Creating a Better Future

This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U. And he outlines a framework for updating the “operating systems” of our educational institutions, our economies, and our democracies. This book enables leaders and organizations in all industries and sectors to shift awareness, connect with the highest future possibilities, and strengthen the capacity to co-shape the future.

Green business and marketing pioneer Jacquelyn Ottman helps organizations achieve competitive advantage by going “beyond green”--promoting their products and services to mainstream audiences by underscoring such primary benefits as health, superior performance, good taste, cost effectiveness or convenience.Green products have been around since the 1970s, but it's only in recent years that they've become ubiquitous. That's because savvy green marketers are no longer targeting "deep green" consumers with a "save the planet" pitch. Instead, they're promoting the added value their products provide: better health, superior performance, good taste, or cost-effectiveness. In this innovative book Ottman argues that emphasizing primary benefits -- the New Rules -- is critical to winning over the mainstream consumer.

Drawing on the latest poll data and incorporating lessons learned from her clients and other leading sustainable brands -- including GE, Nike, Method, Starbucks, Timberland, HP, NatureWorks, Procter & Gamble, Stonyfield Farm, and Wal-Mart -- Ottman provides practical strategies, tools, and inspiration for building every aspect of a credible value-based green marketing strategy. She covers such topics as spurring innovation through a proactive approach to sustainability, developing products that are green throughout their life cycle, communicating credibly to avoid accusations of "greenwashing," teaming up with stakeholders to maximize outreach to consumers, taking advantage of social media, and much more.

The New Rules of Green Marketing captures the best of Ottman's two previous groundbreaking books on green marketing and places it within a 21st Century context. Focusing on a new generation of marketers who likely grew up with an appreciation for sustainability, it provides in one place essential strategies, tools, and inspiration for connecting effectively with mainstream consumers.

• By a trailblazing expert in green marketing

• Demonstrates how to effectively market green to mainstream consumers

• Filled with success stories from sustainability leader including Ottman's Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial clients

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Green products have been around since the 1970s, but it's only in recent years that they've become ubiquitous. That's because savvy green marketers are no longer targeting "deep green" consumers with a "save the planet" pitch. Instead, they're promoting the added value their products provide: better health, superior performance, good taste, or cost-effectiveness. In this innovative book Ottman argues that emphasizing primary benefits -- the New Rules -- is critical to winning over the mainstream consumer.

Drawing on the latest poll data and incorporating lessons learned from her clients and other leading sustainable brands -- including GE, Nike, Method, Starbucks, Timberland, HP, NatureWorks, Procter & Gamble, Stonyfield Farm, and Wal-Mart -- Ottman provides practical strategies, tools, and inspiration for building every aspect of a credible value-based green marketing strategy. She covers such topics as spurring innovation through a proactive approach to sustainability, developing products that are green throughout their life cycle, communicating credibly to avoid accusations of "greenwashing," teaming up with stakeholders to maximize outreach to consumers, taking advantage of social media, and much more.

The New Rules of Green Marketing captures the best of Ottman's two previous groundbreaking books on green marketing and places it within a 21st Century context. Focusing on a new generation of marketers who likely grew up with an appreciation for sustainability, it provides in one place essential strategies, tools, and inspiration for connecting effectively with mainstream consumers.

We're bombarded by messages telling us that bigger and better things are the keys to happiness—but after we pile up the stuff and pile on the work hours, we end up exhausted and broke on a planet full of trash. Sarah van Gelder and her colleagues at YES! Magazine have been exploring the meaning of real happiness for eighteen years. Here they offer fascinating research, in-depth essays, and compelling personal stories by visionaries such as Annie Leonard, Matthieu Ricard, and Vandana Shiva, showing us that real well-being is found in supportive relationships and thriving communities, opportunities to make a contribution, and the renewal we receive from a thriving natural world. In the pages of this book, you'll find creative and practical ways to cultivate a happiness that is nurturing, enduring, and life affirming.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations provided the first, most influential and lasting explanation of the workings of modern economics. But with his focus on "the market" as the best mechanism for producing and distributing the necessities of life, Smith's concepts only told part of the story, leading to flawed economic models that devalue activities that fall outside of the market's parameters of buying and selling. The real wealth of nations, Riane Eisler argues, is not merely financial, but includes the contributions of people and our natural environment. Here, Eisler goes beyond the market to reexamine economics from a larger perspective--and shows that we must give visibility and value to the socially and economically essential work of caring for people and the planet if we are to meet the enormous challenges we are facing.

