Making the Green Revolution

Making the Green Revolution is about the essential fact of our existence: our planet has limited resources yet its consuming population is bursting at the seams. Either we rethink how we make and use what we use, or we cease to exist. And, if we cease to exist, there won’t be any business to worry about.

We make the Green Revolution or we vanish. We can be part of the green problem or part of the green solution. Making the Green Revolution is about the next big revolution in human behavior and how you can capitalize on it.

The company that made this observation is a household name—Panasonic—a near century old manufacturing giant with products in practically every home, office, and factory in the world. All of Panasonic’s products were designed to consume energy, sometimes a lot of it, and many were also designed to use water, often in large quantities. Many used toxic metals like mercury and lead. And all took lots of resources to make and plenty more to dispose of.

Making the Green Revolution is not about dead-end Leninist convulsions. It is about the practical business of using the Green Revolution to increase sales and profits in a big way. It is about reversing received wisdoms that green adds costs and reduces growth. It is about a breakthrough in modern business thinking.

Going green all through the supply chain from the remotest customer to the farthest supplier is a challenge of the first magnitude. But, Panasonic made the only possible decision: Whatever needs to change to preserve humankind must change. And, in changing so much to implement the Green Revolution, Panasonic discovered several new markets, each one of which is capable of profitably doubling its current size.

There is real, future-changing money in green.

Making the Green Revolution is also about how the Cloud Revolution offers us the tools to turn green processes into engines of profitable revenue generation. Clouds, the largest scale drivers in history, allow companies like Panasonic and their customers to create new consumption in less resource-intense ways. Panasonic saw that clouds create new behaviors that open large, profitable, and unforeseen green markets.

No manager can afford to bypass this book. The future of every company on the planet begins here.

Francis McInerney：
Francis McInerney was born in the U.K. and brought up there and in Canada, where he went to the University of Toronto, majoring in economics. After graduating, he cofounded business information publisher Northern Business Information which he sold to McGraw-Hill. Later, he founded North River Ventures LLC for his private equity and advisory businesses. He is also the author of several other books including Beating Japan (E.P. Dutton, 1993), The Total Quality Corporation (E.P. Dutton, 1995), FutureWealth (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Panasonic (St. Martin’s Press, 2007).