Book Review: Global Sustainability by Mark Lefko
When I first read the bumf around Mark Lefko’s new book Global Sustainability, I was a bit worried that it clashed with my own tome, The Green Executive. Both are aimed at senior management, both take a more strategic look at Sustainability and both are built around a series of interviews with senior executives. However, on the latter Lefko has roped in considerably more star wattage than I did, with Sir Richard Branson and the CEOs of TATA, Dow, Cargill, and Unilever featuring amongst the 21 interviewees.
From these interviews, Lefko has extracted 9 best practices which make up the chapter titles of the book. The content of each chapter consists mainly of interview quotes from those CEOs, some extending to quite lengthy extracts. The nine chapters are:
- Establish Guiding Principles
- Practice Long-Term Thinking
- Deal Fairly and Ethically with Suppliers, Employees, and Customers
- Be Concerned about Your Employees’ Motivation and Well-Being
- Support the Well-Being of the Communities Where You Do Business
- Form Good Partnerships
- Find Ways to Reduce Waste
- Be Adaptable—and Seize Opportunities
- Measure the Return on Your Sustainability Investment
The book’s aim is clearly to persuade senior business executives to get on board the Sustainability train via peer pressure – if these business titans are doing Sustainability, shouldn’t you be? And it does this job very well, with a consistently clear and upbeat message, reinforced by those captains of industry.
I’ve had plenty of arguments with publishers over book titles and, to me, Lefko’s subtitle “(21 Leading CEOs show) How to do well by doing good” would be a more accurate title for the book – and one more compelling to its target audience of CEOs and those new to Sustainability than “Global Sustainability”.
The book is not really a ‘how-to’ on making Sustainability a strategic business priority (check out The Green Executive for that!). As someone who lives corporate Sustainability day in day out, I got a couple of new insights and some nice fresh case studies, but nothing to shake up the status quo on planet Sustainability. That’s not a criticism, just an observation on the target audience.
Verdict: buy it for your boss.