Which books can help you bring sustainability into your current career?
Here are 3 easy-to-read books you can start with.
The Sustainable MBA by Giselle Weybrecht (2010)
In a nutshell: If you want to convince anyone in your company to start adopting sustainability, you need to speak in their language. Weybrecht provides you a toolkit speaking the language of business. Every chapter describes what sustainability is like for someone in HR, Marketing, Accounting, etc.
The Sustainable MBA provides the knowledge and tools to help you “green” your job and organization, to turn sustainability talk into action for the benefit of your bottom line and society as a whole. Based on more than 100 interviews with experts in business, international organizations, NGOs and universities from around the world, this first of its kind guide brings together all the pieces of the business and sustainability puzzle including:
The basics on what sustainability is, why you should be interested, how to get started, and what a sustainable organization looks like.
Source: Goodreads
The Art Of Systems Change: Eight Guiding Principles for a Green and Fairer Future (FREE) (2019)
In a nutshell:
We humans are used to linear thinking: one cause has one effect. The apple fell from the tree (effect) because of force of gravity (cause).
But the world doesn’t always work this way. Big problems like climate change have no one single cause and we need the right thinking to solve these challenges.
This is where systems thinking comes in. This FREE resource from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is a handbook to understand the why, what, and how of systems thinking.
Part 1 introduces the fundamental tenets of systems thinking and describes their implications for our understanding of the world. Part 2 presents a set of mutually reinforcing principles that can guide our actions as we work to address our most pressing environmental and societal challenges.
In each chapter, we introduce a principle, why it’s important, and how to work with it. We also provide simple ‘daily practice’ prompts that can help you cultivate both your individual and institution’s capacity for changing systems. Throughout the book, we share stories and examples of both complex problems and systems and share insights on methods and approaches that can help us work more effectively in complex systems.
Download the e-book for FREE here: The Art Of Systems Change 2019
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018)
In a nutshell:
If books were influencers, this would by my top influencer. Factfulness is an important guide for anyone who wants to create positive change wherever you are.
When everything we see on the news is all doom, we may feel paralyzed, that we can no longer do anything about the future (like climate change). This book gives you hope about the world by helping you recognize that so much progress has happened, and so much can still be done.
Be ready to unlearn what you used to think about the world.
Spoiler alert: He predicted the pandemic (sort of).
When asked simple questions about global trends – why the world’s population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty – we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and a man who can make data sing, Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world.
Source: Goodreads
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