About a year and a half ago, I started writing a book about the true nature of business responsibility. It was going to be a book written in response to the climate of scandal caused by the whole sordid Enron/WorldCom/ImClone mess. I was sure this atmosphere was going to result in companies of all kinds jockeying to look like good corporate citizens even as they continued practicing bad business-as-usual behind the scenes. I wanted to expose the coming fraud.
I wanted my new book, What Matters Most (Basic Books, 2003), to be about exposing another dose of corporate greenwashing. I was going to take companies to task for making it look like they were doing the right thing when, in fact, they were doing the same old wrong things beneath the thinnest veneer of social and environmental responsibility. I was raring and ready to go, primed to play the muckraker and unmask the evildoers. However, the more I dug, the more I discovered a single fact that surprised even me—namely, that some of the changes occurring in America’s corporate culture are not window dressing at all, but are actually important, substantive changes rooted in a sincere desire to make the world a better place. It turned out there are companies taking responsibility to heart and changing the way they did business.
As I continued to write, what emerged was a much different book than the one I set out to create. I kept discovering businesses that really are changing and businesspeople legitimately thinking beyond bottom line mentality. A book that I thought would likely end with no small sense of hopelessness, instead ended up imbued with tremendous optimism; the further I dug, the more I saw a light at the end of a very long tunnel. Companies were coming to the conclusion that they did not want to end up shattered wrecks like Enron and World-Com. They were beginning to engage in the fundamental processes of change necessary to ensure their sustainability and, perhaps more importantly, our own as well.
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