The Truth About Green Business [Paperback]

Gil Friend (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0789739402 | ISBN-13: 978-0789739407 | Edition: 1

Everything you need to know to green your business and grow your profit.

• The truth about what climate change means for your business

• The truth about running lean and green

• The truth about future proofing your business

 

Simply the best thinking

THE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

 

This book reveals 52 PROVEN GREEN STRATEGIES and bite-size, easy-to-use techniques that get results.

 

 “This little book is inspiring in its range and practicality—not just for CEOs, but for every member of the enterprise…an exceptionally useful guide for ‘going green’ at any scale of enterprise.”

CHIP CONLEY, CEO, Joie de Vivre Hospitality

 

“In a world where green business advice is rampant, this is the one resource you need: a field guide that combines insight and inspiration with a solid, actionable path forward.”

JOEL MAKOWER, Executive Editor, GreenBiz.com

 

Introduction     ix

Part I: The Truth About Green Business

TRUTH 1: What is a green business?      1

TRUTH 2: Why green your business?      5

TRUTH 3: How to approach greening your business     9

TRUTH 4: Why now?      13

TRUTH 5: Climate change and your business     17

Part II: The Truth About Green Strategy

TRUTH 6: Profit and purpose     23

TRUTH 7: How green is good enough?      27

TRUTH 8: Green regulations     31

Part III: The Truth About Green Operations

TRUTH 9: Secrets hiding in plain sight     35

TRUTH 10: Eco-efficiency: Good for business and the environment     39

TRUTH 11: Waste? Not! Eliminating non-product      43

TRUTH 12: EcoAudits can guide your course     47

TRUTH 13: Running lean and green     53

TRUTH 14: Carbon footprinting     57

TRUTH 15: Reducing your carbon footprint     63

Part IV: The Truth About Green Marketing

TRUTH 16: Green branding and messaging     67

TRUTH 17: Creating strong EcoLabels     71

TRUTH 18: Green marketing claims     77

TRUTH 19: Reaching conscious consumers     81

Part V: The Truth About Green Products and Services

TRUTH 20: What makes a product green?      85

TRUTH 21: Product take-back     89

TRUTH 22: Product to service     93

TRUTH 23: What makes a service green?      97

Part VI: The Truth About Green Design

TRUTH 24: Biomimicry–learning from life    

TRUTH 25: Reducing your product footprints     105

TRUTH 26: Cradle to cradle     109

TRUTH 27: Design with nature     113

TRUTH 28: Innovation is at the heart of greening     117

Part VII: The Truth About Green Procurement

TRUTH 29: Environmentally preferable purchasing     121

TRUTH 30: Supply chain management and partnerships     125

TRUTH 31: Supplier scorecards     129

TRUTH 32: Clearing the rising bar     133

Part VIII: The Truth About Green Buildings

TRUTH 33: LEED standards for green buildings     137

TRUTH 34: The cost of green building     141

TRUTH 35: Green buildings improve productivity     145

TRUTH 36: Integrative design for green building     149

Part IX: The Truth About Green IT

TRUTH 37: Computers and electronics     153

TRUTH 38: Creating more effi cient data centers     157

TRUTH 39: How IT can drive greening     161

Part X: The Truth About Green Management

TRUTH 40: Engaging employees     165

TRUTH 41: Engaging stakeholders     169

TRUTH 42: Keeping score     173

TRUTH 43: Employee incentives     177

TRUTH 44: Environmental management systems     181

Part XI: The Truth About Green Finance

TRUTH 45: Profit, value, and risk     185

TRUTH 46: Reality-based accounting     189

TRUTH 47: Investing in green and attracting green investment     193

TRUTH 48: Carbon trading and offsets     197

TRUTH 49: Fiduciary duty     201

Part XII: The Truth About Green Futures

TRUTH 50: Certainty in the face of uncertainty     207

TRUTH 51: Scenario planning     211

TRUTH 52: Future proofing     215

APPENDIX A: References     219

Acknowledgments     228

About the Author     229

 

Note: Appendix B is available online at no charge at www.informit.com/title/9780789739407.

APPENDIX B: Resources

 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gil Friend is founder, President, and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc. Natural Logic provides advisory services in strategy, implementation, and performance measurement that help companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the hearts of enterprise.

