Do Purpose - Why brands with a purpose do better and matter more by David Hieatt
The most important brands in the world make us feel something. They do that because they have something they want to change. And as customers, we want to be part of that change. These companies have a reason to exist over and above making a profit: They have a Purpose.
Yes, we love the product they make. But the thing we love most about them is the change they are making.
Purpose is an incredibly powerful thing. It provides the strength to fight the impossible. It tells your story, it builds your teams and it defines your culture.
In Do Purpose, David Hieatt offers insights on how to build one of these purpose-driven companies. You know, those rare brands we all fall in love with. The crazy ones that don’t just make something, but change something as well.
The Responsible Company: What we've learned from Patagonia's first 40 years by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley
Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we Make things by Michael Braungart and William McDonough
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model?