Business

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization, Peter Drucker, 2008. These five questions are essentially an organizational assessment, and although they are directed toward nonprofits, they can be used in any type of organization. The five questions are:

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

These five questions weave together a process of reflection an organization can undertake to determine its current reality and chart a future course. For those interested in further inquiry, Drucker lists a number of additional questions for additional exploration.

Although this book is specifically about sustainability, in a broader sense it is really about how to bring systems thinking into our institutions and into our global society. The revolution that the authors refer to is twofold: it is focused on our global environmental impact, and it is focused on the change in thinking that needs to take place in order to minimize that impact. Three key behaviors will create this shift in thinking: seeing systems, collaborating across boundaries, and moving from a problem solving mindset to one of creating the future. The book offers some great examples of how we got into our current predicament and companies that are starting to apply systems thinking to help move "beyond the bubble," as it is referred to in the book. Scattered throughout the book are sections called "Toolbox," which offer a number of exercises and activities that organizations can undertake to begin to address the issue of sustainability. This book is a great resource for any organization looking to do more than pick the low hanging fruit when it comes to sustainability.