In Profits and Sustainability, Geoffrey Jones examines historical patterns associated with entrepreneurs who have promoted alternatives to conventional products or business models that they view as compromising the health of individuals, communities, and/or the environment. Jones's main premise is that the history of green entrepreneurship extends back to the mid-nineteenth century and includes efforts to market health foods, organic agriculture, natural beauty products, green architecture, wind and solar power, ecotourism, waste disposal services, and other such products and services. Jones argues that to make sense of the historical patterns associated with the motivations, strategies, and successes and failures of green entrepreneurs, one needs to take this broader history into account.
Like many business historians, Jones is a good storyteller. Profits and Sustainability is a highly readable book—so much so that one might be lulled into missing the enormous amount of research invested in this project, including a number of original interviews. The notes at the end of each chapter are extensive and broad ranging, with each of the nine main chapters having between one hundred and two hundred notes, many containing multiple citations. Jones divides the book into two parts: the first consists of four chapters that examine the period from the mid-nineteenth century to approximately 1980, and the second takes the story into the period when environmental concerns reach the agendas of consumers, policymakers, and corporate leaders.
In part 1, Jones emphasizes the role of individuals and their motivations in pursuing unconventional and innovative business strategies. Indeed, he divides entrepreneurs into two categories based on their motivations. The greener entrepreneurs are those driven more by sustainability (and sustainability-like) concerns than by profits. He views entrepreneurs who establish innovative businesses in sustainability-related areas only to generate a profit as being more akin to conventional entrepreneurs. In addition to motivations, Jones also examines the strategies that these entrepreneurs employ and whether they are ultimately successful in building profitable businesses. Part 2 of the book continues the focus on individuals, but also introduces efforts at a more institutional level, including the increased availability of finance, the role of governments in shaping markets, and corporate-initiated efforts.
Some of the early entrepreneurs Jones discusses were guided by an eccentric mix of science, spirituality, and evangelical zeal, building businesses as a vehicle for disseminating ideas and practices rather than as a way to earn profits. An example of someone who fits this characterization well is Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), an Austrian philosopher and social reformer who established schools and businesses in support of his efforts to promote biodynamic agriculture (a forerunner of organic agriculture) and anthroposophical medicine (which focused on plant-based drugs, massage, exercise, and counseling). Although Steiner might seem out of place in a “global history of green entrepreneurs,” he certainly meets Jones's criteria of being someone “who imagined that business could make the world more environmentally sustainable rather than less” (p. v).
Somewhere on the other end of the spectrum from Steiner is Tom Fatjo Jr., who founded American Refuse Systems in 1967, at the age of twenty-one, when he became frustrated with the local system of garbage collection and started a one-truck company. Two years later, Fatjo acquired a stake in a manufacturer of heavy equipment and went on to transform the new company, Browning-Ferris Industries, into a leader of the waste disposal industry. Jones describes Fatjo as a conventional for-profit entrepreneur—but one who sees profits as compatible with helping to make the world more environmentally sustainable.
Jones weaves the stories of hundreds of such entrepreneurs into a coherent history of overlapping efforts in several different industries. For example, Amory and Hunter Lovins, who founded a research center focused on energy efficiency, appear in a section on the development of greener buildings, along with the brief stories of architects who went on to start firms that specialized in the design of energy efficient buildings. John Mackey, who borrowed $45,000 to start a natural foods store and later became the cofounder of Whole Foods, appears in a section that examines the rise of the organic-food industry some fifty years after Steiner's promotion of biodynamic agriculture.
Ultimately, Jones concludes that “profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile” (p. 400). Getting too far ahead of the curve and pursuing “crazy” goals using strategies that lie “outside of traditional boxes” is not necessarily a strategy for a successful business (p. 403). At the same time, he notes, green entrepreneurs have acted as pioneers, laying the foundation for future successes in the direction they value.
If there is a weakness in the book, it is the way in which Jones treats the role of environmental governance. The rules that govern a market are often as important as the strategies and motivation of individuals. For example, laws that prohibit people from dumping their garbage on city streets played a significant role in helping someone like Fatjo build a profitable national company around the business of garbage collection. Indeed, laws that place limits on unsustainable practices allow conventional, profit-seeking entrepreneurs to be successful in their adoption of greener practices. Jones recognizes the role of governments in restructuring markets, as is reflected in his discussion of renewable energy and waste management, but the topic deserves more attention in the concluding chapters of a book on profits and sustainability. Jones's conclusion that “crazy” green entrepreneurs have played a pioneering role in encouraging movement toward practices that are more sustainable is dead-on, but the shift from being “crazy” to profitable is often more a matter of governance than of business strategy.
