Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business [Hardcover]

Joel Makower (Author), Cara Pike (Afterword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0071600302 | ISBN-13: 978-0071600309 | Publication Date: December 1, 2008 | Edition: 1

Businesses are entering the green marketplace at breakneck speed to keep pace with customer and societal demands to reduce their environmental impacts. But greening one's business is no small feat. While clear opportunities abound in this new economy, business leaders pursuing a green strategy are finding few roadmaps and established rules and plenty of hidden twists and turns.

So, how does a company succeed in a world gone green?

In Strategies for the New Green Economy, Joel Makower, one of the world's foremost green business experts, provides a clear roadmap for this challenging terrain. Makower offers insights and inspiration gleaned from his 20 years' experience helping Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike formulate strategies that align environmental and business goals. Providing a comprehensive and realistic look at both the opportunities and challenges, Strategies for the New Green Economy shows how leadership companies are finding their way in the green economy, while their competitors struggle.

Strategies for the Green Economy systematically tackles the central issues of greening your business:

• What does it take to be seen as an environmental leader?
• What are the standards, implicit or explicit, that you must meet to be green?
• How do you communicate what your business is doing right--and what it's doing wrong?
• How can you overcome consumer, media, and activist distrust?
• How can your company be heard amid the “green noise” in the marketplace?
• What are the new opportunities emerging for companies in the green economy?

Including groundbreaking data about customers' attitudes and behaviors regarding green products and services, Strategies for the Green Economy will lead you through the thicket of finicky customers, confusing research reports, and public cynicism regarding green marketing claims--and place you on solid footing in the growing green economy.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

“Strategies for the Green Economy joins big-picture perspective with ground-level practicalities in ways that will challenge and inspire even the most skeptical executive.”
--Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of Ecomagination, General Electric

“Long before 'green' was in vogue, Joel Makower shared our understanding of the importance of sustainability in business. His knowledge of the complexities and the dynamics, especially as they relate to the bottom line, yield the insight that many companies have come to rely on.”
--Ursula M. Burns, president of Xerox Corporation

“Joel Makower provides a roadmap--a clear and compelling vision of what's possible when companies harness environmental thinking to create value for their shareholders, employees, customers, and communities.”
--Gary Hirshberg, chairman and president of Stonyfield Farm

“The greening of business is not a fad--it's a fundamental change in how commerce is conducted given the new energy and climate realities. Joel Makower charts the course for this new era, showing how leadership companies large and small are harnessing innovation to transform the challenges into opportunities.”
--Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and author of Earth: The Sequel, The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming

"In Strategies for the Green Economy, Joel Makower challenges business leaders to understand what lies behind the desire for green products. With 20 years exploring environmental perceptions and advances, there are few more qualified than Joel to drive the green debate.”
—Fisk Johnson, chairman and CEO of SC Johnson

About the Author

Joel Makower is Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com® and other websites, research, and events produced by Greener World Media, Inc., of which he is cofounder and chairman. He has 20 years' experience advising companies on green strategy and marketing and is author of more than a dozen books, including The Green Consumer and The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071600302
• ISBN-13: 978-0071600309
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"For more than 20 years, Joel Makower has been a well-respected voice on business, the environment, and the bottom line. As a writer, speaker, and strategist on corporate environmental practices, clean technology, and green marketing, he has helped a wide range of companies align environmental responsibility with business success.

His latest book, ""Strategies for the Green Economy,"" was recently published by McGraw-Hill.

Joel is a talented communicator who can cut through the hype and haze to provide clarity and perspective on a range of business environmental issues. He brings to his writing, speeches, and clients a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing mainstream companies as they try to address environmental issues in a way that drives bottom-line performance and topline growth.

His balanced, realistic, and credible approach to sustainable business and clean technology has helped senior managers in a variety of companies and sectors create strategic roadmaps, make the business case, articulate a vision internally, form meaningful partnerships, and communicate with a broad range of stakeholders.

The Associated Press has called him ""The guru of green business practices.""

Joel is co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, Inc., which produces GreenBiz.com and its sister sites, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and GreenerComputing.com. He also serves as a senior strategist at GreenOrder, a sustainability consultancy, as well as co-founder and principal of Clean Edge Inc., a research and publishing firm focusing on building markets for clean energy technologies. From 1991 to 2005, Joel was editor and publisher of The Green Business Letter, an award-winning monthly newsletter he founded on corporate environmental strategy. In 2005, he was appointed a Batten Fellow at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia.

