"We Spent Thirty Years Trying to Win a Game Designed for Us to Lose": Jeffrey Hollender on Seventh Generation, the Unilever Years, and What Comes After Sustainability

Jeffrey Hollender cofounded Seventh Generation in 1988, long before "sustainability" became a corporate vocabulary. He led the company until he was forced out by his own board in 2010, watched it get sold to Unilever in 2016, and has since become one of the movement's sharpest internal critics. His new book, Built for a Better World, is the most candid account he has yet offered of what Seventh Generation accomplished, where it fell short, and what he now believes the entire sustainability movement got wrong. We sat down with him for an exclusive conversation about the book, the Unilever years, and the question he says still haunts him.

 

1. On the central indictment of your own legacy.

You write that even Seventh Generation was ultimately "less bad" rather than genuinely good, and that the entire sustainability movement is, in your words, failing future generations at a slower speed. That's a much harsher read on your own life's work than most founder memoirs offer. What changed for you between leaving Seventh Generation and writing this book? Was there a specific moment when "less bad" stopped feeling like enough?

 

Leaving Seventh Generation gave me the distance to see what I couldn’t see from inside it. After I left Seventh Generation, I reflected on the key places that the company had fallen short of its aspirations to redefine that business could play to positively impact society and the planet. The first place I focused on was the notion that rather than being an exception to the rules, we need to change the rules. That realization led directly to a conviction that influencing public policy was critical to bringing about the changes we wanted to effect, and that the impact business had on public policy couldn’t be left to the multinational companies who already invest so much in ensuring that things remained the same.

Second, we were selling expensive products to people who already lived healthier lives. That’s not a mission — that’s a niche. To fulfil our mission we needed to democratize access to our products and ensure that those most frequently exposed to harmful chemicals could actually afford what we were selling.

The third realization came from understanding the difference between sustainability and regeneration. Sustainability was a focus on sustaining the present state, keeping things from getting worse. What is required was a strategy that actually made things better and began to fix the damage that had been done. Using fewer resources and creating less pollution would only slow the rate of destruction. What was required was to repair the damage — and that demands a fundamentally different ambition.

 

2. On being right in the wrong way.

In your account of the 2010 board fight that led to your firing, you describe yourself as having been "right in the wrong way", correct on the substance about Chuck Maniscalco and the employee stock issue, but too impatient to win the argument. What's the actual lesson there for mission-driven founders today, especially in moments when their boards start quietly prioritizing valuation over values?

 

The real lesson is structural: mission-driven founders routinely lose fights they should win because they haven’t built the institutional scaffolding to protect what they believe. To protect the mission and values of a business, several things are critical that we failed to pay enough attention to. First was building our values into the governance of the company, ensuring that legally, in the bylaws of the business, the values that were so important to who we were couldn’t be changed by our investors. Second it was essential to ensure that investors we took money from were deeply aligned with our mission. That’s something we failed to do in our obsession on growth and the speed that additional capital was required to support it. Third we had to build board members who were genuine partners in the mission, not just overseers of financial returns.

 

3. On the Unilever years, with hindsight.

You describe being thrilled when the board called in 2016 to say they'd sold the company to Unilever; Paul Polman, the social mission board, the cash-out, the validation. Nearly a decade on, with Unilever having walked back several of its high-profile sustainability commitments and Polman long gone, how do you assess that decision now? What did acquisition deliver that an independent Seventh Generation couldn't have and what did it cost that you didn't see at the time?

 

Watching so many impact and natural product companies get sold to large multinationals, I believe that the level of social and political innovation, the willingness to take risks and push the envelope when it comes to new ways to effect change, definitely comes to a halt when a business is sold. This is true whether Paul Polman is the CEO or someone else. It’s not that Seventh Generation has had to compromise its values — Unilever has never asked us to do that. But being part of Unilever has limited our ability to push the boundaries of what business can do to solve the world’s problems. Those activities are simply not compatible with being a division of a publicly held company. Consider what any public company would think of a CEO who, as a board member of Greenpeace, frequently gets arrested. There must be another path that keeps values-based businesses independent — whether through employee ownership structures, perpetual purpose trusts, or models like Patagonia’s. The sale validated us financially, but it cost us the radical edge that made us matter.

 

4. On the rigged market.

In Final Thoughts you make a forceful case that the "free market" isn't free at all that it's a system of subsidies, tax preferences, and regulations engineered to keep incumbents winning, and that this is why your recycled toilet paper cost more than it should have. If that's the real diagnosis, why did you spend three decades competing inside that system rather than fighting to change its rules? And which companies, if any, do you think have done that rule-changing work better than Seventh Generation did?

