Bookshop

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 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 first-hand 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.

Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; clicktivists create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple greenwashing or pinkwashing ?

This book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360 Degrees Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation.

Despite recent optimism and global initiatives, the implementation of corporate sustainability programs has been slow at best, with less than a third of global companies having developed a clear business case for their approach to sustainability.

Presenting numerous award-winning cases and examples from companies such as Unilever, Patagonia, Tumi, DSM and Umicore alongside original ideas based upon 20 years of consulting experience, this book reveals how to design and implement a stronger sense of focus and move sustainability programs forward. This proven combination of purpose, direction and speed is dubbed Vectoring . Based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index,

Vectoring offers a plain-spoken framework to identify the relative position of companies compared to their peers. The framework and its 4 archetypes deliver insights for practitioners to locate inhibitors and overcome them by providing practical suggestions for process improvements. This includes designing and executing new sustainability programs, embedding the SDGs within company strategy and assessing the impact of sustainability programs on competitiveness and valuation. Offering directions for CFOs to shift companies from integrated reporting to integrated thinking in order to accelerate their sustainability programs, Winning Sustainability Strategies shows how to achieve purpose with profit and how to do well by doing good.

This book brings forth the tacit knowledge of IDH and our partners, accumulated over the last 10 years as we have together engaged in the messy practice of accelerating transitions toward sustainability in international trade, with foreword of Christiana Figueres.

Request for free e-book

Over the last few decades, emerging markets have increased their share in world GDP and have come to play a prominent and growing role in global business. Their period of impressive growth was triggered by major global advances such as economic liberalization and governance reforms and deregulation.

As governments and policy makers have permitted global competition from the more advanced, developed world, the prospect of millions of consumers in developing countries not only encourages locals to start businesses, but also appeals to multinational enterprises overseas. The growing presence of emerging markets on the world stage has not been left unnoticed and many investors have contributed significant amounts of capital with the hope of receiving major financial gains. In this context, emerging markets are particularly facing sustainability challenges due to their fast growing pace and fuzzy or inexistent sustainability regulations.

Corporate Social Responsibility in Emerging Economies represents a realistic critical overview of the state of affairs of CSR in the context of an emerging economy. It is an accessible and comprehensive diagnostic point of reference for the academic world as well as for policy makers. The topic of CSR is highly relevant for the business world and a challenging subject for the theory and literature.

This is a unique book that offers new empirical insights for policy makers and scholars of the fields of CSR, Business Ethics, Organizational Studies and related disciplines

Getting all the Motives Right applies the latest insights from organizational psychology, organization sience and business model literature (amongst others) to help managers better understand their own motivations to become more sustainable and show ways to effectively realize these ambitions. This book includes concrete tools for managers, such as a distance map, issue priority schemes, partnership portfolio strategies, identification of tipping points and the like.

We are entering the age of sustainability – a business era where every company, big and small, must adapt its way of doing business to meet the realities of climate change, a finite supply of natural resources, evolving attitudes about inequality, increasing digitisation and automation. At the same time companies must meet the demands of consumers as they adjust to this rapidly changing way of life. Supercharging this change in consumer behaviour is social media – a communications revolution that is democratising and disrupting society in ways never seen before.

In this book, Matthew Yeomans explains why embracing sustainability is key to helping companies articulate their sense of purpose (and their reason to exist) in a world where social media is eroding trust in all institutions. The book shows how social media has made sustainability a mainstream concern for all society, how it compelled companies to be more authentic and accountable in their actions and how it will continue to shape how companies communicate the importance of sustainability to all of society.

This book is a powerful guide for both communication and marketing professionals in business, especially Fortune 500, FTSE 250 companies and agencies, on how to use social media to communicate with their audiences and stakeholders in an authentic way. It is also a guide/text book for the growing field of sustainability communication in higher education.