Adam Werbach became the Sierra Club’s youngest president in 1996, at 23. Yet by 2004, he argued in a widely discussed speech that environmentalism had hit a wall because it focused on green issues rather than a larger goal: sustainability. His willingness to help Wal-Mart’s efforts to achieve it made him still more controversial among environmentalists. Werbach is now CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, a consultancy arm of the global advertising firm dedicated to sustainability solutions. This article is adapted from his new book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto. In an accompanying video interview, he explains the ideas that inspired it.

An adaptation from Strategy for Sustainability:

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 63 are corporations, not countries. Great power creates great expectations: society increasingly holds global businesses accountable as the only institutions strong enough to meet the huge long-term challenges facing our planet. Coming to grips with them is more than a corporate responsibility. It’s essential for corporate survival.

Unfortunately, short-term thinking is now endemic to business strategy. By the time of the great petroleum price spike of 2008, for example, America’s Big Three had an advantage over their foreign competitors only in light trucks and SUVs—precisely the cars that consumers didn’t want. The possibility of such a firestorm has been obvious for decades, yet the automakers are only now trying to deal with it. For them and all other organizations, survival isn’t a right. To endure in a changeable world with more limits on resources and less credit, companies must develop and execute a strategy for sustainability. But that doesn’t mean a green strategy. Sustainability is much bigger because it takes into account every dimension of the business environment: social, economic, and cultural, as well as natural.

Until the 1980s, business leaders used the word sustainability to mean a company’s ability to increase its earnings steadily. The term became widely used in its present sense in 1987, after it appeared in a UN report by Norway’s former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who defined sustainable development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” More recently, as Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, writes, the whole idea has been “in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever ‘it’ means.”¹ Sustainability even has a dark side: “greenwashing”—that is, focusing more on communicating your green efforts than on the efforts themselves.