Working With the Enemy

Enlarge

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

Related Stories

• Slideshow: Wal-Mart: The New Green Giant?
  Are the corporate retailer's eco-friendly initiatives enough to correct decades of damage?
• How Green Is Wal-Mart?
  In October 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott outlined audacious environmental and sustainability goals for the company. Here's the status of some of the company's major initiatives.
• Wal-Mart's Personal Sustainability Project
  The Personal Sustainability Project, or PSP, that Werbach and his firm, Act Now, are running for Wal-Mart is intended to help the company's 1.3 million employees see how sustainability--defined very broadly as "having enough for now, while not harming the future"--relates to their own lives. Here's the strategy:
• Quiz: How Green is Corporate America?
  As businesses scramble to be identified with the "green" movement and brand themselves as eco-friendly, it gets harder and harder to tell which companies are serious about making a difference and which ones are more interested in making a marketing statement.

Since Werbach started testing his ideas last summer, he and Act Now's 12 field trainers have conducted 150 PSP sessions across the country, covering 4,000 U.S. stores. Each store in a given region sends two volunteers to a paid retreat, a daylong series of open, guided discussions that start with Werbach's stripped-down definition of sustainability: "having enough for now, while not harming the future."

The sessions are designed to encourage participants to discover for themselves how to apply the idea of sustainability to their own lives. For some, it's finding ways to preserve a precious bass-fishing spot; for others, it's realizing that buying things on credit reduces future spending power. Each employee comes up with a PSP, a single, repeatable action--biking to work, quitting smoking--that is good personally and for the wider world. When they return to their store, armed with guides and DVDs, they are supposed to recruit 10 volunteers apiece to help the rest of the staff develop their own PSPs.

The program is radical for Wal-Mart in two important ways: It's totally voluntary. And, unlike Wal-Mart's usual highly detailed procedures, it is free-form. Some stores have shrugged off the program altogether; others are so enthusiastic they have developed store-level PSPs and community-wide PSPs. The strategy is to spread PSP practices virally through the Wal-Mart ecosystem and beyond.

Wal-Mart would not allow Fast Company to interview employees, but according to Act Now, there's some evidence of progress. Shonda Godley, who works in Bentonville, decided to connect her PSP with her farmer grandfather's death from cancer, which she believes resulted from a lifetime around pesticides. She is taking her fourth-generation family farm organic. "On the surface, it sounds rather silly to say that when I choose organic foods, farmers can be healthier," she said in an in-house PSP magazine. "But we sustain organic farmers by purchasing their products; we know that they are not putting their health at risk to make a living."

And Werbach talks about 17-year Sam's Club associate Kim Nicholson, who challenged a senior manager to explain why a meal of pizza and soda in the company cafeteria cost $2, while salad and water cost more than $5. Within a week, Werbach says, the price of the healthy food was lowered in all Sam's Clubs.

Although Werbach's PSP method sounds a little hokey, it's rooted in positive psychology. The idea is to change behavior not, as he puts it, by the "blunt-force trauma scare tactic" that most activists use, but by getting people to change tiny behaviors--nanopractices. "For too long, environmentalists have been telling people they need to sacrifice," Werbach says. "But the great modern challenge is how to be happy. This is the missing link."

Although the PSP program is relatively new, it's being measured, like everything Wal-Mart does. According to weekly reports from the stores, roughly 40% of associates who have made a PSP are staying committed to it, Werbach says, and 12,000 employees have quit smoking.

The PSP effort baffles some of Werbach's former colleagues. "Someone with [Werbach's] kind of brain who has been called a wunderkind is now doing a hybrid between Jenny Craig and SmokEnders for Wal-Mart," says John Sellers, who heads an activist group called the Ruckus Society, a former Act Now client.

Werbach, of course, argues that issues like weight loss are among the most effective entry points for getting people to care about the environment. "People care about themselves first, so you have to start with what's important in their lives." It's Organizing 101: Meet people where they are. "If Wal-Mart doesn't fulfill its goals," Werbach says, "there will be a lot of very angry associates who are very much bought into this now."

A few environmentalists are starting to see value in Werbach's work. Hunter Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and coauthor of the pioneering book Natural Capitalism, was so dubious of Wal-Mart's green conversion that she went to Bentonville in person to see CEO Lee Scott. She calls Werbach's Wal-Mart strategy "absolutely world-changing brilliant. By the time he's done, he'll have spoken to 1% of the U.S. workforce."

Werbach is eating in a vegan restaurant in San Francisco, just back from a Greenpeace International board meeting in Amsterdam. He's getting amped up about a "greenwashing attack" he wants to mount against 7-Up for claiming its flavors are "100% natural" in a recent TV campaign. "It's a total misuse of the term 'natural.' You're tricking people into thinking they should improve their lives with this thing that is natural and healthy--it's immoral," he says. "I'll go talk to them about it first. I'll tell them to fix it. If they don't? Then you attack."