The trinoculars symbolised People, Planet & Profit
My first book came out in 1980, beginning the production of a veritable library over the decades, when foreign editions are taken into account.
So which would be my favorite? The Green Consumer Guide may have sold around a million copies in its various editions, and Cannibals With Forks may have introduced the world to my linked concepts of the ‘triple bottom line’ (1994) and ‘People, Planet & Profit’ (1995), but I have many other favourites among the 19 books I have produced to date. These would include A Year in the Greenhouse, my published diary of an extraordinary year, 1989, The Young Green Consumer Guide (because for years afterwards I was sent school projects from around the world), The Chrysalis Economy (because of the seductiveness of the underlying metaphor), The Power of Unreasonable People (which helped bridge the worlds of social entrepreneurship and mainstream business) and The Zeronauts (which explored the use of zero-based targets in fields as disparate as climate change, health and bribery & corruption).
But there is always the hope that the next book will have a bigger impact, a hope I hold for The Breakthrough Challenge: 10 Ways to Connect Today’s Profits with Tomorrow’s Bottom Line, co authored with Jochen Zeitz, former CEO of PUMA and now co-chair, with Sir Richard Branson, of The B Team. More details on the book here.
Due for release in September 2014, my latest book
Except for the last couple, all of my books to date have been written in the back study of our family home in Barnes. (The Zeronauts and The Breakthrough Challenge were largely born on the kitchen table. At least one earlier book, The Green Consumer Guide, was written with builders’ feet crashing through the ceiling above our heads – Julia (Hailes) and I wrote back to back at that point, with desks facing opposing walls. The books listed here have been categorised under four headings: business; consumer and lifestyle; science and technology; and other.
So here are the books to date:
The Ecology of Tomorrow’s World (1980).
The Green Capitalists (1987), with an additional chapter by Tom Burke.
Green Pages (1988), with Julia Hailes and Tom Burke.
The Green Business Guide (1991), with Julia Hailes and Peter Knight.
Cannibals with Forks (1997).
The Chrysalis Economy (2001).
The Power of Unreasonable People (2008), with Pamela Hartigan.
The Zeronauts (2012).
The Breakthrough Challenge (2014).
The Green Consumer Guide (1988), with Julia Hailes.
The Green Consumer’s Supermarket Shopping Guide (1989), with Julia Hailes.
The Young Green Consumer’s Guide (1990), with Julia Hailes.
Holidays That Don’t Cost the Earth (1992), with Julia Hailes.
Manual 2000 (1998), with Julia Hailes.
The New Foods Guide (2001), with Julia Hailes.
(which invariably also has business dimensions):
Sun Traps (1984).
The Poisoned Womb (1985).
The Gene Factory (1985).
Other: To date, there is only one book in this category:
A Year in the Greenhouse (1990)