Reviews
triplepundit
Book Review
By Steve Puma | July 1st, 2009
Martin Melaver, author of the new book, Living Above the Store, is something of a rarity for an author of a sustainable business text: someone who actually has decades of experience doing the work to create a socially-responsible business. Which is very lucky for us, because while many books claim to be able to teach us how to do it, very few can do so with the wisdom of experience on their side.
The result is an honest and forthright look at what it really takes for shape and maintain values-based business in a very traditional industry.
Melaver is CEO of Melaver, Inc.-a third-generation, family-owned company based in Savannah, Georgia. Through a series of personal anecdotes, Melaver explains, in detail, how a small corner grocery store evolved into a major regional chain, eventually transforming itself into a real estate company focused on sustainable development and management. The fact that this happened was not by accident: all along its seventy-year history, the company chose to pursue a values-based path, even when it meant making difficult choice.
Read the whole review here.
Sustainable Industries
Book Review
by Brian Libby - 6.29.09
When author Martin Melaver’s family sold their grocery store chain in 1985, 15 percent of the proceeds were distributed to employees past and present—anyone who had worked at the store for more than one year. Later, when the company was established as a large-scale real estate developer, Melaver walked away from an office tower deal when the law-firm client wouldn’t agree to a design that followed the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) specifications.
This generous yet unapologetically principled sense of business as more than a profit-generating machine and instead a restorative community force underscores Melaver’s case in “Living Above the Store.”
With a blend of autobiography and business analysis, Melaver asks readers to look toward “taking stock,” as he calls it: building a broad sense of your company’s context in not just the market, but a host of social and community context—from energy and waste usage to relationships with individual employees. More impressive than the content of “Living Above the Store,” however, is the spirit and eloquence of the voice. When Melaver cites the Japanese word for optimism, rankkanteki, as “conveying not a notion of utopian faith but the sense of having enough challenges to give life meaning,” he might as well be talking about himself.
—Published by Chelsea Green
Cover to Cover
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Going Green with Melaver
On this week's Cover to Cover Orlando Montoya sits down with Martin Melaver to discuss his book "Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change and Restores Land and Community"... Orlando Montoya sends us this short history of Melaver's many green endeavors…
Listen Now
triplepundit
Book Review: Living Above the Store by Martin Melaver
July 1, 2009
Martin Melaver, author of the new book, Living Above the Store, is something of a rarity for an author of a sustainable business text: someone who actually has decades of experience doing the work to create a socially-responsible business. Which is very lucky for us, because while many books claim to be able to teach us how to do it, very few can do so with the wisdom of experience on their side.
The result is an honest and forthright look at what it really takes for shape and maintain values-based business in a very traditional industry.
Melaver is CEO of Melaver, Inc.-a third-generation, family-owned company based in Savannah, Georgia. Through a series of personal anecdotes, Melaver explains, in detail, how a small corner grocery store evolved into a major regional chain, eventually transforming itself into a real estate company focused on sustainable development and management. The fact that this happened was not by accident: all along its seventy-year history, the company chose to pursue a values-based path, even when it meant making difficult choice.
Despite its limitations, Living Above the Store has some really great information. Among my favorites are:
- His in-depth look of how and why a business should take stock of its local ecology and its place within that ecology. Melaver provides both historical and business context for the importance of taking stock, and offers good examples of how to go about it.
- His discussion of the merits and limitations of a Triple Bottom Line approach. "A financial bottom line is quantitative and can be captured as a moment in time. Contrast that with social and environmental metrics, which are partly qualitative in nature and are best measured over a time continuum... Instead of speaking about a bottom line, I would suggest an alternative nomenclature, one about three performance organizers (3-PO): financial performance, environmental impact, and social consequences." He the goes on to demonstrate what this might look like.
- His example of the company's use of a Hall-Tonna Survey of Values to track how it's values have shifted over the years. I'd never heard of this tool before, but it seems very powerful: "It enables a company to determine how it is trending around certain values. It enables a company to determine how it is trending and to evaluate the counter-trends creating inherent tensions. Fundamentally it enables a company to answer a critical question: what is it we collectively care about?"
