Want to help your company or organisation save money, boost profits and improve its brand?
The twin challenges of the economic meltdown and climate change means we must act quickly to evolve our businesses to weather the storm. You can ensure your company or organisation saves money, reduces environmental damage and improves its performance while you advance your personal reputation and further your career.
Whatever your level or industry, Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company & Career More Sustainable offers practical knowledge to help you make a difference. Whether you’d like to transform your entire company or just get your colleagues recycling, Climb The Green Ladder will provide you with the tools and motivation to move your company (and career) towards a more successful, more sustainable future.
Authors Amy Fetzer and Shari Aaron undertook extensive research to find out what works and what doesn’t. They surveyed hundreds of employees and employers, and interviewed over 80 sustainability specialists who have successfully changed their workplaces from within to reveal the secrets of their success.
Step by step, Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company & Career More Sustainable identifies the key themes that underpin successful sustainability strategies, including real-life case studies from people who’ve done it, to create a comprehensive tool-kit for action.
Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company & Career More Sustainable sets out to provide a roadmap to achieving a thorough diagnosis of what it means to be socially responsible, and how an individual can have a positive impact on the success of organization. It will help employees solve sustainability issues by showing them how they can put these intangible values into action to ensure the company increases positive environmental, social and economic impacts while reducing risks, strengthening loyalty, brand reputation and competitive advantage.
Here, authors Amy and Shari describe the story of Climb the Green Ladder:
“Everywhere we go – conferences, talks, events, even parties – everyone is asking the same question: ‘What can I do to help save the planet?’ However, the answers coming back feel either inadequate (such as ‘Change your light bulbs’) or extreme (such as ‘Superglue yourself to an oil refinery!’).
There also seems to be a circular argument about responsibility. Do governments need to legislate, corporations change their practices or individuals alter their behaviour? The solutions will come from all these places, but everyone seems to be ignoring one key source of influence. Governments and corporations are made up of people. That gives individuals like us the power to change organisations from within, to set them on more sustainable, more successful paths and, in the process, future-proof our careers.
There are many talented, passionate and creative people using their individual power to make companies or organisations more sustainable, while getting ahead in their careers. The knowledge is out there, but it is under the covers and hard to find. There certainly isn’t much evidence of it in newspapers. When we do find valuable advice, it is often couched in jargon or described in abstract terms that makes it hard to translate into our own working lives.
We want to make a difference, to uncover this knowledge and share it so that we can work together towards a more successful, sustainable future. We know that ‘more sustainable’ means ‘more successful’ – both for the company you work for and for you personally.
Climb the Green Ladder shows the myriad ways that people are using resources more wisely, reducing emissions, pollution and waste and alleviating social injustice and poverty just by helping their organisation change their business practices. All successful sustainability strategies are underpinned by the same basic principles. We have detailed them in the book to provide a framework for others to follow; adding the personal stories behind the business successes makes them real.
People are trying to live responsibly in their home lives, for example by recycling, composting, buying fair trade and organic, and flying, driving or buying less. It can be uncomfortable and distressing to feel that, during our work lives, we are contributing to wasteful, disrespectful, dangerous or environmentally damaging behaviour – often on a scale that dwarfs our personal efforts.
Many people want to do something about their company or organisation’s unsustainable practices, but don’t know where to start. By bringing all this information together, by collaborating and sharing solutions, the book is a ladder to a more successful future – both for yourself and your career, your company and, ultimately, our beautiful planet.
Based in the UK and the US, and with an ocean between us, we relied on the wonderful communications tool Skype to write this book, and spent hours each day discussing it via video chat. Many times we wanted to jump on a plane to meet and be together, to be able to work on one document around the kitchen table or to pop the champagne when we submitted our final manuscript. But this compromise is one way we are trying to walk our talk.
We’re not perfect. We still fly, and drive, and buy. But we’re doing it less and less, and continuing to look for greener, more socially responsible solutions. Sustainability means looking for ways to achieve goals without sacrificing people, planet or profit. Sometimes, that means reassessing the goals themselves, but together we are finding new ways and
new habits.
No company or organisation is perfect either. Sustainability is evolving all the time as new solutions, information and ways of thinking come to light. However, the principles described in the book will remain the same.
We’re not making a judgement on whether the companies or individuals within them described in the book are sustainable. We are hoping to share the successes they have had. We want to show that everyone – in any industry and with any job title – can make a difference and stand up for what they know is right for their workplaces.
In the book you’ll read about people who are personally making a difference and about interesting, innovative and effective initiatives that are making business practices more sustainable. Our readers work for, or run, a wide range of companies and organisations – from multinationals to nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and public sector organisations. To reflect this, we’ve used ‘company’ and ‘organisation’ interchangeably. All these strategies should apply wherever you work, whether it’s a school, a charity, a small or multinational company, a government, a farm, a hospital or your own business.
We hope you enjoy the book and find it helpful. We wish you a fulfilling and inspiring journey as you Climb the Green Ladder.
Please tell us of your progress, and we’ll share updates via our website: www.climbthegreenladder.com. We look forward to meeting you on the way up.”
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