It’s an admittedly worn device to use the alphabet to organize one’s thoughts, but when reflecting over the past decade and trying to distill the most notable events and objects that affected our company and also the publishing industry and business sector into a brief blog post, I found such a device to be quite helpful. As Jack put it when we initially discussed writing a decade-in-review post, not only is it like opening a can of worms, it seems like whenever one harkens back to the Millenium, one can’t help but get sidetracked into thoughts about 9/11. But of course there were many more ups and downs that we’ve all been a victim and/or a participant in, and this list is an attempt to do that chaos a little bit of justice.

Amazon (may not have its origins in this decade, but grew from 1.6B in 1999 to 19.1 in 2008; Annual 800ceoread Business Book Awards (Inaugural 2007); Erika Anderson, founder of Proteus International, Inc., author of Growing Great Employees, and great friend of 800-CEO-READ who introduced us to a new in-office vocabulary (2007)

Blue Ocean Strategy (our decade’s Best Seller, 2005); Bill George, author of three 800-CEO-READ best sellers, Authentic Leadership (2004), True North (2007) and Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis

ChangeThis (website presenting ideas via manifesto PDFs adopted by 800-CEO-READ from Seth Godin, 2005)

Disasters, natural and otherwise (Dot Com Bust, 2000; 9/11, 2001; tsunami, 2004; Hurricane Katrina, 2005; banking, 2009)

Enron bankruptcy (2001); Eight years of George W. Bush (2000-2008); Election of Barack Obama (2008)

Farewell, Schwartz Bookshops (2009); free/freemium changes everything; Facebook leads the herd.

Good to Great by Jim Collins; Green, Global and Google become top trends

Heath Brothers’ Made to Stick (2007) introduced us to a new language for the creation of ideas

InBubbleWrap offers free business books from 800-CEO-READ (2005); In the Books, 800-CEO-READ’s yearly review of business books (2007); It’s Your Ship by D. Michael Abrashoff (2002), an 800-CEO-READ bestseller with legs.

JackCovertSelects reviews (Inaugural 2000); Joy Panos Stauber, design extraordinaire and great friend of 800-CEO-READ.

Kindle (2007) and the advancing threat (revelation?) of digital books.

Lay-Offs (2009), Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005), The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (2006); 800-CEO-READ’s LeaveSmarter events (2006) kick off in Milwaukee.

Mega-Sales of Oprah’s Recommendations, Harry Potter & the Twilight series, lend hopefulness that books still beguile.

New York (book launch, company party, annual awards fete, 2009)

The 100 Business Books of All Time (written & anguished over during 2008, published 2009)

PechaKucha – 800-CEO-READ becomes the Milwaukee host for this exciting new way to present ideas in 20 images in 20 seconds (2008).

QbQ! The Question behind the Question by John Miller (2004), an 800-CEO-READ best seller that tapped into the perceived absence of personal accountability.

Rich Dad books populate the decade as the best selling personal finance books; Rehiring & Remodeling (2009)

Seth Godin (Unleashing the Idea Virus 2001 to Purple Cow 2003 to Tribes 2008); Strengths-based management books and strategies from Gallup.

Todd Sattersten (consultant 2004 – coauthor, 2008 – president, 2009), The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000); Twitter

Used books on Amazon (2001); The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld (2006) became the basis of some important questions we asked of our company and our customers.

Visit 800ceoread’s Daily Blog for daily business insight (2001).

Wiki-anything; The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) and The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (2005), two books that changed the way we think.

X-treme changes to news and publishing industry

You’re a blueberry (2008), an 800-CEO-READ inside joke that encapsulates the relationships of the 800-CEO-READ employees.

Zero percent. The likelihood that 2010 will be anything but another exhilarating ride.

Okay, so in terms of adhering to the alphabetization of this list, some are a bit of a cheat. And some inclusions are events that had a direct effect on our company internally, but most were important occurrences felt by everyone in business. If there is anything I missed, feel free to add in comments.

Happy New Year everyone!

Yesterday, you got a brief look into Rebecca Schlei Hartman’s immense brain. Today, we will glimpse the bizarre workings of her husband’s. Robbie Hartman is the author of one of my favorite lines in recent years:

Though I fully support guns, children, the flag and American entrepreneurship, I do not condone guns that shoot flags at children for money.