- The company's limits to growth chart showing exactly how the company decides which projects to build or reject. A simple, but very effective tool.
Melaver's overriding themes are that running a truly sustainable business requires a whole-systems approach, and is an ongoing process of change. This is a message that needs to be heard loud and clear at businesses everywhere.
Overall, Living Above the Store is a book that is well worth your time and money and a great addition to your sustainability library.
Chain Store Age
Beyond hugging trees
By Katherine Field
(May 27, 2009) I met a self-described tree-hugger last week. Personally, I never use that term anymore, much preferring “green” or “environmentally friendly” or “sustainable.” Yet this young adult, a friend of my daughter, proclaims her sensibilities proudly. She wears organic clothing, drinks organic tea, drives a hybrid and recycles.
Tree-hugger, she is.
Being green, though, is even bigger than what one wears or drinks. I just finished reading a new book by Martin Melaver, “Living Above the Store” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), and it puts tree-hugging in a whole new light.
Author Melaver, also CEO and VP of Savannah, Ga.-based real estate company Melaver, runs a sustainable company with a sustainable mission. The third-generation family-owned developer has Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification down to a science, with a total of eight LEED-certified projects (including the first LEED-certified McDonald’s in the world) and another 29 LEED projects in the development pipeline, a LEED-accredited management team and a goal of becoming a vertically integrated, truly sustainable real estate company.
In his book, Melaver says his goal is to provide a road map for creating green-minded businesses. That is, he lays out a strategy directed toward businesses that want to have a favorable impact on their communities and the world.
Lofty goal, I’d say, but it would appear that Melaver has the credentials to deliver. In building his own company, he said he tries to ensure that profit takes a backseat to “its capacity to provide meaning and purpose, for those who work for it as well as for the larger community.”
To do that, he preaches five principles: Recovery, which entails discarding what has long been accepted and instead creating a business environment built on challenge; Restraint, recognizing limits to growth; Synthesis, taking individual values and integrating then into a holistic vision; Covenantal action, a kind of “covenant” between the land and the community; and Congruence, which links the efforts of business to activities occurring in government, academia and the nonprofit world.
The latter interested me the most. The very idea that a developer would actively propone that it should be accountable to the community in which it plans to build is pretty novel. With all the groans and curses associated with the entitlement process, here’s someone who thinks there should be a renewed covenant between business and society.
In a recent interview, Melaver said, “It is my hope that … we will move from BAUhouse -- or business as usual -- to NAUhouse, nature as usual. In real estate, this might mean moving from, say, developing properties with standard building practices to building with LEED standards and then eventually constructing living buildings that mimic natural strategies. And that movement calls for business -- among the other sectors of society -- to be ever better stewards and trustees of both our lands and our communities.”
“Living Above the Store” isn’t about building a vertical project in which residential sits above the retail, per se, but it IS about community and sustainability and social responsibility. For more information, send me an e-mail (kfield@chainstoreage.com) and I’ll arrange to have details sent to you.
Gaiatribe
Book Review: Living Above the Store
by Elizabeth Barrette on May 4, 2009
This book examines the business sphere as it has been in the past, as it is today, and as it could be in the future. It pays careful attention to values as well as economic principles. It makes compelling arguments for why businesses need to consider the land and the community, not just cash flow.
The introduction, "Who We Are," explains the author’s background in a family business. "Taking Stock" looks at where we are and what we have to work with. "Restraint" challenges the ideal of perpetual unlimited growth. "Magical Synthesis" explores what can happen when different ideas are merged productively. "Covenantal Action" deals with reciprocal obligations and benefits. "Shaping Congruence" presents ideas for creating agreement and harmony. "Living Above the Store" considers issues of family life and community as related to business. Finally, "Operating Instructions" pulls it all together into a cohesive strategy.
On the whole, Living Above the Store does a good job of challenging assumptions about what "business" is and how it works, then proposing alternatives that would be more sustainable. Like many business books, it’s a bit on the dry side, but the personal stories help add some interest. It also has good supporting charts and other materials to illustrate important points. This book is most useful for people interested in sustainable development and green business. Recommended.
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