What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Studying the environment to gain insight into organizational behavior can be a fascinating exercise, with advocates from Jane Jacobs to Margaret Wheatley among those who have helped us envision the inherent possibilities. What We Learned in the Rainforest takes a similar but uniquely focused approach, as Mitsubishi Electric CEO Tachi Kiuchi and environmental advocate Bill Shireman tie development and sustainment of the rainforest directly to progressive practices of businesses such as Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, and Nike. Employing an interesting format--each section begins with the authors describing an ongoing parachute descent into the rainforest in order to illustrate a specific principle--Kiuchi and Shireman explain how concepts such as feedback, profit, design, and diversity aid both their natural laboratory and their corporate examples. In the "Succession" chapter, for instance, they relate a rainforest's "four phases of life" to the cycle of innovation, growth, improvement, and creative destruction that is experienced by successful businesses. With the goal of drawing on nature's wisdom rather than drawing down its physical resources, the book advances a vision of sustainability en route to profitability that is as provocative as it is potentially practical. --Howard Rothman
Book Description
What We Learned in the Rainforest teaches that nature isn't just a source of resources for business -it is a powerful model for superior business performance in the emerging economy. The authors show that the old model of business-the machine model that pitted business against nature-is growing obsolete. In the emerging economy, businesses excel when they emulate what they once sought to conquer. They maximize performance as they become like nature, like a complex living system. By moving beyond the industrial machine model, and applying the dynamic principles of the rainforest instead, business can learn how to create more profit than ever, and to do so more sustainably. What We Learned in the Rainforest presents examples from leading companies -business strategies and management practices that maximize business performance by all measures: economic, social, and environmental. It shows, for instance, how Coca-Cola CEO Doug Daft uses diversity to drive sales, how Intel founder Gordon Moore creates profit by design, how Bill Coors builds businesses on the theory that “all waste is lost profit,” how Shell profits as an industrial ecosystem, and how Dow earns 300% returns.
What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature
What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature,Tachi Kiuchi,William K. Shireman,Berrett-Koehler Publishers,1576751279,Business & Economics,Business / Economics / Finance,Business ethics,Business/Economics,Development - Sustainable Development,Economics - General,Environmental Conservation & Protection - General,Management - General,Organizational Behavior,Rain forests,Social responsibility of busin,Social responsibility of business,Structural Adjustment,Sustainable development,Symbiosis
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