In business, and in life, we’d like to believe that good behavior will be rewarded. Most books on management talk about treating people with respect, or being firm but not harsh, or being generous about sharing credit. What goes around comes around, right? Right.

So what are we to make of Steve Jobs?

Walter Isaacson

I’ve just read Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s riveting biography of the Apple founder and CEO. It’s a terrific book, but an unnerving one–because Jobs was successful despite some sneaky dealings, despite his utter lack of interest in corporate social responsibility, at least as it is conventionally defined, and despite treating people in ways that violate most everything that’s taught at business schools, or, for that matter, in kindergarten.

He could be cold, unpleasant, petulant, arrogant, abusive and self-absorbed. What’s more, this dark side of Jobs seems to be  intertwined with his brilliant and obsessive devotion to making great products at Apple. A “demented genius,” one reviewer called him. Having said that, Jobs could also be sweet, vulnerable, boyish, charming and endearing–when he chose to be.

It’s hard to overstate what Jobs accomplished in his 56 years. No, he didn’t cure cancer or alleviate global poverty but he remade a half dozen industries, all with panache: personal computers, music, animated movies (with Pixar), phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. My life is richer, more fun and more productive because of Jobs. I’m writing this on a MacBook, and I own an iPhone4s, an iPad, and a bunch of iPods. I’ve run hundreds of miles with my Nano, loaded with podcasts or music from iTunes, and  I’ve spent, conservatively, close to $10,000 on Apple products for myself, my wife and daughters.

Then again, there’s this…a story about how Jobs, on a trip to New York, gets into a battle at 10 ‘clock at night with a PR woman named Andy Cunningham over what kinds of flowers need to be  in his hotel suite for interviews the next morning. Somehow, she finds the calla lilies he wants, and then:

By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.

“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it is to be me.”

Clearly, Jobs was tormented at times. A former girlfriend, who felt enough fondness for Jobs that she supported him during his battle with cancer, nevertheless tells Isaacson: “I realized that expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see…I think the issue is empathy–the capacity for empathy is lacking.” He could be unkind to anyone–CEOs of other companies, his Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, waiters, hospital nurses.

He was by no means a paragon of  business ethics and  corporate responsibility, Jobs backdated stock options at Apple and Pixar, lied to shareholders about his health, showed no interest in philanthropy (not even matching employee gifts) and brushed off questions about labor rights in China or the environmental impact of Apple’s supply chain, or its products. Other computer makers touted “product design for the environment,” but for Jobs design was all about the user.

So how did he accomplish so much? More specifically, how did he attract legions of great employees who under his leadership accomplished so much? Why did so many people put up with him?

It’s hard for me to understand why Jobs inspired loyalty, but he did. Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive, marketing chief Phil Schiller and current CEO Tim Cook spent a decade or more working closely with him, as did many others. Maybe they understood that his brutal honesty was part of what made the company great. Maybe his passion for excellence led them to put up with his tantrums. Maybe they saw him as a tormented soul, and forgave him his outbursts. Maybe Apple was just the coolest place to work.

Isaacson’s book–read it, really–ends with Jobs talking about his legacy in his own words. They offer clues to his success:

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation.

It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, you gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

Yes! So many business executives miss this–profits are not why companies exist, they are the fuel that companies need to accomplish their purpose, which is to solve people’s problems.

Also:

You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

Jobs, is another words, was not just a great product guy. He thought deeply about the purpose of business, and his own purpose. This–despite his flaws–helps explain why his work mattered.

The breakthrough energy innovation of the 21st century is not thin-film solar, sophisticated wind turbines, advanced biofuels or small-scale nukes.

It’s shale gas.

So says Daniel Yergin, the energy guru and author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, $35), who was interviewed today (Nov. by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Washington. Yergin, the best-selling author, consultant and all-around energy guru, is right: The ability to extract natural gas from shale, using a controversial technique known as fracking, is reshaping America’s energy landscape.

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” Yergin said. He likened its impact on the energy business to the arrival of a new Walmart in town, which shakes up competitors, big and small.

The impact of cheap, abundant natural gas on energy usage has enormous implications for the climate crisis.

Cleaner-burning gas could replace dirty coal as a fuel to generate electricity. Then again, Yergin said: “It’s does create a more challenging marketplace for wind and solar and everything else.”

Daniel Yergin

I’ve just started reading Yergin’s book, and it’s fascinating. He knows his stuff, did lots of research and writes well,  although it must be said that he’s an establishment figure who some critics (like David Roberts of Grist) say is too industry-friendly.

Be that as it may, there’s no doubt that shale gas is a forced to be reckoned with: Shale gas production grew by 17 percent from 2000 to 2006, which isn’t bad, and then it really took off. Better fracking technology (and higher prices) drove the average annual growth rates to 48% between 2006 and 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Currently, the EIA says, about 23% of U.S. electricity is generated by burning natural gas; by comparison, about 45% comes from coal and just 3.6% comes from all non-hydropower renewables, i.e., wind, solar, geothermal and waste. The U.S. now appears to have a 100-year supply of natural gas, says the American Petroleum Institute, citing the work of the Potential Gas Committee, a nonprofit group of industry experts.