 

A systems ecologist and business strategist with nearly 40 years experience in business, communications, and environmental innovation, Friend combines broad business experience with unique content experience spanning strategy, systems ecology, economic development, management cybernetics, and public policy. Tomorrow magazine called him “One of the country’s leading environmental management consultants–a real expert who combines theoretical sophistication with hands-on, in-the-trenches know-how.” He is a founding board member of the Sustainable Business Alliance, Sustainable Berkeley, and the California Sustainable Business Council and serves on the executive board of OpenEco.org and the advisory boards of CleanFish, WattBot, Green World Campaign, and (past) San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Clean Tech Advisory Council. Friend served in the California Governor’s Office, developing early sustainability policies and programs, was a founding board member of Internet pioneer Institute for Global Communications, was founder and Executive Director of Foundation for the Arts of Peace, and was cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a leading urban ecology and economic development “think-and-do tank,” where he pioneered the current “green roof” trend more than 35 years ago.

 

Friend lectures widely on business strategy and sustainability policy and writes “The New Bottom Line” (www.natlogic.com/new-bottom-line) offering strategic perspectives on business and environment. He has contributed chapters to several books, including Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, Sustainable Enterprise Report, Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook, Sustainable Food Systems, and Stepping Stones, and is the author of the forthcoming book Profit on Purpose: Risk, Fiduciary Duty and the Laws of Nature. He holds an M.S. degree in systems ecology from Antioch University, has a black belt in Aikido, and is a seasoned practitioner of “The Natural Step” environmental management system.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

About this book—Green business, increasingly, is big business. Whether driven by market expectations, climate change, shifting regulations, or simply a commitment to do the right thing, green business has moved rapidly from the periphery to the mainstream and holds promise for businesses of every size in every sector.

Green isn’t just about environment. It also represents a way of seeing your business, and the challenges it faces, through a new lens—a lens that can bring both risks and opportunities into focus.

The promise plays out at the micro scale—the individual enterprise—in direct opportunities to put money in the pockets of owners, shareholders, and employees by cutting wasteful spending on excessive resource use.

And it plays out at the macro scale—national, regional, and municipal economies—with impacts on jobs, economic development, balance of payments, and quality of life. And—just maybe—it’s the engine to power us out of our current financial crises by investing in a new energy economy and clean new infrastructure.

This is not a book about treehuggers’ rhapsodic dreams (not that there’s anything wrong with dreams) but about the hard-nosed realities of business—and about the innovative new course being set by some of the world’s best companies, large and small.

It offers a distillation of my nearly 40 years of experience, in business, government, and the civic sector, bridging the commonly assumed but ultimately false conflicts between business and environment. And it builds on lessons learned over ten years as founder and CEO of Natural Logic, a strategy consultancy that has had the honor to work with clients as diverse as Hewlett-Packard and Odwalla, Conair and Levi Straus & Co., and the city of Berkeley and the World Bank to apply these ideas in the laboratory of the real world.

The Truth About Green Business is designed to help you tackle these grand ideas in simple, practical, profitable, bite-sized chunks. It’s intentionally brief, focused, and straightforward, and not encyclopedic (though I refer you to some books that are encyclopedic in the “Resources” appendix).

This book is organized into 12 sections (plus appendices available for free download at http://www.informit.com/title/9780789739407) that summarize the major themes you need to understand to get your business on this new road. These sections include 52 bite-sized Truths that give you practical steps to take and key questions to explore to put these ideas into practice. Profitably.

How to use this book—The Truth About Green Business is modular and flexible. Feel free to read it cover to cover or to skip around based on what interests you; you’ll notice recurring themes and lots of inter-related material.

This book is not only short, it’s also inevitably incomplete. Green business is a rapidly changing field, one in which the best technologies and techniques are evolving daily, so no book on the subject can stay completely up to date for long. It was up to date at the time I wrote it and won’t be by the time you read it.

I’ve done three things to address that:

1. I back up the “how to” specifics with timeless grounding principles that can help you think wisely to apply these Truths in inevitably changing situations.
2. I provide a “Resources” appendix with references to key books that can take you deeper and links to some of the Web sites that I use to stay on top of this field. You can find it online at http://www.informit.com/title/9780789739407.
3. I invite you to visit me online at http://www.natlogic.com/truth and my blog http://blogs.natlogic.com/friend/ and Tweetstream http://www.twitter.com/gfriend. You can sign up for seminars and online webinars that take you deeper; participate in discussions with me, my team, and other readers dealing with challenges similar to yours; and find out how Natural Logic can support you—with advisory services, education, coaching, and tools—on your path to becoming a greener, more profitable, and more satisfying business.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: FT Press; 1 edition (June 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789739402
• ISBN-13: 978-0789739407
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #477,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gil Friend is founder, president & CEO of Natural Logic Inc, providing advisory services in strategy, design, operations and information systems that help clients build economic advantage through exceptional environmental performance.

