When you’re looking for CSR work, there’s a very clear mantra that everyone repeats, day in and day out. It goes something like this:

“Real CSR jobs are few and far between. If you want to do CSR, go get a functional job within a big company and innovate from the inside out.”

In social change circles, this mantra could also be called social intrapreneurship. Unlike social entrepreneurship, where you’re starting something completely new and distinct, social intrapreneurship is all about finding ways to innovate within the...

The diminutive gentleman sitting behind the enormous prop desk of the premier episode of the “The Amazing Federal Reserve” was none other than Chairman Ben Bernanke. The momentous occasion was billed as the “first press conference ever.” The unusual YouTube hour had all the staged contrivance of a tacky reality TV show. Fanfare leading up to the April 27 premier was much more exciting than the disappointing rhetoric that filled it. Like the fake reality show it is, the Federal Reserve wants...

Slovenian philosopher and theorist Slavoj Žižek swings a sledge hammer at the knees of ‘cultural capitalism’ in this 10-minute video. And I admit, my knees buckled for some moments as I listened to his critique of Starbucks for its fair trade coffee, of philanthropist George Soros and of ‘charity businesses’ like TOMS Shoes.

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Human resources specialists (and corporate social human resources specialists, as Elaine Cohen prefers), take note!  Earlier this month, the ...

Getinvolved.ca is a fantastic initiative focused on connecting individuals and organizations to make change possible. They’re the folks behind Power of the Hour, a national campaign to encourage Canadians to stand up and count the power of volunteer time. They’ve also done a whole series of interesting videos, called Digital U, about various aspects of social media....

You’ve got oil in your bedroom closet. Well, not exactly oil, but products that made from petrochemicals like Spandex. Spandex can be found in swimsuits, socks, intimate apparel, sportswear, ski pants and biking gear, among other things.

Christophe Shilling, an entrepreneur with a PhD in bioengineering, aims to change that–with the help of renewable crops and genetically modified bugs. He’s the founder and CEO of a company...

Each day, the Globe and Mail – one of Canada’s national newspapers – runs a reader poll on a “hot topic.”  Today, in light of current events in Libya and elsewhere, the ...

Interviewed in prison, Bernie Madoff asserted that banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his elaborate fraud. Diana Henriques, writing in the NY Times, 2/15/11, (here) said ”Madoff described as ‘willful blindness’ their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information,” Quoting Madoff, “They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”...

 Readers Note:

GoodB Executive Director Monika Mitchell will be on writing sabbatical until March to finish her new manuscript on The World of Wall Street Finance  due out in ebook in June and print in Fall 2011.

Lately I have been hearing a lot about how Wall Street mortgage market makers who brought the global economies to their knees were “stupid.” MIT Quants, Berkeley physicists, Harvard, Stanford and...

According to a report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch, private security personnel employed at the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have been implicated in alleged gang rapes and other violent abuses. The Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) mine has produced billions of dollars of gold in its twenty years of operation, and  is operated and 95 percent owned by Barrick Gold, a Canadian company that is the world’s largest gold producer.

Barrick’s response to this finding has been commendable and should...

Two posts in less than a week? I must officially be an insomniac.

Tonight’s excuse is that I’m waiting for my laptop to painfully slowly back-up before setting off to Paris to take part in Societe Generale’s Citizen Act finale.

I was invited to take part in today’s Guardian’s Sustainable Business live online Q&A on ‘Using social media to communicate sustainability’.

If nothing else I’d...