Harvard Business Review on Greening Your Business Profitably PDF Download

Author: Jennifer Kaplan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110114923X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The ultimate resource for small business owners who want to go green without going broke. Greening Your Small Business is the definitive resource for those who want their small businesses to be cutting- edge, competitive, profitable, and eco-conscious. Filled with stories from small business owners of all stripes, Greening Your Small Business addresses every aspect of going green, from basics such as recycling, reducing waste, energy efficiency, and reducing the IT footprint, to more in-depth concerns such as green marketing and communications, green business travel, and green employee benefits. For companies too small to hire consultants to draft and implement green policies and practices, this guide is designed for easy use, featuring: ? Simple ways to make the workplace greener ? Two plans of action for going green (divided into two levels) ? Definitions for green terminology and jargon

Author: John Elkington
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1732439133
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second. Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.

Author: Hartmut Berghoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
At a time when the human impact on the environment is more devastating than ever, business initiatives frame the quest to "green" capitalism as the key to humanity's long-term survival. Indeed, even before the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, businesses sometimes had reasons to protect parts of nature, limit their production of wastes, and support broader environmental reforms. In the last thirty years, especially, many businesses have worked hard to reduce their direct and indirect environmental footprint. But are these efforts exceptional, or can capitalism truly be environmentally conscious? Green Capitalism? offers a critical, historically informed perspective on building a more sustainable economy. Written by scholars of business history and environmental history, the essays in this volume consider the nature of capitalism through historical overviews of twentieth-century businesses and a wide range of focused case studies. Beginning early in the century, contributors explore the response of business leaders to environmental challenges in an era long before the formation of the modern regulatory state. Moving on to midcentury environmental initiatives, scholars analyze failed business efforts to green products and packaging—such as the infamous six-pack ring—in the 1960s and 1970s. The last section contains case studies of businesses that successfully managed greening initiatives, from the first effort by an electric utility to promote conservation, to the environmental overhaul of a Swedish mining company, to the problem of household waste in pre-1990 West Germany. Ranging in geographic scope from Europe to the United States, Green Capitalism? raises questions about capitalism in different historical, sociocultural, and political contexts. Contributors: Hartmut Berghoff, Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Brian C. Black, William D. Bryan, Julie Cohn, Leif Fredrickson, Hugh S. Gorman, Geoffrey Jones, David Kinkela, Roman Köster, Joseph A. Pratt, Adam Rome, Christine Meisner Rosen.

Author: Roland Geyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000427609
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
The Business of Less rewrites the book on business and the environment. For the last thirty years, corporate sustainability was synonymous with the pursuit of ‘eco-efficiency’ and ‘win-win’ opportunities. The notion of ‘eco-efficiency’ gives us the illusion that we can achieve environmental sustainability without having to question the pursuit of never-ending economic growth. The ‘win-win’ paradigm is meant to assure us that companies can be protectors of the environment whilst also being profit maximizers. It is abundantly clear that the state of the natural environment has further degraded instead of improved. This book introduces a new paradigm designed to finally reconcile business and the environment. It is called ‘net green’, which means that in these times of ecological overshoot businesses need to reduce total environmental impact and not just improve the eco-efficiency of their products. The book also introduces and explains the four pollution prevention principles ‘again’, ‘different’, ‘less’, and ‘labor, not materials’. Together, ‘net green’ and the four pollution prevention principles provide a road map, for businesses and for every household, to a world in which human prosperity and a healthy environment are no longer at odds. The Business of Less is full of anecdotes and examples. This brings its material to life and makes the book not only very accessible, but also hugely applicable for everyone who is worried about the fate of our planet and is looking for answers.

Author: Geoffrey Jones
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788114140
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book provides rich new empirical evidence on green business as it examines its variation between industries and nations, and over time. It demonstrates the deep historical origins of endeavors to create for-profit businesses that were more responsible and sustainable, but also how these strategies have faced constraints, trade-offs and challenges of legitimacy. Based on extensive interviews and archives from around the world, the book asks why green business succeeds more in some contexts than others, and draws lessons from failure as well as success.

