The Best New Books on Business and Sustainability
Your questions answered by experts in the trenches.
- What is Biomimcry?
- The Applications of "Open Source"
- Financial Incentives for Green Building
- Got a question? Let us know.
What are the best new books on business and sustainability?
Gil: Since the field is growing rapidly, the list of relevant titles is exploding. Here are a few of my current favorites:
- The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift (by Andres R. Edwards) offers a compendium of sustainability frameworks, principles and declarations, which provides a stimulating sense of scope and trajectory of this movement.
- Leading Change Toward Sustainability: A Change-Management Guide for Business, Government and Civil Society (by Bob Doppelt) addresses the critical challenge of changing organizational culture in order to implement sustainability. (Technology innovation is easy, I maintain, compared to the challenge of changing human behavior.)
- Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins) provides a comprehensive, systematic and well document case and roadmap for the challenge raised by its subtitle.
- Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (by William McDonough and Michael Braungart) takes the challenge one step further, calling for a fundamental u-turn in design, chemistry and materials, to eliminate rather than reduce the problem.
- Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results Through Attention to Work and People (by Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms) explains Toyota's and Scania's breakthroughs in cost advantage and reducing waste through the living system principles of self-organization, interdependence, and diversity, managing by results rather than by goals.
- The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line (by Bob Willard) not only lays out the business case for sustainability -- it provides a spreadsheet to help you build yours.
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What is "biomimicry" and what can it do for my business?
Gil: Biomimicry is the title of an inspiring book by science writer Janine Benyus, and the seed of the Biomimcry Guild, which is further developing the tools and cataloging the evolving body of practice.
I've long maintained that Earth's living systems have nearly four billion years' experience in developing efficient, adaptive, resilient, sustainable systems. Why reinvent the wheel, I wonder, when the R & D has already been done?
As I wrote in a 1997 review, Biomimicry explores the quietly gathering trend toward what Benyus calls "doing it nature's way," -- using nature as model, or inspiration, for design to solve human problems; as measure of what works, what's appropriate, and what lasts; and as mentor, focusing us on what we can learn from nature, rather than extract from it. Biomimicry, Benyus suggests, "has the potential to change the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal ourselves, store information, and conduct business."
Benyus spoke recently at NASA's Ames Research Center, presented a breathtaking array of biomimcked products from businesses and universities around the world:
Adhesives inspired by geckos toes, self-cleaning paint by lotus leaves, super-efficient propellers and impellers inspired by
The idea's not new -- humans have been learning from nature for just about forever -- but the systematization may be., taking the form of both the book itself, and the pilot Biomimicry Guild Database. Our friends at WorldChanging described it as a "'growing, open source, peer reviewed' resource that would link biomimicry concepts to known problems . . . along with ready information on who in the public or private sectors is already working on a product or application. It would be a clearinghouse for new scientific discoveries, available for multiple industries to use, promoting more biomimetic successes by making research easily available across disciplines."
How can you apply this approach in your business? Read the book, use the database, open your mind and eyes to the wonders of nature… and take the time to look deeply and patiently at the design inspiration that's all around you.
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I'm hearing more and more about "open source." What's that? How does it apply to business sustainability?
Gil: Open Source software provides freely distributed software that user communities can modify, improve and freely distribute. The success of the Linux operating system is the most widely known example of the open source challenge to the traditional, "patent everything" approach to intellectual property. Those who dismissed it as a curiosity and a hobby for geeks started thinking differently when growing markets like China and Brazil began a systematic shift away from Microsoft Windows in favor of Linux.
The Open Source Initiative says:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.But it's not just software that's being open sourced. We're now seeing open source pharmaceuticals, engineering, copyright, fabrication, scientific publishing, and encyclopedias.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
The folks at WorldChanging.com are among the many sites keeping an active watch. Alfredo Romeo, founder of Spanish micro-car company Blobject, says:
With proprietary software, innovation comes from the people in marketing . . . .But with open source, innovation comes from the guy who is really in the market. It comes from someone who knows the city.Worldchanging.com is a fervent advocate of open source approaches:
A reasonable respect for intellectual property is crucial (adding, as Lincoln said, the fuel of self-interest to the fires of invention), but there's something very wrong with a world in which crops, energy systems, essential drugs, access to information, methods for providing clean water, and so on are priced outside the reach of billions simply because of the legacy of past development patterns. They are proprietary knowledge.How can you make money giving things away? Some open source software producers provide their software for free, but charge for value added enhancements, implementation and consulting. Some provide basic functionality at for free, but charge for enhanced functionality
The greatest strength of the open source model is that it is explicitly non-proprietary. It is a direct antidote to legacy ownership of key ideas, because the core concept is that no one should own core concepts. No corporation, no nation, no person can claim ownership over the core concepts in an open source project in order to demand royalties or restrict its use. No one using open source-built medicines, for example, would ever die of AIDS because some Big Pharma executive in New York or Berlin decided that distributing cheap drugs was too great a risk to their patents.
The larger question -- does open source depend on avid volunteers, or does it have economic legs? -- has yet to be answered definitively. But the potential creative power and speed of active, passionate user networks is a force worth considering -- whatever business you're in.
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What financial incentives are available for green buildings and developments?
Gil: While the cost differentials for green building are continuing to shrink (see "More on the Cost of Green: Why Green Building is Good Business" and "How to Offset the Cost of Building Green"), the transition to any new technology often needs a boost.
"[M]any state and local programs are emerging to provide direct benefits to projects that obtain LEED certification" according to architect Malcolm Wells (http://www.edcmag.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/features/BNP__Features__It…). "These incentives can take the form of grants, tax credits, expedited permitting processes or exemption from specific zoning restrictions... [as well as] … financial incentives, awards and streamlined permitting process."
The American Institute of CPAs published -- in May 2005 -- a table summarizing state level tax incentives for green buildings. Thirty-five states offer financial incentives for green building; Property Tax incentives were the most common, offered by 24 of the states, with Income Tax, Corporate Tax and Sales Tax incentives offered by 10, 13, and 12 states, respectively. We haven't been able to locate a comprehensive list of city and county-level programs, but we know they're out there.
The U.S. Green Building Council, iBuild, and GreenClips are a few of the green building resources worth tracking. But a quicker path may be to ask your local government about they're current or envisioned green building programs. If they don’t have any yet, you might ask them "why not?"
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Gil Friend, systems ecologist and business strategist, is president and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc. -- offering advisory services and tools that help companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise. Sign up online to receive his monthly column via email.
