If Pierre Ferrari were a doctor, he would say:“First, do no harm.”
Yet for Ferrari,that’s only the beginning.It’s not good enough to just run a sustainable business that just keeps the status quo.He believes in“reparative” business practices,companies that actually improve the physical enviornment.

Pierre Ferrari may be one of the most unusual executives you’ll ever meet.
After a couple of decades working his way up the corporate ladder in marketing at The Coca-Cola Co., Ferrari decided to join Atlanta-based CARE, the international relief agency, because he wanted to give back to the world.

But after three or four years, Ferrari realized that he was not a nonprofit kind of guy.

“I started getting hungry for the pace of business,” Ferrari said.
But not business as we know it.
He will tell you that he believes in good business values,social values and environmental values, not as a philanthropist but as a businessman. “That’s what he has been doing ever since.
After leaving CARE,Ferrari met Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a company that shared his business and social values. Cohen and Greenfield actually were hoping Ferrari would consider becoming the company’s CEO, but they couldn’t convince him to take on that role.

Instead, Ferrari joined the corporate board. As a director, he witnessed the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever Plc in 2000 and the agreement that Cohen and Greenfield were able to strike with the global consumer products firm. Unilever agreed to let Ben & Jerry’s continue its business practices.
Today, Ferrari serves as chairman of Ben & Jerry’s board — one of nearly a dozen business ventures and social initiatives where he invests his energy, time and money.

It’s all about the “triple bottom line” — profit, people and the planet. Or as Ferrari said in a recent interview, it’s about running a healthy business, not just financially but socially and environmentally.

Through proceeds of the sale of Ben & Jerry’s, Ferrari and Cohen established Hot Fudge Ventures, a firm that invests in small and midsized companies that will adopt a similar philosophy.

One of Ferrari’s prized ventures is Guayaki, a California-based company that makes Yerba Mate drinks. He is an investor, heads its marketing and serves on its board.

“We are taking the Ben & Jerry idea even further. We are building it into the supply chain,” Ferrari said. That means taking a product to its origins, in this case the rainforests in South America. They pay workers a fair, living wage. They are helping reforest the rainforests.

As a result, Guayaki’s promotional materials show five stamps, showing that it’s kosher, organic, fairly traded and certified by the Rainforest Alliance.Even the brochure has been printed with vegetable-based inks on 100 percent recycled, chlorine-free paper certified Ancient Forest Friendly and produced with renewable wind power.

Ferrari has applied the same principles on a business as mundane as T-shirts. Instead of using poor-quality fabrics produced by cheap labor in China, Ferrari and Cohen invested $1.2 million in a new garment factory in Los Angeles — TeamX.

“I’m going to offer a product that’s produced ethically with union labor; an organic T-shirt produced by Americans,” Ferrari said.

Ferrari,58,becomes even more passionate when talking about executive compensation. He referred to a study conducted by the University of Southern California showing that in 1975, the average CEO earned 28 times more than the average salary of employees; by 2005,the multiple was 465.


http://www.Guayaki.com