University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
True to Yourself
Book

True to Yourself

Leading a Values-Based Business

Mark Albion
Berrett-Koehler, 2006
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Mark Albion explains a very contemporary balancing act: how to run a business based on values and still make a profit. Companies ranging from Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s to small bakeries and toy makers have prospered while supporting the social concerns of their founders and employees. Building such values-based businesses is not easy. They face the same profit-and-loss problems as other small companies, plus they take on an additional layer of social issues. Albion tells his personal story, buttressed by corporate examples and interviews with 75 owners of values-based businesses. getAbstract suggests this book full of practical advice to anyone who is willing to sign up for the challenge of running a values-based business.

Summary

Sustaining Relationships

What does it take to build a values-based business? Certainly you have to follow your moral code as you work to realize your commercial objectives, but you also have to help others achieve their dreams. That means building relationships and focusing beyond business concerns. To create this special kind of enterprise, you need to be sensitive to a complex array of issues and handle diverse challenges, such as cutting production costs to preserve jobs, reaching out to foster minority-owned suppliers, choosing environmentally sound materials or hiring women for senior management.

Leaders make decisions every day that affect many people and relationships. Your success hinges on how you arrive at decisions, as well as the final outcomes of your choices. Making decisions is more difficult in values-based businesses because you have to take into account a number of variables affecting social, environmental, moral, philanthropic and spiritual issues, and then balance them against your business priorities.

If a business decision does not improve the world, it is not values-based. That’s why many owners of values-based businesses find they are ...

About the Author

Social entrepreneur Mark Albion has co-founded seven organizations, including an international network of M.B.A.s dedicated to creating a better world. A former Harvard Business School professor, he wrote the bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living.

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