More than a decade after the Nike scandals of the late 1990s exposed terrible working conditions in the Asian factories where most of our stuff is made, has anything changed? To be sure, in the years since, most US brands — not just footwear and apparel companies like Nike, Timberland and Gap, but corporate giants like GE and Walmart — have assumed responsibility for human rights and environmental problems throughout their supply chains. But are conditions any better for the workers?

Those questions are front-page news these days, literally, in The New York Times, which has published two long and extraordinary stories about Apple and its supply chain in China. [See How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work and especially In China, Human Costs are built into an IPad.] The Apple-in-China story is also brought to life by Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, a lively, provocative episode of public radio’s This American Life, in which an actor-turned-reporter  named Mike Daisey investigates conditions at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. Together this reporting paints a shameful picture of harsh and unsafe working conditions at Apple suppliers: sometimes deadly safety issues, chemicals that scar people’s hands, 60-hour weeks, long stretches of work with no breaks, a rash of worker suicides, etc. To get some perspective, I spoke with Dan Viederman, the executive director of Verite, a nonprofit that helps companies build more humane and sustainable supply chains, and I’ve been reading my friend Adam Lashinsky’s excellent new book, Inside Apple.

Foxconn offers medical care on its campuses

For starters, let’s be clear: This is not an Apple problem. The focus of both The Times’ reporting and Mike Daisey’s story is Foxconn, which is said to be China’s biggest private employer and may be the world’s largest manufacturing company. It employs 1.2 million people (!) and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, for customers including Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung, according to The Times. Part of a company called Hon Hai that is headquartered in Taiwan, Foxconn operates not just in Asia, but in the Czech Republic, Mexico and Brazil. It publishes a corporate social responsibility report and has US-based employees in Houston and Austin, TX.  Most Americans, of course, have never heard of Foxconn although they probably own something that was made by the company.

Nor is the problem of harsh, unsafe working conditions limited to Foxconn or even the electronics industry. Problems abound in the apparel and toy industries, too, as well as in mining, farming, fishing and construction. [See Walmart: A Bully Benefactor at Fortune.com for my story about Walmart's work to prevent  child labor on cotton farms in Uzbekistan]. Last summer, Nike admitted that “nearly two-thirds of the 168 factories making Converse products fail to meet Nike’s standards for contract manufacturers,” according to this story by Good Guide’s Dara O’Rourke, who as a graduate student working in Vietnam in 1997 turned a spotlight on Nike’s use of child labor.  In its most recent corporate-responsibility report, Gap says  that between 10 and 25% of its suppliers in south China don’t comply with child labor laws, don’t pay overtime as required and don’t provide one day off each week. I turned to Gap’s report not because they are a laggard but because, to their credit, they are a leader when it comes to being open about where their factory monitoring efforts are falling shorts. Other companies don’t say nearly as much about where their stuff is made, or how. The factories themselves are often walled off from NGOs and journalists. The result is that, for better or worse, most of our stuff is made in faraway places by people who are invisible to us. Can you find Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people (bigger than New York!) and the world’s manufacturing hub, on a map?

Apple CEO Tim Cook

As best as I can tell, Apple is no worse than most other companies when it comes to protecting the rights of workers in its factories. It may be better. In its sixth annual Supplier Responsibility Report released last month, Apple disclosed the names of its suppliers for the first time–but not the location of their factories. The company also became the first electronics firm to join the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit group that works to improve conditions for workers. (Its other clients include Nike.) In an email to employees, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wrote: “The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.” They don’t, however, tie violations to particular factories.

In its report, Apple also said that it

dedicated additional resources to protecting the rights of workers who move from their home country to work in factories in another country. Many of these immigrants are charged exorbitant fees that drive them into debt, an industrywide problem that Apple discovered in 2008 and that we classify as involuntary labor. In 2010, we continued our search for these violations, auditing all of our production suppliers in Taiwan and many in Malaysia and Singapore. As a result of Apple’s audits and rigorous standards,
foreign workers have been reimbursed $3.4 million in recruitment fee overcharges since 2008.

