Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation's Chief Inspired Protagonist, recommends these books:

Page 1: The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker; Capitalism as if the World Matters
Page 2: Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; The Black Swan
Page 3: The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals And The Next Episode Of Capitalism; Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives; Presence
Page 4: Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership; A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches
Page 5: The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics; The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility
Page 6: Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Page 7: The Bridge at the Edge of the World
Page 8: Classic Books on Sustainable Business and Best Practices

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

Steven Greenhouse
Knopf, 2008

I will never feel the same about using the services of FedEx, a company I had held in pretty high regard. But then again I may never shop in Circuit City, fly NorthWest Airlines, shop at A&P, get my hair cut at SmartStyle or have lunch at Taco Bell.

But we’ll start with a short excerpt about Wal-Mart, a company I’ve been working pretty hard to have faith in their progress.

"In his job at a Wal-Mart in Texas, Mike Michell was responsible for catching shoplifters, and he was good at it, too, catching 180 in one two-year period.

"But one afternoon things went wildly awry when he chased a thief — a woman using stolen checks — into the parking lot. She jumped into her car, and her accomplice gunned the accelerator, slamming the car into Michell and sending him to the hospital with a broken kneecap, a badly torn shoulder, and two herniated disks. Michell was so devoted to Wal-Mart that he somehow returned to work the next day, but a few weeks later he told his boss that he needed surgery on his knee. He was fired soon afterward, apparently as part of a strategy to dismiss workers whose injuries run up Wal-Mart’s workers’ comp bills."

We all keep hearing that business is tough, competition is brutal and low wage developing countries are eating our lunch. But if that’s the case, why have corporate profits soared, climbing on average 13 percent a year for the six years, while wages have remained flat. Greenhouse writes that, “Employee productivity has outpaced wages, rising 15 percent from 2001 through 2007. Corporate profits have climbed to their highest share of national income in sixty-four years, while the share going to wages has sunk to its lowest level since 1929. “This is the most pronounced several years of labor’s share declining,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. “For as long as we’ve had a modern economy, this is the worst we’ve seen it.” Very simply, corporations, along with their CEOs, are seizing a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie for themselves, leaving the nation’s workers and their families diminished.”

Well, we’ve heard that before. But what we haven’t heard are the stories of how the headlines play out in people’s lives. What it feels like to be laid off by Northwest Airlines and receive a booklet titled “101 Ways to Save Money,” that suggests, “Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.”

Capitalism as if the World Matters

Jonathan Porritt
Earthscan, 2005

Porritt is chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission; former chairman of the Ecology Party (now the Green Party); a former director of the Friends of the Earth UK; and currently runs the Forum for the Future, which aims to persuade individual businesses to improve their environmental performance. His book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the essentials of developing a sustainable economy.

"With great respect to those who assert the so-called ‘primacy’ of key social and economic goals (such as the elimination of poverty or the attainment of universal human rights), it must be said loud and clear that these are secondary goals: all else is conditional upon learning to live sustainably within the Earth’s systems and limits. Not only is the pursuit of biophysical sustainability non-negotiable; it’s preconditional."

Having said that, these are really two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, social sustainability is entirely dependent upon ecological sustainability. As we continue to undermine nature’s capacity to provide humans with essential services (such as clean water, a stable climate and so on) and resources (such as food and raw materials), both individuals and nation states will be subjected to growing amounts of pressure. Conflict will grow, and threats to public health and personal safety will increase in the face of ecological degradation."

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Muhammad Yunus
Public Affairs 2008

Economics professor and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize says he originally became involved in poverty not as a policy-maker, scholar, or researcher, but because poverty was all around him. With these words he stopped teaching elegant theories and began lending small amounts of money, $40 or less, without collateral, to the poorest women in the world. Thirty-three years later, the Grameen Bank has helped seven million people live better lives building businesses to serve the poor. The bank is solidly profitable, with a 98.6% repayment rate. It inspired the micro-credit movement, which has helped 100 million of the poorest people in the world escape poverty and earned Yunus (Banker to the Poor).

