Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Just a quick note to point you to this retrospective assessment of the Body Shop founder, who died Monday, written by WorldChanging’s Emily Gertz:

Anita Roddick’s Green Legacy

Today it’s hardly unusual to think about companies’ social and environmental policies alongside their profit-and-loss statements — which, as Gertz points out, is the essence of the “triple bottom line” analysis that is common today, but which was groundbreaking when Roddick started using it decades ago.

Roddick could be a polarizing figure, which was perhaps inevitable given her high-impact personality and her uncompromising stands, both on issues dear to her heart (which alienated her from many old-line capitalists) and on turning a profit (which alienated her from some purist environmentalists). But it seems clear that her innovations will continue to spread through the world of business, far beyond the little cosmetics outfit she founded in 1976.