Author: Yossi Sheffi
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262345765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
An expert on business strategy offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes balance the competing demands of profitability and employment with sustainability. The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes—from Coca Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner's Magical Soaps and Patagonia—navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability. Sheffi, author of the widely read The Resilient Enterprise, argues that business executives' personal opinions on environmental sustainability are irrelevant. The business merits of environmental sustainability are based on the fact that even the most ardent climate change skeptics in the C-suite face natural resource costs, public relations problems, regulatory burdens, and a green consumer segment. Sheffi presents three basic business rationales for corporate sustainability efforts: cutting costs, reducing risk, and achieving growth. For companies, sustainability is not a simple case of “profits versus planet” but is instead a more subtle issue of (some) people versus (other) people—those looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. This book aims to help companies satisfy these conflicting motivations for both economic growth and environmental sustainability.

Author: Christos Pitelis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136805982
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Today greenness is goodness; non-greenness is not an option. It is therefore critical to advance thinking on why and how business, consumers and policy makers can contribute to the goal of sustainable global wealth creation. This volume analyzes the strategic sustainability issues confronting contemporary business, and explores the transformation in values, strategies, and practices needed by modern businesses to attain sustainable business. It is is developed from a Global Business Symposium organized by the Centre for International Business and Management (CIBAM) at Cambridge University in February 2009, which brought together leading academics, scientists and engineers, government leaders, and business executives to consider the transformation in business values and strategies implicit in sustainability. Green Business, Green Values and Sustainability offers a concise and definitive book on the green transformation of business in major sectors including government, finance, energy, and retail. Different solutions to sustainability are explored including ethical approaches, alternative environmental strategies, corporate responsibility, and carbon reductions.

Author: Management Association, Information Resources
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522579168
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1685

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Book Description
The issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility have become vital discussions in many industries within the public and private sectors. In the business realm, incorporating practices that serve the overall community and ecological wellbeing can also allow businesses to flourish economically and socially. Green Business: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source for the latest research findings on the challenges and benefits of implementing sustainability into the core functions of contemporary enterprises, focusing on how green approaches improve operations. Highlighting a range of topics such as corporate sustainability, green enterprises, and circular economy, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for business executives, business and marketing professionals, business managers, academicians, and researchers actively involved in the business industry.

Author: Stephen Fineman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351623605
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The Business of Greening, first published in 2000, debates the relationship between business and greening, and the future form this relationship could take. The book gives voice to industrial actors - employees, employers, managers, technical specialists, regulators - in the context of their organizations, within industrial sectors or as part of wider institution regimes. The business of greening is taken as socially constructed, shaped through tensions and competing interests. It produces outcomes that are sometimes unexpected, sometimes hopeful. These outcomes are explored by examining a range of workers, including estate agents, bankers, bakers, printers, regulators, in small and large corporations. Contributors write from a wide range of different social sciences including sociology, geography, organizational science and psychology. This title will be of particular interest to students and researchers of environmental and business studies, and to those who shape environmental policy in government and industry.

Author: Axel Sommer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642288480
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Environmental sustainability creates both tremendous business opportunities and formidable threats to established companies across virtually all industry sectors. Yet many companies tackle the issue in a superficial or passive way, rather than considering fundamental changes to their existing business models. By ignoring the opportunities of Green Business Model Transformations, companies exclude themselves from a large variety of potential means to create economic value. In addition to ordinary product and process innovations, they can change “the rules of the game” within an industry towards environmental sustainability. Green Business Model Transformations, however, are challenging ventures: New, green business models with all their uncertainties and inherent complex systemic characteristics are difficult to design, assess, and implement successfully, particularly in the context of established companies that often entail complex structures and considerable inertia. As a result, there is a great need for guidance in management practice. This publication addresses this need with a general approach to Managing Green Business Model Transformations that is based on a broad theoretical foundation, illustrated by many real-world examples from various industry sectors.