His latest book efficiently recounts the story of microcredit, then discusses Social Business, organizations designed to help people while turning profits. French food giant Danone's partnership to market yogurt in Bangladesh is described in detail, along with 25 other businesses that operate under the Grameen banner. Infused with entrepreneurial spirit and the excitement of a worthy challenge, this book is the opposite of pessimistic recitals of intractable poverty's horrors.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Random House, 2007

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).
--Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Every once in a while a book comes along that jolts you awake, like a swift slap in the face and a wonderfully strong cup of coffee. Makes you rethink your thinking and realize that if you want to think well, you will need be a little more -- actually, a lot more -- careful and intentional. The Black Swan is such a book.

I’m only on page 81, but so far this has been pretty amazing.

"You know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than what is right."

"How can we figure out the properties of the (infinite) unknown based on the (finite) known?"

This is a book that, in many respects, is impossible to describe without reproducing large portions of it.

The Guardian newspaper review notes: "Why are we so bad at acknowledging life's unpredictability? Things happen, and surprise us. Afterwards, we act as if they were explicable all along. Then we use those explanations to pretend we can control the future: act boldly, and you'll become rich; keep an eye on loners, and you'll prevent massacres.

"There's just much, much more luck than we think," Taleb says, rocking excitably on his chair in a London cafe."

Visit Taleb’s Web site for more.

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin
Viking, 2002

This book articulates the growing divide between our aspirations and needs as individuals and the products and services most companies provide.

"People's desires, needs and wants have radically changed, but corporations have remained distant and indifferent to the true nature of this change. As a result, we have a business environment in which people are chronically disappointed and frustrated by their experiences as consumers and employees. We no longer trust large organizations to serve our needs. On every level, we are experiencing a divisive 'us vs. them' mentality. Now, after decades of being forced to put up with the consequences of corporate indifference, individuals and consumers are striking out on their own to blaze new trails in a new approach to consumption that we call the individuation of consumption. They are pointing us toward the next leap forward in wealth creation that we call the support economy."

Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives

Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Currency/Doubleday, 2007

In their most recent book, the Tofflers describe a huge new and uncharted part of our economy as "prosuming." Prosuming has two primary features: the creation of, "goods, services or experiences for our own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchange," and the co-creation of a product or service offered by a third party or the participation in its delivery in a way that involves no direct financial compensation. This includes everything from parenting and caring for an elderly friend (85–90% of all medical care in the United States is provided by ordinary people) to building Wikipedia, to providing self-banking services through the use of ATMs (thus displacing the need for more than 200,000 tellers annually).

Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future

Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty S. Flowers
Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2008

This is probably the best and most important book I’ve read in the last 10 years!

Over the past month I’ve been reading Presence by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Those of you who have come to know me probably realize by now that I’m an obsessive reader. Unlike most of what I read, Presence was more like a wonderful meditation that the acquisition of information. It is one of the most valuable books I’ve read over the past 5 to 10 years. Over the next few posts I make I’ll try to explain why.

One quote I will probably never forget is, "the longest road is often from your mind to your heart." It will--I hope--forever remind me that more value will always come from love than anything else. How can I do all that I do lovingly? As a serial entrepreneur, I am good at action, criticism, analysis, and creativity. I still have a lot to learn about love. One can of course be lovingly critical or analytical, but somehow the depth of my analysis usually seems greater than the depth of my love.

I was also overwhelmed with the notion of how much of our lives fall within the pre-established patterns we seem to follow over and over. Whether it’s how we respond to each other, read the newspaper, participate in a meeting, or watch a sunset, most of what we do, we do as we have done before. Somehow the possibility of doing it differently doesn’t occur to us. Outside our patterns is all the possibility. Whether it’s figuring out how to stop global warming, be a better lover, or design a new product, 99% of what is possibile, but yet to be, lies outside the pattern.

If we can slow down our thinking enough to actually watch how we think, become conscious of the generation of our thoughts, question whether there is another way to see what we are seeing, do what we are doing, hold what we are holding, a whole new world opens up before us.

Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

Joseph Jaworski and Betty S. Flowers
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1998

"One of the most important roles we can play individually or collectively is to create an opening, or to ‘listen’ to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen..."

I’ve been hanging out at the beach in Bridgehampton, NY for a few weeks now, often five to six hours a day not including my early morning jog to the beach and the swim I take to cool down in the middle of my run. That has given me plenty of time to stare off into the ocean, to think and not to think, surf when there are waves, take long walks looking for shells, and to read. I just finished Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski, a perfect way to continue the meditation that began with Presence, of which Jaworski was a co-author.

