects  
 
The Equator Principles are a voluntary set of guidelines for assessing and managing environmental and social risks in the area of project financing.
 
     
  TerraCycle Creates a Cycle of Hope for the Environment  
 
TerraCycle is proving to the world that there is a way by taking advantage of a consumer population that spends close to $40 billion annually on lawns and gardens.
 
     
  Marilyn Tam: Organic Product Innovations at Aveda  
 
Tam built Aveda on the environmentally enlightened principle that only organic, plant-based products would serve as the ingredients to create healthy cosmetics that also incorporate aromatherapy and natural moisturizers.
 
     
  Marilyn Tam: Making a Social and Environmental Difference at Reebok  
 
As president of Reebok's Apparel and Retail Products Group from 1990 through 1993, Tam helped make the company think beyond its internal profit goals, fostering an awareness that businesses can improve by engaging and growing their employees more to bring the company together and make it stronger.
 
     
  Shorebank: A Self-Sustaining Institution  
 
Shorebank's 30-year track record of successfully pursuing the double bottom line of financial return and development output continues to provide a widely acclaimed international model for market-based community reinvestment.
 
     
  Global Environment Fund  
 
By making private equity investments in businesses that promote sustainable natural resource management, a cleaner environment and improved public health, GEF has certainly committed itself to the less traveled path.
 
     
  Business and Peace: Conversations with Bobby Sager  
 
Conversations with Bobby Sager on his micro-enterprise businesses in Third World countries and the community building for children in conflict around the world.
 
     
  Green Mountain Coffee Roasters: Journey to Successful Supplier Relationships  
 
Green Mountain Coffee Roaster's improvement program began boosting efficiencies in production and administration when they started looking beyond themselves and toward their suppliers.
 
     
  Cabbages and Condoms  
 
Learn about an organization whose motto is quite simply: Our Food Is Guaranteed Not to Cause Pregnancy. Patrons at Cabbages and Condoms Restaurants in Thailand receive a great meal while also contributing to social innovation and community development.
 
     
  UN Global Compact  
 
Chaired by the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, this bold project brings together hundreds of corporate leaders around the globe in an effort to discuss what it takes to be a responsible business in today's complex world.
 
     
  Peter Drucker: Future of Business as an Agent of World Benefit  
 
No single person has influenced the course of business in the 20th century as much as Peter Drucker. Indeed Drucker invented management - not as a practice, but as a field of study. Read commentary by David Cooperrider