Stayin’ Alive: Q + A With Adam Werbach

Former Sierra Club president says businesses must plan for the future to survive.

Adam Werbach became Sierra Club president when he was just 23 years old. Now, he works as the CEO of the Saatchi & Saatchi S, teaming with industries and retailers to develop environmental and economic sustainability solutions; in his new book Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto, he helps readers develop their own plans for survival. Here, Werbach tells Profit readers why today’s economic climate makes this the perfect time to start, who needs to drive sustainability policy, and why he’s hopeful for the future.

Profit Online: Do you want to start by talking about why you decided to write the book?

Werbach: I’ve been on a lifelong journey, trying to figure out what’s the most effective way to protect our natural resources and the people on this planet. I figured out almost five years ago that the work I was doing in the activist sphere wasn’t moving things far enough fast enough. I wrote the book based on the very simple idea there is this convergence between profitability and sustainability that is barely understood right now.

Sustainability is long-term profitability, in a business context. It is too often conflated with environmental sustainability, which while very dear to my heart as a Sierra Club-ber, is not a way to run a business. The book is a road map for businesses to build new strategies.

Profit Online: In the current economic crisis, are the companies you work with saying they can’t focus on sustainability?

Werbach: This is the hardest thing to get across in the book, which is that that this not about protecting your environment. This is about protecting your business. The good news about turbulent times is that everyone realizes that they are existentially threatened, so that allows change to happen. Anyone with a business plan written before the beginning of 2009 has thrown it out if they have any sense, because things have changed. The consumer is spending differently, capital is not as available as it was, oil is unpredictable. And massive new regulations are coming on that will change the marketplace. We’re not even talking about breakthroughs in nanotechnology, biotech, these changes are happening.

So forget that offsite that you did 18 months ago and forget the golf. You’re going to be getting together again, this time without golf, and figuring out how you are going to be sustainable, how your business is going to exist into the next generation.

Profit Online: If people are going to make one fundamental change in their business, what do you want them to do?

Werbach: I would think they’d align the organization around a North Star goal. A North Star goal is something that is aspirational, that can be achieved between 5 to 15 years, that’s connected to the core of the business, that solves a global human challenge and — this one’s really important — that’s actionable by everyone in the company. Sustainability policies should be lead from the top but driven by the bottom. I am seeing more and more businesses adopt North Star goals — I was at a brand conference recently, and I heard Pepsi-Co do it and Dell do it. Lots of companies are saying we need to focus on a larger aspirational goal that ties into how society is changing, and drives purpose throughout the organization as well as profitability.

Profit Online: In the book, you say that leaders need to focus on customers and the staff that works directly with the public. Why is this kind of engagement important?

Werbach: One of the types of business dogma that I am trying to break people out of is that if you just get narrow and lock yourself in your room, and really iterate, then you will find an answer. And the answer for most businesses is actually networked out externally, whether that’s understood as open innovation, taking ideas from other companies, instead of inventing it, or more likely finding really close cooperators and working with them to solve the business challenge. We deal with a lot of businesses that basically face extinction because their business models are changing so quickly, but they are mostly still denying it. So it helps to have contact with customers who actually live in the world and have bought an iPhone or are using a Brita filter, or have an electric car.

Profit Online: Your book is very upbeat despite the obviously serious subject matter. Why did you decide to strike this tone?

Werbach: I have three little kids and if I wasn’t optimistic I’d be really, really scared right now. My colleagues from the activist side who are still trying to convince people that there’s a problem are as out of the step as those business that are acting as though there isn’t a problem. Right now, it’s not about sounding the alarm. It’s telling people what to do when they’ve heard it. It’s teaching stop drop and roll. Generally, when people build business strategy, they look at what happened in the last 100 years and try to figure out lessons from them to use in the next 100 years. If you believe that the world will change even more in the next 100 years, you’ll need a different mechanism for sailing the rough oceans ahead.