I’ve always been very clear about that.

Robbie tried to reconcile his unhinged reasoning skills with reality in last year’s issue of In the Books, looking at the many books published in 2008 that explored human psychology. As you’ll see below, he counsels that we not be too human and, possibly, that we tie ourselves to the masts of ships like Odysseus. I think you’ll want to read this.

Explorations Into the Human Psyche BY ROBBIE HARTMAN

To err is human. Of course, when it comes to your career, you don’t want to be too human. Cutting-edge research focusing on our decision-making tendencies, workplace interactions and the limitations of the mortal mind is casting new light on those moments when we’re all too human. The recent influx of books addressing the who, what, when and why of human behavior can help us understand—and guard against—our error-prone side, no matter how divine forgiveness may be. In a world where mankind too often relies on instinct and conventional wisdom, these books offer us an advantage by delving deeper into the human psyche.

For all of its unique talents and traits, the human mind exhibits familiar patterns from person to person. Whether we’re marketers, artists, athletes, teachers or CEOs, we tend to procrastinate, disavow numbers in favor of gossip and allow loss-aversion to influence our decisions. And while no book reveals a magic formula for creating a mistake-free super-brain, Gary Marcus posits in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind that we can learn to modify our behavior to counteract these foibles of the mind.

When it comes to dealing with procrastination, Dan Ariely emphasizes the importance of setting deadlines in Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. During a semester-long experiment at MIT, Ariely demonstrates that even elite students need set deadlines to improve performance. In one 12-week experiment involving classes that must complete three main papers by the end of the semester, the author found that a class with evenly spaced deadlines dictated by the professor outperformed a class that could choose its own deadlines, which in turn performed better than another class that received no deadlines at all. As Ariely states, “Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it.”

Then again, seeing isn’t always believing. Even with numerical data to corroborate evidence, people sometimes look away. As Daniel Gardner explains in The Science of Fear, people tend to view statistics as “a cold, empty number. In itself, [a number] makes us feel little or nothing.”

Fortunately, that’s where people like Leonard Mlodinow come in. In The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Mlodinow walks readers through the numerical fog of mathematics. Using layman’s terms and familiar examples, like movie studios, Mlodinow explains randomness and probabilities to demonstrate how these concepts can lead to better business decisions. Recently, some studios have made changes at top-level positions because of a poor year at the box office, only to find that previous financial results (as well as ensuing successes or failures) simply reflected random fluctuations or regressions to the mean, not necessarily the skills of the executives. If a movie studio averages $500 million in gross domestic box office, then explodes to $1 billion, followed by a drop back to $350 million the next year, it doesn’t mean that the studio head was a genius for one year and a dunce the next. The sudden increase could have been a random jump: Perhaps economic concerns caused more families to go to the movies instead of on summer vacations; or a cultural event, such as an actor’s death or a political scandal, that coincided with a film’s release date could have provided an unexpected boost at the box office. Likewise, random events can cause fewer people to visit movie theaters and result in lower box office performances. The bottom line isn’t always a direct reflection of executive skill, good or bad. By increasing our understanding of mathematics, we—and movie studios—can better avoid assigning blame or credit for random events, and thereby make decisions based on more sound reasoning.

Mathematics may not come naturally to most of us, but on the flip side, not all that comes naturally is beneficial in the professional realm. As Gardner states in The Science of Fear, “People love stories about people. We love telling them and we love hearing them. It’s a universal trait, and that suggests to evolutionary psychologists that storytelling—both the telling and the listening—is actually hardwired into the species.”

Put simply, storytelling and gossip serve an evolutionary purpose by strengthening social bonds and roles. But when it comes to numbers-driven business, as Gardner warns, “Anecdotes don’t prove anything. Only data—properly collected and analyzed—can do that.”

In The Watercooler Effect, Nicholas DiFonzo explains how stories, in the form of gossip and rumors, can take flight even in the midst of contradicting data. DiFonzo, like all authors in the field of human behavior, offers solutions to combat instincts that may be holding us back professionally.

This isn’t to say that human nature is treated as a trivial force that can be manipulated at will. Ariely, who literally wrote the book on irrational behavior in Predictably Irrational, admits to falling victim to one of the same tendencies he warns about: spending too much time deciding between two similar options, consequently expending time, energy and resources in return for minimal gain.
“In the end, and with all my foreknowledge of the difficulty in this decision-making process, I was just as predictably irrational as everyone else,” Ariely notes.

