What will be the impact of the Great Economic Storm on corporate sustainability initiatives? While it’s reasonable to expect a lot of programs to be scaled back, interviews with two prominent corporate sustainability consultants suggest that there may be less of this than one might expect——and that the economic clouds may have a silver lining.

Gil Friend, who heads up Natural Logic, which delivers strategic sustainability consulting services to companies and communities, hasn’t seen any slowdown yet. “People are wondering what the impact will be,” he reported, “but we actually closed a few new assignments this past week."

For Friend, this is not the time for corporations to cut back. “A lot of people believe that sustainability initiatives are a corporate cost center. From this perspective, it makes sense to eliminate them. But that point of view confuses real with apparent value. Corporate sustainability programs are a great way to reduce costs, make operations more efficient, and create real value. Forward-thinking executives will recognize this and give them the priority they deserve. This is a time when insightful managers can build a competitive advantage.”

Nicholas Eisenberger, who is a managing principal at Greenorder, a sustainability and marketing strategy firm, also sees opportunity in these troubled times. As evidence he points to the recent annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, which took place in late September. “I was there,” he reports, “and it was interesting to see the reaction of these prominent corporate, civil-society, and political leaders. Instead of bemoaning the impact of the crisis on the issues that the Initiative focuses on, there was a widespread sense that these were the right things to be paying attention to.”

“Clinton himself summed it up best,” Eisenberger continues. “He said it’s true that deregulation is one cause of the crisis, and greed is another--but that the main cause has been a failure of the imagination about how to get rich. We’ve been putting our money into illusory bubbles rather than investing in the issues that the Clinton Global Initiative is all about—— education, energy and climate change, global health, and poverty alleviation.”

Eisenberger recounted a separate conversation he’d had with a man who’d just attended the Harvard Business School Centennial, where “four hundred business leaders were talking about the need for capitalism to adapt to this crisis by creating more enduring forms of wealth.”

“A big change is occurring,” Eisenberger concludes. “If 1989 was the high-water mark for capitalism, we’ve come to low tide now. We've reached the end of the era when it was generally believed that market forces were the best way to foster human development. I'm heartened to see a lot of introspection going on currrently. People are asking questions like, 'Are we living beyond our means? Are we investing in a sustainable future?' There are inefficiencies in the market, such as an emphasis on short-term rather than long-term pricing, that this crisis is making people look more deeply at correcting. This is a watershed moment."

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)