Hans Hassle

Hans Hassle, born 1959, is a Swedish businessman who focuses on corporate social responsibility. Today he is the CEO of Plantagon, a Swedish company largely owned by the native American tribe Onondaga.

Biography

From 1981 to 1986 Hassle worked as a freelance travel journalist. He wrote articles from places like Tibet, Indonesia, and New Zealand. In 1986 People Magazine published a story from his time on the Indonesian island Siberut, where he lived with the Mentawei tribe.

Since 1986 Hassle has worked with social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and brand management. He founded the Swedish communication agency Vision and Reality Communication NetWork AB in 1986, and spent 15 years as its CEO. A pioneer in CSR in Sweden, he has developed several management tools for brand management and corporate citizenship. Hassle is a Swedish Government appointee to the Ethical Committee of Karolinska Medical Institute in Stockholm since 2001.

He is co-author of "Global Compact Research Report Sweden", a study of business attitudes in Sweden. The study was published by UN Global Compact in 2004.

Hassle received global attention as CEO of Plantagon, a company founded by Hassle and the Native American tribe Onondaga. The company is structured on Hassle's model that he calls a "Companization". It is an attempt to incorporate moral values into an otherwise economic forum by implementing the Earth Charter and the Global Compact as foundations for the company. The idea is to merge one non-profit and one for-profit organization, making them dependent of each other, thereby making it impossible for the company to act irresponsibly to these two documents.