A likely explanation for his (and our) hemming and hawing is our loss-averse nature. Loss-aversion, which refers to our preference for avoiding loss even over potential gain, leads people to hang onto a falling stock too long, to rush a product into the market before it’s ready, to compound mistakes while trying to stave off perceived losses.

“As difficult as it can be to admit defeat, staying the course simply because of a past commitment hurts us in the long run,” Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman explain in Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. Once again, the solution sounds easy: Slow down and look at the big picture. “When things go wrong, we can either apply a short-term, Band-Aid solution or remember that in the grand scheme of things it’s only a minor misstep,” they remind us. “Having a long-term plan—and not casting it aside—is the key to dealing with our fear of loss.”

Many of the authors’ solutions stem from commonsense advice, like avoiding decision-making when tired or distracted, and making contingency plans. The trick is to learn how to apply these lessons when our instincts would lead us astray. In other words: We can’t make our irrational side disappear, but we can start to avoid its allure.

In Kluge, Marcus reminds readers to consider concepts such as sample size and correlation vs. causation, and to reframe questions in order to view them from multiple angles.

As Marcus notes, “Odysseus tied himself to a mast to resist the temptations of the Sirens; we would all do well to learn from him.”

Yesterday, we had an article from Erika Andersen expounding on the importance of business books. Today, we have an article on a tangential topic from the wonderfully talented Rebecca Schlei Hartman. Rebecca came to us from our former sister company, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, and worked here until the economy wrenched our little family apart earlier this year. Beside managing the project, Rebecca wrote the article below—about business novels—for last year’s In the Books.

Odd Intersections: Fiction Captures the Complexities of Business
BY REBECCA SCHLEI HARTMAN

Fiction allows us to immerse ourselves in different worlds, to escape and meet intriguing characters, and to look for clues and solve puzzles. We are a curious species; we find others’ experiences compelling, and we naturally look for ways to compare our stories to theirs. Business novelists know this about readers, and utilize the fiction medium to convey business lessons through an easily digestible story, fleshed out over the length of a book to offer readers the time and substance needed to invest in characters and follow a plot through to conclusion.

Businessnovels.com describes the business novel as “a book-length fictional work where the characters and plot incorporate specific business related concepts and business experiences,” explaining that “[the] major intent of the author is to teach important business fundamentals while surrogating the reader’s business experience with a fictional one. The advantage is that real learning occurs, because books combine theory with emotion, therefore the student gains both theoretic knowledge and fictional experience they can substitute for their own.”

Differing from fables and parables, which vacillate between lesson and application or analysis, business novels explore areas of commerce and the human networks that drive change in the world. And, as writer Kate Jennings pointed out in a 2001 strategy + business article, “novelists have served up treatments of businesspeople and commerce that are as varied, nuanced, and complex as they are in life, resulting in an engrossing, invigorating literary genre. Unfortunately, these days, with modern readers preferring the narrowly personal or entertainingly exotic, the business-novel genre has fallen on hard times, to the detriment of not just literature but all social discourse.”

The business novel genre has had a tumultuous history. Business novel enthusiasts often cite Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral as classic business novels. Novels like The Great Gatsby and Confederacy of Dunces are still staples in education and are used to teach basic business principles like the destructiveness of greed, success through unwavering determination, and the triumph of the American work ethic.

Today, though, modern attempts at the business novel are most often integrated into the general fiction section, only to be picked up by those oddball readers who, ostensibly, exchange quality literature for simplistic renderings of the exact situations other readers hope to escape from by reading fiction.

We challenge readers to look beyond the seemingly odd intersection of business thought and fiction to the potential of stories to facilitate understanding while capturing both the reader’s intellect and imagination. Some set out to encapsulate the complexities of business concepts, like Paul Goldstein’s fast-paced legal thriller about the politics of the biotech industry, A Patent Lie (sequel to Errors and Omissions), and others simply point out the everyday absurdities of work life, like Dan Kennedy’s hilarious glimpse into the music industry, Rock On, and McSweeney’s writer Ed Park’s perhaps too poignant Personal Days, which follows a once lively group of coworkers as they weather the increasing uncertainty of their job security. In a June 2008 New York Times book review of Personal Days, in which he also highlights the 2007 novel Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, writer Mark Sarvas suggests that, “considering the ubiquity of the work experience in American lives, and the thousands upon thousands of novels published annually, perhaps the question shouldn’t be why there are two work-related novels right now but why there aren’t many more.”

