Sustainability Leadership

As CEOs and business leaders navigate a world of complex global challenges, sustainability is no longer optional but a business imperative. In this book, two sustainability leaders with decades of experience - Henrik Henriksson, CEO of Scania, and Elaine Weidman Grunewald, cofounder of the AI Sustainability Center and former chief sustainability and public affairs officer at Ericsson - offer a simple but powerful three-step model for leading an organization on a sustainability transformation journey that aims at big, audacious, world-changing goals.

The New Sustainability Advantage shows how the benefits of the "triple bottom line" can increase a typical company's profit by at least 51 to 81 percent within five years, depending on the company's size and industry sector, while avoiding risks that could jeopardize its financial wellbeing.

Caradonna's unique and concise history broadens our understanding of what "sustainability" means, revealing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that shapes everything from individual lifestyles, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy. For anyone seeking understand the history of those striving to make the world a better place to live, here's a place to start.

We are exhausted. There's so much to do, and way too much to buy. Whether it's through late night TV ads, social media, or other sources of influence, we seem to be addicted to buying and then storing things. Sometimes we consume with no regret and other times we realize that we're doing more harm than good to our wallets and our homes. It's a constant cycle - one that many are longing to break. Who wants their hard-earned money to go toward something that soon ends up in a landfill?

A circular economy is an economic system designed to save money, eliminate waste, and achieve deep sustainability. No-brainer, right? Circular Economy for Dummies explains why the old way of doing things (the take-make-waste model of a linear economy) is fast going the way of the dinosaurs, and it gets you ready to think circular. From business processes and material lifecycles to circular design in just about every industry, this book is a fascinating glimpse into the sustainable future we urgently need.

Drawing on interviews with 75 leaders in more than 40 multinational organizations and NGOs, the author explores how ecological worldviews are expressed in the context of global sustainability practice. By empirically grounding key theories from developmental psychology in sustainability leadership practice, the author encourages us to think about leadership in a different way.

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, 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. 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....

Leadership for Profitable Sustainability will change the ways leaders, managers, and others perceive and improve their communications to be more clear and efficient, and their behaviors to be more empathetic and irreproachable. It will maximize financial and psychic rewards for individuals and firms.

In The Peacemakers, author Bruce Jentleson shows how key figures in the previous century rewrote the zero-sum and transactional scripts they were handed and successfully prevented conflict, advanced human rights, and promoted global sustainability. Covering a broad range of historical examples, from Yitzhak Rabin's efforts for Arab-Israeli peace to Dag Hammarskjöld's effectiveness as secretary-general of the United Nations and Mahatma Gandhi's pioneering use of nonviolence as a political tool, Jentleson argues that individuals can shape policy.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects. 

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and business coach Jadah Sellner knows what it’s like to be burned out, in debt, and just barely holding on to a new business. In the process of launching and building multiple companies, she realized today’s aggressive 24/7 hustle culture wasn’t working for her—or for her clients. In She Builds, Sellner shares a new entrepreneurial model for women, centered on sustainable leadership—a practical framework they can use to create a business on their own terms, prioritize their well-being, and break free from the toxic culture that leads to burnout.

Most business leaders understand the power of a dynamic, positive culture - but almost every effort to change culture fails. Why? The approach is often all wrong. Rather than attempt to "transform" a new culture from the ground up, leaders need to instead spearhead a culture renovation. In Culture Renovation, Kevin Oakes provides tangible, tactical insights drawn from a robust data set and informed by CEOs and HR leaders at many of the world's top companies. 

The Responsible Business offers a new and strategic approach to doing business that holistically integrates responsibility into all aspects of an organization, allowing for returns at every level, business and social. This book goes beyond the often well-intentioned but limited attempts at sustainability to present a framework that allows organizations to bring responsibility into everything they do and reimagine success.

In The Creator Mindset, Bashan shows you how to use creativity as a decision-making tool and do so every bit as confidently as you use spreadsheets and data analysis.  

In Entrepreneurial Marketing: Beyond Professional Marketing, a renowned team of marketing leaders, including the "Father of Modern Marketing," professor Philip Kotler, delivers a groundbreaking and incisive redefinition of entrepreneurial marketing. In the book, some of the marketing sector's brightest minds explore the increasingly essential initiative to build new capabilities beyond the mainstream marketing approach that also consider the effect of digital connectivity on consumers and companies everywhere.

In Future Ready: Your Organization’s Guide to Rethinking Climate, Resilience, and Sustainability, a team of business leaders with deep expertise in engineering, planning, finance, project, program implementation and advisory consulting perspective delivers an essential guide for executives, managers, and other business and infrastructure organization leaders to set and implement a resilience, sustainability and ESG strategy in complex project and operating environments.

Andrew Liveris provides a new leadership paradigm for resilience and agility in a rapidly changing world. This book is a must-listen guide for leaders in various sectors who are keen on not only ensuring current success, but protecting the planet’s future for everyone. Liveris, who was recently chosen to lead the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Organizing Committee and is former Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company, presents a variety of powerful tools that will enable you to tackle any problem quickly and responsively.

A decade ago, no one would have guessed that GM would be the company poised to lead America into the future. At a time when business book listeners seem endlessly fascinated by soaring tech giants like Amazon and Netflix, and ill-fated startups like WeWork and Theranos, why is it important to put the spotlight back on 112-year-old GM? Because Charlie Wilson’s quip from 1952 is still true: What’s good for GM is still good for America, and vice versa

"Sustainable Sales & Leadership: The Nordic Way" delves deep into the hottest topic in today's business world: sustainability. But this book stands out from ordinary business and leadership books. It's a manifesto for the future, a guide that illuminates the Six Nordic Virtues driving sustainable success in sales and leadership.

How can organizations integrate sustainable design into their overarching operations and align it with profitability and corporate strategy? The Sustainability Scorecard is the first scientifically rooted, data-driven methodology for creating inherently sustainable and profitable products and processes. By redesigning with sustainability as a key design element, firms open themselves to unexpected solutions, leapfrog innovations, and sources of value that simply don’t occur when sustainability is leveraged purely as a risk-avoidance and compliance measure.