New excerpt up - from Green to Gold

One of our favorite books, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, is now available in paperback. Over on the Excerpts blog we've posted a passage called "Green-to-Gold Plays" in which the authors map out the strategies that they have found to create value in organizations that are interested in "doing good and doing well" simultaneously.
Here's a short excerpt from the excerpt:

An Eco-Advantage Mindset, supported by the right tracking tools, a focus on redesign, and a culture of environmental stewardship, is the foundation for turning green to gold. But the real action lies in the strategies that create value, the Green-to-Gold Plays. Like any other business strategy, our Green-to-Gold Plays aim to reduce the downsides a business faces (cost and risk) or increase the upsides (revenue and intangible value). Unlike many others, though, these plays don't sacrifice responsibility in the pursuit of profit -- or profit in the pursuit of responsibility. Our WaveRider companies offer proof every day that doing good and doing well can be symbiotic. We've mapped the eight Green-to-Gold Plays drawn from our study of WaveRiders onto the two-by-two strategy framework we outlined earlier. Not surprisingly, most green business efforts to date have focused on the lower left box. Cost reduction is extremely low risk, easy to sell internally, and often pays back quickly. It can yield competitive advantage. But our research suggests that, by focusing solely on the cost side, many companies are missing chances to generate broader Eco-Advantage. Most companies have not yet executed all of the plays -- they're leaving money on the table.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: 800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008676.html