Subir Chowdhury. Crash of the Titans. Greg Farrell. Warren G. Bennis and Noel M. The Pursuit of Wow! Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Richard Rumelt. Roger Nierenberg. Screw Business As Usual. Richard Branson. The Startup Way. Mastering the VC Game. Jeffrey Bussgang. Love Is the Killer App. Gene Stone and Tim Sanders. The Narrow Road. Felix Dennis. Good Profit. Charles G. Tap Dancing to Work. Carol J. Billion Dollar Lessons. Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui. The Only Game in Town. Mohamed A. The Platform Delusion.
Jonathan A. The Superbosses Playbook. Sydney Finkelstein. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London. Abstract This book offers a comprehensive survey of the issues involved in sustainability development. It has many encouraging stories of how companies are taking action to protect themselves and society from the disaster that could come through complacency.
Market capitalism will still exist, but not in the uninhibited form which puts profits ahead of the needs of humankind as a whole. The bottom line of business will not be purely financial, but will have to be a triple bottom line, taking account of social and natural capital. We will have to live within the limits imposed by the renewable resources of Nature, not making demands upon Nature which leave it too little time to renew and avoiding wasteful use of non-renewable sources, such as oil and gas, which when they have gone will leave a serious void, unless we have moved to natural renewable energy.
Furthermore, we shall need to tackle the problem of waste, either by using synthetic waste as raw material for recycling eg new cars out of old ones or natural waste as food to renew nature. These issues are global because nature and society are a system, where everything interacts with everything else.
These book reviews offer a commentary on some aspects of the contribution the authors are making to management thinking. We aim to give enough information to enable readers to decide whether a book fits their particular concerns and, if so, to buy it. There is no substitute for reading the whole book and our reviews are no replacement for this.
They can give only a broad indication of the value of a book and inevitably miss much of its richness and depth of argument. Nevertheless, we aim to open a window onto some of the benefits awaiting readers of management literature and to encourage constructive debate. This is an outstanding book covering comprehensively the environmental and related economic and social problems facing the world today which will undoubtedly change the way we do business in the future.
It is not a doom and gloom book; neither do the authors, led by Peter Senge, take up an extreme position, though they certainly believe that the issues are serious. If they are not addressed globally in a determined manner we could be facing the collapse of civilization as we have known it.
The book gives many examples of a hopeful nature, where companies of all sizes are introducing revolutionary innovations to pre-empt such a fate. The authors also give us guidance on how we as individuals and as companies can make our contributions in a collaborative way. Sustainability, or its erosion, radically affects people and therefore must include concern for their welfare. There is a social aspect, such as the problem of the ever growing gap between rich and poor countries, and between individuals within countries, which makes for an unstable world.
And it also demands our active compassion, when we realise that two thirds of our fellow humans live below the poverty line. Senge and his colleagues base their analysis on systems thinking, whereby we think in wholes, not looking at problems as individual fragments, but as all linked together, so that what happens in one field of activity in society or in nature can influence all the others.
How we affect the natural world can have serious unintended consequences, both for nature and for ourselves. This is particularly so if we transgress the limits to growth and allow our Western consumer society to continue to grow.
Less fortunate nations reasonably seek to share our apparent prosperity, and together we shall exceed the limits of the planet and be unable to sustain life as we have known it.
This will be exacerbated by the growth in world population. We should need an extra planet and there is not one available to us. On the one hand, we have non-renewable resources extracted from the earth. They are largely based on fossil fuels which when extracted by humans cannot be replaced, being the products of millions of years of development. By the time gas and oil are exhausted we must have developed alternative sources of energy, and basic materials for manufacturing, ie the natural capital springing from nature under the influence of the sun and the process of photosynthesis, plus harnessing of wind, tide and other natural processes.
On the other hand, we have renewable sources, which we are already overusing and are thus in danger of not giving them time to renew themselves. Moreover, we fill the earth with the waste we create from our use, both of renewable and non-renewable sources, and we thus spread the by-products of our activity as pollution and toxicity into the flow of natural life.
We therefore have to reduce drastically our use of non-renewable resources and at the same time ensure that our use of natural resources follows paths whereby any waste from our activity is used as food for them to perpetuate the cycle of nature, instead of piling up on landfill sites.
This means that any waste from manufacturing processes has to become the raw material for new manufactured items. Automobiles, for example, can be built so that at the end of their useful lives they can be easily disassembled and be re-used in the making of new cars. Examples are given of firms that are doing this in a big way and even collaborating in the shared use of facilities to take the new raw material previously considered as scrap and waste to nearby disassembly centres, rather than using transport, with its carbon emissions, to more distant single company central sites.
