Earth Month
April is Earth Month! To celebrate our beloved blue planet, we are spotlighting books in the Pardee collection that focus on sustainability, renewable energy, and efforts to combat climate change. Learn from experts, activists, and innovators working to protect our planet, and get inspired to make a difference in work, school, and life.
For more information about BU's contributions to a better future, visit BU Sustainability.
Featured Reading
Putting the Heart Back into Business: How to Place People, Planet, and Purpose at the Core of What You Do
Location: Online
In this uniquely honest and ground-breaking book, entrepreneur Andrew Thornton and coach Eudora Pascall propose a better way of being in business - one that enables everyone to truly be themselves, harnesses people's strengths and individuality, and puts people and planet first - whilst trusting that profit will still follow.
With the inspiring story of the transformation that took place in a multicultural North London supermarket as a backdrop, Andrew and Eudora demonstrate the huge impact and positive difference that running a heart-centred business can make on the lives of the people you work with and the world you live in too.
Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Important Assets
Location: Online
Pricing the Priceless captures financial recognition for what is otherwise never calculated in financial terms. Water meters only measure the cost of the water we use, not the value of having clean water in the first place, reflecting what goes out but not what goes in. But keeping water clean is a vital public service, surely an indicator of good governance and management. In turn, if capital markets reward coherent risk management and resource stewardship in higher credit ratings for public entities, then those entities can issue bonds or borrow long term against that value. In this sequence, pricing the priceless translates the natural capital of clean water into bankable collateral, as compared to short-term raw material, and extends measurable value today to immeasurable value tomorrow.
Road to Net Zero: Strategic Pathways for Sustainability-Driven Business Transformation
Location: Online
With this open access book, delve into the insights of respected leaders from academia and industry as they unravel the intricacies of sustainability-driven business transformation. This meticulously curated edited volume reflects on The Road To Net Zero, underscoring the need for pioneering pathways. Embark on a collaborative learning journey and explore key issues along the road to transformation, such as crafting corporate sustainability strategies, new forms of corporate disclosure, transforming value chains, and harnessing the power of technological innovation. Packed with guiding questions and distilled findings from research, this book is a must-read for all decision-makers, strategists, engaged citizens, educators, and learners committed to driving change and shaping a more sustainable future.
Books for Earth Month
Business Ethics and Sustainability by
This book equips readers with the knowledge, insights and key capabilities to understand and practice business activities from ethical and sustainable vantage points. In our interconnected global business environment, the impacts of business activities are under increased ethical scrutiny from a wide range of stakeholders. Written from an international perspective, this book introduces the theory and practice of ethical and sustainable business, focusing in particular on eco-environmental sustainability, intergenerational responsibilities, current disruptive technologies, and intercultural values of the business community and consumers. Written by an expert author who also brings to the fore non-Western concepts and themes, this book: features positive case studies, as well as transferrable and applicable key insights from such cases; highlights the importance of taking cultural differences into account; takes a transdisciplinary approach which considers findings from research fields including conceptual and empirical business ethics, behavioral economics, ecological economics, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of culture; weaves in pedagogical features throughout, including up-to-date case studies, study questions, thought experiments, links to popular movies, and key takeaways. Written in an accessible and student-friendly manner, this book will be of great interest to students of business ethics, environmental ethics, applied ethics, and sustainable development, as well as business practitioners striving toward ethical, sustainable, and responsible business practice.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life by
This open access book seeks to understand why we consume as we do, how consumption changes, and why we keep consuming more and more, despite the visible damage we are doing to the planet. The chapters cover both the stubbornness of unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent societies and the drivers of rapidly increasing consumption in emerging economies. They focus on consumption patterns with the largest environmental footprints, including energy, housing, and mobility and engage in sophisticated ways with the theoretical frontiers of the field of consumption research, in particular on the 'practice turn' that has come to dominate the field in recent decades. This book maps out what we know about consumption, questions what we take for granted, and points us in new directions for better understanding--and changing--unsustainable consumption patterns.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
The Crash Course: An Honest Approach to Facing the Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment by