 

Spending three decades competing inside the current economic system rather than fighting to change it, was a huge mistake. Sadly very few mission driven businesses have joined that battle. Patagonia, a privately held and family owned business is a rare exception as is Interface. Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, is one of the world's largest manufacturers of modular carpet. Anderson co-chaired the President's Council on Sustainable Development under Clinton and co-chaired the Presidential Climate Action Plan in 2008, presenting the Obama administration with a 100-day action plan on climate. Anderson used his company as a platform to pressure government to change rules, not just to clean up his own operations.

Corporate responsibility has almost entirely meant company change — voluntary, unilateral efforts to reduce negative impacts. But system change is what’s actually needed. Companies will reduce harm up to the point it costs them money. After that, almost none will go further without being forced. We spent thirty years trying to win inside a game that was designed for us to lose. The next generation needs to change the game.

 

5. On the 2026 ESG landscape.

The political and regulatory environment around sustainable business in 2026 looks very different from the one Seventh Generation grew up in - anti-ESG legislation in parts of the US, major asset managers walking back commitments, the SEC climate disclosure rule diluted, even as the EU pushes harder on CSRD, EUDR, and Digital Product Passports. Is the movement actually losing ground, or is it just getting honest about what corporate sustainability ever really was?

 

The situation is terrible and increasingly dangerous. We’re losing ground that took decades to build. That ground will take many years to make up. The situation is not quite as bad as it looks when it comes to large companies walking back their commitments and investments. Morgan Stanley research indicates that around 70% of large company investments in sustainability are on track. But that’s cold comfort when the baseline was already inadequate — those commitments were never bold enough to begin with.

The real horror show is what’s happening at the federal level from an investment and regulatory perspective. Take the destruction of wind energy deployment. One billion dollars invested to stop building a wind farm. That’s insanity. The dismantling of regulations to protect the public from dangerous toxins, as just one example, will result in billions of dollars of additional healthcare costs to mitigate the impact on the health and safety of Americans. This is a debt my grandchildren will spend their lives repaying.

 

6. On consciousness vs. systems.

You describe creating the "director of corporate consciousness" role for Gregor Barnum, and you write that the only change that will ultimately matter is one of the human heart. Most CFOs and operators would read that and quietly close the book. What's your response to people who argue that the future of sustainable business runs through better data, mandatory disclosure, and capital allocation not consciousness, and certainly not love?

 

Both are essential. It’s clear that government and business are failing miserably to respond responsibility to the danger signs all around us. We’re driving down the road, with thousands of red flags waving in front of us, warning that we’re headed for a cliff, and we just close our eyes. Better data, stricter mandatory disclosure, better capital allocation and shifting the responsibility for negative externalities off the public and the environment and back to corporate balance sheets is essential, but will never be enough.

A large part of the problem is that we have legitimized and legalized unethical and immoral behaviour. We have become less compassionate. We’ve built an economy optimized for producing things people don’t need, sold through emotions people shouldn’t trust. Our narrow attention and focus makes it impossible to see the system of interconnected impacts and unintended consequences that must guide our decisions and behaviour. That will only come from greater consciousness. Data can measure the crisis. Only a change in values can resolve it.

 

7. On the question you're still answering.

The book closes with Carol Sanford's question, which you say still haunts you: what does the world need most that you are uniquely able to provide? You admit you don't yet know your own answer. For a reader in 2026 who's earlier in the journey than you are, a younger founder, an operator inside a big corporate, a sustainability lead trying to do real work in a hostile environment, what's the question they should actually be asking themselves right now about the role of business in their lifetime?

 

Sadly, sustainability is no longer enough — and the sooner leaders accept that, the sooner they can ask the right question. Stop asking “how do I make my company less bad?” Start asking “what kind of world do I want my business help create?” We must become systems thinkers who design products and services that leave the world genuinely better off — businesses that repair damage rather than simply minimize harm. Study regenerative agriculture to see this new paradigm at work. Read Patagonia’s recent Progress Report. Study the companies already leading the way: Natura, Interface Carpet, King Arthur Flour, Tazo Tea, Guayaki, Lush Cosmetics, and Lotus Foods, to name a few. They are far from perfect, but they are pointing toward the future we must build. And that future begins with the question Carol Sanford posed — what does the world need most that you are uniquely able to provide? I’m still working on my answer. You should start working on yours.