This is significant because it’s a rare example of a US brand putting money in the pockets of overseas workers. “On the migrant labor issue, Apple is absolutely a leader,” says Dan Viederman of Verite. [Disclosure: Verite has worked with Apple and my wife, Karen Schneider, is a board member of  Verite.] Others see Apple differently. A consultant for BSR (also know as Business for Social Responsibility) who declined to be identified told The Times that Apple refused to push Foxconn to try out a program where workers could have access to private “hotlines” to report abusive conditions.

The more fundamental problem is that Apple’s reporting doesn’t tell you much about what impact the company is having. Cook’s email, for example, says that Apple’s

Supplier Responsibility team led more than 200 audits at facilities throughout our supply chain last year. These audits make sure [emphasis added] that working conditions are safe and just..

But othey don’t. Suppliers are notorious for faking pay records and gaming the inspectors. And Apple’s track record makes clear that conditions are not safe and just.

Cook also boasts that Apple offers free continuing education programs at  factories in China, saying that “more than 60,000 workers have enrolled in classes to learn business, entrepreneurial skills or English.” But are they earning more money? Working fewer hours? Safer?

Dan Viederman

See the problem here? Apple and other companies are measuring their actions, and not their impact. There’s a big difference between the two.  It’s reason why we don’t know whether the people who make the iPad are better or worse off than those who make an HP printer or a Microsoft X-Box. “Companies report on their activities – audits conducted, training delivered – but don’t tell us what impact that effort has achieved for workers,” Dan says. “As a result, while companies are getting better at reporting on their activities, we don’t have a meaningful way to compare one company to another.” We’d know more if companies reported on the wages that workers are paid, the number of workplace injuries, turnover rates, environmental discharges and the like.

Those who follow these issues also tell me that workplace issues are not part of procurement at most companies. If suppliers had  to demonstrate that they provide ethical workplaces as a condition of doing business with a big US brand, companies might avoid embarrassment–and more important, make a difference in the lives of their workers.

Nicholas Kristof

Having said that, it’s worth remembering that globalization and the manufacturing jobs it has brought to Shenzhen have on balance been good for China and its people. Workers line up for jobs at Foxconn, as the Atlantic reported last week. No less a crusader for the rights of the global poor than Nicholas Kristof has said as much, most famously in a 2000 Times Magazine article called Two Cheers for Sweatshops.

More recently, Kristof, who lived in China, told This American Life that industrialization has

created massive employment opportunities, especially for young women, who frankly didn’t have a lot of alternatives. That tended to give women more clout within families, within the community….for many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of rice paddies.

If you’d prefer the opinion of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, here’s Paul Krugman, writing in Slate, back in 1997:

While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.

What’s more, competition for workers — and the very beginnings of a labor movement — has also begun to  improve conditions in China’s factories. To retain workers, owners are said to be improving wages, working conditions and living conditions, albeit slowly.

But still.

My MacBookPro costs $1299.  My iPad2 retails for $499. I don’t even know how much my iPhone costs, and I don’t want to think about how many iPods, Nanos or shuffles I’ve bought for my family over the years. By selling premium-priced products and generating high margins, Apple was the US’s most valuable company–worth more than ExxonMobil, Microsoft and IBM, last time I checked. It’s holding $97 billion in cash and short-term securities.

Simple fairness dictates that more of that wealth should be shared with the workers in China who are making Apple products.

GI Joe has been green since 1964, when the action figure first went into battle for toymaker Hasbro.

Now his plastic and cardboard packaging will be environmentally-friendly, too.

So will the packaging for such beloved toys and games as Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Monopoly and Candyland, all of which, along with more recent phenomena like Littlest Pet Shop and  the Transformers, are made by Hasbro, a Pawtucket, RI-based firm that sold about $4 billion of toys last year.

Hasbro releases its first corporate social responsibility report today, and it should be available here. The company offered me a preview of the report and a chance to talk with Brian Goldner, the company’s CEO, and Kathrin Belliveau, vice president of corporate responsibility at Hasbro.

Hasbro was formed by brothers Henry and Helal Hassenfeld (get it, Has-bro?) in 1923, and family member and ex-CEO Alan Hassenfeld remains on the board; that kind of long-term family ownership often leads to an ethic of social responsibility. In fact, Hasbro has paid close attention to its social impact for years, particularly when it comes to overseas factories. It’s been slower to look at environmental issues  but, even so, the company tops its bigger rival, Mattel, in the rankings released just this week by nonprofit Climate Counts. [See yesterday's blogpost, Big brands take climate action but...] Hasbro also ranks #59 on FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” List. I don’t know the company well but indications are it’s doing a lot of the right things.