Discover how and why the world's crises are interconnected and what you can do to prepare for the next one The world is experiencing a series of crises. In The Crash Course: An Honest Approach to Facing the Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment, Revised Edition, veteran executive and strategist Chris Martenson delivers an incisive and eye-opening exploration that explains why the reader needs to understand that it is the interconnectedness of the various crises that matters most. From energy shortages to climate instability, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, pandemics, war, and crop failures, you'll discover the common factor that is driving them all and how to adapt to volatile new realities and safeguard your own personal wealth, health, and community. In the book, you'll find effective solutions for living with unpredictability and change, as well as: A workable framework for understanding the "how" and "why" of dramatic societal, environmental, and economic transformation A rich set of solutions, complete with examples, you can use to draw inspiration and motivation to act in your own life An expansive amount of new material, fully updated since the last edition A transformative and thought-provoking strategic playbook for managing increasingly unexpected events, crises, and revolutions, The Crash Course, Revised Edition is an essential resource for anyone concerned about their retirement savings, the world's environment, as well as anyone hoping to become more independent and self-reliant.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership by
Deeply Responsible Business profiles corporate leaders of the past two centuries who made social missions vital to their businesses. Geoffrey Jones explores the characters and motivations of fourteen such leaders and compares their deep social and environmental commitments to the lukewarm "corporate social responsibility" of today.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Environmentally Sustainably Growth: A Pragmatic Approach by
How do we move away from the current environmentally destructive economic system toward one that is more sustainable while still ensuring continued economic growth? This book offers a positive vision of an environmentally sustainable future and lays out the steps ahead as we make the transition.Steven Cohen explores the causes of environmental degradation and examines what sustainability looks like in practice. He outlines realistic paths toward a renewable resource-based economy, demonstrating that, in many respects, the shift to sustainability is already underway. Cohen describes a range of public policy and infrastructure initiatives that can encourage cleaner production in the private sector and consumption in everyday life. He argues that the politics, advocacy, and communication around environmental protection must change to emphasize successes, reduce scare tactics, and make sure that the lifestyles and careers associated with a more sustainable world sound attractive to a wide range of people. The book depicts an appealing and equitable future that assures quality of life while protecting the planet.Environmentally Sustainable Growth brings together insights from many disciplines, spanning the latest scholarship and practical experience. Useful for students and courses, this book will be informative for practitioners, managers, analysts, activists, and scholars whose work incorporates environmental sustainability.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Foundations of a Sustainable Market Economy: Guiding Principles for Change by
The free market underpins our economy and our way of thinking around enterprise and value, but it is also a major factor in the sustainability problems that we now live with. Climate change, child labour and oil spills are just a few of the many problems associated with our economic activity and, although many companies have made an effort to produce more sustainably, the pace of change is much too slow. This engaging and accessible textbook teaches students the relationship between the economy and sustainability, assessing the hand of the free market on company behaviour and, ultimately, providing a framework for transition to a sustainable economy. Using case studies and optional assessment questions, this textbook explains to students what a market is at the macro level and then translates the effects of the market to industries and subsequently to the strategic choices of companies at the micro level. It adopts a model of 8 guiding principles that underpin the current free market economy and 8 guiding principles for the sustainable market economy. Switching these deeply held principles will be essential to any serious transition to a sustainable economy.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Handbook of Business and Climate Change by
Summarizing the current state of knowledge on the links between business and climate change, this timely Handbook analyzes how businesses contribute to and are affected by climate change, looking closely at their centrality in developing and deploying solutions to address this problem. Contributions from a global collection of scholars and practitioners explore a broad range of key industries’ impacts and responses to climate change, examining corporate strategy and leadership in the climate economy, functional perspectives and corporate practice, and climate finance.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Purpose + Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World by
Are purpose and profit in conflict, or can both be achieved simultaneously with the right mindset and tools? What are the forces that are reshaping the relationship between the two? What can we all do to strengthen the relationship between purpose and profit as entrepreneurs, managers, employees, consumers, and investors? Backed by cutting-edge research, Purpose and Profit provides answers to these fundamental questions that are increasingly defining the business landscape all around the world. Distinguished Harvard Business School Professor George Serafeim takes readers on a research-driven journey to understand: How and why environmental and social issues are becoming increasingly relevant for organizations worldwide; The ways that companies can design and implement strategies that generate greater impact; The six archetypes of value creation enabled by these new trends; The role of investors in driving greater recognition of ESG issues; and How we can all look at the choices we make and careers we pursue in a way that maximizes purpose and profit in our own lives.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Sustainable Leadership : Lessons of Vision, Courage, and Grit From the CEOs Who Dared to Build a Better World by
Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly Bestseller Deliver Extraordinary Sustainability Results for Your Business In Sustainable Leadership: Lessons of Vision, Courage, and Grit from the CEOs Who Dared to Build a Better World, accomplished leadership expert Clarke Murphy shares a can't-miss toolkit for delivering remarkable sustainability results. You'll learn what it takes to become a Sustainable Leader and how you can turn your sustainability promises into tangible action on the ground. Drawing on the real-life stories of Sustainable Leaders from across the world, Murphy proves that sustainability success is within reach for every business executive. He debunks the myth that sustainability is at odds with profitability and reveals the inside track on how to make sustainability your new growth strategy. You'll find: A step-by-step framework on how to build your Sustainable Leadership legacy. Pragmatic examples of balancing the demands of shareholders and other stakeholders. Lessons from CEOs on how they stayed the course in the face of setbacks. Strategies to prepare your up-and-coming executives to carry the sustainability mantle and help you hit your short and long-term sustainability goals. An essential blueprint for CEOs, boards, founders, entrepreneurs, and other business executives, Sustainable Leadership also deserves a place on the bookshelves of Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG professionals looking for immediately actionable approaches to increase the long-term viability of their organizations.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Featured: Big Data is Big Business
Building a Data Culture: The Usage and Flow Data Culture Model by
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, organizations face an ever-increasing volume of data that holds immense potential for driving business success. However, many businesses struggle to harness this potential. This book is a comprehensive guide that unveils the transformative power of data and provides actionable insights to cultivate a data-driven organizational culture. The book emphasizes data strategy and data governance's pivotal role in cultivating a mature data culture using practical insights, frameworks, and best practices. This approach ensures robust data culture structures that uphold data integrity, accessibility, and accountability. These structures operate through analytics, literacy, governance, process management, and data inventory management. Behind all of this lies the authors' groundbreaking Usage and Flow Data Culture Model, a unique framework that enables organizations to evaluate and reshape their data culture based on distinct cultural types: Preservationist, Protectionist, Traditional, and Progressive. Building a Data Culture carefully dissects these cultural types, revealing the associated challenges and opportunities, and uncovering suitable strategies in the process.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Progressive Capitalism: making tech work for all of us by
Congressman Ro Khanna offers a revolutionary, "progressive" (James J. Heckman, Nobel Prize winner and professor of economics at the University of Chicago) roadmap to facing America's digital divide, offering greater economic prosperity to all. In Khanna's vision, "just as people can move to technology, technology can move to people" (from the foreword by Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics) where "Khanna envisions redistributing opportunities from coastal cities to rural middle-America...An exciting vision, brilliantly rendered." (Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land). Unequal access to technology and the revenue it creates is one of the most pressing issues in the United States. An economic gulf exists between those who have struck gold in the tech industry and those left behind by the digital revolution; a geographic divide between those in the coastal tech industry and those in the heartland whose jobs have been automated; and existing inequalities in the technological access--students without computers, rural workers with spotty WiFi, and many workers without the luxury to work remotely. Congressman Ro Khanna's Progressive Capitalism tackles these challenges head-on and imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people across the country without uprooting them. Anchored by an approach Khanna calls "progressive capitalism," he shows how democratizing access to tech can strengthen every sector of economy and culture. By expanding technological jobs nationwide through public and private partnerships, we can close the wealth gap in America and begin to repair the fractured, distrusting relationships that have plagued our country for fall too long. Inspired by his own story born into an immigrant family, Khanna understands how economic opportunity can change the course of a person's life. Moving deftly between storytelling, policy, and some of the country's greatest thinkers in political philosophy and economics, Khanna presents a vision we can't afford to ignore. Progressive Capitalism is a "practical and aspirational" (Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University) roadmap to how we can seek dignity for every American in an era in which technology shapes every aspect of our lives.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Restoring the Soul of Business: staying human in the age of data by
