Sustainable Business

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and business coach Jadah Sellner knows what it’s like to be burned out, in debt, and just barely holding on to a new business. In the process of launching and building multiple companies, she realized today’s aggressive 24/7 hustle culture wasn’t working for her—or for her clients. In She Builds, Sellner shares a new entrepreneurial model for women, centered on sustainable leadership—a practical framework they can use to create a business on their own terms, prioritize their well-being, and break free from the toxic culture that leads to burnout.

It's easy for scale-ups, giddy from early startup success, to get ahead of themselves and stumble. It's even easier to be slowed down by the many forces of resistance working against them: drag, inertia, friction, and waste. Drawing on a mastery of lean-based methods for achieving maximum effect with minimum means, private equity operators Matthew E. May and Pablo Dominguez provide listeners with a powerful framework of universally applicable principles that enable any company to effectively accelerate its ability to scale and grow.

In The 4 Day Week, entrepreneur and business innovator Andrew Barnes makes the case for the four-day week as the answer to many of the ills of the 21st-century global economy. Barnes conducted an experiment in his own business, the New Zealand trust company Perpetual Guardian, and asked his staff to design a four-day week that would permit them to meet their existing productivity requirements on the same salary but with a 20 percent cut in work hours. The outcomes of this trial, which no business leader had previously attempted on these terms, were stunning.

A lean strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form, lean has been radically effective, but its true powers have yet to be harnessed. The Lean Strategy harnesses that power and delivers a new way of creating value from lean.

An accessible guide showing all people how to create and sustain diversity and inclusivity in the workplace - no matter your identity, industry, or level of experience.

Written by Shingo Prize winner Jacob Stoller, Productivity Reimagined shows how most companies are constrained by deeply engrained myths that prevent employees from reaching their full productive potential, causing frustration, poor decisions, and disappointing results. Evidence is drawn from Toyota and dozens of other companies that have countered these myths to build strong collaborative cultures and achieve sustainable growth.

In the last thirty years, the developing world has undergone tremendous changes. Overall, poverty has fallen, people live longer and healthier lives, and economies have been transformed. And yet many countries have simply missed the boat. Why have some countries prospered, while others have failed? Stefan Dercon argues that the answer lies not in a specific set of policies, but rather in a key "development bargain," whereby a country's elites shift from protecting their own positions to gambling on a growth-based future.

Over the past several years, Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of three thousand residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America.

Sustainable Business in Iowa provides a simple framework for any professional who is committed to environmental and social performance but who feels stuck and unsure of where to go next.

Negotiation and decision-making expert Max Bazerman explores how we can make more ethical choices by aspiring to be better, not perfect.

In Honor Thy Label, Dr. Bronner’s head of Special Operations, Gero Leson, reveals the inside story of how a little-known family-run soap company grew from countercultural roots to create a revolutionary fair trade and organic supply chain from the ground up - and rode the waves of popular demand without losing sight of the process. Through stories of harrowing setbacks and hard-won triumphs in projects that spanned the globe, in Sri Lanka, Ghana, India, and beyond, Leson demystifies the process of building and scaling ethical production.

When he first envisioned becoming a farmer, author Emmet Van Driesche never imagined his main crop would be Christmas trees, nor that such a tree farm could be more of a managed forest than the conventional grid of perfectly sheared trees. Carving Out a Living on the Land tells the story of how Van Driesche navigated changing life circumstances, took advantage of unexpected opportunities, and leveraged new and old skills to piece together an economically viable living, while at the same time respecting the land’s complex ecological relationships.

Not one to shy away from developing countries, Yusuf Amdani has laid a path for other investors to follow. Originally from Pakistan, Amdani moved to Honduras at a time when few international players paid attention to the Central American country. Amdani’s quick eye and keen business savvy paid off. Today his company has grown and expanded into other Central American countries, along with the Caribbean, United States, Pakistan, and beyond. Moreover, Amdani’s initiatives provide an example of how to create opportunities in developing countries.

Publishing is an incredibly rewarding yet endlessly complicated profession. This comprehensive and empowering book serves as a resource and reality check for anyone considering launching a press or publishing a single book. Author Joe Biel draws on 23 years of experience in all parts of operating a small publishing company to teach you the skills of the trade, from distribution, operations, inventory, scheduling, and accounting to development, sales, publicity, and marketing.

Scaling with Purpose provides an indispensable guide for taking advantage of opportunities in the ever-evolving IT landscape. As businesses become increasingly reliant on technology, managed service providers (MSP) hold the key to unlocking their potential through expert guidance and support. This book offers a comprehensive blueprint for purposeful growth, presenting insights, best practices, and strategies that ensure the long-term success and prosperity of your MSP.

Since founding Fixup, a pop-up repair shop, Sandra Goldmark has become a leader in the movement to demand better "stuff". She doesn't just want to help us clear clutter - she aims to move us away from throwaway culture, to teach us to reuse and repurpose more thoughtfully, and to urge companies to produce better stuff. Although her goal is ambitious, the solution to getting there is surprisingly simple and involves all of us: have good stuff, not too much, mostly reclaimed, care for it, and pass it on.

For hardworking and dedicated professional service providers, Make Them Smile offers a way out of the grind of living hour to billable hour, providing a road map for how to build a scalable, standardized brand that provides a consistent, repeatable, and high-quality customer experience.

Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they're obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they're extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren't average consumers - they're superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company's bottom line.

Companies have different needs and live in vastly different environments. The internal structure of an organization and the market in which it competes is not going to adapt to a digital strategy process; it must find a process and methodology that works best for it. With big data emerging as a standard framework for decision-making, digital strategy and governance have taken on increased importance.

We are living in a time when behavioral change is necessary for our health and survival. Yet we find it exceedingly difficult to transform our own habits, let alone those of other people. Enter Naohiro Matsumura, whose powerful new design method is as astonishingly simple in its logic as it is sophisticated in its psychology. It allows any of us to address challenges in our homes, our public spaces, and our social interactions.