For someone who has theoretically spent all of his adult life in one leadership role or another – the point of view put forth by Jaworski, based in large part from insights he derived through meetings with David Bohm and Francisco Varela as well as Robert Greenleaf’s book Servant Leadership - held out the challenge, opportunity and possibility for a fundamentally new way for me to lead.

As I was reading the final chapter of the book, my cell phone rang. On the phone was Sara Schley, who is working with Peter Senge to write the The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. She wanted to interview me about my leadership of Seventh Generation. I spent over two hours talking with her about what I felt were the greatest challenges and opportunities for business to plan a leadership role in the blossoming world of sustainability. She asked great questions, which allowed me to address the issues I was most passionate about.

Seems like synchronicity.

"(T)rue leadership is about creating a domain in which we continually learn and become more capable of participating in our unfolding future. A true leader thus sets the stage on which predictable miracles, synchronistic in nature, can – and do – occur. (T)he deeper territory of leadership – collectively 'listening' to what is wanting to emerge in the world, and then having the courage to do what is required.

"The entire past is enfolded in us in a very subtle way. If you reach deeply into yourself, you are reaching into the very essence of mankind.

"We are all connected. If this could be taught, and if people could understand it, we would have a very different consciousness.

"(P)eople create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have been dissolved, then there arises one mind..."

A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations

Brook Manville and Josiah Ober
Harvard Business Press, 2003

This book presents a road map for business based in part on this participative system. The Athenian democracy created the experience of a collective journey and shared responsibility.

One review of the book noted:
"Membership in the city's leadership was rotated among all citizens. Everyone’s voice was welcome. The citizens and their community lived by a code that Manville and Ober describe as 'moral reciprocity' which 'provided the essential link between 'What's in it for me?' and 'What's in it for us?'" Eliminating the conflict between self-interest and community interest. Manville and Ober contrast the open, inclusive environment of ancient Athens with the "closed doors of executive offices and conference rooms," where decisions are made by a small group of "insular elites." Indeed, "the entire shape of the modern company reflects a fundamental distrust of its members," the authors argue.

The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics

Riane Eisler
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007

Great books are few and far between, but go out and get this one. A review from The Baltimore Chronicle gives a better overview than I can!

"Do you ever open your eyes in the morning and think, Oh, wow, why bother...? If so, you’ll be glad to hear that macrohistorian and cultural transformation theorist Riane Eisler has just delivered another massive and exhilarating dose of hope for the sane and weary, with the publication of her latest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics.

"In The Chalice and the Blade, her 1987 introduction to 'partnership' as the leitmotif of sane social engineering, Eisler persuasively argued that nonviolent, egalitarian, culturally advanced and prosperous societies have existed in the past and could certainly be made (by us) to exist again.

"Now comes The Real Wealth of Nations, tackling the ominous gaps in our mental map of what economic theory is all about. An economy is more than the market, the government, and the military, says Eisler, eventually citing chapter and verse from a long list of other scholars to create a very persuasive case. A complete picture of a national and global economy must include the whole range of vital caring and caregiving activities—mostly undervalued, undercounted, and either severely underpaid or totally unpaid; and mostly performed (surprise!) by women—that take place in the community and in the home.

"Eisler, a meticulous cross-disciplinary researcher, presents a good deal of cheering evidence to fortify her recommendations. What we spend to maximize the value of so-called human capital, for example (i.e., caring for and educating our children and youth), should be considered not a burdensome expense but a capital investment, insists the author; and as such, it should be amortizable over twenty years—the time frame for nurturing a generation of healthy, high-performing human beings. To back that up, she presents research outcomes showing that, e.g., early childhood educational interventions produce a 200 percent return on investment, and that actual companies that have adopted a comprehensively caring orientation to their workforce more than recoup their considerable investment in health care, exercise facilities, onsite child care, parental leave, and so forth, with better motivated employees, lower turnover and training costs, and higher productivity.

"The cases cited come from enlightened regions like the Nordic nations, where social policy is light-years ahead of nearly everyone else’s; but even in the USA, where the publicly funded social safety net now consists of way more holes than netting, there are already numerous companies profiting over the long term from this kind of investment in caring and caregiving.

