Reviewed by Robert Colman

Abbott, R. M. (2009). Conscious Endeavors: Essays on business, society and the journey to sustainability. Scriptorium / Palimpsest Press, 174 p.

Rob Abbott is a great believer in businesses and how they can change themselves and society. For this reason, he has worked for many years advising businesses on how to create wealth through a deep integration of sustainability with core business strategy. Conscious Endeavours, his newest book, is a collection of essays and speeches that aim to help business leaders guide their thinking as they consider how to create that deep integration.

One of the most penetrating questions Abbott raises in the book is in his introduction when he asks, “How do organizations form a vision of where they need or want to go?” Seems like a simple question, but sustainability isn’t always considered in a company’s answer to it. And yet, embedding sustainability in the answer can create strategic advantages for a company if its leaders take sustainability into account at every step of the way.

This is why “Conscious Endeavors” is such an apt title for the book; it emphasizes the importance of growing a business, not for the sake of growth, but also to build value for society.

The book is geared towards helping sustainability leaders within an organization build their profile by building the case for sustainability as a central part of business strategy. But rather than taking the tried-and-true “how-to” approach that so many business books do, Abbott takes the reader on a journey through the history of environmentalism, the sustainability movement, and the way it has connected with business.

He includes in that discussion homages to several individuals that he considers important to the sustainability movement for the work that they have done to help us understand how we interact with nature, and the importance of how we treat our “natural capital.” What’s fascinating about this section is that it isn’t the same old names one might expect: conservationist Aldo Leopold, scientist Loren Eiseley, management thinker Peter Drucker, scientist Charles David Keeling, and economist Herman Daly. This is one of the most valuable sections of the book because it offers insight into five people who could explain the sustainability story very effectively.

Abbott’s main thrust is to help others create an effective sustainability “story” for their organizations. He feels that this story hasn’t yet been told well or certainly effectively enough. The challenge is bridging mainstream strategy with sustainability efforts, and managing that bridging process is something that each company must deal with in their own way. However, he offers plenty of guidance within these pages of how an individual can frame that story.

If I have one reservation about the book is that, as a collection of essays, the narrative is somewhat uneven in places. Some of the essays would have benefited from an introduction within the text, and a couple probably could have been left out altogether — shorter pieces that, although they accentuated Abbott’s thesis, weren’t absolutely necessary.

Another thing that works in the book’s favour is that when there are case studies presented, they are not the same case studies of Walmart and other large companies that are continuously repeated in so many sustainability books. At no point do you feel like switching off because you’ve heard this story before.

Conscious Endeavors is an interesting addition to the sustainability lexicon because it opens up the discussion a bit wider, adds to our knowledge of how the sustainability debate has developed over the past 100 years, and challenges us to reinvent what it will mean in the next few years.

For a short excerpt of Conscious Endeavors, click here. 

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