What We Learned in the Rainforest Business Lessons from Nature

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

Tachi Kiuchi is one of Japan's best known and most iconoclastic corporate executives. As chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America, he built the company's brand in the U.S. and managed the company's transition from the old to the new economy. Today he continues to press for profitable and sustainable business practices at Mitsubishi and other major Japanese corporations.
Bill Shireman is one of America's leading environmental advocates. He wrote California's bottle bill recycling law and has brokered deals between some of the world's largest corporations-Coca-Cola, Coors, Nike, Mitsubishi, and Weyerhaeuser-and most impassioned activists-Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and the Sierra Club. Today he is CEO of Global Futures, serves as President of the Future 500, and leads a Corporate Accountability Practice (CAP) in partnership with Manning Selvage & Lee.