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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When asked how Wal-Mart would feel about him exercising his activist self, the question catches him by surprise. "Who knows if Wal-Mart would like that?" he shrugs, as if not realizing how much shelf space 7-Up's parent, Cadbury Schweppes, has in every Wal-Mart store.

Werbach knows he's straddling two contradictory cultures. He is a complicated blend of creativity, idealism, and pragmatism; sometimes, he admits, that puts him at war with himself. He seems able to compartmentalize things that might otherwise be inconvenient--his irritation over 7-Up's ads versus the wishes of his largest client; his initial outrage over how Wal-Mart treats its employees versus the opportunity to leverage Wal-Mart to change the world.

"There's an interesting book called Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," he says. "I guess that's where I live, somewhere between all those places. I don't know whether it's irony or hypocrisy." (After 20 years as a vegetarian, Werbach has started eating meat again since joining forces with Wal-Mart. If he sees any irony in his rebirth as a carnivore, well, he lets that pass.)

There are many questions about Wal-Mart's commitment to sustainability. The CEO has announced bold, clear goals for the company: to produce zero waste; to use 100% renewable energy; to supply customers with sustainable products. The hurdles, though, are enormous. (See "How Green Is Wal-Mart?") Two years ago, amid much fanfare, Wal-Mart opened two experimental energy-saving stores. This year, the company says it will open four "high efficiency" supercenters. Meanwhile, in the two years ending December 2007, Wal-Mart will have opened hundreds of conventional stores.

And for every success story, like the Wal-Mart in Brady, Texas, that has recycled 8,000 tires, doubled paper and aluminum recycling, and created community PSP teams that include the mayor and the city landfill manager, there's a story like the one in Santa Fe. We visited the New Mexico store that went through the PSP training in April; the associates we asked had never heard of PSPs. One of Werbach's staff acknowledged in an email that the Santa Fe store's management team didn't buy into the PSP training and never passed it on to the staff.

"I'm an insider with outsider tendencies," says Werbach. "I'm still trying to channel the outsider."

Some moments in the past year have been surreal for Werbach. One day in Bentonville, he was leaving Wal-Mart headquarters, walking to his parked car. "I looked back to Lee Scott's window, and he was waving me good-bye. It was the oddest experience, the CEO of the world's biggest company waving, kind of like, Come back, ya hear."

But for Werbach, the big surprise is how much he's learned from Wal-Mart. He riffs on the company's obsession with its core mission, its relentless tracking of results, its "correction of error" meetings. "In failure," he says, "you don't hide your head in shame, you actually get on the phone the next day and you talk about what went wrong." In Wal-Mart's culture, he has found what he thought was missing from the environmental establishment.

"Right now I'm an insider with outsider tendencies, but I'm still trying to channel the outsider," he says, washing down his hummus with coconut juice. "I don't think you can be both. I mean, we'll see. I'm going to try. I'm trying."

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