Wall Street is starting to pay attention to corporate environmental performance. That s good news for environmental managers. Some years ago, environmental-management consultant Rob Shelton coined a phrase that stuck. It was the Green Wall, and it referred to corporate resistance to integrating environmental considerations into line operations. The reasons for the Green Wall were pretty straightforward.
Profit centers are where the action is.
There was another reason, too. The world s money centers didn t give a hoot about corporate environmental performance unless it hurt a company s bottom line or stock price. As far as they were concerned, ethics and investment didn t mix. This bias played a huge role in shaping senior managers priorities. From one perspective corporations have lots of power, but from another they are lapdogs, begging for scraps from the financiers who are their masters.