You may pick up a business novel to enjoy a good story, or you may look to it for guidance on a particular problem or solution. Either way, business novels provide an unconventional look into the issues we face each day. While perhaps not appropriate for all change initiatives, business novels could, on a personal or small-group level, be an even more effective tool in grasping the essence of an idea than a journal article or typical non-fiction business book.

Our third installment of articles from past issues of In the Books, our annual review of the finest business books, comes from the indomitable spirit of Erika Andersen, founder of Proteus International. Erika is a friend of the company, and I’ve always thought of her as our cool and world-wise aunt. She is one of those people that teaches you something about yourself every time you meet her and, lucky for us, she does so for organizations as well. If you need to better understand your organization and the folks that make it run—and, no offense, but you probably do—you can do no better than call on Erika Andersen. If you would like to learn more, check out her two ChangeThis manifestos or her two books, Growing Great Employees and Being Strategic.

The piece below is from our first annual review, released two years ago, and is about our favorite topic—business books!

Why We Love Business Books More Than Ever BY ERIKA ANDERSEN

Around 1500, a guy named Machievelli wrote a book called Il Principe. It could be argued that this tough-minded little volume was the first classic business book of the western world. It was a wild time: he was advising various warring Popes and secular rulers—the Jack Welches and Sumner Redstones of his time—and Machiavelli offered advice he thought would be most helpful to them in consolidating
their power and creating thriving and profitable governments. Though it’s now mostly read as a cautionary tale, an example
of how NOT to lead, hundreds of generations of leaders have absorbed its lessons, and the business book was born.

The next few hundred years of western civilization (this phrase always reminds me of Gandhi’s response as to his view of western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea,” he said…but I digress) produced a few other volumes of political and economic wisdom. In 1609, for instance, Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), which helped to establish the foundations of international law by formulating the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations should be free to
use it for seafaring trade. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the development of industry and commerce in Europe, and offered rationales for free trade, capitalism and libertarianism. It seemed that only a handful of people felt compelled to share their thoughts about business, and that a slightly larger handful read them.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the business book began to emerge as an actual category. In the early 1900s, two books on business became standards in the libraries of America’s captains of industry: Henry Ford’s My Life and Work, and a book by a man named Henri Fayol, called General and Industrial Management. They offered very different opinions on business and management (Henry Ford deeply distrusted managers, though he treated his front line workers much better than most of his contemporaries, while Fayol talked about management as one of the six key elements of business success), but both focused on providing personal insights into how business should be done.

Through the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of books published about business gradually increased. Still, by today’s standards, business books had a relatively modest readership: in 1975, about 300 new business book titles were published in the US, with overall sales for the business category of just over a million volumes.

Then in the early ’80s, the whole business of business books changed—quite suddenly and dramatically: the bellwether book of this change was Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, which became the first bona fide business best seller. And over the past 25 years, the business book category has literally exploded: in 2006, almost 11,000 new business books were ublished in the U.S., with total business book sales of over $800,000,000.

Why this ever-increasing appetite for business books?

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS
Part of the explanation, I believe, can be found in the current American mythology that business is the best and most reliable road to fame, fortune and happiness. In fact, this mythology seems to have largely replaced other American mythologies about achieving success, such as “the overnight star,” “marrying rich,” “being plucked by fate from the chorus line (or assembly line),” “virtue rewarded” and (my personal favorite) “persisting through terrible tribulations and being uplifted by some extremely unlikely deus ex machina.” Not that these things don’t still happen (occasionally), or that people don’t pine for them, but I’ll bet if you talked to ten college students who want to become wealthy, nine would say they’re planning to do it by starting or getting involved in some sort of lucrative business venture.

This popular mythology about business, it seems to me, is an amalgam of a number of elements. First, there’s the core American belief in the efficacy of hard work and the possibility of raising oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. This
has formed the basis of how we see ourselves since the very beginning of our nation: the idea that in America, ancestry is not destiny, and that people can become what they envision. Pushing westward, building the railroads, inventing, creating, refining: we have always believed in commerce as the great leveler of society.

