It pays to track sustainable development

His co-authors, who are also fellow prime movers in the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, are interesting: Charles Holliday, Chairman and CEO of DuPont, and Philip Watts, Chairman of Shell. It's difficult to remember how many times one has seen three global business leaders co-authoring a book.

In some sense, corporate social responsibility represents the business end of sustainable development. It allows organisations to move beyond environmental compliance and move progressively towards a solid social contract within the communities, regions and nations in which they operate.

It moves beyond internal health and safety and environmental management regimes towards a participatory based approach with an organisation's workforce and the communities where they are situated.

Despite its heavy text book style of writing "" which makes it a yawn at times "" Walking the Talk is worth reading simply because it doesn't talk at you; rather, it attempts to spell out a real business case for addressing sustainable development as a key strategic issue.

Where the book disappoints is its silence on the demand made by leading NGOs that mere voluntary self-regulation isn't enough and there is a need for binding regulations to hold companies to international human rights and environmental standards.

By avoiding the issue, specially in a book of this nature, the authors have only lent credence to the belief that companies love sermonising but have also lobbied to ensure that minimum standards do not become mandatory.

The redeeming feature, however, is that the book answers the most crucial question which every businessman would ask: contributing to sustainable development is great, but does it pay?

There is a good chance that the 288-page book with as many as 67 case studies (these are easily the best part of the book) will convince you to answer that question in the affirmative.

For example, listen to what Pasquale Pistorio, CEO of the Swiss-based STMicroelectronics tells the authors. His vision is to turn the company into a 'zero-equivalent carbon dioxide emission company' by 2010 "" while still maintaining a leading market share.

And Pistorio intends to do this by continuous improvement of energy efficiency in company processes (a 5 per cent annual reduction of energy per unit of output) and increased use of alternative and renewable energy sources.

The recipe also includes compensating for the company's remaining carbon dioxide emissions by planting about 35,000 acres of land with tress.

"If we achieve these goals, we calculate that we shall save close to $1 billion on our energy costs between 1994 and 2010", Pistorio says.

Pistorio obviously has maths behind his vision. In 1995, the company began to devote an average of 2 per cent of its annual capital investment "" a total of more than $3 billion a year in 2000 "" to improving StMicroelectronics' environmental performance.

Thanks to these measures, the planet has been spared the burden of another 100-megawatt power plant; the water saved could quench the thirst of 50 million people a year.

The company is using 28 per cent less electricity and 45 per cent less water than in 1994 for the same output. This translated, with a large increase in volume, into a saving of $50 million in 2000 alone.

On average, investment in energy conservation, for example, pays back within 2.5 years, proving the validity of the stance taken by corporate leaders like Pistorio: ecology is free.

Even more remarkably, the authors insist that a global partnership "" between governments, business and civil society "" is essential, if accelerating moves towards globalisation are to maximise opportunities for all "" especially the world's poor.

As Charles Holliday says "given existing technology and products, for all six billion people on the planet to live like the average American, we would require the equivalent of three planet Earths to provide the material, create the energy and dispose of the waste."

Such an option is evidently not available and the book argues that far more eco-efficient and socially equitable modes of development must be pursued in order to allow poorer nations to raise their standards of living.

The solution provided by the book is to mobilise markets in favour of sustainability, leveraging the power of innovation and global markets for the benefits of everyone "" not just the developed world. This means a further liberalisation of the market "" a move that would be condemned by anti-globalisation protesters.

The book is structured around ten chapters, which represent the ten building blocks that pave the corporate journey towards sustainable development.

Overall, the book argues that the challenge for companies is to find new ways to align innovation with public expectations and to provide a management framework that is based on discussing, deciding and then delivering sustainable value.

It examines the new partnerships needed among companies, governments, and civil society to produce real change, and the ways in which these alliances can work for all concerned.

And it argues that consumer choice and consumer information should be encouraged as a positive force for sustainable development and sees globalisation as the best path towards sustainable human progress.

WALKING THE TALK

The Business Case for Sustainable Development

Charles O Holliday, Jr, Stephen Schmidheiny and Philip Watts

Greenleaf Publishing