Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Gil Friend to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic Inc, and Critical Path Capital, advises leading companies, communities and investors on business-driving sustainability strategies. Author of The Truth About Green Business and more than 100 articles on strategy, policy, and performance, Friend has been a noted sustainability pioneer for nearly 50 years, and is widely considered one of the founders of the sustainable business movement.
In the 1970s, two summers working with Buckminster Fuller’s World Game Workshop convinced him that “a world that works” for all was not just desirable, but possible, and framed the commitments for what was to become his life’s work.
He co-founded the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to bring those insights to local communities, where he advocated for integrated urban food/waste/energy systems, and designed and built the first rooftop farm in the United States.
On Governor Jerry Brown’s staff, he wrote the executive order for California’s agricultural investment fund, advancing sustainable agriculture research in the early 1980s.
In the 1980s, as founder of Foundation for the Arts of Peace, he developed peace propaganda campaigns on mainstream media, and co-founded one of the first internet companies.
In the mid-1990s he designed and developed the first corporate sustainability dashboard. In the 2000s, he built Natural Logic into a leading sustainable business consultancy, advising clients (ranging from Odwalla and Equal Exchange to Hewlett Packard, Levi Straus, Sunpower, Steelcase, Avery Dennison, Coca-Cola, eBay, the US General Services Administration) on designing, implementing and measuring sustainability strategies that deliver massive value, and published what John Elkington called the best sustainable business book of the (admittedly still young) 20th century.
In the 2010s, as the first Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Palo Alto, he led the city to unanimously adopt the most aggressive municipal sustainability policy in the US and the toughest green building standards in California, and advocated for new approaches to mobility and land use planning.
Now, in the 2020s, he’s bringing all that experience to bear in the development of Critical Path Capital and the Critical Path Academy.
Friend been named an inaugural member of the Sustainability Hall of Fame, one of the top ten voices in sustainability in the US, and (twice) one of the top 25 movers and shakers in cleantech.
Read more
Read less
