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They urge united action to solve major ecological problems before solutions become impossible. The Earth faces grave sustainability problems, including global warming. getAbstract recommends this enlightened book's informed focus on exactly how to improve the sustainability of life on the planet. They even note that businesses can save and earn money through environmentally sound products and policies. In this new book, experts Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara Schley discuss how people, organizations and nations are coming together to bring about positive change. The authors demonstrate that sustainability issues are part of an interconnected global dilemma that affects everyone.
Almost. Cool organizational learning tools plus the Sustainable Value Framework. Building a business based on principles of sustainability is an ongoing process that depends on people, and on a particular set of people skills that are underdeveloped within most organizations today. The rest is to be filled in by you.working effectively with others.as you learn your way to your own unique solutions. This is all to the good, in my opinion, 'cause when it comes to steering companies in new directions, I've always found the "soft stuff" to be the most challenging. If you're in search of a formula for going green - a goofproof method for aligning business and environmental or social issues - your eyes'll likely light up when they reach this book's chapter on "Positioning for the Future and the Present." That's where the authors introduce the Sustainable Value Framework: a cool strategic planning tool that DuPont used to transform itself from "world's number one polluter" (in 1989) to number one on BusinessWeek's list of "The Top Green Companies" of 2005.
However, in the words of Harvard's Michael Porter (who has nothing directly to do with this book but who co-authored an article I recommend at the end): "Integrating business and social needs takes more than good intentions and strong leadership." To which I would add, it also takes more than the SVF. Is this the complete, can't-miss formula for success. Could your company use this SVF to accomplish something special, too. (One of my favorite parts of the book involves a made-up management team discussion that illustrates just how easily communications on the subject of going green can break down and stall).So. If that's your inclination, you'll find The Necessary Revolution both helpful and inspiring.*I also recommend you read Michael Porter's and Mark Kramer's article "Strategy & Society" (Harvard Business Review, December 2006). You might hope.
IT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE, I must say, that maybe forty percent of this book is about said skills and how they can be strengthened - based on the authors' work through the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and with "business and non-business organizations all over the world collaborating for systemic change around core challenges such as food and water, energy, and material waste and toxicity." Chapters 12 through 24, in fact, revolve around tools and methods that've been used by individuals and groups to successfully see systems; collaborate across boundaries, and; adopt more creative orientations.
Through boundary-spanning collaborations, these groups and individuals are developing breakthrough solutions that hold the promise and potential of creating a sustainable world for both the current generation and beyond. Robert Malthus' essay on the principles of population, which was published in 1798, was one of the first writings to study the sobering relationship between an increasing population and finite natural resources. That's a message Soundview supports in its endorsement of this book. Whether or not you believe the growing data surrounding global warming; deforestation; and fossil fuel depletion the panel of authors encourage us to believe in being good stewards of the earth. While the discussion has since expanded well beyond basic Malthusian concepts regarding food supply, the clarion call to action continues to sound regarding the need for all of us to collaborate toward a sustainable world - and companies around the world are heeding that call. The Necessary Revolution reveals how individuals at all levels of diverse organizations are exchanging the "sustainability status quo" for creative partnerships resulting in the betterment of business, community and the environment.
Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)2. Convening diversity of viewpoints2. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)2. Food & Water3.
It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works. No viable path neglects future generations2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GEI put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.+ Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.+ Other "big ideas" by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)PROBLEM STATEMENT:1. plus The Lessons of History which was written by Durant to accompany the 10-volume set)Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)The Knowledge ExecutiveThe Battle for the Soul of CapitalismHigh Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve ThemThe Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global NetworksOne from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic OrganizationThe Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and FreedomCollective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at PeaceI resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot.
Nurturing relationships over time and above moneyEXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:1. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be "the" reference work for the next seven years).Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. Waste is a cancer on the Earth6. Material Waste & ToxicityTHREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:1. Energy & Transportation2. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline4. At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for changeTHREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:1.
Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)3. Save dollars internally2. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:1. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy3. Sustainability as point of differentiation5. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)THREE GUIDING IDEAS:1. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot7.
Industrial system must operate in that context3. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.Following from my extensive notes:+ A handful of top global businesses "get it" and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.+ Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world "writing off" the one billion extreme poor) than any market "intelligence" firm.+ With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality "bubble," and the "real real" world bubble that is catching up with it. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:1. Non-renewable resources are finite.5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share6. Make dollars externally3.
Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of "toolbox" pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g.
That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.Other important books NOT mentioned by this book:The Story of Civilization by Will Durant with The Lessons of History (Complete in 10 Vols. Natural system encloses social and economic systems2.
Vivienne Cox of BP2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)3.
Provide customers with competitive value4. Regenerable resources have harvest limits4.
Institutions matter3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolationSIX BASIC IDEAS:1.
Forrester moved to the Sloan Management School and took his Systems Dynamic Theory with him. Causal loops are an incomplete and often inaccurate way to describe human and social systems since they imply a single connecting or steam of causes back to an original cause. It is still a part of the Sloan School and has been adopted by the SOL Sustainability Consortium unrevised from its computer science basis and applied directly to human systems. In open systems, the actions are independent of past action. The book includes many stories of what organizations and individuals are doing to try to be more proactive. The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and organizations are working together to create a Sustainable World. (TNR)Value of TNR: The theme of TNR is that we must shift beyond being reactive in our solutions approach, merely seizing short term solutions, and move to deep thinking to really make a difference. It is the right message but with insufficient thinking on the part of the authors on what it would really take to accomplish that deep thinking.
However, TNR is working with an approach to Systems Thinking based on the Study of machines and computers that originated at MIT with Jay Forrester in the Engineering and Cybernetic Systems School in the 1950s. Even Forrester said that feedback loops do not apply to open systems, which Living Systems are because feedback loops are based on repetitive behavior and refer back to actions of the past and control those directly for the future. Even though the authors open with the Einstein quote, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we create them," they fail to see that that is the mind that created the form of system thinking is still the one they are using for the most part. (see Principles of Systems, Jay Forrester, 1979) [.]. This comes from the way of thinking about Systems itself.The least encompassing type of Systems Thinking is what I call, Causal Systems Thinking or Cybernetic Systems Thinking because it is based in Cybernetic Studies and Science coming from Computer Science fields and Industrial Engineering applications to machinery based on non-living metaphors applied to Living Systems. They fall into the same trap they are critiquing, working in a problem-solving mode with humans doing less harm and letting nature restore itself, but with just a more sophisticated version than they challenge. One of the greatest shortfall of the book is the banalization of the term regenerative and equating it with renewable, as in renewable resources and restorative, as restoring a wetland to its original state--or letting nature do it. I strongly agree.
It is true that Systems Thinking is needed to get us past the current crisis but one based in and developed from understanding artificial intelligence in computers and the working of machinery is just as limited as the element Cartesian model that positioned us for the current challenge. As a result we have outsourced solutions by specialty, allow the problem creator to side step the deep dive to get to the underlying causes. The "Take, Make, Waste" mode of the last 60 years is no longer viable and some folks are digging deeper in their thinking and getting beyond symptom solutions. Shortfall: The authors point out that what got us into the mess we are in is working from a Cartesian view of reality that sees the world as things divided into parts and pieces that are not connected.
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