Prologue

I met Jeff Furman in 1998, when he offered to rent me a corner of the large room he said was his office. I knew that Jeff had degrees in accounting and law and that he also had something to do with Ben & Jerry’s, but I didn’t know exactly what that was. Perhaps Jeff worked for a local not-for-profit group that hires teenagers, which operated the ice cream shop directly below the office and had its papers and junk taking up most of the room. Or maybe he worked for the Ithaca Skate Park—one afternoon I had to pick my way past a group of teenagers who were politely holding a meeting, some of them balancing on skateboards while they talked. It was a chaotic but friendly place, and everyone around Jeff was doing something interesting.

Jeff used the office mostly to change clothes before he went for his daily run. He had a small desk in one corner, mounded over with dusty papers, and balanced on top of the mound was a spectacularly grimy, sticky telephone. The phone looked like it belonged in a dairy barn. A lot of people used it, and many of them worked downstairs, where they handled ice cream. Every so often Jeff would come in and talk on that phone for a while, and then he’d leave.

I was alone in that room one day, wandering around the way writers do, when I noticed that Jeff had taped, right above his telephone, a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” After that, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I asked Jeff what kind of accountant he was. He smiled and said that he was training to be an alter kocker, which is a Yiddish term for a foul-tempered, forgetful old troublemaker. We started hanging out in coffee shops, and over the next fifteen years, he gradually answered my question.

Jeff is an interesting guy, but I learned that he was protecting something even more interesting. He is the co-creator and guardian of the social mission of Ben & Jerry’s, and a stubborn advocate for a vision of business the company calls “linked prosperity.” This is the simple but radical idea that when the company benefits, everything it touches should also benefit, including employees, suppliers, customers, communities, and the environment. One day, Jeff suggested that I write a magazine article about linked prosperity at Ben & Jerry’s. This book is the result.

The journey of linked prosperity spans four decades, has a cast of thousands, and contains as much human drama and unexpected plot twists as anything by Dostoevsky. I spent a solid year learning about it, interviewing more than three dozen people and digesting several hundred pounds of company reports and internal documents. (If a source is not attributed in this book, it comes either from these personal interviews or company documents.) It was all I could do just to tell the story, dear reader, so please do not expect a typical business book with a lot of easily summarized “take-aways.” This is a story about inspiring, fallible people and their shared quest to attain a goal they know they will never reach. They fail and struggle, and sometimes they think they have failed even when they have succeeded. They are also extremely funny, and they make a product few can resist.

If we are to give everything its due, the story of linked prosperity is a very charming thing. But it is also a very complicated and provocative thing. It raises so many big, fascinating ideas that beg for discussion: What is fair compensation? When publicly traded businesses invest in social change, how do you define success? If you liberate a hen from her cage, is she happier, and what is that worth? And so on. To encourage those discussions in informal groups, I have prepared a study guide with free documents and links at www.bradedmondson.com.

I was welcomed by almost everyone I approached while writing this book, with the notable exceptions of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who said they didn’t want to relive the past (see “human drama,” above). That was okay, because this book isn’t really about them, or Jeff, or any other person. It is about the extraordinary organization a small group of committed people helped create and how they managed, almost despite themselves, to preserve their vision for future generations.

Jeff was patient, honest, and unfailingly helpful during the long process of writing and revising this book. I am equally indebted to his spouse, Sara Hess (favorite flavor: Liz Lemon Frozen Yogurt), who read and commented on each chapter with the wisdom of someone who was paying attention as she watched the whole thing happen. Twenty percent of the book’s royalties are going to a not-for-profit organization Jeff and Sara maintain to support community organizations, and that doesn’t begin to repay the debt of gratitude I feel toward them.

This book is an entirely independent effort. It is not endorsed and was not financially supported by either Ben & Jerry’s or Unilever. So I am especially grateful to the people of Ben & Jerry’s who remained engaged through months of writing and fact-checking, especially Chuck Lacy, Liz Bankowski, Howard Fuguet, Lisa Wernhoff, Michael Graning, Debra Heintz, Rob Michalak, and Jostein Solheim. Everyone I spoke with was cooperative and generous with their time and attention. As I kept pushing and probing, their genuineness convinced me that their commitment to linked prosperity is also genuine.

I am fortunate to have large groups of friends who supported, encouraged, and challenged me in ways too numerous to mention. I would particularly like to thank Jon Crispin for the author photo; the staff of the Finger Lakes Land Trust for being nice to the writer who works upstairs; Nancy Wells, Henry Tepper, Fred Connor, and Stephanie Sechler, for their friendship and encouragement; my children, Will and Emma, whose intelligence and work ethic give me something to aspire to; and my wife, Tania Werbizky, for always believing in me and never giving up.

I could not have written this book without Tania, or without Jack Greer, David and Sharon Schuman, James McConkey, John Marcham, S.K. List, Cheryl Russell, Robert Wilson, and many other editors and teachers who insisted that I go back, again and again, until I got the story. This book is dedicated to all of them.

Brad Edmondson

Ithaca, New York

July 2013