Sustainable business may save the world, says Stuart Hart in new book

By Linda Myers

Stuart Hart is aiming high with his game plan for corporations seeking to grow and thrive. The plan also may help reduce world poverty, reverse environmental degradation and even counteract terrorism along the way.

Hart, the S.C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, makes a convincing case for how to do well while doing good in his new book, Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems, published this month by Wharton School Publishing.

In Hart's brand of inclusive capitalism, corporate strategy involves making sustainable products designed to be drivers of economic growth, rather than merely enhancing a company's green-friendly, do-good status and not much more. Hart also identifies an expanding market for such products: The world's 4 billion poorest people, whose combined buying power could be substantial.

Will such a strategy work? It already has begun to, says Hart. The book includes case studies from more than 20 top companies worldwide, among them DuPont, Unilever, S.C. Johnson and Grameen Telecom. Hart's article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," with C.K. Prahalad, first articulated how business might productively reach the people at the base of the economic pyramid, who have been bypassed by globalization.

"This book takes the contrarian's view that business -- more than government or civil society -- is uniquely equipped, at this point in history, to lead us toward a sustainable world," writes Hart. "Properly focused, the profit motive can accelerate (not inhibit) the transformation toward global sustainability, with nonprofits, governments and multilateral agencies all playing crucial roles."

Hart considers terrorism a symptom of the underlying problem of unsustainable development. To eradicate it he suggests we use the terrorists' target, global trade -- as symbolized by the World Trade Center -- rather than their tactics. Reforming capitalism to create sustainable global enterprise will help eliminate problems of poverty and exploitation that breed terrorism, he says.

"Hart's book presents a compelling argument that capitalism cannot afford to ignore sustainability -- indeed, that capitalism will thrive by embracing sustainability (and vice versa)," wrote William Baue in a book review in Socialfunds.com.