Goldner has chaired the board’s social responsibility committee since 2006. I asked him why the company is doing its first CSR report now.

Partly, he said, it’s because the company is expanding–in recent years, it opened marketing and sales offices in China, Brazil, Russia and Korea, among other places–and Hasbro wants to communicate its values to its employees everywhere.

“As we hire hundreds of new people around the world,” Goldner said, “we want people to understand that we’re not only in the markets to win but we’re there to be a good corporate citizen.”

He also said: “At the end of the day, I think it comes down to, frankly, myself and our senior management team who feel very strongly about this as individual citizens and people who are running a company.” CSR at Hasbro is a “long process of continuous improvement.”

Most of todays’ news (such as it is) is about packaging. The company said it would eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from “all new core toy and game packaging beginning in 2013,” it promised to insure that 90 percent of paper and board packaging will come from recycled material, or from sustainable forests by 2015, and it noted that it has already replaced all the wire ties in its packages with ties made from paper, rattan or bamboo. Fun fact: The company said the changeover to rattan and bamboo “eliminated approximately 34,000 miles of wire ties – more than enough to wrap around the circumference of the Earth.”

In truth, the planet is unlikely to notice much of this. Reducing packaging is all to the good, but it’s a bigger issue when it comes to things we consume frequently (fast food, drinks, groceries, etc). Hasbro’s packaging reductions were surely driven, at least in part, by Walmart’s attempts to get all of its suppliers to cut back on packaging. Said Belliveau: “Certainly their scorecard process, which we have been very committed to, has guided us, but we also have our own aspirations and requirements that are driving our business.”

Littlest Pet Shop Hamster Playground: Despite the plastic, it's probably "greener" than a real hamster

What’s more, Hasbro will continue to use lots of PVC. The company says it is keeping it in toys because it is a extremely durable plastic, which resists wear and tear. It’s low-cost, too. Belliveau said: “There’s a lot of good things about PVC. We’re not here to attack PVC. Really, it came to a landfill issue, and an incineration issue.” PVC is said to give off toxins when burned.

On greenhouse gases, Hasbro said recently that it is on track to reduce its direct global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) 10 percent for the time period 2008-2012, building upon earlier U.S. reductions of more than 43 percent from 2000-2007. It reported for the first time this year to the Carbon Disclosure Project. The company operates factories in East Longmeadow, MA, and Ireland, but most of its manufacturing is done by third-party vendors in Asia; it’s in the process of collecting emissions data from them as well.

But Hasbro’s bigger impacts are social–on the kids who play with its toys, and on the workers who make them. Here, the company has a good record, as best as I can tell. In 2007, when other toy companies, including rival Mattel, were forced to recall millions of toys made in China because of worries about lead paint, Hasbro was unaffected.

In cooperation with others in the industry, Hasbro has set labor standards for factories in its supply chain since the early 1990s. In this report, for the first time, the company makes the names of all of its suppliers public.

Goldner told me that when Hasbro has made acquisitions, it learned that its costs tend to be higher than rival toymakers. “We tend to pay about 10% more for product,” he said. “That has a lot to do with the product safety protocols that we have in place.”

The payback from those higher costs is hard to quantify. It comes in the form of recalls that are avoided, or scandals about child labor that don’t happen.

Goldner hopes that consumers will, over time, recognize Hasbro’s efforts. “We believe the Hasbro name can be a trust mark,” he said. We’ll see.

Elizabeth Grossman

Today’s guest post comes from Elizabeth Grossman, a gifted environmental journalist who is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, YaleEnvironment360, The Washington Post, The Nation and Grist. I met Lizzie this past fall at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference; she’s been writing about science and the environment for more than a decade.

She reported this story by taking EPA data uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity, and checking it against publicly-available information from OSHA. Her story got my attention because it suggests (based on admittedly limited evidence) that companies that are careless or irresponsible about air pollution also have workplace-safety issues. I wasn’t surprised to see BP among them–my FORTUNE colleagues David Whitford and Peter Elkind did a great job dissecting its culture in BP: “An Accident Waiting to Happen.’  Seeing DuPont on the list did surprise me, since the company is known for its safety culture. This story first appeared at The Pump Handle, a website about public health and the environment.

We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its “watch list.” The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act – but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies’ occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators of Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) standards.

Sally Jewell – 2011 Net Impact Conference from Net Impact on Vimeo.

Sally Jewell, the chief executive of REI,  is the most unpretentious big-company CEO I know. When we first met a couple of years ago for dinner in Washington, she arrived in toting an REI backpack (made from recycled material). She’s plain-spoken, direct and a good interview.Her company, as you might expect,  is committed to minimizing its environmental footprint. (Without  a healthy planet, there’s no business for REI.)

So I was delighted when Sally agreed to a keynote interview at the 2011 Net Impact conference last week in Portland. We talked about how REI has lowered its energy and GHG emissions while adding stores, about the (unfair) competition from Amazon and about how ideas percolate up, down and around the retailer.

Some 2,600 people attended the New Impact confab which, as always, was a great event. I’m only slightly biased, as a board member of Net Impact; the organization’s mission is to inspire and equip young people to use the power of business to make a more just, sustainable world. You can hear more about Net Impact on the video below from Liz Maw, Net Impact’s executive director.. The interview with Sally is nearly an hour long, but I’ve posted it here, figuring that at the least REI employees may want to watch.

And, if you are one of those people who plans ahead, please mark your calendar for the 2012 Net Impact conference on Oct. 26-27, in Baltimore, MD.

Douglas Conant

Ten years into his career in the food industry, Douglas Conant was fired from his job at General Mills. He had two small children, a big mortgage, and a feeling of bitterness. Then he called an outplacement firm where the man on the other end of the line answered as he always did: “Hi, it’s Neil McKenna. How can I help?”

That moment–in a new book, Conant describes it as a “touchpoint”–shaped his approach to leadership. “Leadership isn’t about you,” he says. “It’s about them.” McKenna became a mentor and friend, and Conant saw how seemingly small interactions can have a deep impact on people. He went only to a long career at Kraft, Nabisco and as CEO of Campbell Soup, where he led an impressive turnaround before retiring in July.

I met Conant this week in Washington to talk about his 10 years at Campbell and about the book. In Touchpoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments (Jossey-Bass), Conant and his co-author, consultant Mette Norgaard, argue that “the daily interruptions that leaders face in nearly epidemic proportions are actually the moments where the greatest leadership opportunities lie.”

They write:

Each of the many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or low point in someone’s day. Each is an opportunity to establish high performance expectations, to infuse the agenda with greater clarity and more energy, and to influence the course of events. Each is a chance to transform an ordinary moment into a Touchpoint.

“The soft stuff is the hard stuff,” Conant likes to say.

Conant, who is 60, is not a touchy-feely guy. Leaders, he says, need to be tough-minded and set high expectations. Three years into his tenure at Campbell, he replaced 300 out of 350 senior managers. “They either didn’t have the skills to lead their organization,” he said, “or they weren’t engaged in the culture-building we needed to do.” Boy, was culture building needed. Shortly after Conant took over, Gallup came in to survey employees and found that their engagement scores were rock bottom.

But it’s a sad fact that most workers in corporate America aren’t engaged. Towers Watson’s 2010 Global Workforce Study, which surveyed 20,000 employees, found that 21% were engaged, 42% were “enrolled” (meaning they do their jobs without much enthusiasm) and 38% were disenchanted or actively disengaged. That’s bad for business and a terrible waste of human potential. “Confidence in leaders and managers is disturbingly low,” the survey says.

This is why Conant’s message resonates. If you don’t treat people right, nothing else you do as a leader – the more visible work of devising strategy, buying or selling businesses, improving operations – is likely to succeed. “High trust leads to high performance,” he told me. The first thing he did as CEO was to drive the development of what became known as the Campbell promise: “Campbell valuing people; people valuing Campbell.”

Of course, the claim that “our people are our most important asset” has become a corporate cliché, and a hollow one at that. So I asked Conant what valuing people means in practice? Do people really need to read a book to learn how to treat others well?

“The key is to be disciplined and vigilant about it,” he told me. For example, he set aside time daily as CEO to write 10 to 20 personal notes to workers at Campbell – newly-hired staff, people who got promoted, others whose kids won a scholarship or were celebrating their 20^th or 25^th anniversary with the company.

