So what does it really mean to be sustainable? It seems that people you talk to about sustainability development (SD), or “being green,” have their own (oftentimes extremely self-serving) definition. The academics are saying one thing while the practitioners are saying something totally different. If they’ll both check the Bruntland Commission’s report from back in 1987 they’ll see that SD was defined some 24 years ago as “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 47). This isn’t as self-serving as a lot of corporations like in practice or a lot of academics like when trying to operationalize their next big theory, however.

More-and-more you are seeing a triple-bottom line terminology emerging – who wouldn’t want to make more money, better the environment, and better the society as a whole at the same time? In theory, this is great. BUT, the problem we are seeing is that the vast majority of American corporations are putting their primary focus on the economic benefits of SD (which looks and sounds an awful lot like “greenwashing”), their secondary focus on environmental issues (e.g., recycling), and forgetting about societal issues all together – societal concerns, such as not “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” are not even showing up on the radar.

With the emergence of NGO’s, watchdog groups, and the availability of information on the Internet, corporations are becoming more responsible to a much larger body of legitimate stakeholders. If you haven't heard of having a "social license to operate" yet, take note. While standards like GRI and ISO 2000 for reporting have become more popular, they are still voluntary. The corporations who are building LEED certified buildings or who are producing voluntary sustainability reports are realizing what SustainAbility showed us back in 2001 with their SD Matrix-- when you are accountable and transparent to your stakeholders and focus on socio-economic issues as well as environmental issues, financial performance often follows. Put simply, if doing the right thing isn't enough in-and-of-itself, corporate environmental and social focus has historically shown a strong positive relationship with financial performance.