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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The text of Werbach's controversial speech had taken on a life of its own, circulating furiously online. It ended up in the least likely of hands. Andy Ruben and his wife read it together on a flight from Arkansas to Chicago. A former Ernst & Young management consultant with no environmental background, Ruben was Wal-Mart's recently named vice president of sustainability.

When Werbach said yes to Wal-Mart, a colleague said, "I have no idea what Adam believes anymore."

"I was really moved by the guts it took to have that perspective," says Ruben, 34. Charged with designing an environmental push for the company, he was trying to talk to as many environmentalists as possible. He asked one of his consultants to see if Werbach would meet with him. Werbach's response: No thanks.

Ruben persisted, and Werbach finally agreed to meet in the spring of 2005. On one condition: "I remember people saying, 'Don't let them buy you lunch because once they do, you become tainted.'" He quickly learned that wouldn't be an issue--Wal-Mart never buys anybody lunch.

At San Francisco's Town Hall restaurant, Werbach insisted to Ruben that Wal-Mart's business model precluded it from being a sustainable company. "I wanted to talk about labor conditions," Werbach says. "If employees weren't happy with labor conditions and didn't have health care, you couldn't be a sustainable company." Ruben replied that he didn't believe Wal-Mart's labor practices were abusive. Says Werbach, "I didn't buy it."

He left the lunch suspicious that Wal-Mart wanted to use him as a PR fig leaf. "I thought I was being spun," he recalls. But he couldn't shrug off the audacity of Wal-Mart's ambitions. "Even if they did a hundredth of what [Ruben] was talking about, that would be good." He found himself thinking about how environmentalism has been aimed mostly at "people in big cities, coastal towns, and college towns. But Wal-Mart speaks to 90% of the American public every year."

Werbach had given Ruben a list of things to do if he really wanted to understand the landscape--check out Curitiba, Brazil's efficient transportation system; learn about San Francisco's solar program; meet with experts on carbon emissions; read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. "He followed up with everyone I suggested and read every book I told him to read," Werbach says.

He and Ruben continued to talk over the next several months. Early in 2006, Ruben invited Werbach to Bentonville for Wal-Mart's quarterly assessment of performance. When senior managers were told that improving sustainability would be factored into their evaluations and bonuses, he was floored. At that moment, he concluded that Wal-Mart was serious about making sustainability part of its daily business.

But he saw a major problem. Your customers, he told Ruben, don't buy things at Wal-Mart because they're recycled or use less energy. They shop for the lowest prices. Once Wal-Mart stocked green products, it would face the same problem environmentalists had struggled with for years: getting customers to buy the stuff. How could Wal-Mart make sustainability matter to its customers?

Then he and Ruben hit on an idea: Wal-Mart and Sam's Club's 1.3 million employees were the ideal focus group for the company's customers--and for most of America. If they could get the associates to care about sustainability, they would know how to reach the company's 127 million weekly customers in the United States And the employees could help spread the message. Ruben offered Werbach the opportunity to do a pilot project.

Werbach hesitated. He knew the fallout of signing on with Wal-Mart could be severe. But his wife, Lyn, CFO of Act Now, says Wal-Mart's potential was irresistible: "Imagine that struggle of knowing there's an opportunity that has unprecedented reach and not taking it." Werbach realized that as much as Wal-Mart could use him, he could use the company.

At the last minute, a wealthy supporter offered to fund his Wal-Mart work, so he wouldn't have the indignity of a Wal-Mart check. Werbach turned him down. He recognized that people respect advice more when they pay for it. For him, it was worth betting his reputation and his business on Wal-Mart only if he could get a seat at the table. "It seemed pretty clear that [by signing on] I would get a level of access that I would never get as an outsider."

Wal-Mart gave Werbach the lab to do what he'd exhorted his colleagues to do in the Commonwealth Club speech: make sustainability personal. The program he has designed for the largest employer in the country, in fact, is called the Personal Sustainability Project. The idea of PSP is simple. Each participant picks some part of his or her life that seems somehow "unsustainable" and develops a plan to fix it. The goal is to teach Wal-Marters what sustainability is, and to show them the power of changing even the smallest habit, like not printing a paper receipt at the ATM.