Customer Reviews

Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World

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Hirshberg does a great job of showing how reducing a company's environmental impact can do wonders for the bottom line. As a businessman, he recognizes that telling people to buy a product because "it's the right thing to do" won't work. Instead, he focuses on producing a quality product using sustainable practices.

Unlike a lot of books written by CEO's, this one doesn't focus on just the author's company. He profiles about a dozen other companies (Terracycle, Patagonia, Timberland...) that are breaking new ground and making money with earth-friendly strategies.

One bonus feature - there are a number of coupons for products from Stonyfield and other profiles companies in the back of the book.

Gary Hirshberg is the CE-Yo (I'm not making that up) of Stonyfield Farms where they make great yogurt. I love it because it's good. It is also organic. For me, the yogurt eater, that is mostly irrelevant.

Hirshberg titled his book, Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World. The subtitle should be a clue that there are two kinds of material in this book.

There are the places where Hirshberg writes as if he's trying to pass some sort of environmentalist purity test. These are mostly long expository sections that may be of great interest to you. If so, read them. I found them stupifyingly boring most of the time.

If you're reading this as a business book, you may be tempted to write Gary Hirshberg off as a nut case. But consider the following.

His company makes a great product. The only limit on his production is the number of organically certified cows he can get to supply his farm and meet his standards. And his company makes a lot of money. That's why you want to pay attention to the other parts of the book.

The other parts of the book are where Hirshberg tells the story of his business and several other businesses including Timberlake and Patagonia. He tells about how Wal-Mart is making "environmentally friendly" changes to its operations because those changes are good business.

Those were the parts of interest to me. They are written in a less formal style. They are mostly stories. And there are a lot of lessons in them about business, business practices, and what both successful businesses and Mother Nature might have to teach us about them.

Here's an overview of the book.

The first chapter, Natural Profits, begins with the simple, but profound, observation that nature does not produce waste. When nature is functioning naturally, everything thrown off by one process is used by another. Hirshberg suggests that following that principle with business practices will make things more efficient and, thus, more profitable.

He tells us the story of how he wound up at Stonyfield Farms. There's info on the early stages of the company and how many of his principles about how to live on the planet also helped his company survive and grow. The story of Stonyfield Farms runs through the book.

Mission Control gets us into the mission statement for Hirshberg's company. Frankly, this is as good a chapter on mission statements as I've seen anywhere.

Hirshberg says that a mission statement, in addition to guiding operations, should be simple and enduring. He also points out that Exxon's mission statement at one time only cited "increasing return to shareholders" as a guiding principle and he describes how that informed the company's response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Hirshberg makes the point that if you have only one purpose, as Exxon did, it's relatively easy to make decisions and to be blind to other concerns. But if you have several sub-missions or groups of stakeholders to consider, things get more nuanced. The main story in this chapter is about Patagonia, whose CEO, Yvon Chouinard, says: "Profit is what happens when you do everything else right."

From CO2 to COno is about Stonyfield's efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. There's excellent material on doing analysis of a problem, seeking solutions and using metrics to gauge success or lack of it. This chapter includes the stories of Timberland, Wal-Mart's recent changes and Adobe's efforts to make its campus carbon neutral. Hirshberg describes cost-saving benefits to the corporations.

Hands Across the Aisle has a lot of excellent material on Hirshberg's marketing methods. In the beginning there was no money for marketing so Stonyfield had to be creative. They were. They also developed the idea of marketing as making a "handshake connection" with everyone. He has important things to say about how the quality of the product is important because that's what gets customers to come back.

The Delicious Revolution includes the story of Honest Tea. In 1998, Seth Goldman left his job at the Calvert Group of "socially responsible" mutual funds to join Barry Nalebuff and found Honest Tea. Nalebuff was Goldman's professor at Yale, where Nalebuff is known as an expert on business strategy and game theory. You may know him for his books such as Co-Opetition : A Revolution Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation : The Game Theory Strategy That's Changing the Game of Business and Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life.

No Such Place as Away is all about recycling and re-using and planning in ways that leave you with less to transport somewhere else. A lot of this sounds new, but it's not. There was a time when Henry Ford demanded that suppliers of engines for his cars pack their engines in boxes made of boards of a particular size. Ford then took the crates apart and used the wood to make floorboards for his cars.

