ABSTRACT
In a recent working paper from the Harvard Business School, Eccles et al. (2011) examine the impact of corporate culture on corporate behavior and performance by studying 180 companies over an 18-year period. They have found that high sustainability fi rms (defi ned as those who voluntarily adopted environmental and social policies many years ago) signifi cantly outperform their low sustainability competitors on both stock market and standard accounting measures. The authors posit that “these policies refl ect the underlying culture of the organization, a culture of sustainability, where environmental and social performances, in addition to fi nancial performance, are important, but also forge a stronger culture by making explicit the values and beliefs that underlie the mission of the organization” (p. 2).
