Working With the Enemy

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Desk Jockey Teaming up with the country's largest employer, Werbach says, gives him a chance to change the world.

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“To this day, they won't speak to me," says Adam Werbach. His clients--or rather, his old clients--fired him when word got out last year that he was doing work for Wal-Mart. Of course, many people make compromises to do business with the largest company in the world--accept lower profit margins, absorb relentless performance pressure. But for Werbach, 34, a lifelong environmentalist, the cost of working with Wal-Mart has been personal. Some of his old friends don't speak to him. His former colleagues think he's sold out. And then there are the threats. "I attended this event and someone came up to me," recalls Werbach, his discomfort still fresh. "He said, 'I wouldn't feel safe if I were you. People have gotten hurt.'" Werbach has stopped speaking in public without special security.

He has made a leap that is either visionary or naive, depending on your perspective. He's been a leader in the environmental world, president of the Sierra Club at just 23, author of a 1997 book Act Now, Apologize Later that called Wal-Mart "a new breed of toxin" that "could wreak havoc on a town." He was such an iconoclast, he'd publicly challenged old-line environmentalists in a speech in 2004.

But in signing on to Wal-Mart last year, he went too far, driving off even those nonprofits who still did business with his small consulting firm, Act Now. They didn't want the help of someone who would sell his services to the Behemoth of Bentonville.

Folks at the Sierra Club, which funds the watchdog Wal-Mart Watch, begged him to reconsider, and activists John Sellers and Barbara Dudley wrote an open letter headlined, "The Death of Integrity: In Working With Wal-Mart, Activist Adam Werbach Is Abandoning His Principles."

For Wal-Mart, winning over Werbach is a critical part of its battle to redefine itself as environmentally progressive. There are nagging doubts in many quarters about just how sincere that effort is--doubts magnified this summer when Wal-Mart postponed the release of its own long-awaited sustainability progress report. But, in fact, Werbach is hardly the only activist to see Wal-Mart as a potent partner for change. Environmental Defense has opened an office in Bentonville to work more effectively with the company, although the group is careful to take no money from the chain. Even environmental icon Amory Lovins now advises the company on its green policies. But none of that provides quite the same sheen of legitimacy as signing up the former Sierra Club golden boy.

The journey to Bentonville has been difficult, even painful, for Werbach. Yet now this activist who'd set foot in a Wal-Mart store exactly once in his first 30 years is bleeding Wal-Mart blue. "I wholeheartedly believe in what Wal-Mart's doing, which astounds me," he says. "Wal-Mart is expert at solving problems."

His new vision: to do nothing less than make Wal-Mart as well known for environmental sustainability as Target is for everyman design. And to do that in a way that's good for the business. "Our goal," he says, flopping into a retro orange chair in his Act Now office, "is to have Wall Street look at Wal-Mart's green performance, and say, 'Wow, do more of that.'"

Today, his firm operates out of new offices in a renovated pie factory in San Francisco's Mission District. The space has been retooled with eco-friendly carpeting, skylights, and a meditation room. In the last year, Werbach has hired three dozen new employees to help handle the Wal-Mart business, boosting Act Now's staff from 8 to 45. He's also pulling in other corporate clients, including General Mills, Sony BMG, and Procter & Gamble.

The Act Now team is running one of Wal-Mart's key environmental initiatives, a program Werbach himself helped design, which aims to teach the company's 1.3 million U.S. employees about sustainability. He says the company offers him the organizational leverage to make change rapidly and on a scale that the traditional environmental establishment just can't provide. The movement, he says, "is not willing to suggest solutions that are as big as the problems."

In the nonprofit world in which Werbach grew up, his conversion is not just unpopular, it's incomprehensible. Wade Rathke, who runs ACORN, a community-organizing group based in New Orleans, says he called Werbach to try to persuade him not to become a Wal-Mart contractor, but never heard back from him. "For you to believe that you and your little lonesome are changing something with a million-and-a-half employees, $350 billion of sales, well, there's a level of ego there that just is staggering," Rathke says. "It sounds like an Adam Sandler movie or something." He pauses. "I have no idea what Adam believes anymore."