Eisler proposes a new "caring economics" that takes into account the full spectrum of economic activities--from the life--sustaining activities of the household, to the life-enriching activities of caregivers and communities, to the life-supporting processes of nature. She shows how our values are distorted by the economic double standard that devalues anything stereotypically associated with women and femininity; reveals how current economic models are based on a deep-seated culture of domination; and shows how human needs would be better served by economic models based on caring. Most importantly, she provides practical proposals for new economic inventions--new measures, policies, rules, and practices--to bring about a caring economics that fulfills human needs.

Like her classic The Chalice and the Blade, The Real Wealth of Nations is a bold and insightful look at how to create a society in which each of us can achieve the full measure of our humanity.

• From the author of the bestselling classic The Chalice and the Blade (over 500,000 sold)
• Proposes a dramatic new economic model that could help resolve many of the most critical problems we face today
• Offers concrete steps for putting this model into practice

In this revised and updated new edition of a classic—over 560,000 copies sold and translated into 18 languages—is a practical guide for "unpacking" your physical, emotional, and intellectual baggage and "repacking" for the journey ahead.
 
People everywhere feel overwhelmed today—weighed down by countless responsibilities and buffeted by never-ending changes in their personal and professional lives. Repacking Your Bags shows readers how to climb out from under these burdens and find the fulfillment that is missing in their lives.
 
“Living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose.” This is how Richard Leider and David Shapiro define the good life. Technological advancements, economic shifts, and longer lifespans mean most of us will need to repeatedly reimagine our lives. In this wise and practical guide, Leider and Shapiro help you weigh all that you're carrying, leverage what helps you live well, and let go of those burdens that merely weigh you down. 
 
This third edition has been revised with new stories and practices to help you repack your four critical “bags” (place, relationship, work, and purpose); identify your gifts, passions, and values; and plan your journey, no matter where you are in life. 

• New edition of the classic bestsellerover 500,000 copies sold and translated into seventeen languages

• An indispensable tool in the lifelong journey of living a purposeful life

• Thoroughly revised and updated with new stories, exercises, and tools

The first and second editions of this classic book showed readers how to develop their own unique vision of the good lifewhich Leider and Shapiro define as "living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose"and take practical steps to achieve it. Inspired by a spirit of travel and adventure, it uses packing and repacking your bags as a metaphor for deciding what you really need in your journey through life.

So why a third edition? Because the world has changed. When they wrote the first two editions, Leider and Shapiro assumed that repacking was something people might do once or twice in their lives. But technological advances, major economic shifts, longer life spans, and changing social roles are revolutionizing the way we live and work. Today we have to repeatedly unpack and repack as the inevitable shifts and surprises life has to offer continually unfold before us. With each step along the way, we must reexamine what has brought us here and continue asking ourselves if the choices that have sustained us so far are continuing to do soor if they're just weighing us down.

This new edition has been thoroughly revised and reimagined with this lifelong focus in mind. It contains new stories and practices for repacking your four critical "bags"place, relationship, work, and purposeas well as a new Repacking Journal for planning your "trip" and Leider's immensely popular Calling Card exercise for identifying your gifts, passions, and values. Repacking Your Bags reminds all of us to regularly ask why we carry what we do and try to lighten our loadsbecause the good life is worth striving for at every age.

What sets this book apart from similar titles

• Another book in this genre is The Happiness Project, but it focuses on the author's personal journey, making it a good fit mostly for readers who share the author's personality.  Repacking Your Bags is a happiness book that applies to a wide range of people and personalities.  
• Books like the Power of Less suggest you approach happiness through simplification and efficiency, whereas Richard Leider points to deeper themes such as finding one's true purpose or calling.  
• And the book Stumbling on Happiness devotes many pages to the psychology and neuroscience of unhappiness, which leads to some interesting insights but is less focused on practical, easy-to-implement advice.  

Stop Seeking Happiness; Just Get Out of Its Way!

Happiness is our natural state, for each of us and for humanity as a whole, argues John Izzo. But that happiness is being stolen by insidious mental patterns that he depicts as thieves: the thief of control, the thief of conceit, the thief of coveting, the thief of consumption, and the thief of comfort. He discovered these thieves as he sought the true source of happiness during a year-long sabbatical, walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and living in the Andes of Peru. This thoughtful and inspiring book describes the disguises these thieves wear, the tools they use to break into our hearts, and how to lock them out once and for all. Izzo shows how these same thieves of personal happiness are destroying society as well. This book will help us all discover, develop, and defend the happiness that is our true nature while creating a world we all want to live in.