From three local authors who know volumes

Three folks with deep business roots in the Twin Cities have recently published interesting books.

Robert MacGregor was a Presbyterian minister in southeast Minneapolis 50 years ago, who went from community activist to City Council member to one of the architects of the business-community collaborations of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Aligned with the Dayton brothers (who hired him), and Graco's Dave Koch, Chuck Denny, Tony Andersen, Win Wallin, Dick McFarland and the other progressive business lions, MacGregor helped revive a sagging downtown, plotted the renaissance of the Mississippi riverfront and started a local corporate-responsibility initiative that had a global impact.

MacGregor, 78, titled the book "Leadership: A Team Sport Surrounded by Saints and CEOs."

In a good narrative for civic-minded folks, Bob MacGregor reveals himself as the successful "front man "because he was empowered by thoughtful CEOs, supported by enthusiastic volunteers, and trusted by elected officials and others intent on partnerships and progress that often displaced rancor and factions around a host of issues.

"I believe the only reason for the existence of the free enterprise system is to serve society," MacGregor recalls the late Kenneth Dayton, a founder of Target Corp., saying.

"Profit is a reward for serving society well,'' MacGregor writes. "The Dayton brothers knew that the cash register rang loudest in a healthy community where everybody shared in some prosperity. That's a pretty good mandate for business."

MacGregor takes us into some of the vexing issues of the 1960s and 1970s, including civil rights, local politics and the Vietnam War, and into the meetings and strategies that transcended the boardroom, city hall and the streets.

In the late 1970s, MacGregor was recruited to run Chicago United, a business-backed organization focused on civic issues, and he later ran the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

Along the way, he helped start and later run the Minnesota Center for Corporate Responsibility, the founding principles of which were substantially the charter of the Caux Round Table, headed for a time by retired Medtronic CEO Wallin.

"Bob knows how to get useful results," Wallin once said.

MacGregor, an intrepid guy with a quick laugh, took the show on the road in 1998, including stints as a redevelopment-foundation executive in Lebanon; a graduate-school lecturer in South Africa, Egypt and Lebanon, and an ever-ready volunteer on any continent.

Jack Uldrich, a former Navy intelligence officer who served as state planning commissioner under Gov. Jesse Ventura, has overhauled his several-year-old "Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks" by updating the landscape in the wake of the Great Recession and stock-market washout. Uldrich is an authority on next-generation manufacturing and energy conservation.

There's good news, particularly for those like me who don't want to argue global warming to death, but who believe our economy and national security are best served by developing more of our own energy sources. The clean-tech sector -- which ranges from huge General Electric to smaller companies in next-generation ethanol and biofuels plants -- are growing faster than the economy as a whole.

BP and Exxon Mobil, for example, are not investing hundreds of millions in developing oil from algae or waste for public relations purposes. They believe the world is running low on easily recoverable oil, and they want new products for cleaner markets.

Uldrich gives a brief synopsis of Fortune 500 companies doing interesting things, as well as pure-play solar, biofuel, wind, conservation and other energy-related outfits. He explains the upsides and pitfalls, and also how the average investor should bring the same level of due diligence to the clean-tech field as any other in assembling a promising portfolio.

Harvey Mackay, the inimitable author of several bestsellers about outwitting and outswimming sharks and terrestrial competitors, has written a useful book for out-of-work Americans on the hunt for a job entitled: "Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door."

Mackay, 75, who has a column Mondays in the Star Tribune, is a venerable CEO and envelope salesman.

His book can help some job seekers with its back-to-basics, working-the-network, attitude-is-everything and preparation-is-king advice.

Neal St. Anthony • 612-673-7144 • nstanthony@startribune.com