“In the energy sector, it all comes down to scale,” Yergin said.

Yergin views the shale gas revolution as a boon. “This resource will grow and be very beneficial to our economy,” he said, because it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, across many regions. Shale gas is found in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as in Louisiana, Texas and Wyoming. Petrochemical plants that left the U.S. when natural gas prices spiked could return. Consumers should benefit from lower electricity and heating costs.

He’s confident that the environmental issues around fracking can be resolved. Yergin, who served on an energy department advisory committee on shale gas, said: “The likelihood that fracking is going to affect the water supply is, as the scientists on the committee said, very, very, very unlikely.” Local air pollution and waste issues can also be managed, he said. “The need for environmental protection can be met if approached properly,” Yergin told a congressional hearing last month. This matches what I’ve been hearing from companies like Shell.

Yergin does not disparage cleaner forms of energy. Costs of solar are coming down because of low-cost manufacturing in China. Wind, he said, is entering the mainstream. “It’s a conventional form of energy,” he said. Can wind compete with coal or natural gas without subsidies, he was asked. “There’s a lot of argument about that.”

I asked Yergin whether he thought some combination of technological breakthroughs and political developments could bring down greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, which is what scientists say needs to happen to avert climate instability. He replied that regulations such as California’s renewable portfolio standard, which requires that 33% of the state’s energy be provided by renewables by 2020, and the Obama administration’s automobile fuel efficiency standards, which require cars to average 54 MPG by 2025, will have a major impact.

But, he said, such regulations are “a second-best answer.” A price on carbon would be better, giving a clear signal to consumers and spurring the most cost-efficient low-carbon alternatives.

“Wouldn’t the simplest answer to be to put a tax on carbon?” Isaacson asked.

“After seeing what happened with cap and trade, I think the answer is yes,” Yergin replied.

But, he added, “there’s not a big taste right now for raising taxes.” Climate could get back on the political agenda if the economy improves.

But climate is a global problem, and even if the U.S. moves to a low-carbon economy, China and India will continue to burn fossil fuels. “Twenty years from now, on a global basis, our energy mix won’t look too different than it does today,” Yergin said.

If he’s right about that. we’re all in big trouble.

Fortunately, as the saying goes, predictions are hard…especially about the future.

I’m a lover of books and I’m guessing you are, too.

So you know that books can lead you to think differently about life, perhaps improve your life, maybe even change your life.

Today, I’m writing about a book that will quite literally save lives. Indeed, that’s why it was created.

The book is called End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life. It’s the brainchild of a writer and editor named Michael Bungay Stanier, and you can buy it here. End Malaria is published by The Domino Project, a Seth Godin book publishing venture with which I am loosely affiliated.*

End Malaria  is a collection of 62 essays–some inspirational, others practical–from a wide range of business thinkers and doers. They include personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey, productivity guru David Allen, Premal Shah of Kiva [See my blogpost, Kiva: pushing the envelope on green),  wine guy and social-media maven Gary Vaynerchuk, Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly, pursuer of excellence Tom Peters, and authors Patrick Lencioni, Dan Pink and Tony Schwartz. An impressive group, to be sure.

Like most compilations, this one is a mixed bag. There's a bit too much breahtless inspiration for me, but I'm someone for whom a little inspiration goes a long way. Dream big dreams! Pursue your passion! Believe in yourself! Speak out! Just do it! (Some of the contributors might want to think about switching to decaf.) Having said that, even as someone who's not a bigtime reader of self-help writing or business advice, I found lots to value here--ideas that were worth well more than the $20 price tag of the Kindle edition or $25 cost of the paperback.

A few of my favorite nuggets:

To tackle something most productively, you must begin in clear space. Physically, you need all your tools in order, plus an open table for spreading your raw elements and assembling structures. Psychically, you meed an empty head, clear of distractions and unfinished business, holding your attention hostage. - David Allen, The Strategic Value of Clear Space

Researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity--people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. - Jonah Lehrer, Don't Pay Attention

There are countless hours scheduled for operations, sales, reporting, finance, efficiency gains and human resources--yet very few people actually schedule time to think, create and invent. -- Josh Linkner, What's Your Idea Schedule?

There's a major cultural shift happening. Because people are more connected than ever on the Web, we're going back in time and living under small-town rules....This is a monumental shift--we're now in a marketplace where every whisper about your business gets heard. - Gary Vaynerchuk, The Best Marketing Strategy Ever

These are just my own favorites; you'll discover others. The real genius of this book is the generosity behind it, and a business model that delivers the overwhelming majority of the revenues--that's revenues, not profits-- to charity.

Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier, the editor, says $20 from every sale will go to Malaria No More. ** That’s 100% of the Kindle price, and 80% of the print copy. (The remaining $5 covers production costs.) All the writers wrote for free, to their credit. The Domino Project isn’t taking any money from sales, either. Michael isn’t taking any money, and Amazon is a supporter, too, which is one reason why End Malaria is only available through Amazon.

“It’s an amazing business model,” Michael said, on a call yesterday, one that couldn’t have been arranged with a conventional publisher. He took on the job without pay, he explained, in order to live up to the message of his last book, which was called Do More Great Work.

Michael has also raised about $100,000 from corporate sponsors, including Ashley Sleep and HubSpot, all of which goes directly to Malaria No More. Media sponsors ranging from Huffington Post to The Onion have agreed to promote the book. So have the authors.

Very cool.

* I don’t get paid to be park of what The Domino Project calls its “street team.” The publisher sends me a free book, and when I am so inclined, as I was here, I help spread the word about the books.

** Another member of The Domino Project “street team” checked out Malaria No More on www.givewell.org, a website that assesses charities, and they are not rated. I emailed them and they told me that 84.7% of the money they raise actually goes to fighting malaria. That satisfies me.

Maybe it’s time t0 do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we’re at it, let’s think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company’s core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

I’ve been thinking about CSR and how to talk about it for years.  I wrote my first article on corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003. It ran under an odd headline — Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers and Profits — because my editors knew that  words like corporate social responsibility turn off readers. I grappled with the meaning and terminology of CSR again in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune, which explored connections between religion, faith, values, spirituality and business. The language of faith and values, I subsequently decided, wasn’t the best one to use when speaking to corporate executives about business and its impact. I’m now inclined to talk about sustainability. For all its vagueness, corporate sustainability is an idea that is both practical–no one wants to kill their company–and radical, because no company  is truly sustainable, at least as defined by the Bruntland Commission as promoting development in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

But the here goes beyond language. I was reminded of that when reading an excellent new book by Carol Sanford called The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). No, I don’t love the title or even her terminology. (One chapter is  called, yikes, “Stakeholders as Systemic Collaborators.”) But Carol’s arguments and insights (and the title wasn’t her idea) are spot on. Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that “practice CSR” but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do.

As Carol writes:

Responsibility isn’t a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in its practices.

This may sound obvious but it leads her (and her readers) to new ways of thinking about business. Businesses, she says, should strive not just to minimize the harm they do, but to do good, to become restorative, to “improve and evolve healthy systems.” She explains:

Ecological and biological systems not only adapt to their surroundings, they also transform them. They create contexts in which increasingly sophisticated networks of relationships emerge…

Corporations, and the businesses within them, work more or less the same way. If they are to live and prosper, they find ways to remain connected to their origins while cultivating and then adapting to changes in the world around them. Their long-term viability has as much to do with how well they create networks of relationships [emphasis added] with consumers and other companies and industries that advance the health of all.

Yes! Here’s how I think about this:

The old/traditional/assembly-line way of doing business was fundamentally transactional. Business was seen as a set of discrete win-lose transactions with customers, employees and suppliers. Companies created value by paying their employees as little as possible, paying their suppliers as little as possible, charging their customers as much as possible and externalizing their costs.

The new/progressive/responsible/sustainable business is fundamentally about relationships. This company sees itself as the center of a network of long-term, win-win relationships with workers, customers, suppliers and communities. The company’s value lies in its ability to strengthen and enhance all of those relationships.

This new way of thinking and behaving can’t be left to the CSR department, the chief sustainability officer or anyone else. It’s the job of the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the CMO, the head of sales, the factory foreman, product designers, everyone.

With a focus on CSR, “you get officers, you get programs, you get incentives,” Carol told me when we spoke by phone. “If you are given a target that you are to achieve, people focus on the target and the processes.” Instead, people need to feel free to express their highest values and beliefs at work. “Humans are most alive, and most creative and innovative when something comes out of them as a person,” she says. A company should be “more like a jazz quartet and less like a conducted symphony.”

Nor does “embedding sustainability” into the business do the trick, Carol told me. Sustainability to what end? Recently,  I had an opportunity to give a paid speech about sustainability to suppliers of a big tobacco company. Uh, no.

Carol has corporate experience to back up her thinking. She’s been a business consultant since 1980, working for such companies as DuPont, Colgate, Seventh Generation and several units of  Clorox, including Kingford Charcoal and Britta.

She tells revealing stories in the book.

A Kingsford Charcoal executive leads a transformation of the company by developing the skills of the company’s workers and encouraging them to think like business owners; he dissolved departmental boundaries, invited everyone to put themselves in the shoes of a customer, and to see the contribution that their work makes to other people’s lives.  He helped them connect their work to a bigger purpose.

In South Africa during the turbulent 1990s, a Colgate leader shook up the workforce by persuading whites to work for blacks, and getting everyone to come together to address issues in both the business and the community.

At DuPont, a middle manager looking for an alternative to Freon, which was contributing to ozone destruction, gets help from throughout the company, from customers and, unexpectedly, from Greenpeace.

None of that could have been accomplished by a CSR executive or department–or any department. “The biggest challenge for a company that aspires to be a responsibility business,” Carol says, “is to stop working on parts and start recognizing and working on whole systems.”

CSR “can’t be bolted on but must be built in,” she says.

Business is too important to be left to CSR departments. It’s also too important to be left to business alone.

Pressures on business to become life-enhancing must come from without as well as from within–from customers, from rank-and-file workers, from engaged shareholders, from activist groups and, gently, from governments. If we find ways to hold businesses accountable for what they do, smart businesses will adapt and meet our rising expectations. Others will die.

It’s not a lot more complicated than that.

Business managers should focus on generating long-term value for their shareholders.

They should lead their companies in ways that enable human flourishing.

That’s the purpose of business in a phrase, a wise man once told me, and he wasn’t a CSR officer.

As Carol writes: “I can hardly wait for the corporate responsibility movement to run its course so that businesses can get back to being responsible by nature.”

Me, too.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven’t read Ralph Waldo Emerson since college, but recently had the occasion to revisit Self Reliance.

It’s wonderful, readable, short (88 pages), very contemporary and, of course, quotable.

To wit:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Or, famously:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

And

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Relevant, no? And relevant, I think, to the theme of this blog, which is how all of us can harness the power of business to solve the world’s most important problems.

Since reading the book again, I’ve done just a bit of (Internet) reading about Emerson. His idea of self reliance, as best as I can tell, is not an argument that every man must always fend for himself. This is from a Unitarian Univeralist website on Emerson, who as a young man was a Unitarian minister:

He said in an 1854 address on anti-slavery, “Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is self-reliance on God.” He preached the God within, not the God of authority and tradition. He many times indicated that we know God first and mainly through the moral law within

I’m calling your attention to the book because I am very loosely affiliated with a publishing venture called The Domino Project which is exploring new models in book publishing. It has re-issued Self Reliance with a bit of contemporary commentary.

Some good news: Today (Wednesday, May 25) and tomorrow, the Kindle version of the book (which can can read on a PC, smartphone, iPad, etc.) is free, albeit with a caveat. It is sponsored by a progressive outerwear company called Ibex, so it comes with a couple of ads–one at the beginning, one at the end, less obtrusive in my view than the underwriting announcements we’ve all become used to on PBS and NPR.

You can download the book here. Give it a few quiet minutes–you won’t regret it.

Thanks for your emails and comments to my post last week, Best books in corporate sustainability? Not surprisingly, there was no consensus on what books are best–probably 200 books in were recommended–although many, many people suggested the writings of Paul Hawken and Bill McDonough. I don’t want to overwhelm you by listing all of the books that were recommended by email,  but here are some of my favorites as well as a few selections from last week’s comments, which can be found here.

From sustainability consultant Gil Friend, the ceo of Natural Logic:

My current picks:
> New: Climate Capitalism, Hunter Lovins & Boyd Cohen
> Venerable: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth – R. Buckminster Fuller
> Practical: The Truth About Green Business – Gil Friend
> Inspiring: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist – Ray Anderson

There are many more good ones, so here’s TriplePundit.com’s [year-old] list of the “must read” sustainability books:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/02/sustainable-mba-crash-course/

A classic suggestion came from Keli Rae McMillen of Winter Park, CO, who send me a PDF of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as this quote from Emerson’s History:

In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.

Steve Schein, a longtime business exec who now teaches sustainability at Southern Oregon University, sent a Top 20 list:

1) Blackburn, William, The Sustainability Handbook – The Complete Management Guide to Achieving Social, Economic, and Environmental Responsibility (2007), Environmental Law Institute, Washington, DC.

2) Savitz, Andrew, The Triple Bottom Line – How Today’s Best-Run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success (2006), Jossey – Bass

3) Esty, Daniel and Winston, Andrew, Green to Gold (2008), Yale University Press

4) Edwards, Andres R., The Sustainability Revolution – Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, (2005), New Society Publishers – BC, Canada

5) Hawken, P., Lovins, A., Lovins, Hunter, Natural Capitalism – Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, (1999), Little, Brown, and Company – New York

6) Henderson, Hazel, Ethical Markets – Creating the Green Economy, (2006) Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont

7) Brown, Lester R., Plan B 4.0 – Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, (2010) Norton & Co. – New York

Jones, Van, The Green Collar Economy – How One Solution Can Fix our Two Biggest Problems, (2008) Harper One Publishing

9) Senge, Peter, The Necessary Revolution – How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, (2008) Doubleday – New York

10) Hawken,Paul, Ecology of Commerce – A Declaration of Sustainability, (2010) Harper Business – New Yor

11) Schendler, Auden, Getting Green Done – Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution – (2009) Public Affairs – New York

12) Flannery, Tim, Now or Never – Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future – (2009) Atlantic Monthly – New York

13) McDonough, William, Braungart, Michael – Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way we Make Things – (2002) North Point Press – New York

14) Hollender, Jeffrey, The Responsibility Revolution – How the Next Generation of Business Will Win – (2010) Josey Bass – San Francisco

15) Barlow, Maude, Blue Covenant – The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water – (2007) W.W. Norton – New York

16) McKibben, Bill – Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet – (2010) Times Books – New York

17) Douglas, Dave, Papadopoulos, Dave, Citizen Engineer – A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering  (2010)

18) Cramer, Aron, Karabell, Zachary, Sustainable Excellence – The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World, (2010) Rodale Books – New York

19) Hawken, Paul, Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming – (2007) Viking – New York

20) Werbach, Adam, Strategy for Sustainability – A Business Manifesto, (2009) Harvard Business Press – Boston

Paulina Migalska, who’s active in the D.C. professional chapter of Net Impact, is a Tom Friedman fan. She writes:

(1) The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman – Yes, I know book is not on CSR but one quote from the book really stuck with me. Hence my pragmatic viewpoint of CSR, even though my true love is social enterprise. “Sometimes the best way to change the world is by getting the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons, because waiting for them to do the right things for the right reason can mean forever.”

(2) The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz – from the first pages of the book I couldn’t stop thinking: ” Jacqueline, you’re amazing, I agree with you more than you agree with yourself”

(3) Hot, Flat, and Crowded again by Thomas Friedman – he may sound gloomy at times but one has got to admire his pragmatism.

Dror Etzion, who teaches about business and the environment, at McGill, had two recommendations:

Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, by Auden Schendler

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard

Lewis Ward, who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., my hometown, fittingly nominates:

a booklet that influenced my thinking, by friend and colleague Paul Glover: Hometown Money: How to Enrich Your Community with Local Currency

Rusty Shelton, a digital marketer with Shelton Interactive, suggested two books from his clients:

THE GREEN TO GOLD BUSINESS PLAYBOOK, by Daniel Esty and PJ Simmons (April, 2011)

This is the follow-up to Esty and Andrew Winston’s bestseller, GREEN TO GOLD, and is getting very nice reviews from the corporate community. The book scored endorsements from Jeff Immelt (CEO, GE), Muhtar Kent (CEO, Coca-Cola Company), Paul Polman (CEO, Unilever), Andrea Jung (CEO, Avon), Mark Tercek (The Nature Observatory) and others.

What is different about it–it skips the environmental ideology and deals exclusively with tools and strategies that have been shown to cut costs, reduce risks, drive revenues, and build brand identity.

THE RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS, by Carol Sanford (March, 2011)

Carol’s new book has been turning heads in corporate circles for a few months. It 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 re-imagine success. From innovation, product development, and production processes to business management, strategic planning, and shareholder development, the author shows how being a Responsible Business is a practical skill that can be applied day-to-day at every level of the business.

What is different about it–When most people think of corporate responsibility, they are focusing on a business’s effect on and relationship to stakeholders. A Responsible Business sees stakeholders as full partners and meaningful instruments for the evolution of healthier communities and more successful businesses.

Richard Mills has a favorite which was highlighted by several others:

The Sustainable MBA: The Manager’s Guide to Green Business by Giselle Weybrecht is a great overview and introduction to sustainability. It skips the how to save the world stuff and is really focused on the business side, why business should be interested in sustainability and what they can do. It covers sustainability as it relates to Accounting, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Economics, Marketing, Operations, Organizational Behaviour Strategy. Giselle is not a journalist or a consultant which is probably why the book is most useful.  The aim is to give individuals tools to be able to bring sustainability into their jobs.

R. Paul Herman, author of The HIP Investor, says:

Faves are Cradle to Cradle, Natural Capitalism and now Climate Capitalism.

Of course, I love The HIP Investor: Make Bigger Profits By Building a Better World, because it focuses on how to design an investment portfolio to seek both human impact and profit at the same time – as well as a guide for companies (and yes, I wrote it too).

Anything by David Bornstein is a compelling read as well, from How To Change the World to Muhammad Yunus.

And you can’t beat Ray Anderson for telling it straight, and translating it for both engineers and businesspeople (check out his TED video as well as John Doerr’s).

Graeme Heyes writes from the UK to recommend:

Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company and Career More Sustainable by Amy V. Fetzer and Shari Aaron

I imagine that many of the nominations you will receive will be based around bringing about change in large corporates, by already qualified
individuals, however as somebody who has just graduated with a Masters Degree in Environmental Management and who has been fortunate to find
himself leading the environment group of one of the UK’s largest environmental charities just a few months after graduation, I have found this book to be a tremendous help, possibly second only to reading articles posted on Greenbiz!

