If you must start somewhere...

As I was reading about corporate social responsibility and sustainability, I came across references to a book by John Elkington in pretty much every article. The book is called Cannibals with Forks. When I was done reading journal articles, I decided to grab a copy of the book at the Vancouver Library (which finally opened after two months of strike).

John Elkington is the Founder and Chief Entrepreneur of SustainAbility, a renown consultancy firm and think tank in the UK. The book was published in 1997 and, although ten years have passed since, it is still very relevant today. In the book, Elkington introduces the concepts of triple bottom line (people, planet AND profit), sustainable development, and challenges faced by companies as the world's population grows and consumes beyond what our planet can sustain. If you are curious about the topic of corporate sustainability, this is a good book to start with.

I started building a collection of links to web sites that discuss sustainability and CSR. Most are sites I came across while researching my MBA project. I used a very neat little link-sharing site called del.icio.us. If you are like me and add quantities of sites to your favourites, only to not remember why you linked them in the first place, you'll like del.icio.us. Once you add their button bar and find a web page of interest, you can highlight text on the page, click the Tag button, add a few keywords to help categorize the content, and voilà! You can also see how many other del.icio.us users have tagged a web site and then visit their list of favourites to find other link of interest.

Very well done.