Also, check out the manifesto Gary wrote for ChangeThis.

This past month we've been working on our yearly magazine, In the Books (our second edition is due out in January!). My research project was on sustainability and business and the business books written about that intersection. One of those books was Stirring it Up.

In the interview, GOOD asks Gary what's the holdup in companies pursuing sustainability? Gary answers that the selling point of sustainability is not "your company is better morally if it's sustainable"; rather it's, your company can be more profitable when it is sustainable. Morality doesn't sell. Increased profits does. As Gary tells it:

We need to shine a very bright light on the inherent un-profitability on depending on non-renewable fuels and conventional agribusiness. Waste is really too expensive now. The concept of waste doesn't even exist in nature. Nevertheless, we've allowed it because it's been cheap. The reality is that all businesses use non-renewable fuels, all businesses generate waste. But waste can be food; waste can be energy. It will have to be for us to have any hope for our children. The idea of waste is a flawed concept. We have to re-engineer our thinking.

In architecture, exists the study of biomimcry. The idea of copying various elements of nature to build stronger (and more varied) structures. Gaudi did this in Barcelona with many of his buildings, churches and parks. In business, understanding nature and copying its lessons is a good starting point to begin re-engineering our thinking about sustainability, as Gary suggests.

One of his many legacies is the New York-based Leader to Leader Institute, an organization that focuses on developing leadership in the social sector. The Institute has updated and reissued a book that was written for non-profits originally but works for any organization.

In the early 1990's, Drucker and the then Drucker Foundation published a self-assessment tool titled "The Five Most Important Questions". In writing why he created the tool, Drucker said:

Although I don't know a single for-profit business that is as well managed as a few nonprofits, the great majority of the nonprofits can be graded a "C" at best. Not for a lack of effort; most of them work very hard. But for lack of focus, and for lack of tool competence."

Let's not be fooled. Business needs plenty of help too.

Drucker's questions are simple, but as is always found in Drucker's writings, the simplicity is deceiving and the clarity of the questions forces you to reexamine your assumptions.

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer?
• What does the customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

The new book is titled The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization and the Leader to Leader Institute has enlisted some big names to expanded on Drucker's original message. Jim Collins, Phil Kotler, and Jim Kouzes along with Judith Rosen and Kasturi Rangan each provide an essay that follows one of five questions.

The book is a quick read; I was able to finish it during a flight back from the West Coast.

It's the answers to the questions that I am still working on.

Don't dismiss that premise as lofty and unrealistic, though. The success of sustainability efforts in this world depends on our adoption of idealistic standards and a vision for a healthier world. Ehrenfeld addresses the obstacles and problematic attitudes to this vision, and offers practical steps to adopting a sustainability mindset on both the personal and corporate levels. He suggests new, holistic approaches to sustainable design that won't act, as others have in the past, as Band-Aids. Instead, Ehrenfeld focuses on the routes we should take to ensure success.

Here is John Ehrenfeld on The Tao of Sustainability:

Flourishing can occur only if we pay close attention to the three critical domains that the forces of modernity have dimmed:

• Our sense of ourselves as human beings: the human domain.
• Our sense of our place in the [natural] world: the natural domain.
• Our sense of doing the right thing: the ethical domain.

And here are his suggestions about the Special Role of Business in becoming a sustainable society:

• Replace the rubric of sustainable development with that of sustainability as flourishing


• Stop publishing misleading advertisements hinting that ecoefficiency will solve the world's problems and save money at the same time


• Use the "Tao of Sustainability" as a strategic and operational template


• Create a culture of sustainability in the workplace


• Businesses should design their offerings to guide behavior toward ethical responsibility


• Social responsibility, like charity, begins at home.

You can read more about John and Sustainability by Design at: http://johnehrenfeld.com/index.html

Cool Idea of the Day: The Bicycle as Bookstore Sideline
Monkey See, Monkey Read, Northfield, Minn., which opened two years ago (Shelf Awareness, February 22, 2007), is now selling the Kona Africabike 2.0 in the store and online. In his blog, owner Jerry Bilek explains why he's stocking the $299 bike that he calls a "utilitarian riding machine. . . Single speed, coaster brake, chain guard, fenders, basket on the front, rack on the back, thornproof tubes, rear wheel lock."