"For about the price of a good vegan (or steak) dinner, you can order The Real Wealth of Nations in hardcover. This is one time when I wouldn't’t wait for the paperback edition. Your alarm will buzz again at the usual time tomorrow morning. As you open your eyes on another day of global warming, tribal and regional conflict, and general transnational chaos, it will feel wonderful to have Eisler on your team, sharing her straightforward prescription for planetary rescue: a lot more serious, high-level, long-range attention to the crucial economic role of caring and caregiving, and a thoroughly partnerist orientation, starting right now. Today."
~ The Baltimore Chronicle

The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility

David Vogel
Brookings Institution Press

Despite the powerful forces driving businesses to become better corporate citizens, the measurable impact of corporate responsibility in the marketplace according to David Vogel’s 2006 book The Market for Virtue has been underwhelming. It seems that while select businesses have made big changes that have translated into superior financial performance, in total there is much left to be done. David Vogel, a friend and occasional debating partner, has attempted to add up the total cumulative marketplace impact of thousands of activities in companies through out the economy, and while the results were depressing, I would only note that while the absolute numbers are small, the trend is still just beginning.

The Market for Virtue explores the extent to which improvements in corporate conduct can occur without more extensive or effective government regulation—in the United States, Europe, the Far East, and developing nations. In other words, what is the long-term potential of business self-regulation? The improvement that can be expected is far more modest than recent breathless writing on CSR would indicate. At some point, many businesses must choose between doing what seems ethically rights and what is most profitable. Since businesses are typically found to make money—and because shareholders and capitalism demand that they do so—the bottom line tends to win out. There is a market for virtue, but it is limited by the substantial costs of more responsible business behavior.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

David Bohm
Routledge Press, 2002

This a book I aspire to finish reading some day. Bohm could be considered the grandfather of today’s sustainability movement. He provides the philosophical underpinnings of modern systems thinking. He writes about the essential interrelatedness and interdependence of all phenomena – physiological, social, and cultural. Nothing can be understood in isolation; everything has to be seen as part of a unified whole. It is only through abstraction that things look separate. We are each "the whole of mankind." That’s the idea of the implicate order – that everything is enfolded in everything else.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins

One of the first systemic guides to how it might be possible to reconcile ecological and economic goals. Hawken is the founder of the Natural Capital Institute, a small research group focused on better understanding principles and practices leading to social justice and environmental restoration. He is an aggressive proponent for more definitive standards especially when it comes to the selection and support of "responsible and sustainable businesses," ones that will "conform to people’s hopes and aspirations, but also their desire to allocate their savings and investments in a manner that will promote social and ecological change … it hardly matters how a company operates its business if where it is going is harmful."

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus, one of sustainability’s most brilliant minds, developed the idea of Biomimicry. Biomimicry is the rather simple idea that if we can understand the way in which nature works to acquire and store energy, build bridges and tunnels, create community, and manage population that we might get some clues as to what we need to do to create a more sustainable business.

Janine Benyus describes Biomimicry as, "coming from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate and is a design discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example of this “innovation inspired by nature."

Benyus has worked at the fringes of business but has yet to break through to the mainstream. There are few more deserving of being discovered than she. "The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

"Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.

The conscious emulation of life’s genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone."

The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

James Gustave Speth
Yale University Press, 2008

Speth takes all of us to task -- business, government, NGOs, individuals, and the capitalist system itself -- in an urgent appeal to make large scale, fundamental changes to the path we've taken. More than most, Speth argues that our incremental approach to change -- whether it's the corporate responsibility movement or the environmental movement -- is woefully and dangerously inadequate.

While the book is deeply thoughtful, thoroughly researched, and a pleasure (albeit depressing) to read, my only complaint is that Speth stops short of detailing the best ways to take urgent action.

Classic Books on Sustainable Business and Best Practices

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins

October 2000, Back Bay Books

Beyond Economic Growth: An Introduction to Sustainable Development

Herman E. Daly

Paperback, August 1997 Beacon Press Books

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Collins, JC and Porras, JI

Random House 1995

Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business

John Elkington

Capstone 1997

The Chrysalis Economy, How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation

John Elkington

Capstone Publishing Ltd.; London; 2001

The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship

Simon Zadek

Earthscan Publications Ltd.; London and Sterling, VA; 2001

Corporate Citizenship: Successful Strategies for Responsible Companies

Malcolm McIntosh, Deborah Leipziger, Keith Jones and Gill Coleman, Financial Times and Pittman Publishing

London; 1998

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

William McDonough and Michael Braungart