“Over the 10 years, I sent 30,000 notes out,” he said. “And we only had 20,000 employees.” That’s impressive.

Conant would invited 20 employees from all levels of the company to lunch every four or six weeks, urging them to speak candidly and promising that nothing they said would leave the room. Many days, he practiced what Tom Peters called Managing by Walking Around; he’d change into a pair of casual shoes and wander the Campbell campus in Camden, N.J., talking to people along the way. Often, he’d engage people with the greeting he’d learned from Neil McKenna: “How can I help?”

He also tackled social and environmental concerns including obesity and the impact of the company’s purchases on agriculture and carbon emissions. “Companies have to step up to a new level of social engagement, in a way that’s a win for their shareholders and a win for the world,” he said. “People…want to feel grounded in a very frenetic world. They hunger to contribute to a greater good.”

How did it all work out?

Not bad at all. Campbell grew revenues and earnings throughout Conant’s decade as CEO and outperformed the broader markets, although not by much. During the last 10 years– an imperfect window in which to measure his impact, but it’ll have to do — Campbell stock grew by 18.12% while the S&P500 was up by 12.43%.

The company was doing better before Conant was sidelined by an automobile accident in July 2009, which required three extensive surgeries. “It’s been horrible,” he said. Joking that he prided himself on staying away from drugs during his youth in the 1960s and 1970s, he said: “I’ve been living with morphine and Ambien.”

There was, however, one aspect of the experience that wasn’t horrible at all. Personal notes poured into his office as word of his accident spread. Thousands of people who worked at Campbell took a few minutes to write a note or send cards.

“I never expected that,” Conant said. Touchpoints, it seems, are contagious.

I’m going to try to never again buy a supermarket tomato.

Partly that’s because they have so little taste–a sad fact I’m reminded of every summer when we buy our tomatoes at a local farmer’s market. Any resemblance between a locally-grown tomato and  the industrial tomatoes sold in supermarkets and restaurants, particularly in winter, is strictly coincidental.

Mostly, though, it’s because I now understand what goes into the production of a tomato in Florida–the nation’s No. 1 tomato-growing state, which supplies virtually all of the fresh, field-grown tomatoes sold between October and June. That’s thanks to a terrific new book called, appropriately, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.

This eye-opening expose by veteran food writer Barry Estabrook, who formerly contributed to Gourmet, now writes for The Atlantic and blogs at his own site, Politics of the Plate, is a worthy addition to the growing number of books on my shelf that takes us behind the scenes of today’s alimentary-industrial complex, books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish. From bookstores to the blogosphere, food writing these days is smarter and more tough-minded than ever.

The Florida tomato story isn’t new. Writing in The New Yorker back in 1977, Thomas Whiteside chronicled the sorry state of supermarket tomatoes. In this deeply-reported book, Estabrook finds that not much has changed since then.

There’s lots not to like about the way tomatoes are grown in Florida, but the most memorable scenes in Tomatoland portray the Dickensian conditions under which migrant workers toil in Florida’s tomato fields. Children as young as 12 do farm work. Workers are paid, at least in part, by the number of containers of fruit they pick, a system that often leaves them with less than the minimum wage. They are on call daily, but work only when needed. They get no sick benefits, no vacation and if they are hurt on the job, they pay their own medical bills, assuming they can afford to see see a doctor. Estabrook writes:

This might explain why the life expectancy of a migrant worker in the United States is only forty-nine years….migrant workers typically make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, a figure that is distorted because it includes the higher wages paid to field supervisors.

Wait, it gets worse. While earning poverty wages for doing backbreaking work, tomato pickers risk being exposed to pesticides. While regulations require those workers who handle pesticides to use protective eye-wear, gloves, aprons and respirators, the rules are poorly enforced. Because Florida’s sandy soil is not well suited for agriculture, growers

pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal…The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens and babies born with horrendous birth defects.

…An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of California tomatoes.

In a particularly heartbreaking chapter, Estabrook  details the struggles of three women who lived in a labor camp near Immokalee, Florida, and had children born within a few weeks of each other with severe birth defects.