He wrote: "I know, why would a bookstore sell bikes? It goes like this. Books and bikes are two things I enjoy the most. Okay, add beer to the list, but I don't have a liquor license. And ice cream, but no freezer. So I settled on bikes. Not just any bikes, one bike. The Kona Africabike."

Bilek added that a T-shirt phrase he summed up his views on the matter. It read: "Gas sucks ride a bike."

For every two bikes that Monkey See, Monkey Read sells, manufacturer Kona will donate one to a home health worker in Africa as part of the BikeTown Africa program.

I'm sure somewhere, there's a theory that, those who ride together, work well together. Or so holds true here.

We 8cr-ers have a bicycle gang. It's a group of us that rides together to and from company gatherings and homes and apartments. Dylan, Todd (our shipper) and I often traverse the Milwaukee streets in our pack of three on our ride home.

There's a list of reasons supporting why bicycling to work, well, works -- nice to the environment, heart-friendly, and easy on the budget. It's the beginning of taking up bicycling to work that can be a bit daunting. For various reasons.

If you're looking for advice on how to start, try Rory McMullan's Biking to Work guide. It's an 85-page introduction to the type of bicycle to choose, helpful accessories, and talking points for getting a bike rack at your office.

Good luck!

There is a widely held view out there that greening your lifestyle is an expensive and painful process. Bach deftly explodes this myth in 192 (recycled) pages. Early on in the book he revisits the Latte Factor concept, but tweaks it a bit and suggests we find our "Litter Factor."

I have long encouraged my readers to identify their Latte Factor and eliminate it to start saving money. But small changes such as not buying coffee in a disposable cup or water in a plastic bottle not only are good for your wallet, but they actually better the planet. In the same way that "little things" add up to drain your wealth, "small changes" add up to make a big difference for the Earth.

Consider this: Every year, Americans drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee. Of those, 14.4 billion are served in disposable paper cups, enough to wrap the Earth 55 times if placed end to end! Plus, those paper cups contain a plastic lining made from a petro-chemical that would produce enough energy to heat 8,300 homes a year.

He goes on to briefly discuss bottled water, referencing what I think was the best article published last year--Charles Fishman's Message in a Bottle. This is just a snippet of the first chapter, but it contains advice that, if taken, can lead to serious change... and save you money to boot. The rest of the book has equally clear and concise thinking and advice that ranges from how to save money by becoming energy smart, to shopping green, to going green at work. The steps to going green and energy-efficiency aren't necessarily going to be completely new to people, but Bach revealing how taking them is ultimately cost-efficient probably will be.

You'll be hearing much more from Bach on this issue. His first stop will be on the Today Show next Monday discussing seven green steps that can save you 3,000 dollars a year. The book itself will be hitting the shelves on Tuesday of next week, and I think you could consider it's $14.95 list price as an investment in the future of your finances, and maybe, even the future of planet as well.

Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work as founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit organization in Bangladesh. He launched Grameen 31 years ago to help poor people start businesses. Since then the microcredit movement has gone global, with copycat organizations springing up in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Now Yunus is back in the public eye with a concept he calls social business. This form of capitalism, he believes, can make progress against poverty in ways that governments and traditional charities have not done. He lays out the concept in his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. It's an inspiring volume, full of practical information for people who are motivated to try out his ideas.

Read the full review here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_10/b4074085355044.htm?chan=magazine+channel_opinion

What industry generates more than $1 trillion in revenues, is adding more jobs than any other sector, and is ranked #3 after retail and wholesale trade? Non-profits. The social sector is gaining momentum in its ability to serve communities and influence policy, and the time has come for business leaders to pay attention. Non-profits have been looking to business for better operating practices for some time, and now companies should be looking to their counterparts for equally new insights.

In Forces For Good, authors Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant report on their three-year study to find successful non-profits and pinpoint the practices that made them stand out from the 1.5 million other U.S.-based non-profits. The authors ignored traditional measures of success like overhead ratio or annual fundraising and instead looked for non-profits that "are driven to achieve broad social change... [and] have an unstoppable desire to create deep impact as well." Six practices emerged from the twelve case study organizations: advocate and serve, make markets work, inspire evangelists, nurture non-profit networks, master the art of adaptation, and share leadership.