A real strength of this chapter is the description of Interface Carpet. Interface Carpet is two things. It is the world's largest manufacturer of carpet tiles, a publicly traded company worth almost a billion dollars. It's also a company with a commitment to sustainability.

Nurturing Those Who Nourish the Earth is about Stonyfield's dealing with suppliers. There's good material here about the importance of relationships along the supply chain. Stonyfield Farms may be an "organic" business, but when Hirshberg talks about thinks like marketing and cost analysis, and supply chain relationships, the lessons are solid business.

Future Perfect is Hirshberg's vision of an ideal future. Since it's a true "Utopia" or "nowhere" he feels free to let his inner zealot run free. This chapter is awash in unexamined and unsupported assumptions.

Worse, from my perspective, is that Hirshberg tends to present only his own favored solution or technique. So you don't get any discussion of whether offsets, for example, are actually a good idea or how to make them work better. There are no alternatives in this chapter.

Zealots are often insufferable. Practical zealots have the capacity to change the world. Gary Hirshberg is definitely a zealot, but because he's also both practical and successful, you will find a lot of good business advice in this book.

this is a great book because it shatters one of the big myths and that is that there, somehow, is a disconnect between being successful in business and doing something right for the earth

the stories about Timberland, Patagonia, and even Wal-Mart are really interesting and it's very interesting read - especially for a business book, something I rarely read

plus there are about $10 in coupons in the back for Stonyfield products :)

FDR once said ""We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."

The flipside of this is that not only is running your business with the environment in mind is not only good morals, it is good business, and Hirshberg, who has made millions incorporating earth-friendly practices into his business is proof, and this is a great, entertaining book that shows how he and others are lining their pockets and saving the planet at the same time. Kudos.

This was the first book I read on sustainability as so many of them feel intimidating and daunting. This tells an entrepreneurial story in a very entertaining and easy to read way. During the course of reading you recognize not only are you learning something, but the way you think and look at the world starts to change. It stirs your hunger for more knowledge. Downside, makes me feel slightly more guilty to drive my truck.

As a Social Impact Consultant for some time, the standard question I would receive surrounded the idea of balance: how do I balance my requirement to make a profit with my desire to do good. This book provides numerous, practical examples. What I enjoyed most about it was GH's emphasis on sourcing such ideas and powering such initiatives from the employees within an organization. Sustainability as a concept is, itself, only sustainable, if everyone buys-in. A great read...and GH comes across as incredibly likable. That is something I feel is rare when reading books by an entrepreneur and innovator discussing their own success (Build-a-Bear book is quite similar in that regard).

I found this book in a university bookstore, and was later unable to find it in any Borders or Barnes & Noble. However, the author did not use academic language, so I wish it was more mainstream. I see many enjoying this easy, inspiring read. It's a good introductory book for the eco-minded -- businessmen and consumers alike.

You may not be a CEO or working for a large corporation, but if you feel in your soul that you're going to change the world, read this book. It is a very business-oriented book and it also gets into specific business tactics and strategies that are green for the bottom line and the environment. However, reading about the success of Gary Hirshberg's "out-of-the-box" (pardon for the cliche) approach will grease the wheels in your head and inspire you to think bigger and more creatively.

The CE-Yo of Stoneyfield Farm Yogurt shares how he built a hugely successful business by implementing ecologically sound practices. The title sums up the book quite well. If you're already in business and just starting to think about how to be more eco-friendly, Hirshberg presents his solutions in the language of business. It's tactical, factual and straightforward.

Always having an interest in entrepreneurial and humanitarian/sustainable projects, I thought I would pick this up to see how Stoneyfield did it. However, I came away re-inspired to be conscious of decisions I make concerning products I use and the waste it produces. The past few years I have definitely fallen off the wagon, a little exasperated that my efforts really didn't make much of a difference and we will end up having to deal with the issues he discusses anyways. But, I see there are those out there that are addressing these problems and continue to work towards solutions AND are profitable. Go figure! I think everyone should read this book - especially kids in school just developing purchasing habits and will be our future entrepreneurs.

Excellent depiction of what truly environmentally conscious companies and individuals can and should do to help ensure sustainability of our planet for future generations. Stonyfield Farms and their CEO Gary Hirshberg provide an ever improving benchmark for making ecologically-minded decisions while achieving business success. Highly recommended.