Second, there is the assumption spawned by the Internet (the late-’90s bust notwithstanding) that if you just find/create the right product/service/idea at the right time and offer it online in the right way, you can achieve crazy-level financial success. Look at the Google guys. For most of us, there’s still enough mystery and magic about how the web actually works to enable us to imagine that any business having to do with new media might instantly result in thousands of rabbits from hundreds of hats.

Finally, we may no longer think that “greed is good” (in the words of Gorden Gekko, the creepy Michael Douglas character from Wall Street)—or, at least, most people don’t say it out loud—but the legacy of the eighties is this: that young, Bright-eyed men and women can aspire to do well in business without feeling like soulless sell-outs.

So, if we as a nation believe that there is both physical and psychic gold to be had by pursuing business, what better way to find out where to dig than by reading books that provide the needed maps? Unlike previous generations, who had to actually get out and do it (make your way to California, apprentice yourself to a bootmaker, sign up for the next clipper ship to China), we can sit in the comfort of our living rooms and look over the shoulders of those who’ve done it before us, trying to extract the lessons we’ll need to do it ourselves…or at least to let us dream—to convince us that we could do it if we really wanted to.

THE CELEBRIFICATION OF BUSINESS LEADERS
If you scan the business book shelves of any Barnes and Noble or Borders, you’ll see a lot more volumes with faces on them than in years past. Business books used to be serious—if boring—tomes in strong colors with impressive typefaces. Now, more often than not, the front cover shows a slick photo of Donald, Martha, Lee, Carly, Jack or whoever. What gives?

It seems to me the American fascination with celebrity has played a large part in boosting business book sales. As a culture, we seem endlessly intrigued with people who have lives of privilege and wealth, and over the past decade or so, we’ve turned some of our attention away from movie stars, athletes and royalty, and trained it on business tycoons. In fact, it seems that no matter what these celebrity business people are saying (or, in some cases, preaching) in their books, the real draw is that face on the cover.

When I was looking for an agent for my first book a few years ago, one of the people I spoke to—a woman who is agent to a few of these very mega-executives—told me that while my book was very solid and compelling, I didn’t have a “big enough platform.” A novice in these matters at the time, I asked her what she meant. “Well, to be quite blunt,” she replied, “you’re not famous enough.”

So, it’s not so much what these folks have accomplished or the clarity of their wisdom that sells their books—although that is, in some cases, very impressive—it’s quite simply that they’re well-known and therefore interesting. People buy books by “famous” business people for basically the same reason other people buy Entertainment Weekly or listen to Larry King—they want to find out more about people whose lives they find intriguing.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME
A few months back, when I was just beginning to think about writing this article, I was out to dinner with my 19-year-old son, and I asked him why he thought there were so many more business books being bought these days. “It’s the complexity of the undertaking,” he replied. At my quizzical look, he continued, “Imagine some guy in the Korean war. All he thinks about is getting back home and starting an auto-body shop, or a pizzeria. And when he gets home, he does it: borrows some money from his dad or the bank, rents a space, buys some stuff and starts fixing cars or making pizza. If he works hard and does good work, he hires a couple of people. Gets married, sends his kids to college. The American dream: simple.” I nodded. “Now, though, that guys’ kids want to be portfolio analysts or music producers. It’s much more complicated and shapeless. How do you do it? And they think, ‘I bet there is a bunch of books about this.’ And there is.”

I think he’s absolutely right. And I’d expand it to include the complexity of everything—not just of the undertaking. People who want to start businesses today, who want to do well in their chosen careers, or who want to figure out how to choose a career are faced with orders of complexity that would boggle the mind of that unconfused Korean war vet.

It seems to me this is the most important factor driving the exponential increase in the popularity of business books: the world—and the world of business—is a complicated place, and we want help figuring it out.

We’ve always used books to explore and to learn. Books about history to explore the past and learn the lessons of others’ mistakes; books about travel to explore distant places and learn about other cultures; books of fiction to explore invented worlds and learn about others’ experiences. Now, as we rush headlong into the 21st century, business books allow us to explore all the emerging worlds of commerce, invention and growth, and teach us how to navigate through those worlds.

