Sustainable Value: How the World’s Leading Companies are Doing Well by Doing Good is garnering national attention for its author, Case's Business as an Agent of World Benefit Associate Director, Chris Laszlo. In this San Francisco Chronicle editorial, Laszlo argues,

Making people feel guilty about their high-consumption lifestyles will not work. Browbeating only induces apathy. Forcing people to balance consumerism and ecological responsibility may work for an enlightened minority, but if a trade-off is involved, the great majority will choose to consume.

Instead, our best hope may be to use market forces to engage big business in a process of innovation that will lead to better, cheaper products and offer solutions to the world's environmental and social problems. Solar technology and cellulosic polymers are examples of innovations that could eventually transform the energy and plastics sectors. Consumers will choose cleaner energy at a lower cost, just as they will opt for the shopping bag that biodegrades over the plastic one that doesn't, as long as quality remains the same and they don't have to pay more for it. The current generation of compact fluorescent lightbulbs is a case in point: cheaper to buy when taken over its longer lifespan, one CFL replacement of an incandescent bulb saves the consumer $30 to $80 in energy bills and avoids one barrel of oil and one ton of carbon-dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Multiply these savings by 1 billion replacements a year, and soon the CFL is making a real impact.

And in this podcast with the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education, Laszlo says he's come around to a “Milton Friedman approach to sustainability, who said that the only social responsibility (that works) is that which generates profit for its shareholders.”