Now, in the most inspiring business book of our time, Anderson leads the way forward and challenges all of industry to share that goal. The interface story is a compelling one: In 1994, making carpets was a toxic, petroleum-based process, releasing immense amounts of air and water pollution and creating tons of waste.
In 1994, interface founder and chairman ray Anderson set an audacious goal for his commercial carpet company: to take nothing from the earth that can't be replaced by the earth.
Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
Ever the pragmatist, ever the optimist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity when we shore up the countervailing power of everyone else. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of economics and politics than Robert B. He shows that the critical choices ahead are not about the size of government but about who government is for: that we must choose not between a free market and “big” government but between a market organized for broadly based prosperity and one designed to deliver the most gains to the top.
He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the “free market” is, and how it has masked the power of moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. From the author of aftershock and the work of nations, his most important book to date—a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make America so strong is now failing us, and what it will take to fix it.
Reich, a shrinking middle class, and now he reveals how power and influence have created a new American oligarchy, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. Passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, Saving Capitalism is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.
From the Hardcover edition.
Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It
But we are not as ethical as we think we are. Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis.
From the collapse of enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, the downfall of Bernard Madoff, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be.
They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. In blind spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to.
The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, Blind Spots shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives.
The Measure of America: American Human Development Report, 2008-2009 A Columbia / SSRC Book
It introduces the american human development Index, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, and ethnicity.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Arlie hochschild, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, a Tea Party stronghold. As jedediah purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives.
Reveal a gulf between hochchild’s ‘strangers in their own land’ and a new elite. Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called “humble and important” by David Brooks and “masterly” by Atul Gawande, Hochschild’s book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.
The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers’ group guide at the back of the book.
Design For Society
Nigel whiteley analyses design's role and status today, and discusses what our obsession with it tells us about our own culture. Design for society is not an anti-design book; rather, it is an anti-consumerist-design book, in that it reveals what most people would agree are the socially and ecologically unsound values and unsatisfactory implications on which the system of consumerist design is constructed.
. In so doing, it prepares the ground for a more responsible and just type of design.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Elaborating their principles from experience redesigning everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, William McDonough and Michael Braungart make an exciting and viable case for change. But as this provocative, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, much of it toxic.
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism"Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses as most "recyclables" now are.
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The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation
They use enormous amounts of energy to heat raw material, strength, shape it with heavy machinery, and maintain its design, and durability with toxic chemicals. Biomimicry, the science of employing nature to advance sustainable technology, is arguably one of the hottest new business concepts. He shows business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs how we can reconcile creating more powerful, lucrative technologies with maximizing sustainability.
. At the center of this growing movement has been award-winning inventor and biomimetic entrepreneur Jay Harman. In the shark's paintbrush, harman introduces us to pioneering engineers in a wide array of businesses who are uncovering and copying nature’s hidden marvels.
Hegarty on Creativity: There Are No Rules
. A look into what lies behind creativity from one of the advertising industry's leading playersCreativity isn’t an occupation; it’s a preoccupation. Over fifty entries, ” “get angry, ” “respect don’t revere, sustain, including “Good is the Enemy of Great, ” and “Bad Weather” relay useful and generous advice on how best to improve, and nurture creativity in any profession.
Here, challenging, aimed at provoking, the world-famous advertising creative John Hegarty offers a pocket bible of creative thinking, and inspiring greater heights of innovation. From renaissance art to rock ‘n’ roll, Hegarty takes a wide-angle view of creativity as he sets out to demystify the many ups-and-downs that can arise during the creative process.
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Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist: How a CEO Doubled Earnings , Inspired Employees and Created Innovation from One Simple Idea
Ray anderson is featured in the film, so smart, so Right, which takes a behind-the-scenes look at how his leadership transformed Interface into a company with a sustainable business practices that made it more profitable than it was before. Fifteen years after anderson's call for change, interface has: —cut greenhouse gas emissions by 82%—cut fossil fuel consumption by 60%—cut waste by 66%—cut water use by 75%—invented and patented new machines, materials, and manufacturing processes—increased sales by 66%, and raised profit margins With practical ideas and measurable outcomes that every business can use, doubled earnings, Anderson shows that profit and sustainability are not mutually exclusive; businesses can improve their bottom lines and do right by the earth.
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Thinking in Systems: A Primer
. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, to stay humble, not just what is quantifiable, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, and interdependent, crowded, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.
In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global.
Donella meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. Edited by the sustainability institute’s diana wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.
Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures.