The Positive Deviant

Subtitled 'sustainability leadership in a perverse world', this is a real tour de force by the co-founder with Jonathon Porritt of the Forum for the Future. Based on 40 years of campaigning, a positive deviant is a person who does the right thing for sustainability, despite being surrounded by the wrong institutional structures, the wrong processes and stubbornly uncooperative people. Building on James Lovelock's medical analogy, the author provides a diagnosis and treatment for unsustainable development with five symptoms - biological resource depletion, mineral depletion, waste generation, burning fossil fuels, and persistent poverty and injustice. All this leads to the insight that we have broken the laws of nature and require radical treatment involving a transformation of our ideas about capital, money, markets and growth.

The second section discusses dysfunctional leadership, leading to third section on sustainability literate leadership. This involves four habits of thought - resilience, relationships, reflection and reverence - new perspectives and new tools of practice. The final section provides a global sustainability to do list with five strands - growing natural capital, and reducing numbers of people and their impact, growing human and social capital, reducing overall consumption of energy and raw materials, and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of energy and raw material consumption. These are then explained in considerable detail. By the end of the book, the reader has a comprehensive picture and a call to action. The author notes that we are squaring up to what she calls a fiendishly difficult couple of decades, which will determine whether the 21st-century is a human triumph or a tragedy. Existing players may consider this unrealistic, but the alternative destination is unthinkable. The combination of the sustainability agenda with new leadership skills is essential for a constructive future, and this book sketches out a plausible route.