Ford Library Blog

The lecture, “Building a Sustainable Energy Future: Market Approaches to Choices and Trade-offs” will be held today; Thursday, November 5th from 4–6 p.m. in Geneen Auditorium.

This is the first of a four-part series and represents a joint collaboration between the Fuqua School of Business and McKinsey Quarterly.  The series will consist of forums on the following areas:  energy, the financial system, globalization and business education.

Check out some of these new titles from the Ford Library on sustainability (click on a link to place a hold or check availability). Or come browse our Sustainability display at the front of the library:

• Profession and Purpose: A Resource Guide for MBA Careers in Sustainability by Katie Kross
• Investing in a Sustainable World: Why GREEN is the New Color of Money on Wall Street by Mathew J. Kiernan
• Sustainability Strategies: When Does it Pay to be Green? by Renato J. Orsato
• Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts by Marc J. Epstein
• Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long-Term Performance edited by Cary Krosinsky and Nick Robins
• Sustainable Development Handbook by Stephen A. Roosa
• Global Warming is Good for Business: How Savvy Entrepreneurs, Large Corporations, and Others are Making Money While Saving the Planet by K. B. Keilbach
• The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni

Kiernan, Matthew J. Investing in a sustainable world : why GREEN is the new color of money on Wall Street. Wiley, 2009.

Krosinsky, Cary and Nick Robins, eds. Sustainable investing : the art of long-term performance. Earthscan, 2008.

Traditionally, ethical and socially responsible investing has been driven by personal values. While this approach has been successful in some sectors in the U.S. and the U.K., the mainstream institutional marketplace has been out of reach. But now, research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors shows that companies with superior positioning on sustainability issues achieved superior financial returns. Two new books discuss how both Wall Street and Main Street are now interested in investing in ethical, social and green companies to attain long term financial performance.

In Investing in a Sustainable World, Innovest founder and CEO Matthew J. Kiernan makes the business case for integrating environmental and social considerations into investment decisions. He presents conceptual and practical tools to help investors realize environmental, social and financial objectives at the same time. (more…)

Szaky, Tom. Revolution in a bottle : how TerraCycle is redefining green business. Portfolio, 2008.

Once I carried some bags of semi-composted leaf litter from our neighbor’s curb to mulch a new garden bed in front of our house. The neighbor was furious. “I paid good money for those bags,” he shouted.
So when I read in Tom Szaky’s Revolution in a Bottle, that his neighbors called the police because he took plastic bottles out of their recycling bins on the curb, I was totally sympathetic. But I was already hooked on this account of the first product in the world that was made entirely from and packaged entirely in waste.

Author Szaky dropped out of Princeton in 2002 and founded a company that makes products from waste. Szaky’s company TerraCycle uses worms to recycle garbage into fertilizer, which is bottled into used plastic liters found in the trash. This is the story about a green entrepreneur and his company — how it started, overcame many challenges and grew to a successful venture. A company that began with garbage from Princeton Univ.dining halls grew to a company that produced 100 products in 15,000 big box stores. (more…)

If you have seen the documentary The Corporation you may remember Ray Anderson, owner of the carpet company Interface.  He retooled the company to take advantage of sustainable business practices after reading Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce.

He has a new TED talk up on the business logic of sustainability.

MIT Sloan is now offering free case studies through their new web site called MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources. The case studies cover the following management areas: industry evolution, sustainability, and global entrepreneurship.

April is Earth Month at Duke. Also, the 8th Annual MBA International Retreat will be held on Energy & the Environment (May 31st-June 1st).

See these new titles at the Ford Library on energy, the environment, and sustainability issues. As always, you can click on any title below to check availability or to place a hold.

• Saving Energy, Growing Jobs: How Environmental Protection Promotes Economic Growth, Profitability, Innovation and Competition by David. B. Goldstein
• Carbon Strategies: How Leading Companies are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint by Andrew J. Hoffman
• Terra Incognita:A Navigation Aid for Energy Leaders by Christopher E.H. Ross and Lane E. Sloan
• Managing Green Issues by Tom Curtin
• Harvard Business Review on Green Business Strategy by Harvard Business School Press
• Markets and the Environment by Nathaniel O. Keohane and Sheila M. Olmstead
• The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth, 2nd Edition by by Peter G. Brown
• Sustainability in Manufacturing: Recovery of Resources in Product and Material Cycles edited by Gunther Seliger
• Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics, and Portfolios by Bill Paul
• Green Seduction: Money, Business, and the Environment by Bill Streever
• Business, Ethics, and the Environment: Imagining a Sustainable Future (Basic Ethics in Action)by Joseph R. Des Jardins
• Cut Carbon, Grow Profits: Business Strategies for Managing Climate Change and Sustainability edited by Kenny Tang and Ruth Yeoh
• Organizations and the Sustainability Mosaic: Crafting Long-Term Ecological and Societal Solutions edited by Sanjay Sharma, Mark Starik and Bryan Husted

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