From old-fashioned bricks-and-mortars to cutting-edge startups, businesses are moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to move from an analog past to a digital future effectively. How can you make sure not to leave human instinct behind? Businesses are leaving behind traditional meetings in favor of virtual ones, transitioning from surveys and studies to analytics and algorithms. The startling and often unacknowledged truth is that?the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with the promise of people.?In the end, it's the people that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them. In Restoring the Soul of Business, business leader Rishad Tobaccowala?teaches you to: Understand how to unleash the significant benefit that can be realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital. Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies: cold cultures with little human interaction, poor innovation stemming from discouraged employees who don't contribute ideas, and poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes. Explore how organizations of various sizes and from different industries have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity. Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology. Everyone working in an organization will find penetrating observations and guidance about how and why establishing the proper balance between human intuition and creativity and data-driven insights can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention--and even joy--in their careers and business. Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization can and should implement, and challenges you to move forward with the kind of balance that capitalizes transformation and produces one great success after another.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by
From the New York Times bestselling author of Big Data, a prediction for how data will revolutionize the market economy and make cash, banks, and big companies obsolete In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schörger, bestselling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. This is the dawn of the era of data capitalism. Will it be an age of prosperity or of calamity? This book provides the indispensable roadmap for securing a better future.
Location: Pardee Stacks HC79.I55 M3725 2018Publication Date: 2018
Don't Be Evil by
A penetrating indictment of how today's largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds--from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND EVENING STANDARD "Don't be evil" was enshrined as Google's original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company's cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it's been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth--while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don't Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul--and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access--won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology--she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology. Praise for Don't Be Evil "At first sight, Don't Be Evil looks like it's doing for Google what muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell did for Standard Oil over a century ago. But this whip-smart, highly readable book's scope turns out to be much broader. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump's election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed."--Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of The Square and the Tower
Location: Pardee Stacks HD9696.8.U62 F67 2019Publication Date: 2019
The Efficiency Paradox: what big data can't do by
A bold challenge to our obsession with efficiency--and a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity. Algorithms, multitasking, the sharing economy, life hacks: our culture can't get enough of efficiency. One of the great promises of the Internet and big data revolutions is the idea that we can improve the processes and routines of our work and personal lives to get more done in less time than we ever have before. There is no doubt that we're performing at higher levels and moving at unprecedented speed, but what if we're headed in the wrong direction? Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest headlines and findings of computer science and social science, The Efficiency Paradox questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of digital platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and, above all, an inability to break out of established patterns. Edward Tenner offers a smarter way of thinking about efficiency, revealing what we and our institutions, when equipped with an astute combination of artificial intelligence and trained intuition, can learn from the random and unexpected.
Location: Pardee Stacks T58.8 .T45 2018Publication Date: 2018
Big Data at Work by
Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author was--at first. When the term "big data" first came on the scene, bestselling author Tom Davenport (Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind. Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data means--and why everyone in business needs to know about it. Big Data at Work covers all the bases: what big data means from a technical, consumer, and management perspective; what its opportunities and costs are; where it can have real business impact; and which aspects of this hot topic have been oversold. This book will help you understand: * Why big data is important to you and your organization * What technology you need to manage it * How big data could change your job, your company, and your industry * How to hire, rent, or develop the kinds of people who make big data work * The key success factors in implementing any big data project * How big data is leading to a new approach to managing analytics With dozens of company examples, including UPS, GE, Amazon, United Healthcare, Citigroup, and many others, this book will help you seize all opportunities--from improving decisions, products, and services to strengthening customer relationships. It will show you how to put big data to work in your own organization so that you too can harness the power of this ever-evolving new resource.
Location: Pardee Stacks HD38.7 .D379 2014Publication Date: 2014
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