In the world of non-profits, organizations tend to either provide services to a community (e.g., Red Cross) or propose policies to influence public debate (e.g., Brookings Institution, a D.C.-based public policy organization), matching a traditional view from business--offering either products or services. Providing both categories better serves customers and generates greater profits, but North-Carolina-based Self-Help has had greater impact learning from the constituents they serve and advocating legislation to further their cause. This non-profit started by providing mortgages to low-income families, and found through working with clients that over 10,000 families were losing their homes due to predatory lending practices. After successfully lobbying the state legislature, Self-Help established the Center for Responsible Lending, which conducts policy research and advocates for changes to state and federal lending laws. This effort has led to 22 states enacting anti-predatory lending laws.

Businesses can learn from both watching the social sector and working with it. The "advocate and serve" practice draws striking similarity to the philosophy John Bogle used in founding Vanguard with the lowest-cost indexed mutual funds in the industry, and then advocating that passionately customers purchase the product for their financial well-being. Danny Meyer's Union Square Ventures connected Share Our Strength with American Express as he looked to expand a "charge against hunger" campaign nationally. Forces for Good has the good ideas and inspirational lessons only non-profits can provide--and which the private sector can't afford to miss out on.

[Carlos] DANEL: If we think that capital markets are the devil, we're never going to solve poverty

[Maria] HINOJOSA: The entrepreneurs behind Compartamos will tell you that it's the lure of profits that will motivate people to lend to the poor.

DANEL: We have to stop looking at this as a zero-sum game and look at how we can bridge business and social objectives together in a successful way.

HINOJOSA: Simply put, the business objective is to make money. But how much profit is too much? That's the question being asked by the company's high profile critics, including Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who pioneered the idea of modern microcredit thirty years ago.

YUNUS: When you are maximizing your profit-you are not looking at whether the poor people are getting out of poverty. You are always looking at your bottom line, how much money we are making out of this business with the poor people

It seems to me that the big difference is in who owns the bank. Maria Hinojosa sums it up.

Muhammad Yunus' Grameen bank is also a for-profit business. But there's a big difference. Any profits there go directly back to the borrowers, who are also owners of the company. Not so at Compartamos. [...] Recently, microlending as an investment idea has gained a lot of momentum. A small but growing number of international banks and investment firms are realizing that microcredit can also be good business. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, TIAA-CREF all have backed multi-million dollar microcredit deals...

If done right, these banks could positively affect millions of lives. If you're interested in this topic, you can learn more about it, or watch Friday's program online, here. Other resources would be Yunus' own book, and for an economist's view on ending poverty, take a look at Jeffrey Sachs' aptly named and extremely popular book from 2005, The End of Poverty . Sachs also has another title being published by Penguin early next year called Common Wealth that looks like it should be fascinating.

The Indian government set up its own kind of new deal for their most disadvantaged citizens when they wrote their constitution back in 1950. The Dalit community, often referred to as the "untouchables", make up 16% of the Indian population, and after centuries of living at the bottom of a rigid caste system, the 1950 constitution offered many of them the prospect of a better life. As reported in Wednesday's WSJ, there is some controversy surrounding these policies today. Yaroslav Trofimov writes:

Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to [certain] benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. This provides the country's most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.
But there is a catch: Any Dalit abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villager's comings and goings.

[...]

Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India's society. "If they ever find out I'm a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it" says a Dalit school teacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyberabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Now what to do? The private sector isn't yet meeting all the needs of the disadvantaged in this situation, and the government has put restrictions on their programs to do so. This is when charities often enter the picture, but as Phil Smith and Eric Thurman note in A Billion Bootstraps, even "experienced philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates have complained that giving money away is often more difficult than making it in the first place." The authors call the U.S. non-profit sector a "$900 billion black hole" because there are few reliable statistics about it and it can be very difficult to know exactly what is being done with the money you contribute. This is not to suggest we shouldn't donate to charity, but Smith and Thurman's book offers both a humanitarian and entrepreneurial alternative by documenting the world of microfinance. Muhammad Yunus, who wrote the forward for this book and has written his own book on the topic, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his pioneering work in the field of microcredit. Realizing that the largest contributor to poverty is not lack of skill or ambition, but access to capital, those in the vanguard of this "barefoot banking" movement began making small loans to individuals mired in poverty with no access to traditional loans. One such example from the book:

