The Business of Building a Better World

Twenty-nine leading scholars and executives provide a visionary look at the future of business, propelling past damaging industrial-age values to uncover the key ingredients of humanistic, ecologically sustainable, and intergenerational prosperity.

 

 

Through the exploration of robust cases and stories packed with deep insight and vital science, this extraordinary collection explores how we can adapt our notions of value, markets, and models of cooperation and collective action to create a world where economies and businesses excel, all people thrive, and nature flourishes.
 
In part I, “The Business of Business Is Betterment,” the contributors show how enterprises today are further developing—and even taking a quantum leap beyond—the multistakeholder logic of “shared value creation.” Part II, “Net Positive = Innovation’s New Frontier,” is focused on what companies can and are doing to move away from “doing no harm” to playing an active role in solving environmental, social, and economic problems. The final section, “Ultimate Advantage: A Leadership Revolution That Is Changing Everything,” looks at new leadership paradigms—characterized by unexpected qualities like virtue, love, compassion, and connection—that are crucial to creating engaged, empowered, innovative, and out-performing enterprises.
 
This book is designed to galvanize change and unite a global community of inquiry and action. It establishes the conceptual cornerstones for a new kind of business practice that will lead the way to an equitable, sustainable, and flourishing future.

David L. Cooperrider is a distinguished university professor at Case Western Reserve University and holds two chaired professorships there. He is the founder and faculty director of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit and is the honorary chairman of Champlain College's David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry. He has served as an advisor to prominent individuals like Bill Clinton, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan, and Jimmy Carter and companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Keurig Green Mountain Coffee, Apple, Verizon, McKinsey, the US Navy, and the UN Global Compact.
 

Audrey Selian is director at Artha Impact (the impact investing arm of Rianta Capital Zurich) and cofounder of Artha Networks Inc. She has been working in the field of impact finance for more than fifteen years.