Big brands, it turns out, are part of the problem. When a coalition of farm workers brought pressure on Burger King, Taco Bell and McDonald’s to pay more for  Florida tomatoes and set aside the money for the workers,  the “vice president of food safety, quality assurance and regulatory affairs” at Burger King responded by going online and using an assumed name to smear the organizers of the farmworkers as “the lowest form of life.” Nice, huh. Eventually, the fast-food outlets came around to support the workers.

Barry Estabrook

The strangest thing about this story is that although the social and environmental costs of growing tomatoes in Florida is high, the benefits to consumers are low–and by design. Florida tomatoes are bred so that they can be picked and shipped with minimal damage, last a long time on store shelves and present a consistent appearance. Taste? Well, as Estabrook explains, “the structure of a tomato…makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act.”

Harry Klee, a University of Florida professor who is trying to design better tomatoes, puts it this way:

As you focus on making the tomato bigger and firmer, you are ruining the flavor, pure and simple…What we have ended up with is  something that’s large but has basically had all the good points diluted out of it. They’ve essentially taken the package and added water.

Estabrook’s conclusion: “Florida’s tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated.”

My conclusion: No more Florida tomatoes for me.

Photo credit: The Ewan via Flickr

Maybe it’s time t0 do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we’re at it, let’s think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company’s core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

I’ve been thinking about CSR and how to talk about it for years.  I wrote my first article on corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003. It ran under an odd headline — Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers and Profits — because my editors knew that  words like corporate social responsibility turn off readers. I grappled with the meaning and terminology of CSR again in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune, which explored connections between religion, faith, values, spirituality and business. The language of faith and values, I subsequently decided, wasn’t the best one to use when speaking to corporate executives about business and its impact. I’m now inclined to talk about sustainability. For all its vagueness, corporate sustainability is an idea that is both practical–no one wants to kill their company–and radical, because no company  is truly sustainable, at least as defined by the Bruntland Commission as promoting development in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

But the here goes beyond language. I was reminded of that when reading an excellent new book by Carol Sanford called The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). No, I don’t love the title or even her terminology. (One chapter is  called, yikes, “Stakeholders as Systemic Collaborators.”) But Carol’s arguments and insights (and the title wasn’t her idea) are spot on. Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that “practice CSR” but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do.

As Carol writes:

Responsibility isn’t a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in its practices.

This may sound obvious but it leads her (and her readers) to new ways of thinking about business. Businesses, she says, should strive not just to minimize the harm they do, but to do good, to become restorative, to “improve and evolve healthy systems.” She explains:

Ecological and biological systems not only adapt to their surroundings, they also transform them. They create contexts in which increasingly sophisticated networks of relationships emerge…

Corporations, and the businesses within them, work more or less the same way. If they are to live and prosper, they find ways to remain connected to their origins while cultivating and then adapting to changes in the world around them. Their long-term viability has as much to do with how well they create networks of relationships [emphasis added] with consumers and other companies and industries that advance the health of all.

Yes! Here’s how I think about this:

The old/traditional/assembly-line way of doing business was fundamentally transactional. Business was seen as a set of discrete win-lose transactions with customers, employees and suppliers. Companies created value by paying their employees as little as possible, paying their suppliers as little as possible, charging their customers as much as possible and externalizing their costs.

The new/progressive/responsible/sustainable business is fundamentally about relationships. This company sees itself as the center of a network of long-term, win-win relationships with workers, customers, suppliers and communities. The company’s value lies in its ability to strengthen and enhance all of those relationships.

This new way of thinking and behaving can’t be left to the CSR department, the chief sustainability officer or anyone else. It’s the job of the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the CMO, the head of sales, the factory foreman, product designers, everyone.

With a focus on CSR, “you get officers, you get programs, you get incentives,” Carol told me when we spoke by phone. “If you are given a target that you are to achieve, people focus on the target and the processes.” Instead, people need to feel free to express their highest values and beliefs at work. “Humans are most alive, and most creative and innovative when something comes out of them as a person,” she says. A company should be “more like a jazz quartet and less like a conducted symphony.”

Nor does “embedding sustainability” into the business do the trick, Carol told me. Sustainability to what end? Recently,  I had an opportunity to give a paid speech about sustainability to suppliers of a big tobacco company. Uh, no.

