Sustainable Business

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....

Filled with illuminating case studies and brilliant in-depth analysis, this invaluable book provides a multitude of insights that will help you weather market upheavals, adapt to disruptions, and optimize your resources to your best advantage.

Entrepreneurs have a problem: startups. Almost all startups either fail or never truly reach a sustainable size. Despite the popularity of entrepreneurship, we haven't engineered a better way to start...until now. What if you could skip the startup phase and generate profitable revenue on day one? In Buy Then Build, acquisition entrepreneur Walker Deibel shows you how to begin with a sustainable, profitable company and grow from there.

You'll never see leadership the same way again after reading this book. These 15 commitments are a distillation of decades of work with CEOs and other leaders. They are radical or provocative for many. They have been game changers for us and for our clients. We trust they will be for you too. Our experience is that unconscious leadership is not sustainable. It won't work for you, your team, or your organization in the long term.

For business owners and listeners interested in creating a business that serves its owners, "Sustainable: A Fable About Creating a Personally and Economically Sustainable Business" offers much more than just a good listen. It’s a guidebook filled with wisdom and practical solutions for building a business that can thrive well into the future. And it's not another how-to book; there's a great story that you can use to learn from the Aardvark family.

Growing on just one and a half acres, owners Jean-Martin and Maude-Helène feed more than 200 families through their thriving CSA and seasonal market stands and supply their signature mesclun salad mix to dozens of local establishments. The secret of their success is the low-tech, high-yield production methods they've developed by focusing on growing better rather than growing bigger, making their operation more lucrative and viable in the process.

No experience in farming? No problem! The Profitable Hobby Farm gives you all the tools you need to launch a thriving hobby-farm business. Based on the author's expert guidance and the motivating experiences of other small farmers, it shows you how to blend strategy, marketing, and money management in order to prosper. The Profitable Hobby Farm provides sound, friendly start-up advice on a variety of topics essential to making an initial foray into a local-foods venture. A supplemental PDF is included with this audiobook.

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.

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.

Gary Vaynerchuk's personal trainers explain how you can enjoy your favorite foods without guilt while losing weight, getting stronger, and improving your health.

Whether you're in the trenches struggling to make consistent sales or dreaming of turning your art into a full-time living, this groundbreaking guide provides the inspiration and the practical steps you need to become your own art boss. There's never been a better time to turn your creative ideas into a successful business. The internet is pushing aside art world “gatekeepers” who used to decide what was "worthy”—now anyone with a laptop and a dream can make a thriving living from their creativity.

Character is something intrinsic to us all; it forms and reveals who we are. Unbeknownst to many, character is foundational to our judgment, behavior, and leadership. As we tackle the grand challenges of our time, strength of character guides us to make better decisions, creates greater well-being, and contributes to human flourishing. For those who lead—whether in the public, private, not for profit, or education sectors—a greater understanding of character will challenge your thinking, inspire new ideas, and elevate your personal and professional performance.

In 12 Disciplines of Leadership Excellence, bestselling author and motivational expert Brian Tracy teams up with global learning expert Dr. Peter Chee to reveal simple, straightforward principles any business leader can use to make lasting positive changes in his or her organization.

Regardless of the sector your organization operates within or its size, increasing employee performance, building customer loyalty, and growing revenue are likely your top priorities. How can you continually improve your employees' morale and performance in a sustainable way? How can you stay ahead of your customers' ever-changing needs without spending a fortune on technology? In The Unstoppable Organization, Shawn Casemore will show you how to master the trilogy of success for unsurpassed performance as he shares insights, examples, and proven practices.

In this paradigm-shifting book, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and sustainable business guru Andrew Winston provide a model to help leaders build companies that contribute more to the world than they use or take - that is, net positive companies. Net Positive outlines the principles and practices for surviving and thriving based on the experience of one world-leading company, Unilever, and other groundbreaking global organizations.

Over the course of seven decades Ralph Nader has been Corporate America's fiercest critic. But now, in a book that will surprise both his fans and critics, Nader profiles a small group of CEOs who he believes performed extraordinarily well as business leaders and civic reformers, some well-known, some not, who should be celebrated as exceptions whose life and career should be a course of emulation and inspiration for students of business, executives, and the wider citizenry.

Today's headlines are full of employee unrest over racial injustice, communities infuriated by corporate environmental impacts, staff anxiety over surveillance, and discoveries of child labor in supply chains. Simply maximizing shareholder value while not breaking the law is no longer an option, but we've never been so confused about what it means to do the right thing. NYU ethics professor Alison Taylor argues that amid stakeholder demands and transparency pressures, we can no longer treat ethics as a legal and reputational defense mechanism.

What happens to our trash? Why are our oceans filling with plastic? Do we really waste 40 percent of our food and 65 percent of our energy? Waste is truly our biggest problem, and solving our inherent trashiness can fix our economy, our energy costs, our traffic jams, and help slow climate change—all while making us healthier, happier and more prosperous. This story-driven and in-depth exploration of the pervasive yet hard-to-see wastefulness that permeates our daily lives illuminates the ways in which we've been duped into accepting absolutely insane levels of waste as normal.

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.

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.