Talent, Transformation, and the Triple Bottom Line: How Companies Can Leverage Human Resources to Achieve Sustainable Growth

Employees are central to creating sustainable organizations, yet they are left on the sidelines in most sustainability initiatives along with the HR professionals who should be helping to engage and energize them. This book shows business leaders and HR professionals how to: motivate employees to create economic, environmental and social value; facilitate necessary culture, strategic and organizational change; embed sustainability into the employee lifecycle; and strengthen existing capabilities and develop new ones necessary to support the transformation to sustainability.

Talent, Transformation, and the Triple Bottom Line also demonstrates how leading companies are using sustainability to strengthen core HR functions: to win the war for talent, to motivate and empower employees, to increase productivity, and to enliven traditional HR-related efforts such as diversity, health and wellness, community involvement and volunteerism. In combination, these powerful benefits can help drive business growth, performance, and results.

• The book offers strategies, policies, tools and specific action steps that business leaders and HR professionals can use to get into the sustainability game or enhance their efforts dramatically
• Andrew Savitz is an expert in sustainability and has worked extensively with many organizations on sustainability strategy and implementation; he and Karl Weber wrote The Triple Bottom Line, one of the most successful books in the field
• Published in partnership with SHRM and with the cooperation of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• Foreword by Edward Lawler III

This book fills a gaping hole in both the HR and sustainability literature by educating HR professionals about sustainability, sustainability professionals about HR, and business leaders about how to marry the two to accelerate progress on both fronts.

About the Authors

Andy Savitz is an internationally known expert on sustainability and was one of the lead partners in the Sustainability Services practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global advisory services firm . He has worked with many companies to help them improve their financial, social, and environmental performance, and wrote The Triple Bottom Line (2006), one of the most successful and highly acclaimed books on sustainability. Andy worked extensively with the Society for Human Resource Management and with numerous companies and organizations in developing the guidance, strategies, and tools in this book, and to demonstrate why human resources is a critical and oft en underutilized asset to all organizations, small and large, that want to move toward sustainability. Andy now runs Sustainable Business Strategies ( getsustainable.net), an independent consultancy based in the Boston area.

Karl Weber is a writer and editor specializing in business and current affairs. In addition to his collaboration with Andy Savitz on The Triple Bottom Line, Weber's recent projects include the New York Times best seller Creating a World Without Poverty, coauthored with Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (2008), and its sequel, Building Social Business (2010); the New York Times number-one best seller What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, by Scott McClellan (2008), which Weber edited; and two best-selling companion books to the acclaimed documentary films Food Inc. (2009) and Waiting for “Superman” (2010), both of which Weber edited. He has also collaborated with the noted consultant Adrian Slywotzky on several books, including Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It (2011). Weber lives in Irvington, New York.