Business leaders searching for a green strategy encounter few roadmaps and established rules and plenty of hidden twists and turns. Strategies for the New Green Economy describes how companies can succeed in the green marketplace, keeping pace with customer and societal demands to reduce their environmental impact. In this book, Joel Makower provides clear guidance for this challenge. He offers insights and inspiration gleaned from his 20 years’ experience helping Fortune 50…
Buy Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business at Amazon
With more than a dozen previous books, including “The Green Consumer”, already on corporate and small-business bookshelves, Joel Makower has become a master green business analyst. This book draws on his knowledge and analytical skills, with market research assist from Cara Pike, and his talent for clear writing to provide business executives a set of insights they need in planning green strategies.
Makower came onto the scene at about the same time that business was being shocked into dealing with stratospheric ozone damage from CFC emissions, and he has come to know the movers and shakers from all the communities engaged in greening over the years. This book looks forward, to show why corporate greening will endure (even if media’s attention wanes), citing climate change as a major spur. He notes a parallel shift: the environmental movement morphing into the climate movement and business coping with carbon constraint linked to climate change.
Problems for greening companies include a lack of standards by which to judge “how good is good enough”, leaving the bar free to drift higher; an escalating investor intensity for companies to acknowledge, reduce and report on environmental risks (which I would connect with corporate governance influenced by climate change activism); and the erosion of “sustainability” as a green leadership characteristic.
As he has done in his Greenbiz.com commentaries, Makower makes business choices easy to grasp. On energy use and climate change, he makes it simple: reduce the amount of energy used, buy more renewable-source energy, and remedy climate impact of even the renewables by moves such as carbon offsets.
Business opportunity — starting with GE’s “green is green” — and communications are focused through the perspectives of context, relevance and good, plain talk. Easy to read, well organized, with nearly 40 short chapters, this is Makower’s best book yet for corporate C-suite green strategists.
Too often, I get the feeling that authors of books like these come up with a few ideas, write them on the back of an envelope, then figure out how to stretch their “3 principles to…” or “change the world by…” concept into a 240 page book. Joel Makower’s book is the grand exception. It is brimming with substance, possibly weighing in at under 300 pages -of 100% post consumer recycled paper- merely to conserve.
I work as the sustainability coordinator for a clothing retail store (shopbop.com), and his book is fantastic. It’s taken a very long time to read, because every page seems to be followed by 5-20 minutes of pondering and scribbling ideas down.
Makower got his start in the green boom of 89-90, and much of the book references this period for perspective on where we are today, and what we can expect in the future. In a world where 18 months experience makes you a Green Jobs Veteran, Joel Makower is the old sage on the mountain top.
If you want to understand the challenges facing companies trying to sort out what it means to be “green” as they attempt to make sense of the competitive threats and opportunities at the intersection of business and the environment, Joel Makower’s “Strategies for the Green Economy” is the right place to start. In this highly readable and engaging book, Joel chooses to not push an agenda but instead to expose just how difficult it is for businesses to devise a green strategy and execute against it. Rather than stepping away from the challenges, the book provides a foundation from which every business can consider their strategy and what it would mean for them to be green. With a wide array of examples from diverse industries, there’s something for everyone to take away. If you’re looking for an effective way to start the green dialogue at your company, this is a great place to start.