Biography of Joel Makower

For 20 years, Joel Makower has been a well-respected voice on business, the environment, and the bottom line. He is executive editor of the acclaimed website GreenBiz.com as well as its sister sites, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and Greener Computing.com, and writes the annual “State of Green Business” report.  Joel also is senior strategist at GreenOrder, a sustainable business consultancy and co-founder of Clean Edge, a clean-tech research and publishing firm. He writes “Two Steps Forward” (www.readjoel.com), a popular blog on green business.

As a strategist on corporate sustainability practices and green marketing, Joel has helped a wide range of companies align environmental strategy with business success, including Clifbar, Clorox, GE, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and Nike, along with several start-up clean-technology companies.

The Associated Press has called him “The guru of green business practices.”

Joel counsels mainstream companies on how to integrate environmental thinking into their operations in a way that aligns environmental responsibility with business success. Being environmentally responsible, he says, is about growing productivity and profits and ensuring companies stay competitive in an age of growing expectations by stakeholders. It's about creating value in its myriad forms — increased sales, decreased costs, new product innovation, increased ability to attract and retain employees, new market development, reduced risk, and improved reputation.

Joel's messages are upbeat, empowering and focused squarely on the bottom line.

A former nationally syndicated columnist, Joel is author of more than a dozen books, including Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World (Simon & Schuster) and The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business (Random House).

His newest book, Strategies for the Green Economy, will be published in October 2008 by McGraw-Hill.

Joel is a frequent keynote speaker at business conferences and events, and at business schools around the world. He serves as an advisor to VantagePoint Venture Partner’s clean-tech venture capital fund and in a board or advisory capacity for more than a dozen other for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

Joel's topics are tailored for each audience. Sample topics include:
• The bottom-line case for sustainable business practices
• Talking about the environment -- communicating with internal and external stakeholders
• Business opportunities from the clean-tech revolution
• The business case for proactive climate strategy