Marc Gunther

Ted Turner's Montana Adventure

The highlight of my trip to Montana last weekend was a visit to the Flying D, Ted Turner's ranch. It's a breathtakingly beautiful place, and an interesting one, too, because Turner is raising American bison, protecting the environment and trying (and mostly succeeding) at making money. (Not that he needs it.) Probably having more fun, too, than he did in the last few years at Time Warner. Below is a picture of Russ Miller, who manages Turner's ranches, and a few bison. Yes, he looks a little like Ted. I wrote about Turner's ranch today in my CNNMoney column. Here's how the column began:

Bozeman, Montana --"I don't want to own every ranch," Ted Turner once said. "I just want to own the ranch next door."

This is the kind of thinking that has made Turner, the restless 67-year-old cable television billionaire, the largest private landowner in America. Turner, the former vice chairman of Time Warner, who left the company's board in May, owns 15 ranches in seven states, covering 1.9 million acres. That's 3,000 square miles - bigger than Delaware or Rhode Island.

A visit to one of those ranches - the 113,000-acre Flying D ranch in southwestern Montana - demonstrates that the Turner ranches stand out not only because of their size, but because of the values that drive them.

You can read the the column here.

Kleenex--Wiping Out Forests?

In my CNNMoney.com column today, I look at the battle being waged by Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council against consumer products giant Kimberly-Clark. The environmentalists charge that K-C has failed to follow best practices in its sourcing of wood, and in particular uses wood pulp from ancient Canadian forests to make throwaway products like Kleenex and toilet tissue. The company's bigger problem may be that it misled the public and its shareholders about its practices. Here's how the column begins:

NEW YORK -- Question: When you wipe your nose with a Kleenex, are you helping wipe out ancient forests?

Answer: That depends entirely on who you ask.

The environmental groups Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council say that Kimberly-Clark, the world's largest tissue manufacturer, has failed to keep its promises to protect ancient forests in Canada. Kimberly-Clark calls itself an environmental leader. Be warned: digging through the competing claims in this controversy is not easy.

But one thing's evident: Kimberly-Clark's credibility has taken a hit, and that's a problem for the $16 billion a year consumer products firm whose brands include Kleenex, Huggies, Scott, Pull-Ups, Cottonelle, Viva, Kotex and Depend.

You can read the column here.

Corporate volunteering

In my coverage of corporate citizenship, I haven’t written much about voluntarism and philanthropy. Two reasons: It’s hard to write about them without sounding mushy, and typically they aren’t core to a company’s mission or impact.

But I had the opportunity to speak yesterday at an awards luncheon sponsored by the Metro Atlanta Corporate Volunteer Council, which encourages companies to make it easy for their workers to do volunteer work. To prepare for the speech, I did some research and thinking about corporate volunteering, and then I learned more at the event, which drew a crowd of more than 500 people from Atlanta's best companies. (The top award, FYI, went to a law firm called Kilpatrick Stockton.)I’ve come away thinking that every company ought to have a program to help its people to volunteer—not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because it makes business sense.

It’s amazing, once you dig a little, to see how much company-sponsored volunteering is going on, not just in Atlanta, where companies are famously civic-minded, but all around the country. IBM and Pfizer run great volunteer programs, focused on education and global health. In Atlanta, Home Depot will help connect more than 40,000 volunteers and 1,000 nonprofits during its current “corporate month of service.” Small companies like Georgia Natural Gas are active, too; more than two-thirds of its 65 employees regularly volunteer on company time. This is not a bad way to set your company apart, especially if you are selling a commodity like natural gas.

The business case for corporate-sponsored volunteering is straightforward. The opportunity to volunteer is an appealing benefit to employees. These efforts burnish a company's reputation in the eyes of customers. And they help over time to build strong communities, without which business cannot thrive.

Transparency at Timberland

Last winter, I wrote a column about Timberland's plan to attach "nutritional labels" to its shoes. The company says that all of its shoeboxes now carry the label, "so you know exactly what went into making the shoes you put on your feet." The labels aren't perfect--it's hard, for example, to know how much energy should go into making a pair of shoes, but they are a laudable effort by the company to be more open about its business.

Revolution Foods

Childhood obesity's a serious problem. One in three children and adolescents in America are either obese or at serious risk of becoming obese, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Like most big problems, this one creates a business opportunity. Which is where Revolution Foods comes in.

A northern California startup, Revolution Foods provides healthy food for school lunches and nutrition education to four charter schools serving poor children in Oakland, Ca. The business is the brainchild of Kristin Groos Richmond, a 31-year-old newly-minted MBA from Berkeley who spent her last year of business school writing a business plan, forging a strategic partnership with Whole Foods and running a 10-week pilot program at a local school. Kristin and co-founder Kirsten Tobey, another Berkeley MBA, secured startup funding from the Bay Area Equity Fund, a venture capital fund managed by J.P. Morgan, that "seeks to invest in companies that can deliver market-rate venture capital returns while enabling social and environmental improvement in the San Francisco Bay Area's low and moderate income neighborhoods."

Although Revolution Foods is just getting started, Kristin's excited by what she's seen. By email, she says, "We've had great results so far with parents, teachers, and kids writing in about the healthier, mostly organic foods we are offering each day. Everything is fresh and seasonal."

Interestingly, both Kristin and Kirsten worked for NGOs -- Kristin helped start a school in East Africa, Kirsten worked at Earthjustice and a UN hunger program -- before going to b-school and becoming social enterpreneurs. Now they're running a company with a powerful idea behind it. They're part of a new wave of socially conscious MBAs who, I believe, are going to rock the world of business in the years ahead.

McBlogging

When I wrote a long story about McDonald’s and corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003, my colleague at the time, Joe Nocera, said that the most responsible thing for McDonald’s to do would be to shut down. He was kidding, but he was expressing a view of Mickey D’s shared by liberal elites. What other U.S. corporation has been the target of two Hollywood movies in recent years—Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and Fox Searchlight’s upcoming Fast Food Nation?

The truth is, McDonald’s takes CSR seriously. It offers healthy choices in its restaurants, has worked with environmentalists for more than a decade around issues ranging from packaging to sustainable fisheries, does lots of charitable work, etc. The company is far from perfect—there’s a raging and very complicated controversy about its ties to exploited migrant workers who pick tomatoes in Florida, and giving away Hummer toys in Happy Meals isn’t exactly green practice. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Bob Langert, who runs the corporate responsibility operation at McDonald's, is one of the people inside corporate America who is changing things for the better.

Bob and a colleague, Catherine Adams, have been writing a blog for McDonald’s, and it’s worth a look. It’s an effort by the company to be more transparent and open. Some of what Bob writes strikes me as spin—he defends the Hummer giveaway by saying it’s just a toy—but he also offers insight into the tensions that face a company that’s trying to change its business to meet the rising expectations of consumers and critics. Fitting the blog-writing into his schedule isn’t easy, Bob tells me via email, but he says he’s enjoying the writing.

I am always thinking about my next blog, and the next one. I wish we had more comments, more dialogue, but there is a fair amount of blog activity outside my own blog on what I write, so I think that is good.

Corporate blogging's catching on. I think that before too long, any company that wants to connect with its many stakeholders will have one. The challenge will be to make them authentic--and not just spin.