AUTHOR:Chris Laszlo
PUBLISHER: Island Press
DATE: 2003
PAPER: Recycled fiber
PAGES: 215
PRICE: $26.00
Want your business to be around 50 or 100 years from now? The key,
according to Laszlo, is stakeholders. Sustainable companies generate
value for their stakeholders while companies doomed to be dinosaurs expose
theirs to risk. So who are these folks? They’re anyone who can help you
or hurt you. Be it employees, regulators, customers, suppliers, neighbors,
or nonprofits.
Laszlo argues, with case studies and statistics, that companies generating
stakeholder value do well by their stockholders too. And this is the crux of
the book--to be successful, sustainability efforts need to be born of self-interest.
So where do you start? By understanding where you’re at.
A benchmarking exercise is the first of eight steps on the stairway to
building responsibility into your business. All eight steps--or disciplines
as he calls them--are drawn from the author’s experience as a partner and
co-founder of the management consulting firm Sustainable Value Partners.
This is not a book of fluff or feel-good case studies. It’s a handbook
for organizational change. The instructions are specific, potential
pitfalls are highlighted, and the appendix provides a detailed discussion of
outside evaluation tools. If you’re seeking concrete guidelines for the launch
(or revamping) of a company-wide sustainability program, you’ll find it in this
practical, how-to manual.
--Avery Yale Kamila
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