My new book, The Truth About Green Business will be released by Financial Times Press on May 29.

We're pleased to give you an exclusive early look -- condensed from "Truth 40: Engaging Employees".

You can read the full chapter here, or pre-order the book here.

Highly engaged employees outperform their disengaged colleagues by 20 to 28 percent. A 2004 study of 28 multinational companies found that the share prices of organizations with highly engaged employees rose three times faster than industry averages.

Building your green strategy into the daily life of your business means changes in behavior, not just technology. But how do you get your employees aboard? And how does the "We've always done it this way" sentiment change?

Clean technology gets a lot of attention, but people are the heart of greening a company. What people do each day is where the DNA of your company (its culture as well as its policies and operating procedures) is "expressed." Changing the DNA is one thing; having that show up as different behavior on the ground -- in everything from purchasing to design to customer service -- is quite another.

How to engage your employees
Engaging your employees takes thoughtfulness, commitment, heart and, above all, respect.

Know the value. Managers often assume they can't afford to engage their employees; but the value of an employee who knows the right thing to do -- or how to figure out what that is -- outweighs the effort needed to engage them. Employees who are engaged in greening create value through added efficiency, waste reduction, and process improvement.
Get everyone on same page. A shared mental model, like the Natural Step (TNS) management framework, provides a common sense of direction and a shared vocabulary for discovering new opportunities. When Ikea trained its entire workforce in the TNS framework, it was surprised to find suggestion boxes stuffed to the brim with good ideas.
Listen to your employees -- even ones you think might not think of as innovative. When the Scandic hotel chain engaged its workforce in learning and working with the TNS framework, management was surprised to find that many of the best ideas came from the chambermaids; they weren't highly educated, but they were "face to customer," and once equipped with the right questions they saw things that no one else could see.
Start a Green Team representing a cross-section of the company, with different functions and levels of seniority. Get management support if at all possible--if only to give your green champions some free time to drive the process. (Look what a gold mine 3M's "15% rule," which encourages people to spend 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing, has been for that company's patent pipeline!) But be prepared to proceed and show value as informal "skunkworks" if management isn't ready.
Show the results directly, whether in management reports, control charts or performance dashboards, so people can see how their "drop in the bucket," in the words of David Gershon, helps fill the bucket.

The early reviews for The Truth About Green Business have been extremely gratifying, and affirm that this book will be the very useful tool for change that we hoped it would be.

Alex Steffen, Editor of Worldchanging .com says:

"For the last few years, I've been imagining what the essential one-volume green business handbook would look like. Now, I don't need to imagine it, because Gil Friend has written it. The Truth About Green Business is simply the best green business book on the market."

In the coming days, you'll be receiving emails with further news, event announcements and other updates from us. We hope that you'll join us in our quest to get the word out about this important book. Because, as Hunter Lovins (President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, and Professor at Presidio School of Management) has told us:

"This book contains everything you didn't know how to ask about green business and can't afford not to know! Just imagine if everyone issued a business license were given a copy of this book as required reading for success. Now that's a stimulus package American businesses could use."

Natural Logic brings an integrative approach to our work with clients, since piecemeal approaches just don't do the job. The ideal engagement takes clients through the complete cycle of charting your course (Strategy), reading the signs (Feedback) and making it go (Implementation).

But "integrative" doesn't mean "all at once." You can begin with any of our three options, each at a different scale of intensity. In each case we tailor our approach to your organization's needs, circumstances, and readiness -- and we design each engagement to produce clear, reliable results:

Strategic briefings: Our CEO and senior associates conduct a customized, confidential briefing for your executive team on the key trends and emerging issues facing your company.
Rapid diagnostics: Our analysts perform a rigorous diagnosis of your current baseline and recommend prioritized opportunities.
Comprehensive engagements: Our team helps you design and implement systemic change at your company and supply chain to ensure that you effectively and consistently harvest the value you identify.

Here are just a few of the clients we've had the pleasure of serving recently:

Watch for our next newsletter to learn about other projects underway and in the pipeline.

Gil Friend's recent presentations have included:

Senior Sustainability Analyst Ken Hejmanowski spoke on on Environment and Sustainability as part of the Town of Los Gatos' General Plan Update process, May 2, 2009.

Gil's upcoming presentations:

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