It contains many tips I have found useful in terms of engaging with employees, talking to senior management, and beyond.

Helen Clarkson, who runs the U.S. office of Forum for the Future, has some fresh suggestions:

I think that the market for ‘making the case’ books is pretty saturated now, as your bookshelf shows. So there are plenty on this list so far for anyone new to the topic. I think the next layer of reading is where it gets interesting, so both in-depth books about particular industries (The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one of my favourites in that category) or books about how change is created. In that category I loved Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, SuperCorp by Rosabeth Kanter, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, all with very different but very interesting things to reflect on as we try and shift the way we do business.

Other suggestions can be found in last week’s comments, which link to other lists. Writing about this reminded me how lucky I am to have engaged readers of this blog, as well as to have had the opportunity to meet leading thinkers and doers  like Hawken, McDonough and Ray Anderson. I forgot to mention another favorite of my own last week–Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline.

Finally, I’ve decided to send the free books to Keli Rae McMillen, Lew Ward and Paulina Migalska.

Judging by the number of books about business and the environment piling up on my shelves, the corporate sustainability movement is alive and well.

One of the best is Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist by Ray Anderson, the founder and chairman of the commercial carpet company Interface.

I’ve been provided with two signed copes of the paperback edition to give away. I’m expecting a signed copy of Howard Schultz’s book, which I’m also going to give to a blog reader. More on that, in a moment.

But first, a few thoughts about Ray and his book. Ray is a terrific guy who has had a great influence on business people across America, by tirelessly promoting the idea that a truly sustainable approach to business  is good for business. (See my 2009 interview, Ray Anderson, Radical Industrialist.) “Take nothing from the earth that cannot be replaced by the earth” is how he puts it.

Fifteen years after setting that goal for Interface, the company has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 94 percent, cut fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent, cut waste by 80 percent, increased sales, doubled earnings and re-invented the way carpets are made, sold and recycled.

Says environmental activist Bill McKibben: “Ray Anderson is a hero.”

A soft-spoken, genial Georgian, Ray, who is in his late 70s, can’t get out to promote the paperback edition because, as he writes in a new foreword: “I have spent the last year dealing with cancer, thankfully holding my own–barely.”

He can’t help but draw analogies between his own experience with disease and environmental pollution. Neither his father, who was one of seven siblings, nor his mother, who was also one of seven, nor any of their brothers and sisters had cancer. But he and and his two brothers have had the disease. Could it be something in the environment? Hard to say.

But Ray writes:

Irresponsible business–the diggers, the drillers, the processors of poison, all of whom ought to know better–they and their abusive industries–are a cancer on society.

…It is high time we all started on the right treatment of this disease before it takes us all down.

Strong words, to be sure, but coming from a CEO and businessman with his own inspiring story, they resonate.

Interestingly, I’ve found that the best books about business and sustainability are written by CEOs and insiders, and not by journalists or consultants. My personal favorites include Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, Stirring it Up by Gary Hirshberg and What Matters Most by Jeff Hollender and Stephen Fenichell.  I liked Howard Schultz’s first book, Pour Your Heart Into It, a lot, although it’s less about the environment and more broadly about doing business right. Jim Collins’ work, especially on leadership in Good to Great, has had a big influence on my thinking. My friend Barbara Waugh’s The Soul in a Computer is another inspiring read.

What about you? Which books about business, values and sustainability have influenced you most? I invite you to nominate a favorite or two in the comments below or, if you prefer, email me at marc.gunther@gmail.com. I’ll do a blogpost in the next week or so highlighting some of the nominations. Here’s a Top 10 list I found online to get you thinking.

I’ll send my two signed copies of Ray Anderson’s book and my  copy of Howard Schultz’s Onward (assuming it arrives soon) out to those who sent in the most interesting or original nominations. Ancient as well as contemporary wisdom is welcome.

I’ve also decided to reduce my pile of books (below) by sending them to people who write guest posts to this blog, so if you’re passionate about a corporate sustainability issue, please let me know if you like to contribute a post.

Notwithstanding the terrible decline of newspapers, it is an exciting time to be a writer–and reader–of nonfiction.

I could spend half my time reading blogs, and the other half writing this one. (All too often, it feels like I do, alas.)

Now, thanks to  the Internet, which has hollowed out much of the traditional news media, here come a rush of new opportunities to publish and distribute high-quality journalism and good writing of all kinds. Read on, because most of the works that I’m about to describe are available free or at a very low cost:

Seth Godin’s Domino Project: This publishing venture, backed by Amazon, today released its second book, a 98-page manifesto called Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. It’s about getting things done, and overcoming a force that Pressfield  describes as Resistance. (Pressfield is probably best known as the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, which became a movie starring Will Smith and Matt Damon.) Do the Work will help keep you focused on the project at hand, and while it’s applicable to any big undertaking–a book, a business venture, a philanthropic project, a new romance–it strikes me as particularly useful for those of us who write and are easily distracted by, say, spending half the day reading blogs.

