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The Dow Chemical Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. got theirs. So did ConocoPhillips Co., International Paper Co., Weyerhaeuser Co., and Monsanto Co. Between 2004 and 2006, these companies received resolutions from shareholders pressing them to take better care of the environment. And then between 2006 and 2007, these businesses indeed made at least one eco-friendly move: They shared data with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a London-based NGO that compiles and publicizes the largest database of corporate greenhouse gas emissions in the world. These corporations’ tales are part of a larger trend, report Erin M. Reid and Michael W. Toff el of Harvard Business School. “We find that if a [Standard & Poor’s (S&P)] 500 company had a shareholder resolution in its recent past,” says Toffel, “it was more likely to disclose to the CDP.” The researchers also find that shareholder resolutions have a spillover effect: If one firm gets an environmental proposal from a stockholder, the rest of the firms in its industry become more likely to comply with the CDP. “Most of these resolutions initially lose, and lose big,” notes Toff el. “Managers don’t like to be told how to behave by shareholder activists.” But within a few…

As wealthier nations age, nonprofits are retooling their operations to accommodate an older volunteer workforce. But they would be remiss if they didn’t also look for help at the other end of the life span, reports Charlene S. Shannon, an expert in recreation and leisure studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She documents how “younger youth”—children between the ages of 8 and 12—are an energetic, useful, yet largely overlooked pool of volunteer labor. Interviewing younger youth and executive directors at Boys & Girls Clubs in Atlantic Canada, Shannon finds that the younger set’s needs and strengths are different from those of their slightly older counterparts. For instance, the difficulty that these small volunteers most frequently cite is that their assigned tasks are physically challenging. Dealing with rude people—both peers and older people—is also particularly taxing for them. But as legions of cookie-peddling Girls Scouts can attest, younger youth are particularly adept at fundraising. They are also well suited for assisting adults in tasks that require minimal responsibility, such as stuffing envelopes and tidying up after events. Helping seniors is also a younger-youth bailiwick. Recruiting 8- to 12-year-olds may be easier than coaxing adolescents and adults to volunteer,…

In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and though they’ve heard that it’s not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant, they still use it. Shanti’s family has been drinking the local water for generations, and although it periodically makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it. Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re not the reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home—roughly a third of a mile. It is also well known and affordable (roughly 10 rupees, or 20 cents, for 5 gallons). Being able to pay the small fee has even become a status symbol for some villagers. Habit isn’t a factor, either. Shanti is forgoing the safer water because of a series of flaws in the overall…

Many books and articles support the view that an organization must choose between creating value through innovation and creating value by building scale and wringing out cost. The thinking styles and capabilities required for success appear to be diametrically opposed. Innovators are right-brained people who rely heavily on their intuition, whereas the leaders of large, efficiency-oriented organizations achieve results through rigorous, continuously repeated analytical processes and reject decisions based on instinct and judgment. In The Design of Business, Roger Martin contends that organizations can balance intuitive originality and analytic mastery in a dynamic interplay that he calls design thinking. This approach is necessary, according to Martin, to maintain long-term competitive advantage. As the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and an advisor to many CEOs, Martin has worked with and studied a wide range of organizations. He has come to embrace the design thinking approach after seeing its powerful impact in a diverse array of companies. The vivid articulation of these company stories, paired with some very useful conceptual frameworks, makes The Design of Business both compelling and actionable. Martin anchors many of his concepts in a framework depicting the way knowledge advances. He…

If you’re a born and bred American and you’ve lived in any non-Anglophone country, you may have realized after a time that the local people you met didn’t just speak a different language—they were really weird. They acted in all sorts of ways that struck you as irrational, frustrating, and eventually annoying. They stood too close to you, or too far away. Their voices were too loud, or too soft. They were vague about such basics as time, distance, and probabilities. And after months of this disorienting behavior all around you, you may have wondered whether you were going mad. In a sense, you were. You were suffering from what has come to be called “culture shock”—a sometimes-traumatic condition that results from the removal of familiar cultural cues. In its worst manifestations, culture shock can make you feel as though you’ve been detached from reality. This concept was brought home to Americans by returning Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s and 1970s. Because volunteers had been immersed by design in local cultures, they brought culture shock to light for many Americans. Fortunately, even before the first Peace Corps volunteers were posted overseas, a cultural anthropologist named Edward T. Hall had…

Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, is described on the book cover as an icon of the environmental movement. He actually isn’t and doesn’t want to be. Brand (who, in full disclosure, is a friend) has always been much more of an iconoclast than an icon. In Whole Earth Discipline, he combines his deep concern for the environment, his pugnacious search for windmills to tilt at, and his technological optimism to produce an intriguing, confounding, utterly Brand-type book. By that, I mean a full-throated assault on conventional wisdom, laced with enough ironic riffs and personal confessions of his own past errors to disarm most critics. Brand came to public attention 41 years ago by publishing the wildly successful Whole Earth Catalog, a practical guide for back-to-the-land refugees from suburbia. The catalog questioned virtually every attribute of 1960s middle-class suburban America and offered a telephone directory-sized, annotated compilation of equipment for rural self-reliance. Ultimately, the back-to-the-land movement proved to be vanishingly small, over-fond of drugs, and stuck in a historical cul-de-sac. In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand examines and embraces the scientific basis of some of the principal problems that scare the hell out of environmentalists. Indeed, his bottom line on…