I was both shocked and saddened when the news broke yesterday that Seventh Generation’s longtime co-founder and ex-CEO Jeffrey Hollender had just been fired by the company’s board of directors. A little more than a month after the green cleaning products company’s new CEO, PepsiCo expat Chuck Maniscalco, quietly and abruptly resigned after only a year-plus on the job, “the Board has decided to end the company’s employment relationship with Jeffrey,” wrote Seventh Generation chairman Peter Graham in a letter to the company’s stakeholders.

My initial reaction was that it was Hollender’s mouth that put the final nail in the coffin. In all my years as a business journalist, I have never met a chief executive as refreshingly candid as Hollender.

Last fall, when I traveled to his adopted hometown of Burlington, Vermont to report a story on ethical capitalism, I was impressed with his ability to be so ruthlessly transparent about his own shortcomings, his willingness to be self-critical, and his appetite for political incorrectness. Over the course of our many discussions he told me things he probably shouldn’t have: how Seventh Generation, under his leadership, didn’t make money for 13 years because he was perpetually torn between doing the right thing and the company’s bottom line. How until corporate money stopped polluting politics, our country’s economic and environmental issues will be never be resolved. How short term gains on Wall Street needed to be taxed 99%. How companies like PepsiCo were trotting out healthy eating programs while simultaneously making the public sick with its products.

“Almost every day I ask myself, ‘Am I devoting myself to the right thing that will make the biggest difference?'” Hollender posed to me back then, several months after hiring Maniscalco to take over his post. After two decades in which he grew his crunchy company into category game changer–and himself from a Park Avenue kid who sold seminars on “How To Lose Your Brooklyn Accent” to an industry pioneer–Hollender’s interests were starting to drift elsewhere as the country’s environmental and economic problems continued to spiral out of control. “We really need a movement to address these systemic issues,” he told me, clearly feeling the urges of an activist, more than a business man. “It will require a full scale social movement like the civil rights or women’s equality movement.”

As he got more involved with other activists–combating the Chamber of Commerce’s aggressive lobby against global warning legislation, helping to propagate the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies–his day-to-day focus on cleaning up the cleaning products industry was getting pushed to the sidelines. “There might have been a time where I deleted a financial report without reading it,” he conceded to me. “That was a telltale sign that that’s not what you want the CEO of your company to be doing.” After rummaging through some 70 candidates to take his post, he finally handpicked PepsiCo’s Maniscalco. While Maniscalco could take the $150 million business to its ambitious goal of $1 billion, Hollender–now executive chair of the board of Seventh Generation–had the time to immerse himself in activism. “After an hour of being together we knew this would be the right thing,” Hollender told me back then of his new replacement. “It’s like a little love story.”