Much of the non-renewable mineral and other products used in manufacture and processing become an output of waste. Witty but sobering! Under the EU directives on Extended Producer Responsibility EPR , if you sell a new automobile in Europe, you, the producer, are responsible for taking the car back at the end of its lifetime. This legislation has been extended to setting phase out schedules for a variety of toxic materials.
This principle actually gave financially beneficial opportunities for manufacturers, who are increasingly pursuing a policy of leasing their products such as automobiles and other goods such as carpets eg the Interface company.
The customer for an automobile, in effect, buys only the value of transport, enshrined in a temporary vehicle. Waste also escapes into the atmosphere in the form of emissions from the fossil fuels that have been used in the manufacturing, processing and distribution processes. One of the current worries is that because there have been mistakes — and worse — made by some scientists, people will become complacent and become sympathetic to the climate change deniers.
If only half of the worst prognostications come to pass we should be foolish if we had done nothing to reduce the dangers by firm action. It is interesting to note that the concerns of this book are not primarily with climate change, other than as one serious ingredient in our concerns, but rather with the whole business of the misuse of natural resources and the impeding of nature by our addiction to a consumerism that produces enormous quantities of waste and toxicity.
This happens in nature too, but what does nature do? It uses these wastes as nutrients to regenerate the natural products of the earth; the leaves and parts of fruit and vegetable not consumed as human and animal food, become compost which feeds new crops of fruit and vegetables. This applies to how we should be treating our water, soils, crops, forests and fisheries.
It has to be accompanied by our not harvesting what nature provides more quickly than the time it needs for renewal. Alcoa, the large aluminium corporation, became aware of the large amount of water they were using and the vast quantity of waste. So, first a small group of their employees of all levels were invited to come up with ideas, in which there were no holds barred.
This search was then thrown open to thousands of employees. They asked questions previously regarded as having no answers.
What if we could send no waste to landfill sites, use no water and create no emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals? Among the ideas implemented were closed loop rinsing and cooling processes, where the same water is used repeatedly within a self-contained system. And the reduction in operational costs was phenomenal.
In their thinking they decided to ignore boundaries and also to get on with pre-empting possible future dangers without getting involved in scientific debates about the figures. They began to design aluminium plants that required no water and waste systems based upon complete recycling. Coca-Cola — Coke — set themselves the goal in of zero net water discharge. They were initially concerned about internal efficiency of water usage in their bottling plants, but realised that they must take note of the feelings of local people in India who were suffering from drought while Coke were using water prolifically.
True, they were using it from a deeper source and were not worsening the local situation, but it was not perceived that way and therefore it became an urgent PR issue which could be met only by engagement with the whole water problem.
So they resolved to give back to nature the water they extracted, and became involved in a worldwide study of watershed systems. The value of working with well informed, but cash strapped, NGOs became visible to other organisations and has caught on. In both the above cases the companies discovered for themselves the value of systems thinking, where one makes advances when one thinks in wholes.
The relationship of one part of nature and human activity links with many others and action has to be comprehensive, instead of looking for quick and limited solutions to problems. Then problems actually create opportunities. Nike resolved to get dangerous chemicals out of their shoes, and got their designers on course by the approach that they were not merely trying to avoid something bad, but actually to do something which would be permanently good.
Nike people liked innovating as part of their business philosophy and through the impact of sustainability they advanced to new design approaches. They designed a totally re-cyclable shoe and a running shirt that was completely compostable.
This involved influencing suppliers and the creation of networks which spread the message and the opportunities. The Building Industry. Other stories are told of energy being used innovatively, such as using the sun on hot sunny days to maximise, by solar panels, the provision of power for air conditioning in homes — harnessing the sun to help when combating its effects was most needed. Building design is now introducing ways of capturing heat which previously used to go to waste, and to do this by the positioning of windows and solar panels, diverting kitchen heat into other parts of the house, and generally taking a systems thinking view of a building so that everything is designed to support everything else in terms of energy usage.
These bodies have influential rating systems. Some of the stories we have been re-telling illustrate the importance of collaboration even among organisations that as competitors tended to frown on close relationships with their peer companies, but who are now finding themselves networking with them.
Anyone was free to drive their cattle and sheep there to graze. However, there were limits to how many animals could be accommodated; to exceed this would diminish the value of the commons for everyone. But of course some were greedy and took more than their fair share by driving more of their animals on to the pasture than was fair.
Short term, the greedy might prosper, but it would not be long before everyone would suffer as the quality and, finally, the quantity of available pasture declined. The grassland became parched, brown and weed infested until it was useless, a mud patch in winter, a dust bowl in summer. That is exactly what we have been doing with the planet as a whole. It is a parable of the issue of sustainability.
Now, stop imagining — that world is already emerging. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Includes bibliographical references page The controversy fueled by George Barna's current best-seller, Revolution, has raised many questions about the nature of the people the California-based researcher labels 'revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries possess some attributes that fail to distinguish them from other born again Christians.
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