Rich because Green, or Green because rich?

One could quibble with BCG's analysis. Phil Rosenzweig of Switzerland's IMD business school has arguid that management writers are prone to "the halo effect": they treat the temporary success of a company as proof that it has discovered some eternal principal of good management. The fact that some successful companies have embraced greenery does not prove that greenery makes a firm successful. Some firms, having prospered, find they can afford to splurge on greenery. Some successful firms pursue greenery for public-relations purpose. And for every sustainable emerging champion, there are surely 100 firms that have prospered by belching fumes into the air or pumping toxins into rivers, as a visit to Chaina or India will show only too vividly.

Nonetheless, the central message of the WEF-BCG study- that some of the best emerging-world companies are combining profits with greenery is thought-provoking. Many critics of environmentalism argue that that it is a rich-word luxury: that the poor need adequate food before they need super-clean air. Some even see greenery as a rich-world conspiracy: the West grew rich by industrializing (and polluting), but now wants to stop the rest ot the world from following suit. The WEF-BCG report demonstrates that such fears are overblown. Emerging-world companies can be just as green  as their Western rivals. Many have found that , when natural resources are scarce and consumers are cash-strapped, greenery can be a lucrative business strategy can be a lucrative business strategy. Indian Corporate houses have dovetailed their core competencies and core potentials in the realm of promoting 'green technology' not merely for ethical reasons but it also makes a lot of business sense.