By Kenneth P. Pucker, a senior lecturer at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and advisory director at Berkshire Partners.
Over the past 20 years many academics, consultants, executives and nongovernmental organization leaders have promoted a theory outlining how businesses can prosper while pursuing a greener and more socially responsible agenda. These people, whom I refer to collectively as “Sustainability Inc.,” believed that if companies committed to measuring and reporting publicly on their sustainability performance, four things would happen:
1. Individual companies . . .