Joel has helped a wide range of companies improve their environmental strategy and communications -- including Clifbar, Gap, Hewlett Packard, Levi Strauss, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Stonyfield Farm -- as well as advising more than a dozen early-stage companies focusing on environmentally sustainable products and services.

A former nationally syndicated columnist, Joel is author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including ""Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World,"" about the profit and potential of socially responsible business practices; ""The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business,"" on how companies are responding to environmental challenges in positive and profitable ways, and ""The Green Consumer,"" a best-selling guide to the environmental marketplace.

In addition, he is author of an oral history of the Woodstock music festival, published in 1989, which Rolling Stone called ""the definitive history of the mega-event.""

Joel has been a featured commentator on environmental topics for public radio's ""Marketplace"" and appears frequently in both broadcast and print media. He serves as a board member or adviser to a range of for-profit and nonprofit organizations and lectures regularly to companies, industry groups, and business schools around the world."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Guru's insights provide best guide yet for green biz strategies, October 1, 2008

By 

E. Bruce Harrison "Author, Corporate Greening... (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business (Hardcover)

With more than a dozen previous books, including "The Green Consumer", already on corporate and small-business bookshelves, Joel Makower has become a master green business analyst. This book draws on his knowledge and analytical skills, with market research assist from Cara Pike, and his talent for clear writing to provide business executives a set of insights they need in planning green strategies.
Makower came onto the scene at about the same time that business was being shocked into dealing with stratospheric ozone damage from CFC emissions, and he has come to know the movers and shakers from all the communities engaged in greening over the years. This book looks forward, to show why corporate greening will endure (even if media's attention wanes), citing climate change as a major spur. He notes a parallel shift: the environmental movement morphing into the climate movement and business coping with carbon constraint linked to climate change.
Problems for greening companies include a lack of standards by which to judge "how good is good enough", leaving the bar free to drift higher; an escalating investor intensity for companies to acknowledge, reduce and report on environmental risks (which I would connect with corporate governance influenced by climate change activism); and the erosion of "sustainability" as a green leadership characteristic.
As he has done in his Greenbiz.com commentaries, Makower makes business choices easy to grasp. On energy use and climate change, he makes it simple: reduce the amount of energy used, buy more renewable-source energy, and remedy climate impact of even the renewables by moves such as carbon offsets.
Business opportunity -- starting with GE's "green is green" -- and communications are focused through the perspectives of context, relevance and good, plain talk. Easy to read, well organized, with nearly 40 short chapters, this is Makower's best book yet for corporate C-suite green strategists.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All substance, no filler., March 24, 2009

By 

Jeremiah P. Donohue (Jackson, Mississippii) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business (Hardcover)

Too often, I get the feeling that authors of books like these come up with a few ideas, write them on the back of an envelope, then figure out how to stretch their "3 principles to..." or "change the world by..." concept into a 240 page book. Joel Makower's book is the grand exception. It is brimming with substance, possibly weighing in at under 300 pages -of 100% post consumer recycled paper- merely to conserve.

I work as the sustainability coordinator for a clothing retail store (shopbop.com), and his book is fantastic. It's taken a very long time to read, because every page seems to be followed by 5-20 minutes of pondering and scribbling ideas down.

Makower got his start in the green boom of 89-90, and much of the book references this period for perspective on where we are today, and what we can expect in the future. In a world where 18 months experience makes you a Green Jobs Veteran, Joel Makower is the old sage on the mountain top.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want just one green business book..., December 1, 2008

By 

John Davies - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business (Hardcover)

If you want to understand the challenges facing companies trying to sort out what it means to be "green" as they attempt to make sense of the competitive threats and opportunities at the intersection of business and the environment, Joel Makower's "Strategies for the Green Economy" is the right place to start. In this highly readable and engaging book, Joel chooses to not push an agenda but instead to expose just how difficult it is for businesses to devise a green strategy and execute against it. Rather than stepping away from the challenges, the book provides a foundation from which every business can consider their strategy and what it would mean for them to be green. With a wide array of examples from diverse industries, there's something for everyone to take away. If you're looking for an effective way to start the green dialogue at your company, this is a great place to start.