HOW THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPANIES ARE BUILDING BUSINESS STRATEGIES THAT TACKLE THE BIGGEST GLOBAL CHALLENGES
Today’s business landscape is changing in fundamental ways: Natural resources are growing ever more scarce and expensive. Technology and changing consumer expectations are making transparency a fact of life. The rise of emerging economies creates vast market opportunities for companies—and better living standards for hundreds of millions. In Sustainable Excellence, Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell tell the stories of the companies who are transforming themselves by responding to these paradigm shifts and in the process shaping the future.
From their work with these Global 1000 companies, Cramer and Karabell know firsthand how business can successfully grapple with big-picture issues like resource scarcity, supply chain complexities, and the diverse expectations of government and the public. In Sustainable Excellence, they tell the story of how Coca-Cola and Greenpeace collaborated on a refrigerator that fights climate change. They show how companies like Best Buy and Nike are transforming the very products they sell to deliver more value to consumers with less waste. They recount how GE and Google created an innovative partnership that is developing “smart grids” that radically reduce energy use. And they show how business leaders like Starbucks’ founder and CEO Howard Schultz put sustainable excellence at the center of his company’s business strategy.
Through these and other fascinating stories, Sustainable Excellence makes the case for a different way of doing business—one that will define both business success and economic vitality in the 21st century.
Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World
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nordend |
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energy renewables | Tagged:
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In Sustainable Value, Chris Laszlo illustrates how the competitive strategies of some of the world’s largest businesses are changing as their leaders begin to take on a number of the world’s most important social, environmental, and economic issues. The book’s website is at www.sustainablevaluebook.com.
Part I of the book is a management fable about a young CEO and the challenges she faces in addressing her company’s impact on society and the environment, while remaining profitable. Based on forward-thinking business leaders the author has worked with over the past twenty-five years, her character reveals how a small but influential group of leaders are re-inventing the role of business in society by offering new solutions to global problems that the public sector has been unable to tackle alone.
Part II outlines the new competitive environment in which societal challenges are becoming huge business opportunities. It showcases global industry leaders who are successfully integrating sustainability into their core activities as they respond to issues such as climate change, ecosystem health, and global poverty—not only from a sense of moral correctness, but because it makes good business sense. It demonstrates that, in the “new” competitive environment, stakeholder value built on a company’s economic, ecological, and social impact is becoming an effective way to achieve competitive advantage. The real-life sustainability stories of DuPont, Wal-Mart, Lafarge, and Cargills NatureWorks are guided by top management with Profit & Loss responsibility.
Part III introduces the Sustainable Value tool-kit—a step-by-step approach to creating and managing value for stakeholders in a broad range of sectors in today’s shifting competitive environment. The tool-kit is based on the authors many consulting engagements and executive working sessions in Fortune 1000 companies. These sessions, and this book, are designed to equip managers with the skills to identify how and where they can do well by doing good, thus providing them with the means to build sustainable value and compete effectively in the twenty-first century.
Sustainable Value: How the World’s Leading Companies Are Doing Well by Doing Good
by
nordend |
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energy | Tagged:
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Quick fix or permanent, local or imported, synthetic or natural? Everyday we are faced with a myriad of complex, often contradictory choices that have a bearing on the climate and sustainability. Yet whether at home or in business, without a method for understanding our thought processes we often default to behavior that is destroying the climate, natural environment and social wellbeing. How can we change our thinking and behaviors to protect the climate and move towards sustainability?
In this new book, renowned sustainability, business, and organizational change specialist Bob Doppelt provides both an easy to understand explanation and practical methods for transforming our climate-damaging, unsustainable ways into sustainable thinking and behaviors. Doppelt makes the case that global warming and today’s other ecological and socioeconomic problems are not technical in nature, rather they represent a crisis of thought. Every society has a shared “mental frame”—core beliefs and assumptions—that shape the way people make decisions and behave. Effective solutions will emerge only when new, sustainable forms of thinking emerge. Sustainable thinking requires a clear understanding of the systems humans are part of, the use of proven strategies for facilitating personal, team, and organizational change, ethical rules to guide behavior, and a creative rather than problem-solving orientation.
The first part of the book makes the case that new ways of thinking are needed to resolve climate change and other sustainability issues. Part two starts by explaining how the human mind works and how people change. It then provides proven “staged-based” methods for transforming thinking and behavior, beginning first with the reader’s own cognitive patterns, then moving to how individuals can motivate other people to change, and finally to how teams and organizations can be motivated to change.
To bring the ideas alive, Doppelt offers numerous examples from his own experiences and those of business and government leaders from different places and contexts. The end result is a practical, inspiring read for all those who want to change their own thinking and behavior and contribute to a cascade effect that produces widespread social change for climate protection and sustainability.
The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How to Create a Positive Future for the Climate, the Planet, Your Organization and Your Life
by
nordend |
Categories:
energy | Tagged:
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