The Boss of You

I’m always on the look­out for busi­ness books that embrace, pro­mote & cel­e­brate small & locally-owned busi­nesses. I don’t believe that small & local are always or inher­ently bet­ter, but I have a strong affin­ity for spend­ing my dol­lars on prod­ucts and ser­vices that help sup­port the liveli­hoods of good peo­ple, and sup­port­ing my neigh­bours is even bet­ter. I like to get to know the peo­ple who cre­ate the prod­ucts I buy, because ser­vice means a great deal to me, and because I enjoy know­ing a lit­tle bit about the ethics and val­ues of the peo­ple I’m giv­ing my money to.

So I am intrigued by this book: Small is Pos­si­ble: Life in a Local Econ­omy

The blurb begins:

In an era when incom­pre­hen­si­bly com­plex issues like Peak Oil and cli­mate change dom­i­nate head­lines, prac­ti­cal solu­tions at a local level can seem some­how inadequate.

In response, Lyle Estill’s Small is Pos­si­ble intro­duces us to “home­town secu­rity,” with this chron­i­cle of a community-powered response to resource deple­tion in a fickle global econ­omy. True sto­ries, spring­ing from the soils of Chatham County, North Car­olina, offer a pos­i­tive coun­ter­bal­ance to the bleak­ness of our age.

This is the story of how one small south­ern US town found actual solu­tions to actual prob­lems. Unwill­ing to rely on the gov­ern­ment and wary of large cor­po­ra­tions, these res­i­dents dis­cov­ered it is pos­si­ble for a com­mu­nity to feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself, and gov­ern itself.

If any of you have read Small is Pos­si­ble, I’d love to hear your thoughts — or indeed your thoughts about small/local busi­nesses in general.

(I also spot­ted another interesting-looking book from the same pub­lisher: Eco­pre­neur­ing: Putting Pur­pose and the Planet Before Prof­its.)