"This is just the book for anyone who enjoys the podcast 'How I Built This.'" - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Nader is one of America’s most effective social critics." - Forbes
One of corporate America's greatest foes shows how 12 CEOs he has known uniquely rejected narrow yardsticks of shareholder value by leading companies to larger models of prosperity and justice
Over the course of 7 decades Ralph Nader has been Corporate America’s fiercest critic. Supreme Court Justice William Powell singled out Nader in his infamous memo as the “single most effective antagonist of American business… [the] target of his hatred… is corporate power.”
But now, in a book that will surprise both his fans and critics, Nader profiles a small group of CEOs who he believes performed extraordinarily well as business leaders and civic reformers, some well-known, some not, who should be celebrated as exceptions whose life and career should be a course of emulation and inspiration for students of business, executives and the wider citizenry.
This select group of mavericks and iconoclasts — which includes The Body Shop’s Anita Roddick, Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, Vanguard’s John Bogle and Busboys and Poets' Andy Shallal —give us, Nader writes, “a sense of what might have been and what still could be if business were rigorously framed as a process that was not only about making money and selling things but improving our social and natural world.”
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and author. Named by The Atlantic as one of the hundred most influential figures in American history and by Time and Life magazines as one of the hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century. Ralph Nader and the dozens of citizen groups he has founded have helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer workplaces. Nader continues to be a relentless advocate for grassroots activism, more civic organizations, and democratic change for a just society.
