All the books on this list deal with personal meaning and human relationships. These two things are the sources of lasting joy for all of us. These two things provide the deep fabric of sustainability—ecological, social, or economic. I’m pretty good at being mission driven, but need a lot of work on creating and nurturing strong relationships. I reread many of these books on a regular basis and they help keep me focused on what really matters and what I most need and want to sustain. These books have also helped the over 2,000 students I’ve taught over 30+ years.
I wrote...
Clean: Lessons from Ecolab's Century of Positive Impact
Clean is the perfect guide for CEOs, business leaders, chief sustainability officers, and business students who want to understand the importance of sustainability and how it can drive business growth. The book provides an in-depth analysis of Ecolab’s successes and challenges, and offers practical advice on how other companies can incorporate sustainable practices into their operations.
The book explores how Ecolab has implemented sustainable practices across all areas of its business, from manufacturing and supply chain to product development and marketing. It highlights how the company is helping its customers implement water stewardship, reduce their carbon footprint, strengthen diverse communities, create a culture of sustainability, and provide impressive returns to shareholders.
The most sustainable need we have is to be loved, and this book helps me learn to express love to those I care about deeply in ways they will perceive as loving.
This book made a huge difference in how I nurture family, friends, and even professional relationships.
A perennial New York Times bestseller for over a decade!
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—that’s the challenge. How can you keep your relationship fresh and growing amid the demands, conflicts, and just plain boredom of everyday life?
In the #1 New York Times international bestseller The 5 Love Languages, you’ll discover the secret that has transformed millions of relationships worldwide. Whether your relationship is flourishing or failing, Dr. Gary Chapman’s proven approach to showing and receiving love will help you experience deeper and richer levels of intimacy with your partner—starting today.
A happy life is all about meaning, and Frankl’s story of finding and holding on to meaning during his time in the concentration camps gets to the heart of the issue.
I love the “last human freedom:” the ability to choose how we will react in any given situation.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
This book, all about being in and getting out of “the box,” can profoundly change the way we deal with ourselves and others.
We get “in the box” when we deny our spiritual instinct to help another person. Being “in the box” leads us to treat others as objects—something we all hate.
Getting out of the box allows us to treat each other as human beings and children of God.
This third edition of an international bestseller--over 2 million copies sold worldwide and translated into 33 languages--details how its powerful insights on motivation, conflict, and collaboration can benefit organizations as well as individuals.
Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become an international word-of-mouth phenomenon. Rather than tapering off, it sells more copies every year. The book's central insight--that the key to leadership lies not in what we do but in who we are--has proven to have powerful implications not only for organizational leadership but in readers' personal lives as well.
Leadership and Self-Deception uses an entertaining…
From the authors of Leadership and Self-Deception (over 2 million copies sold) comes a new edition of this bestseller that has been thoroughly revised to more effectively address the diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges that plague our communities and hinder our organizations.
What if conflicts at home, at work, and in the world stem from the same root cause? What if we systematically misunderstand that cause? And what if, as a result, we unwittingly perpetuate the very problems we think we are trying to solve?
The Anatomy of Peace uses a fictional story of an Arab and a Jew—both of…
Covey’s teachings about living a quadrant II life changed the way I approach my professional life. It’s helped me fight fewer fires—because they don’t arise—and be far more productive and effective as I focus on things that are important to me, but not necessarily urgent.
The book has reinforced my belief that being mission driven is the key to happiness and a very productive professional life.
New York Times bestseller - over 25 million copies sold The No. 1 Most Influential Business Book of the Twentieth Century
"[Thirty] years after it first appeared, the wisdom of The 7 Habits is more relevant than ever. On an individual level people are burning out, and on a collective level we are burning up the planet. So Dr. Covey's emphasis on self-renewal and his understanding that leadership and creativity require us to tap into our own physical, mental, and spiritual resources are exactly what we need now." Arianna Huffington
One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written,…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