Carol has corporate experience to back up her thinking. She’s been a business consultant since 1980, working for such companies as DuPont, Colgate, Seventh Generation and several units of  Clorox, including Kingford Charcoal and Britta.

She tells revealing stories in the book.

A Kingsford Charcoal executive leads a transformation of the company by developing the skills of the company’s workers and encouraging them to think like business owners; he dissolved departmental boundaries, invited everyone to put themselves in the shoes of a customer, and to see the contribution that their work makes to other people’s lives.  He helped them connect their work to a bigger purpose.

In South Africa during the turbulent 1990s, a Colgate leader shook up the workforce by persuading whites to work for blacks, and getting everyone to come together to address issues in both the business and the community.

At DuPont, a middle manager looking for an alternative to Freon, which was contributing to ozone destruction, gets help from throughout the company, from customers and, unexpectedly, from Greenpeace.

None of that could have been accomplished by a CSR executive or department–or any department. “The biggest challenge for a company that aspires to be a responsibility business,” Carol says, “is to stop working on parts and start recognizing and working on whole systems.”

CSR “can’t be bolted on but must be built in,” she says.

Business is too important to be left to CSR departments. It’s also too important to be left to business alone.

Pressures on business to become life-enhancing must come from without as well as from within–from customers, from rank-and-file workers, from engaged shareholders, from activist groups and, gently, from governments. If we find ways to hold businesses accountable for what they do, smart businesses will adapt and meet our rising expectations. Others will die.

It’s not a lot more complicated than that.

Business managers should focus on generating long-term value for their shareholders.

They should lead their companies in ways that enable human flourishing.

That’s the purpose of business in a phrase, a wise man once told me, and he wasn’t a CSR officer.

As Carol writes: “I can hardly wait for the corporate responsibility movement to run its course so that businesses can get back to being responsible by nature.”

Me, too.

It’s the end of an era at Timberland, one of the most socially-responsible companies in America.

Family-owned since it was started in 1953 by Nathan Swartz, the grandfather of the current ceo, Jeffrey Swartz, Timberland  is being sold for $2 billion to VF Corp. VF is one of the world’s largest clothing and shoe companies; its brands include The North Face, Vans, Wrangler and JanSport.

What this means for the New England company’s well-known commitment to environmental responsibility and social justice remains to be seen.

Uncertain, too, is the future of  Jeff Swartz, perhaps the most passionate advocate in corporate America for the idea that companies have a moral obligation not only to generate wealth for shareholders but to do good for the world.

“This is hard,” says Jeff told me when we spoke yesterday.

I’ve known and admired Jeff, who is 51, for about 10 years. I devoted a chapter to Timberland in my 2o04 book, Faith and Fortune: How compassionate capitalism is transforming American business. Back in 2000, when the company issued its first CSR report, Jeff wrote:

It is no longer enough to measure business by standards of profit, efficiency and market share. We must also ask how business contributes to social justice, environmental sustainability and the values by which we choose to live.

Because he’s outspoken, Jeff  has had an impact bigger than the size of Timberland, which had $1.4 billion in revenues last year. To pick just one example: He pushed the outdoor industry to come up with an “Eco Index” to measure the environmental impact of their products. (See my 2010 blogpost, How ‘green’ are those hiking boots?)

It’s interesting–and very much in character–that as part of the acquisition Jeff didn’t negotiate a contract for himself to stay on at Timberland, either as CEO or as an adviser. Executives of companies that are being sold often do that, but they are, in effect, using the leverage they have during a negotiation to take care of themselves, potentially at the expense of other shareholders.

“It’s standard procedure,” Jeff said. But, he added: “I need to live by a higher standard that standard procedure. I didn’t want there to be any appearance of self-dealing.”

I called VF Corp. to ask what plans they had for Jeff.

“That’s something we’ll be talking with him about in the coming weeks and months,” said Cindy Knoebel, vice president of corporate relations at VF Corp. That’s not exactly a vote of confidence, but one shouldn’t read too much into comments from PR folk.

The deal appears to be a good one for both companies from a business standpoint. That’s important, of course, because as CEO of a publicly-held company, Swartz  has a fiduciary obligation to all his shareholders. VF agreed to pay $43 a share for Timberland, a 43% premium over its closing price of $29.99 last Friday–so his shareholders, including the family, will do well. Over the past year, Timberland has traded in a range between$15 and $45 a share. As is customary in an acquisition, several plaintiffs law firms are making noise about challenging the price.