For our second installment of articles from past issues of In the Books, we turn to Kate Mytty and her piece on sustainability in business. We lost Kate to Boston this year, where she is working her magic for PublicWords.

When Ecology and Economy Meet BY KATE MYTTY

Ecology and economy have finally reached a crossroads. No longer can each operate as an individual facet or separate entity, uninfluenced by the other. Like all “eco”-systems, business is changing to adapt to the changing environment. That adaptation goes by a few different names: the green revolution, sustainability, the green wave and greening, to name a few.

Last year we lamented the shortage of books geared towards the intersection of business and sustainability. We postulated that with the increase of magazine and newspaper coverage on sustainability and, of course, Al Gore’s film, bookstores would be ripe with “green” titles this year. The publishing industry simply needed time to catch up. As expected, 2008 brought a slew of new titles on sustainability.

The range of titles and bylines touting and teaching sustainability is diverse and broad. Some challenge us to look at sustainability from an ideological standpoint and redefine what it means for a business to be sustainable, while others look at the nuts and bolts of integrating sustainable practices into a business.

The authors include well-known names, such as Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline) and David Bach (The Automatic Millionaire), and emerging voices in the genre, such as the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm Gary Hirshberg (Stirring It Up), John Ehrenfeld (Sustainability by Design) who worked at MIT, and Brian Dumaine (The Plot to Save the Planet) of Fortune Small Business.

Some people might be turned off by the term sustainability and equate it with hippy, tree-hugging principles. But these authors are not Don Quixotes seeking to reach the impossible dreams. They are not the tree-huggers of the world. This group of authors is composed of those who study and research green efforts and those who employ green practices in their workplaces. With their books, they are educating business people on what it means when the economy can no longer function effectively without taking the natural environment into account.

Perhaps the best explanation for why these books matter (and ultimately, why sustainability matters) comes from Andrew Hoffman and John Woody, who wrote Climate Change: What’s Your Business Strategy: “as a business executive, you must move beyond the public debate and think about how climate change will affect your business environment. In fact, you should not think of climate change as an environmental issue at all. Instead, you should think of it as a market transition. Controls on the emission of greenhouse gases will affect the price of energy and the products, services, and sectors that rely on that energy. In other words, it will affect virtually all sectors of the economy to varying degrees. Some will be disadvantaged, but others will be advantaged. As in any market transition, there will be winners and losers” (1). In order to survive, business people must embrace sustainability.

A few reoccurring themes occur in this category. First, each author believes that a green revolution is already here or is in the works. Some even call this point in time the tipping point. Second, more than a few of the authors argue that the United States is lagging behind the rest of the world in adopting sustainability principles (the United States is the only first-world countries that has yet to add its name to the Kyoto Treaty). Finally, most authors agree that this green revolution will influence our economy. Businesses that understand and prepare for the green “evolution” will capitalize on it. Those that reject it as foreign or untrue will go the way of the dinosaurs.

GOING GREEN PAYS OFF
Going green is not as foreign as it may seem. As Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy and editor of GreenBiz.com, points out, “Companies in nearly every sector are continually improving their efficiency, engineering waste, inefficiency, and toxicity out of their manufacturing and distribution processes. Many companies have learned how to deliver products and their functionality using far fewer resources; a few have upended their business models in the name of resource efficiency and enhanced productivity. They do these things partly because of the reduced environmental impact but largely because they make good business sense” (31). The process of becoming less wasteful and more sustainable is already integrated into most business practices. This market transition, as Hoffman and Woody deem it, challenges businesses to be even more resourceful.

As with any new transition, sustainability must begin on an individual level. David Bach’s Go Green, Live Rich is a good starting point. Bach takes his usual personal finance approach and outlines 140 steps an individual can take to save money by going green. One chapter in particular is dedicated to how to do the same in a business. By putting a savings amount on each of the 140 steps, Bach uncovers just how much there is to be gained by pursuing sustainability. It doesn’t take much to start. For instance, you could “save $2,250 a year by brown-bagging your lunch. Together, we’ll reduce our landfills by 1.8 million tons of trash” (117). Bach shows that even simple changes on an individual level can save money and be more environmentally friendly.

