I read about marketing, business, and sustainability somewhat haphazardly, picking up recommendations from colleagues or online. To gauge what books are considered must-reads, I recently ran an informal poll on LinkedIn (Sustainability Professionals and GreenBiz.com groups, and Green Business Answers) asking, “What three books from the last 10 years would you recommend as basic texts on sustainability in business?” The exercise yielded 33 responses, recommending 39 books. Here’s the tally. Some books are more than 10 years old, and some respondents recommended fewer/more than 3 volumes.
1.) 5 mentions:
- Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston
2.) 4 mentions:
- Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
- Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins
3.) 3 mentions:
- The Business Guide to Sustainability: Practical Strategies and Tools for Organizations by Darcy Hitchcock and Marsha Willard
- The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman
- The Next Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-in by Bob Willard and Hunter Lovins
2.) 2 mentions:
- Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit by Al Gore
- The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line by Bob Willard and John Elkington
- The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and Theodor Seuss Geisel
- Sustainable Value: How the World’s Leading Companies Are Doing Well by Doing Good by Chris Laszlo
5.) 1 mention:
- A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity by Nicholas Stern
- Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future by Jeff Goddell
- Biomimcry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus
- The Bridge at the End of the World James Gustave Speth
- Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner
- Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems by Hart Stuart
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
- Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs
- Eco-industrial Strategies: Unleashing Synergy Between Economic Development and the Environment by Edward Cohen-Rosenthal and Judy Musnikow
- Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything by Daniel Goleman
- The End of Nature by Bill McKibben
- The Entropy Law and the Economic Process by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
- Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution by Auden Schendler
- Getting to the Better Future: A Matter of Conscious Choosing, How Business Can Lead the Way to New Possibilities by John E Renesch
- Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel
- How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein
- Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today by Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert J. Addison
- Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts by Marc J Epstein, John Elkington, and Herman Leonard
- Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model by Ray Anderson
- Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick by Ken Iverson
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
- Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment by James Gustave Speth
- The Report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, that was published by Oxford University Press
- Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business by Joel Makower and Cara Pike
- Sustainability: The Corporate Challenge of the 21st Century by Dexter Dunphy and Jodie Benveniste
- Toward sustainable development by Jeroen van den Bergh and Jan van der Straaten
- Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical’s Toxic Century by Jack Doyle
- The Truth about Green Business by Gil Friend
I’ll be reviewing some of these here over the next few months.
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UPDATE, 6/22/09: I received a few more responses after posting. The stats and tally above reflect the new votes. The intro is new too, following a glitch during the update.