In Tamil Nadu, the southern-most state in India, Shanti, a 28-year-old mother of two young sons, weaves delicate silk saris to sell in the neighborhood. Born into the extreme poverty rampant in this region, Shanti's weaving skills were hard won, and she has worked diligently since childhood just to survive. Though renowned for the quality of her saris, Shanti was earning only $2.60 per day, barely enough to allow her to care for her children. Desperate for the capital required to expand her business, she became indebted to a local loan shark who charged outrageous interest rates. Later, she learned about microcredit and took a loan for $60 that she invested in her business. Her income has since increased to more than $6 a day, and she is now free from crippling debt. Today, Shanti is able to focus on growing her business and creating a better life for her family.

If you get a chance, go back and revisit Jack's posts on Chasing Daylight.

If anyone is a big fan of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, I'm Proud of You: Life Lessons from my friend Fred Rogers by Tim Madigan has just been released in paperback.

A good friend, who coincidentally gave me my first copy of The Little Prince, handed me a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's book Peace is Every Step about ten years ago. She said that if it didn't lower my blood pressure I should seek professional help. I was very excited to see his latest book The Art of Power sitting on top of a pile of books in the office. Here is a little blurb from the back cover:

"Our society is founded on a very limited definition of power, namely wealth, professional success, fame, physical strength, military might, and political control. My friends, I suggest there is another kind of power, a greater power: the power to be happy right in the present moment......."

Wouldn't the environments we spend time in be more enjoyable with a stronger presence of the human value in them? I would like to think so.

Klein focuses on the hidden causes that are destroying workplace meritocracy (a system based on rewarding ability and talent). Giving Notice is "low on jargon and filled with common sense approaches to solve the current imbalance" of minorities and women in positions of leadership. This book is one of many we're seeing on the "international war for talent." It also fits nicely into a growing group of books on the current (and ineffective) career model. Using a combination of quantitative research and anecdotal evidence, Klein addresses nation-wide and world-wide biases, unconscious ideas about stereotypes and commonly accepteed business practices, and the economic, corporate, and human capitol costs of the brain drain. From the press release:

Corporate Leavers: What My Employer Could Have Done to Help Me Stay

This revealing survey is based on the Level Playing Field's exclusive Corporate Leaver's Study conducted in January 2007. LPFI began with 19,000 potential survey subjects to yield 1,700 professionals and managers who met our criteria and completed the survey.**

People of Color: Very likely to have stayed if employer had...

• 34 percent: Offered better management which recognized your abilities


• 30 percent: Offered schedule flexibility such as flex time, alternative working hours, or telecommuting


• 29 percent: Offered to pay you more fairly


• 29 percent: Offered a more positive work environment

Gays and Lesbians: Very likely to have stayed if employer had...

• 43 percent: Offered more or better benefits


• 41: Offered to pay you more fairly


• 35 percent: Offered schedule flexibility such as flex time, alternative working hours, or telecommuting

Caucasian Women: Very likely to have stayed if employer had...

• 24 percent: Offered to pay you more fairly


• 20 percent: Offered schedule flexibility such as flex time, alternative working hours, or telecommuting


• 20 percent: Offered more or better benefits

Caucasian Men: Very likely to have stayed if employer had...

• 28 percent: Offered to pay you more fairly


• 20: Offered more or better benefits


• 18 percent: Offered better management which recognized your abilities

The survey also included results that indicated which aspects of work life each group felt more strongly about than their colleagues. It's interesting to see that people value the same things, just in different orders and strengths. Some might say, "we already know this," or "this is intuitive," to which one might respond, "so what are you doing about it?"

**Level Playing Field Institute was founded by Dr. Freada Kapor Klein in 2001. The Institute promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and the workplace.

As we've learned over the past few weeks, not everyone shares this vision of how to promote their company. I'm speaking, of course, of John Mackey. The CEO of Whole Foods has been posting to yahoo! message boards under the pseudonym Rahodeb for the last 8 years promoting his own company and trashing its opponent, Wild Oats. The discovery of this comes at an especially bad time for the company, which is facing an antitrust suit from the FTC because of their planned acquisition of (who'd have guessed) Wild Oats!

