For more than 20 years, Joel Makower has been a well-respected voice on business, the environment, and the bottom line. As a writer, speaker, and strategist on corporate environmental practices, clean technology, and green marketing, he has helped a wide range of companies align environmental responsibility with business success.
Joel is a talented communicator who can cut through the hype and haze to provide clarity and perspective on a range of business environmental issues. He brings to his writing, speeches, and clients a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing mainstream companies as they try to address environmental issues in a way that drives bottom-line performance and topline growth.
His balanced, realistic, and credible approach to sustainable business and clean technology has helped senior managers in a variety of companies and sectors create strategic roadmaps, make the business case, articulate a vision internally, form meaningful partnerships, and communicate with a broad range of stakeholders.
The Associated Press has called him "The guru of green business practices."
Joel is co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, Inc., which produces GreenBiz.com and its sister sites, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and GreenerComputing.com. He also serves as a senior strategist at GreenOrder, a sustainability consultancy, as well as co-founder and principal of Clean Edge Inc., a research and publishing firm focusing on building markets for clean energy technologies. From 1991 to 2005, Joel was editor and publisher of The Green Business Letter, an award-winning monthly newsletter he founded on corporate environmental strategy. In 2005, he was appointed a Batten Fellow at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Joel has helped a wide range of companies improve their environmental strategy and communications -- including Clifbar, Gap, Hewlett Packard, Levi Strauss, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Stonyfield Farm -- as well as advising more than a dozen early-stage companies focusing on environmentally sustainable products and services.
A former nationally syndicated columnist, Joel is author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World, about the profit and potential of socially responsible business practices; The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business, on how companies are responding to environmental challenges in positive and profitable ways, and The Green Consumer, a best-selling guide to the environmental marketplace.
His latest book, Strategies for the Green Economy, will be published in October 2008 by McGraw-Hill.
In addition, he is author of an oral history of the Woodstock music festival, published in 1989, which Rolling Stone called "the definitive history of the mega-event."
Joel has been a featured commentator on environmental topics for public radio's "Marketplace" and appears frequently in both broadcast and print media (read recent clippings here). He serves as a board member or adviser to a range of for-profit and nonprofit organizations and lectures regularly to companies, industry groups, and business schools around the world.
