Good, Green Reads
<p>What are the best new books on business and sustainability?</p>
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:
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
(I also like my book -- Risk, Fiduciary Responsibility, and the Laws of Nature. It's just not out yet. Stay tuned.)
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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. Read Gil's blog here.