Imagine what’s possible on a larger scale. In Stirring It Up, Gary Hirshberg, shows how companies are capitalizing on sustainability. Take Adobe Systems—a $2 billion company. It spent $1.1 million on “motion-sensing light switches, waterless urinals, automatic faucets, and fluorescent lights, among other things, which paid for themselves in just over a year and now continue to add millions to Adobe’s bottom line.” (68) There is much opportunity is to be had by going green.

THE MEASUREMENT FOR GREENNESS
But how much is enough? What does a green business look like? One of the challenges associated with the green revolution is there remains no common definition for what it means to be sustainable or even a way to measure sustainability. It is difficult to change or effect change if we have no way to measure progress or define success. And the traditional places we look to for good examples, don’t necessarily have the answers.

Hirshberg, who knows the agricultural business well, hangs up agriculture’s approach as a model of inefficiency—though most would assume agriculture to be incredibly efficient. “Some analysts calculate that typical food producers use ten to fifteen calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce every single calorie of food energy they sell. By any standard, economic or environmental that’s ridiculous—a suicidal ride to bankruptcy via inefficiency. But because the industry’s conventional accounting method adds up only dollars, not energy—or, for that matter, any so-called externalized costs, such as resource depletion, pollution or the demise of farmers—agribusiness is wrongly deemed ‘efficient’” (5).”

The day is coming when a common measurement will be used. Already, Woody and Hoffman explain in Climate Change that the Investors and Business for U.S. Climate Action asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to outline to what extent companies should account for their effects on the environment in their financial reports. Theoretically, when this measurement is found, it’ll ripple through organizations accounting departments similar to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Until that measurement is found, Makower suggests starting with these three questions.

1. What do you know? How and where does your company affect the environment? What about upstream in your supply chain—your suppliers, their suppliers’ suppliers? And downstream, how does your customers’ use and disposal of your product or service affect the environment?
2. What are you doing? Now that you know where you stand, the next step is to figure out where it’s possible to incorporate more sustainable practices.
3. What are you saying? What message are your spreading to your customers and stakeholders about your company’s green practices?
   (Strategies for the Green Economy, 115)

These questions will help you evaluate whether your company is on the right path.

LESS UNSUSTAINABILITY IS NOT SUSTAINABLE
Along with the measurement of sustainability comes the question of how to define sustainability. Presently, as Ehrenfeld suggests, “All of the existing efforts toward sustainable development simply equate more sustainability to less unsustainability” (Sustainability by Design, 20). Both Ehrenfeld and Senge call for a change in how we define sustainability.

For years, we have defined success by economic output, by gross domestic product. Senge, who wrote the forward to Ehrenfeld’s book, notes that “It is ironic, and perhaps tragic, that economics…started as a science of means, the efficient use of resources, and today defines the accepted and virtually unquestioned ends of society, and as well provides virtually all the guidance we acknowledge about those ends” (xiv). For too long, we have used economic output to define our businesses, our governments and ourselves. The more we produce, the more successful we are.

This attitude, of course, runs in direct opposition to the idea of sustainability. Brian Dumaine, in his book The Plot to Save the Planet, questions whether “an organization that promotes endless consumption, that exists to sell as much as it can as cheaply as it can, ever be green?” (51). Take Wal-Mart, an organization on a quest to integrate sustainable practices in all it does; “Even if the company manages to reduce the amount of carbon used to deliver and sell paper towels but ends up selling three times as many each year, it will amount to a net loss in the battle against global warming” (The Plot to Save the Planet, 51). Producing more, even if the production process is green, does not equate to being sustainable.

What is sustainability, then? Senge explains: “When a process is sustainable, it can be carried out over and over again without negative environmental effects or impossibly high costs to anyone involved” (9). Ehrenfeld goes a step further and adds that sustainability enables human beings to flourish. And that should be our ultimate goal on the pursuit of sustainability.

Either way you define it, according to these authors, sustainability as it is practiced now is simply not sustainable for the long-term.

IN THE END
In this convergence of economy and ecology, change is guaranteed. Each of the books published this year on sustainability offer a different perspective on what that means for business. The reoccurring theme is that it’s time to change. Businesses can either avoid that fact or embrace it. To quote Dumaine, “Rather than a threat, global warming might be seen as an opportunity to unleash America’s technological genius and create huge, new green industries through a fresh wave of government and entrepreneurial environmentalism” (The Plot to Save the Planet, 256). There are opportunities to be had in this transition, and these are the resources to guide you there.