It has been written about pretty widely in the blogosphere already, but yesterday's Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) by David Kesmodel and Jonathan Eig is the best I've read. It really dives into the history of the man and his character, along with that of the company he built, that has been lacking elsewhere. So, from the Journal...

"I'm going to destroy you," the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. shouted at Perry Odak, CEO of Wild Oats Markets Inc., the first time the two men met six years ago at a retailing conference in Manhattan, according to Mr. Odak.

Mr. Mackey fit in nicely among the health-food industry's scrappy entrepreneurs. He was a six-time college dropout, curly haired and casually dressed. He spoke passionately about food (the natural kind), politics (the libertarian kind) and capitalism (the aggressive kind). Colleagues who knew him as a young man say he was -- and remains today, at 53 -- a man of opposing characteristics: forthright and yet distant, compassionate and yet cutthroat, idealistic and yet capable of compromise.

And how is this very ugly situation playing out? So far, not very well.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mackey apologized and the Whole Foods board announced it will launch an internal investigation. The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the chief executive's posts to see if they violated the law. Mr. Mackey's online alter ego came to light in a court filing by the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a lawsuit last month seeking to block Whole Foods's planned purchase of Wild Oats on antitrust grounds.

A Whole Foods recently opened in Milwaukee, which caused me some concern for the natural foods co-op I used to work for. When I asked an old friend in their marketing department how they were reacting to it, she was unfazed. She tells me that they feel a Whole Foods in town will educate more consumers than it takes away from them, and that it will eventually create a larger overall market here. I think that may be true, and if so, I think it's remarkable.

I've always had a great amount of respect for the foresight Mr. Mackey has shown in building his natural foods empire. I appreciate the ways in which his company has established its credibility and reached out to the community to educate them about healthier foods. I do worry that this episode will damage some of that credibility.

Alan Murray released a book in May of this year entitled Revolt in the Boardroom about the recent wave of CEO firings and resignations. It includes stories of big hitters like Carly Fiorini and Michael Eisner, along with CEOs of companies such as Merck, Pfizer, Home Depot, & Fannie Mae. If things keep going the way they're going over at Whole Foods, Mr. Murray may have to get started on a revised edition that includes Mackey.

Postscript. The stories about himself aren't the only ones in which he comes off a bit abrasively this month (at least to me). By far my favorite article so far this month was Charles Fishman's piece on bottled water for Fast Company. Mackey was interviewed for the piece. The articles pretty long, so make sure you have some down time before starting it.

Jack and Todd are doing what Steve Harrison refers to as "decencies" in The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies. In describing his father's role as a psychiatrist, he says "My father's job was to listen--perhaps the ultimate decency of all." As most managers know, there are even more decencies a company can extend to its employees--small decencies like a coffee cart, a work-at-home day, introductions at meetings, and the freedom to choose projects that interest them. And then there are large decencies like company-wide mentoring programs, flexible schedules/shifts, defined employee rights, gestures of gratitude, and inviting employees to voice their opinions and concerns.

This book provides a list of these decencies, categorized under chapter titles like Consideration Decencies, Recognition Decencies, and Executive Humility Decencies, that can lead to workplaces where people are excited to come to work and happy to do their jobs. Harrison profiles a number of decency-extending companies like Lee Hecht Harrison, Disney, HP, Nabisco, Starbucks...the list goes on. Here's a brief excerpt on building great companies:

"Creating environments that employees describe as "a great place to work" and in which employees are free to speak their minds relies on the practice of decencies on a regular basis by everyone in the organization. It also takes leadership at the top to start the process, reinforce the efforts along the way, and communicate the long-term benefits of creating and sustaining an organization culture based on trust. These practices go beyond the leaders at the top to become common acts among people throughout the organization."

What I love about our workplace is our culture of extending decencies--of shutting up when someone's taking an important call, helping tip letters into a thousand books, toasting an important event in one of our lives, and taking the time to meet every two weeks and talk about the things we're working on. And the employee lunches haven't been half bad.

This movement, however, doesn't fit the standard model. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with. It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums--and yes, even fancy New York hotels. One of its distinctive features is that it is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up. Historically social movements have arisen primarily in response to injustice, inequities, and corruption. Those woes still remain legion, joined by a new condition that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/006964.html