Clients have included Arizona Public Service, Auberge Resorts, Agilent Technologies, the California Department of General Services, Coca Cola, Dean Foods, Ex'pression Center for New Media, Equal Exchange, General Mills, Gilead Sciences, Granite Construction, Green Mountain Energy, Hewlett Packard, Levi Straus & Co, Nike, Odwalla, Pacific Gas & Electric, Sun Microsystems, the US General Services Administration and many others.

A systems ecologist and business strategist with nearly 40 years experience in business, communications, and environmental innovation, Friend combines broad business experience with unique content experience spanning strategy, systems ecology, economic development, management cybernetics, and public policy. Tomorrow magazine called him "One of the country's leading environmental management consultants--a real expert who combines theoretical sophistication with hands-on, in-the-trenches know-how."

He is a founding board member of the Sustainable Business Alliance, Sustainable Berkeley, and the California Sustainable Business Council and serves on the executive board of OpenEco.org and the advisory boards of CleanFish, WattBot, Green World Campaign, and (past) San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's Clean Tech Advisory Council. Friend served in the California Governor's Of???ce, developing early sustainability policies and programs. He was a founding board member of Internet pioneer Institute for Global Communications, founder and Executive Director of Foundation for the Arts of Peace, and cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a leading urban ecology and economic development "think-and-do tank," where he pioneered the current "green roof" trend more than 35 years ago.

Friend lectures widely on business strategy and sustainability issues and writes The New Bottom Line, offering strategic perspectives on business and environment. He was coauthor of Biofuels Development and Soil Productivity (1982), has contributed chapters to several books, including Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century, Sustainable Enterprise Report, Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook, Sustainable Food Systems, and Stepping Stones, and is the author of The Truth About Green Business (FT Press) and the forthcoming book Pro???t on Purpose: Risk, Fiduciary Duty and the Laws of Nature.

He holds an M.S. degree in systems ecology from Antioch University, has a black belt in Aikido, and is a seasoned practitioner of "The Natural Step" environmental management system.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for everyone., July 1, 2009

By 

Jason Mcvay (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Truth About Green Business (Paperback)

The truth about this book is that it's written for everyone interested in a sustainable future. What I appreciate most is that it provides me with a quick overview of so many topics. While intended as a field guide for business leaders and their employees, it should work equally well as a career and educational guide for students.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sustainability A...to...Z, July 27, 2009

By 

Grant Ricketts "Software executive" (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Truth About Green Business (Paperback)

Mr. Friend provides a very compelling compendium of sustainability insights, any one of which is interesting and something to learn more about, and any sequence of which can become a blueprint for a company sustainability strategy and path to triple bottom line success. Collectively, he provides a road map that will help one begin to look at their business in new ways. He's obviously been doing this for awhile, putting a lot of thought and experience into it. So, it's much easier for us to get a lot of value back. Should be on the reading short list for any business manager or executive. Nicely done!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is one Big Gold Nugget, February 17, 2011

By 

Frank Roettgers "Author of Going Green Together" (Frankfurt, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Truth About Green Business (Paperback)

"The Truth About Green Business" is my favorite underdog when it comes to helpful advices on how to green your business! Although this book does not get the same attention in the media as e.g. Green to Gold by Esty and Winston, it should!

Almost every page is packed with advices from Friend's personal experiences which can be put into practice instantly. I found myself nodding a lot while reading the book. Covering most of the cornerstones of every business, Gil Friend gives plausible ideas about how to make businesses greener.

Unlike other books, this one is concerned about greening businesses not only from the outside but living up to it from the inside as well. Realizing that sustainable green businesses are only possible if the foundation within the organization is solid green as well, Gil Friend provides tips how to create such a foundation. One can literally read Gil Friend's personal interest in environmentalism between the lines, which made it a nice read. This book should be on everyone's shelf who is interested in greening businesses. 5 stars for this gold nugget.

- Frank Roettgers, author of Going Green Together - How to Align Employees with Green Strategies