You can read an excerpt from Do The Work in Fast Company. Better yet, you can download the Kindle edition of the ebook for free, thanks to an unusual sponsorship deal with GE. Lest you fear that you’ll be assaulted with ads….don’t worry.  GE offers a few harmless platitudes in the beginning of the book (“A remarkable thing happens when you bring together employees who are driven to make a difference: They do.”) and after scanning them you’ll be on your way.

Try the book–what have you got to lose?

The hardcover, by the way, is $7.79 and it’s the perfect companion piece to the first book in the Domino series, Seth Godin’s Poke the Box, which is all about taking initiative. With these two slim volumes in hand, you’ll have no excuse for not plunging into whatever it is you have been dreaming of doing. Make an impact! There’s no time to waste.

Kindle Singles: Branded as “Compelling ideas expressed at their natural length,” these are 5,000 to 30,000 word articles? short books? novellas? available at a low cost or no cost for the Kindle platform. They’re short enough so that you can read an entire book over a meal or on a plane when traveling, even if you don’t own a Kindle. I don’t, and I read Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation: How American At All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will (Eventually) Feel Better on my iPhone, easily, perhaps because it was such a compelling read. Cowen delivers a lively analysis of the late 20th century American

economy that will help you better understand the 2008 financial crisis, the reason why we’re wrestling with federal budget deficits, the role of innovation in creating wealth and more, for just $3.99.

The boom is shale gas is the big energy story of the moment. To understand why hydrofracking technology is so controversial, read the Kindle single called Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling by my former Fortune colleague Abrahm Lustgarten, who’s now an investigative reporter with Pro Publica. It’s free.

Byliner: If you didn’t see the 60 Minutes expose of Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, you’ve surely heard about it. Now you can read the story behind the story, a short book called Three Cups of Deceit: How Humanitarian Hero Greg Mortenson Lost His Way by one of my favorite writers, Jon Krakauer. (Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman was awesome.) As I write on Wednesday evening, the Krakauer book is a free download but that offer is said to expire after 72 hours so move fast on this one.

Byliner itself won’t formally launch until next month but here’s how it is described:

Byliner.com…combines curated archives of the best nonfiction writers’ work with personalized recommendations, social bookmarking and aggregated discussion. It allows fans of great storytelling to easily find, share and discuss new and classic work by their favorite authors. Byliner.com also serves as a distribution platform for Byliner Originals, compelling nonfiction stories by great writers, told at lengths that allow them to be read in one sitting.

Byliner’s founder and CEO, John Tayman, is an author, editor and entrepreneur who says that Byliner Originals “fill the gap between magazines and conventional books. They’re compelling stories by great writers, told at their proper length.” Byliner will publish ebooks, audio books and print-on-demand books on paper. The next two books will come from National Book Award winners William Vollman and Bob Shacochis. Byliner’s editorial director, Mark Bryant, is the former editor of Outside and Men’s Journal. Not too shabby. Here’s more from TechCrunch.

I’m thrilled by all this as a reader and writer (with an e-book or two in my future, perhaps). It’s too easy to get mired in the gloom and doom about print. While  I can’t prove it,  I believe there’s more great journalism being produced today than ever more, and more ways to consume it.

Whether it’s the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, or last year’s BP oil spill, or the 2008 collapse of the housing market, or the difficulty the U.S. is having in Iraq and Afghanistan, the headlines on any given day should make us humble.

They don’t.

We humans make lots of mistakes, some terribly costly, and yet we continue to believe that we are smarter than we are.

We don’t even understand ourselves very well.

David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, has written a couple of excellent columns about overconfidence–see The Fatal Conceit from 2009 and, more recently, The Modesty Manifesto – and in his best-selling new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, he takes a broader and deeper look at how people and societies are shaped by “the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms.” Much of this, by definition, is invisible to us.

I’m a Brooks fan, so I went to hear him speak last week at The Aspen Institute in Washington. (Here’s the video.) He was funnier in person than he is in print.  (“I know many people in the audience. I know you didn’t come here to hear me speak. You came to hear yourself speak. So I’ll try to be brief.) He told a few stories about politicians and how they have “phenomenal social skills,” yet they consistently underestimate the role of emotion, passion and irrationality when they make policy.

Efforts to reform schools neglect the emotional side of learning. “People learn from people they love, but if you mention the world love at a congressional hearing, they look at you like Oprah,” he said. “It’s just not a language we’re comfortable with here.”

He quoted an educator who told him that kids stay in school because of the ABC’s — athletics, band and cheerleaders — and yet  “we’re cutting those things that attach students emotionally to school.”

In the business arena, “we had a financial regulatory system more or less based on the supposition that bankers were rational, self-interested creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse.” We know how that ended.

