For next term's MBA courses (he said a fortnight after Spring term ended, three full weeks before first Fall lecture) one of my two electives is a strategy-area course on sustainability. I've settled on strategy as my area of concentration because I have developed a kink for pushing the big levers that will Get Stuff Done and sustainability addresses my grar at the short-termism endemic in business that has leaked through to society at large.

Naturally I bought the course textbooks already. They arrived today and in the less than an hour I've been home since work ended I've read through the beginning material of both and the afterword of one. It's clear these books will give me specific problems to think about and, with the prof's guidance and classroom participation, tools to address them meaningfully. One can expect me to blurt out somewhat well-formed thoughts and ideas about social, economic, and environmental stewardship with greater frequency from now through mid-December.

The books themselves are Reconstructing Value by Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler (structured as a business textbook) and Capitalism at the Crossroads by Hart (appears to be built as a general business book, with an Al Gore preface and a Fisk Johnson foreword). I am glad to have the structure imposed on me to read both these books deeply and consider the contents thoroughly.

Although business books tend to overpromise, I'm intrigued that these two promise to change the way the reader thinks. I believe I have fewer and healthier assumptions than the average businessman, while continuing to run periodically into the brick wall of my societal programming.