The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Book review

The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. By Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara Schley. Doubleday, 432 pages. $29.95.

This is among a recent crop of business books that wears its well-meaning heart on its sleeve. As the subtitle suggests, it's concerned with issues around sustainability, which often translate into corporate social responsibility, environmental stewardship and rethinking corporations' ties to the larger society.

These topics have gotten a lot of ink and attention in the last few years, though recent economic woes have pushed them toward the back burner. These ideas are being taken up most forcefully by people outside the corporate world, as they are here: chief author Senge (author of the 1990 best-seller, The Fifth Discipline) is a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, where co-authors Laur and Schley work; Smith and Kruschwitz are involved with Fifth Discipline fieldbooks.

To their credit, the authors have cast their net around corporate America and come up with examples of companies they find are doing good works. Not surprisingly, most are giants--DuPont...