Female Designed Volvo
More than a year ago, Volvo gave female employees a special project: design the car they would like to drive ... everything in a car that men want in terms of performance and styling, "plus a lot more that male car buyers have never thought to ask for," said Hans-Olov Olsson, Volvo's president. The result: a car that's designed to be nearly maintenance-free, requiring an oil change only every 31,0... posted on Mar 11 2004, 1,293 reads

Monks Dot Com
Father Bernard needed some ink cartridges for their monastery, the Cistercian Abbey. What he ended up with was a dot-com business -- LaserMonks -- that sold printer supplies worth $2000 in 2002. By the end of last year, they had over half a million dollars in sales and an incredible fundraiser for the monastery! "Why buy it from Office Depot or Office Max?" Rev. Bernard McCoy said, eyes twinklin... posted on Mar 09 2004, 2,638 reads

The Embryo
Some class science projects get out of hand. That is certainly the case with a do-it-yourself supercomputing graduate course at the University of San Francisco. John Witchel's idea of building a volunteer super computer on the fly is now turning into reality -- 1200 volunteers will bring their computers to a Gym and plug it into a high-speed network! "We're trying to democratize supercomputing,"... posted on Feb 26 2004, 1,307 reads

Ordinary Paper Clips
Paper clips. That's what students at a Tennessee middle school class used to honor six million Jews killed in the holocaust. Their goal was one paper clip for each life lost; their initial trickle of paper clips quickly became a torrent, finally exceeding 30 million! An international groundswell of support even brought a World War II-era boxcar to their school grounds to serve as a permanent ho... posted on Jan 31 2004, 1,056 reads

Chapter A Day
Suzanne Beecher's employees, stay-at-home moms, didn't have enough time to read, so she did something simple: "One night in the daily company e-mail, I started typing in the beginning of a book that I was reading. I stopped after about a 5-minute read and said that I would continue the book in tomorrow's e-mail." Pretty soon, they were all reading. Four years later, Suzanne is running an organiz... posted on Jan 22 2004, 1,120 reads

Avenues of Happiness
They throw parties. But they donate all the proceeds to development projects. Couple of young entrepreneurs, relics from Silicon Valley's dot-com era, started AHIMSA Fund to raise some money to buy musical instruments for underprivileged slum children, to setup a curriculums for them to grow further and to give them an avenue for creative expression. "Some would say, why are you wasting your ti... posted on Jan 21 2004, 3,354 reads

The Only Slavery
Ideo. Ever heard of it? The four-lettered firm has shepherded some of the most popular innovations of the past few decades. Apple's first mouse. Prada's ultrahip Manhattan store. Stand-up toothpaste tubes that don't get icky. The Palm V. How does Ideo do it? The secret, it turns out, reduces to one of those touchy-feely terms that make MBAs squirm: "empathy." In the Ideo universe, great design do... posted on Jan 20 2004, 1,632 reads

Slow Food Movement
There's a new movement in town -- instead of fast food, it's called "slow food." Born in Italy 17 years ago, Slow Food aims to be everything fast food is not. It's slow — in the making and the eating. It's fresh — not processed. It's from neighborhood farms and stores — not from industrial growers like Tyson Foods or retail goliaths like Wal-Mart. Armed with a snail logo, Slow Food chapter... posted on Jan 16 2004, 1,446 reads

Double Bottom Line
Chocolate cakes. Mousse Cakes. Lemon Cakes. They also bake wedding cakes, and cakes that have been served at the White House. A bakery in Yonkers, N.Y. is not only making cakes for the rich and famous, but also supporting the poor and disenfranchised! Greyston Bakery is a social experiment that started more than 20 years ago with the goal of employing the chronically unemployed -- getting them o... posted on Jan 13 2004, 1,191 reads

A Trip
In 1993, he graduated from college, hopped into a 1971 Volkswagen Bus with his golden retriever, and set off to follow the Grateful Dead. Challenged by his mentor to make his trip more meaningful, Eric Saperston decided to call up some of the most powerful people in the world and ask them out for a cup of coffee. What started out as a personal journey to find the answers to life's biggest questi... posted on Jan 08 2004, 1,390 reads