Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work

"Now what am I going to do?" is a question many people ask—and leave unanswered—at critical potential turning points in their careers.

Perhaps you’re a new graduate, but instead of lining up for a boring entry-level job at a big corporation, you wish you could start your own sustainable and responsible business. Or maybe you’ve been stuck in a job you hate for a few years, but you still dream of doing the thing you love and that you’re actually good at. Or maybe you’re a boomer and you’re ready for a second career, a personal venture that will represent a total change from what you’ve spent most of your work life doing.

Whatever your situation, this is the book to help you get started. Finding the Sweet Spot explains how sustainable, responsible, and joyful natural enterprises differ from most jobs, and it provides the framework for building your own natural enterprise. You’ll learn how to find partners who will help make your venture successful, how to do world-class market research, how to innovate, how to build resilience into your enterprise, and how to avoid the land mines that sink so many small businesses. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to find the "sweet spot" where your gifts, your passions, and your purpose intersect.

And make no mistake: our world needs your talent. The current economic system and the educational system that feeds into it have let us down and are destroying our planet. We need a blossoming of natural enterprises—connected, collaborating, and supporting ventures—to form a dynamic new natural economy.

Is such a thing possible? Inventor, entrepreneur, and humanist Buckminster Fuller said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Finding the Sweet Spot presents a new model. Use it to find the work you were meant to do, thereby helping to create the world we’re meant to live—and make a living—in.

Dave Pollard spent twenty-seven years with Ernst & Young LLP as practice leader and advisor to entrepreneurs and then as chief knowledge officer and member of the firm's Strategy and Innovation Group. In 2010, after 40 years trying to work within the industrial growth society, Dave walked away from it. During that 40 years he advised entrepreneurs about innovation, research, sustainability, coping with complexity, and the effective use of knowledge and social media. In 2003 he started a blog called How to Save the World, which documents what he's learned about how the world really works, and how we might create better ways to live and make a living, and in 2007 he authored his first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work.

 His popular environmental and business blog can be found at howtosavetheworld.ca. He lives with his family in Toronto, Canada.