Finding Your Religion by Scotty Mclennan (HarperSanFrancisco)

When the faith of one's youth loses its meaning, there is no ingrained cultural habit of looking elsewhere," writes cartoonist Garry Trudeau in the introduction to Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning. The book's author, the Reverend William ("Scotty") McLennan, Jr., was Trudeau's roommate at Yale and the real-life inspiration for his hard-working, ever-optimistic Doonesbury character, the Reverend Scot Sloan. A senior lecturer at HBS for the last nine years, McLennan teaches the elective course The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature.

Finding Your Religion offers guidance and inspiration to people who may harbor negative childhood associations with religion or feel daunted by the seeming remoteness of religious institutions. It has particular relevance at a time when 30 to 40 percent of Americans switch religions during their lifetimes. A graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School, McLennan is a Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain at Tufts University who has spent some thirty years researching the stages of spiritual development. The book represents a milestone in a lifelong personal spiritual odyssey, a process he likens to climbing a mountain with many paths to the top.

Richly anecdotal, the volume provides examples of spiritual journeys drawn from literature and the lives of great figures, such as Carl Jung and Mahatma Gandhi. It includes dozens of interviews with Tufts students, faculty, and alumni as well as McLennan's compelling descriptions of his own religious experiences during his travels around the world. McLennan outlines six specific stages of faith - magic, reality, dependence, independence, interdependence, and unity - that serve as markers to help readers find their own place in the seeking process and lead them to a religion that has meaning for them.

"Discovering our religion," McLennan observes, "should be an exciting, dynamic process that ebbs and flows with the seasons of our lives." His next project, in collaboration with Laura Nash of Harvard Divinity School, is a book on the role of institutional religion in helping businesspeople to integrate spirituality and work.

by Nancy O. Perry

Down to Earth by Forest L. Reinhardt (HBS Press)

In Down to Earth: Applying Business Principles to Environmental Management, Associate Professor Forest Reinhardt argues that managers should treat environmental management as an integral part of corporate strategy rather than merely as an exercise in public relations. "Social responsibility is often invoked in discussions about business and the environment," he writes. "I have been more concerned in this book with a manager's responsibilities to shareholders and to his or her own intellectual integrity."

Reinhardt asserts that discussions of business and the environment have become bogged down in a sterile debate about whether it pays to be "green," as though there were a categorical answer. "Of course, the answer is, 'It depends.' The appropriate environmental policies for a firm depend on the firm's circumstances: the basic economics of its industry, its position within the industry, its internal capabilities, and the strategy it has chosen."

In Down to Earth, Reinhardt draws on studies of companies in industries as diverse as energy and packaged consumer goods to illustrate approaches for reconciling shareholder value with environmental performance. One such company, Switzerland-based Ciba Specialty Chemicals, reengineered its textile dyes so that its customers could reduce their use of other raw materials and their costs for end-of-pipe waste treatment. Ciba could then capture some of these cost savings.

Another example is the Ventura, California-based Patagonia sportswear clothing business. Inspired by its founder, mountaineer Yvon Chouinard, the company differentiates its clothing along environmental lines, using expensive organic cotton and polyester made from recycled bottles. Patagonia's margins shrank, but sales to its high-end retail clientele grew and, along with it, the association of the Patagonia name with quality.

Reinhardt reminds managers that social concerns about the environment will not go away and that the underlying conditions that made the environment relevant to business in the first place are intensifying. Down to Earth provides guidance to business leaders who must develop policies that satisfy consumer preferences and regulatory concerns without sacrificing a healthy bottom line.

by Jay Chrepta

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