Towards the Sustainable Corporation: Win-Win-Win Business Strategies for Sustainable Development

John Elkington §§ I often wake up in the middle of the night," Pope John XXIII once said, "and start thinking about grave problems—and decide to talk about them with the Pope. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope." Western industrial societies have undergone a similar awakening over the last three decades as the scale of the environmental and natural resource problems they face has become increasingly clear. In doing so—and before they finally accept that the responsibility for tackling these problems is theirs, not something to be pushed onto future generations—they typically move through a number of stages. These have included: ignorance awakening denial guilt reduction, displacement behaviour, and tokenism conversion integration In the wake of the publication of Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development,' and the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the concept of sustainable development—involving the integration of environmental thinking into every aspect of social, political, and economic activity—has become central to the environmental debate. This article considers some of the ways in which business is now developing new "win-win-win" strategies in this area to simultaneously benefit the company, its customers, and the environment.

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Sustainable Strategies?
Most countries are still some considerable way from genuine conversion to the cause and realities of sustainable development, let alone the effective integration of environmental sustainability as a national priority. But we are beginning to see an early crop of strategies designed to move individual national economies—and even the