Getting Smart at Being Good...Are Companies Better Off for It?

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Whole Foods' Mackey believes that people are far more inspired by their work when they feel it connects them to ideals that reach far beyond the bottom line. "We need to tap deeper into the purpose of business," he argues. "Teachers go to school with a deeper purpose--to educate young minds. Lawyers ... are not taught in law school that their job as a lawyer is to maximize billing for their firm. Law school preaches the ideas of fairness and justice. Every other profession has a deeper purpose to it. So does business, only it's been taught that it doesn't, that its only purpose is to maximize profits." Critics say, however, that when profit is the sole measure of performance, managers can be held eminently responsible. "In a nutshell, the problem with CSR," says Stephen Bainbridge, a corporate-law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, "is that managers who are responsible to all of their constituencies are accountable to none."

To Cypress's Rodgers, all this talk about purpose higher than profit also seems like a Trojan horse for the eventual piling on of top-down government controls on commerce. The virtues touted by CSR, in his opinion, come just as easily if markets are left to run freely. Rodgers points to the initial public offering last month of Cypress's solar-power subsidiary, SunPower, and asserts that investors chipped in not to make an environmental statement but because they believe clean solar power is a potentially profitable enterprise. He is running a business, he notes, whose motivation is profit alone. In his mind, the long-term pursuit of profit necessitates socially responsible practices. "We practice and have always practiced good environmental standards because it's good business," says Rodgers. "The idea that you can pollute and get away with it is wrong. It doesn't work. It's bad business."

Funny enough, his position turns out to be not that far from that of many of his intellectual adversaries. Indeed, once you get past the ideology--Rodgers argues that advocates of corporate social responsibility are "negating capitalism and espousing socialism"--it isn't clear how much the standards CSR advocates seek to impose differ from those ostensibly supported by their opponents.

Liberals may argue that all that strategic thinking about social responsibility means companies' motives aren't sincere. But who cares? It is, after all, business's job to do business. At the same time, in a globalized economy, the problems faced by societies and corporations are undeniably converging. Investing in the former is often equivalent to securing the future of the latter. As GBC's Neilsen puts it, "Global issues have become the business of business." The question for companies and activists alike is how best to mine the opportunity.