Sustainable Business: Home

Once a model of innovation and a sparkly future for the rest of the world, America's infrastructure is outdated and crumbling. The US lags behind much of the world in internet access, bridge and highway safety, modern airports, and new energies. What will it take to restore America's infrastructure and take it to the next level? Some point to the green economy as a solution to lifting America out of a stagnant job market while rebuilding and modernizing its infrastructure. But can it drive and sustain the economic growth needed to maintain America's competitiveness on the global stage?

Now with SAGE Publishing!Timothy S. Hatten's Small Business Management: Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage, Seventh Edition equips students with the tools they need to navigate the important financial, legal, marketing, managerial, and operational decisions to help them create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in small business. Strong emphasis is placed on application with Experiential Learning Activities and application of technology and social media throughout. New cases, real-world examples, and illuminating features spotlight the diverse, innovative contributions of small business owners to the economy. Whether your students dream of launching a new venture, purchasing a franchise, managing a lifestyle business, or joining the family company, they will learn important best practices for competing in the modern business world.New to this Edition Experiential Learning Activities provide students with hands-on opportunities to practice their small business management skills.   Tech in Action boxes highlight how small business owners can leverage technology, big data, and social media.   Issues in Small Business boxes prompt critical thinking on current issues.  Small Business in Action videos showcase stories and interviews from a wide variety of small business owners.  How To. . . videos provide students with instructions and examples of basic business tasks such as performing a breakeven analysis, understanding income statements, and forecasting demand. 

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? Whatscience do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future?This short, accessible book written in the signature question-and-answer format of the What Everyone Needs to KnowRG series tackles these and numerous other questions. Sustainability is a porous topic, which has been adapted and reshaped for developing ecological models, improving corporateresponsibility, setting environmental and land-use policies, organizing educational curricula, and reimagining the goals of governance and democracy. Where other treatments of this topic tend to focus on just one application of sustainability, this primer encompasses everything from globaldevelopment and welfare to social justice and climate change. With chapters that discuss sustainability in the contexts of profitable businesses, environmental risks, scientific research, and the day-to-day business of local government, it gives readers a deep understanding of one of the mostessential concepts of our time.Bringing to bear experience in natural resource conservation, agriculture, the food industry, and environmental ethics, authors Paul B. Thompson and Patricia E. Norris explain clearly what sustainability means, and why getting it right is so important for the future of our planet.

With the threat of climate change looming over the present, many consumers and companies have prioritized minimizing their environmental impact through making more sustainable choices. This volume examines the role that individual consumption plays in climate change, and how companies have attempted to become more sustainable and the effectiveness of these practices. Readers will evaluate whether countries and local municipalities should regulate consumption, and if it is even possible to change consumption practices enough to meaningfully impact climate change. Through reading opposing perspectives on these questions, readers will become better equipped to form their own intelligent opinions on these important issues.

A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor offers his vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today's most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it's time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken -- that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest. Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus's vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups. In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.