Policy-making is driven by “almost a dehumanized view of human nature,” Brooks said. “Why are the most socially attuned people on earth so socially unattuned when they get in theory policy-making role?”

The reason, he said, is that “we’ve inherited this view of human nature that we are divided selves…and that society progresses to the extent that reason, which is trustworthy, suppresses the passions, which are untrustworthy.”

The trouble is, reason can’t suppress the passions. “Emotions are not separate from reason,” he said. “Emotion is really at the center of how we think.”

“While the conscous mind writes the autobiography of our species,” Brooks said, “most of our thinking is below our our level awareness.

He cited one of my favorite examples of how the unconscious mind operates–the matter of names. People named Dennis are more likely than the rest of us to become dentists. Those named Lawrence gravitate towards the law. In a newsroom where I once worked, we kept a list of people (like the late Bill Headline) whose names matched their jobs. It became a long list.

There’s no harm done when Catherine Greener and Josh Green become environmentalists. That’s not so with the rampant problem of overconfidence, which is both hard-wired and intensified by today’s we-are-all-so-special culture. Look at this startling data, cited by Brooks in a book excerpt in The New Yorker:

Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

Surely this same overconfidence can be found in presidents, treasury secretaries and diplomats. As Brooks writes in The Social Animal:

In recent decades, the world has tried to export capitalism to Russia, plant democracy in the Middle East and boost development in Africa. And the results of these efforts are mostly disappointing.

The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature.

That’s not exactly right. An overly simplistic view of human nature can’t explain why Africans aren’t rice. Nor is it an adequate explanation for the failures of other policies cited by Brooks, including those designed to “reduce widening inequality,” “boost economic mobility” or “ameliorate the boom-and-bust-cycle of our economies.” But I do think that all these examples remind us the world is much harder to shape, and more complicated, than we typically imagine.

Speaking of which, I have a question: What are we doing in Libya? When did Congress and the American people debate the need to intervene? Why Libya, and not Yemen or Darfur or the Congo? How will we define success? As James Fallows writes today, “What happens then?” Or, as Peggy Noonan wrote the other day:

America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there–the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint–there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.

Yes, we are an overconfident species. That’s not a reason to be passive. But we need to remind ourselves–often–that we’re just not as smart as we think are.

The Internet has not been kind to gatekeepers, middlemen, and those who depend on centralized power and control. Just ask the stockbrokers and travel agents who lived off their commissions (before eTrade and Expedia), the newspapers that monopolized classified ads (before Craigslist), the record companies who packaged CDs (before iTunes) and Hosni Mubarak who controlled communications in Egypt (before Facebook and Twitter).

Book publishers–who have historically been the only way for authors to get their words in front of readers–could be next.

Seth Godin

In my latest column for Cisco’s website about technology, news@cisco, I look at a new, disruptive book-publishing venture called The Domino Project, launched recently by the brilliant marketer and entrepreneur, Seth Godin.  Seth and his colleagues invited me to be part of a support group called the Domino Project Street Team, which is helping to spread the word about Domino and its new books.

Seth’s own book Poke the Box, an instant business bestseller, is the first one out of the Domino Project. Next month will bring be a manifesto by ex-Marine (and author of The Legend of Bagger Vance) Steven Pressfield called Do the Work. Domino plans to publish short, accessible, low-cost, easily-shared books in a variety of formats that will help people change their lives, and the world.

Quick aside: The most surprising thing I learned when reporting this story is that a 26-year-old blogger and novelist named Amanda Hocking has sold nearly 1 million books in less than a year–without the help of a publisher.

Whether all this is a good thing–for writers, for readers, for the rest of us–depends on how you feel about gatekeepers in general and book publishers in particular.

I love newspapers and magazines, the gatekeepers who have enabled me to earn a very good living since I left college many moons ago. I’m also a big-time consumers of newspapers and magazines.  If I had to choose between giving up The New York Times, and giving up all the blogs I read….I’d probably give up the blogs. Fortunately, that’s not a choice any of us have to make.

Book publishers are, in my view, more like travel agents or stockbrokers than they are like newspaper owners. They’re distributors and marketers who as a rule don’t add a lot of value. I’m interested in seeing a world where books can take on many more shapes and forms (shorter, longer, e-books, audio books, PDFs) and where more authors have a chance to connect directly to readers. That’s what Seth is trying to create with The Domino Project.

Here’s how the story begins:

Seth Godin’s first book failed because of Vanna White.

My last book was crushed by George Bush and John Kerry.

The book publishing industry is stuck in a rut. It desperately needs new ideas.

That’s why Seth and I are both excited about his new venture: The Domino Project, a publishing platform that uses the power of social media to help writers spread their ideas and connect to readers.

The Domino Project’s first book is an 85-page manifesto by Godin called Poke the Box, which was published March 1. It’s about starting things, making changes and learning in today’s fast-moving economy.

You can read the rest here.

Here’s Seth on video, talking about  about Poke the Box and the Domino Project.