By Robert Colman

If you’re involved in driving sustainability into your organization, you’ll understand how hard it can be to get everyone to understand what sustainability really means, and then get them to commit to making it part of their business practice. This shouldn’t be the case, but it is. In Adam Werbach’s new book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto, he insists that sustainability is no longer an optional part of business — it’s a question of corporate survival. How you make that a reality is the tough part, and his goal in this book is to tackle that.

Werbach says that sustainability should encompass four key components: social, economic, environmental and cultural concerns. If a company can engage all four of these components, they will improve their bottom line and simultaneously drive new business opportunities.

To do so, he suggests that companies should adopt what he calls "North Star Goals" — aspirational business goals that aim to solve a global human challenge as well. Such goals help businesses stay profitable, in his mind, and also help them engage their employees.

Werbach believes that companies should focus on transparency, engagement and networking to create tangible results on the way to being more sustainable businesses.

When you reduce a book like this to a few paragraphs, it can sound a bit pat — like so many business books. The value Werbach brings is in his implementation discussion, and in outlining what a North Star Goal can really mean. The best North Star Goal would likely be one that sets a company apart from its competition through innovations that, at the same time, make it more sustainable in a resource-constrained world. It’s worth asking what such a goal might be for your company while you read the book.

There’s also pretty encouraging material here about how to engage employees and a network of sustainability partners outside of your own business.

What this book doesn’t do as well as it might is tackle what continues to be such a big challenge — getting senior management buy-in consistently. Very few corporate social responsibility leaders are given the full reign to put into place the processes that they know are necessary to fully embed corporate sustainability in an organization.

But this is a minor quibble. As a tool, this is a useful and engaging book — a quick read with good case studies that will help many executives guide their approach to the challenge of moving sustainability to the forefront of their company or their department within a company.

For an excerpt of the text, click here.

By Adam Werbach. Published by Harvard Business Press. For more information visit www.harvardbusiness.org/press.

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