As for VF, its shares rose by 10% after the deal was announced, adding about $1 billion to the company’s market capitalization. That’s unusual. When deals like this are made, shares in the buying company usually fall because investors believe (and rightfully so) that most acquisitions end up destroying value. VF says it intends to both grow Timberland’s sales and make the company  more efficient — Timberland’s operating margin was 9% last year, well below VF’s 20%.

One reason may be that Timberland goes the extra mile for its employees. They get 40 hours of paid volunteer time a year, and enjoy such perks as a $3,000 subsidy to buy a hybrid car. FORTUNE has long recognized Timberland as one of America’s best places to work.

One the conference call announcing the deal, an investment analyst asked VF CEO Eric Wiseman, “How do you bring SG&A (selling, general and administrative) down without hurting corporate culture?”

Wiseman replied that VF has supported other brands it has acquired over the years, and intends to do the same at Timberland.

“VF admired the Timberland brand for a long time. It goes back a decade and more,” said Wiseman.

In fact, VF Corp. approached Jeff’s father, Sidney Swartz, about buying Timberland back in the 80s. Nike and Adidas have also made overtures. “There have been plenty of other knocks on the door,” Jeff told me. Indeed, it’s possible that a rival suitor could emerge before the deal closes later this year.

Jeff said he felt optimistic about this deal because VF Corp. expressed strong interest in Timberland’s earth-friendly Earthkeeper line of footwear. “They believe that Earthkeeper is the heart of this company,” he said. VF executives  told him that their research indicated that “outdoor products that perform that are also green are something that consumers value.”  This was a business judgment, he noted: “They are not emotional. They are data driven.”

He also felt good after visiting a factory in Bangladesh that supplies product to both Timberland and North Face, and being told that North Face took the factor’s environmental and labor-rights performance seriously.

Another potentially encouraging sign: Last fall, when I met Conrad Anker, the mountaineer, author and environmentalist, he told me that North Face, where he has worked for 27 years, is getting serious about sustainability, lobbying for action on climate change and looking at the environmental footprint of its products.

Still, there’s little doubt that change will be coming to Timberland.

As Jeff put it: “When you change the signature in the bottom right corner of the paycheck, that means they will get to make decisions that I now get to make.”

Best Buy’s in a tough business. The electronics giant ($50 billion in revenues in 2010) competes with Amazon, the best of the online retailers, and Walmart, the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer. The company’s shares have fallen lately.

What’s Best Buy’s competitive advantage?

It’s the people in the blue shirts, says Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s chief executive. “Our business is utterly dependent upon getting those 180,000 people aligned and moving forward,” he says.

This is why sustainability is important to Best Buy, the 51-year-old chief executive says. It’s about providing those people with opportunities, making sure they are heard and showing them that Best Buy cares about them and their values.

Brian gave the keynote speech this morning at the Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference, which is being held in Minneapolis, Best Buy’s home town. We spoke briefly after his talk, which wasn’t your typical speech about sustainability or corporate responsibility. I don’t believe he mentioned the words “carbon footprint.” Instead he talked, in a personal way, about Best Buy’s people, their  aspirations, how they connect to sustainability and how he connects to them.

Providing an inspiring, engaging workplace is “the No. 1 element of Best Buy’s sustainability strategy,” Brian said. “We are leveraging our people as a competitive advantage. We stand on the shoulders of all the people who have worked on the floor for the past 40 years at Best Buy.”

This not only sounds good but makes business sense: Just try getting help from Amazon or Walmart if you can’t figure out why your  TV or computer isn’t doing what you want it to. In a commodity business, what makes Best Buy different is (or needs to be) service.

Of course, all CEOs mouth platitudes about how people are their company’s most valuable asset. Brian is different, I think, because of where he came from–he began his career at Best Buy as a salesman, 26 years ago. “This is personal to me,” he says. He knows that selling boxes isn’t a glamorous job. “Working in retail is tough,” he says. “It’s the monotony.” So he wants to help Best Buy’s people to connect their work to a larger mission that matters to them. He told a story about a Mexican-American worker in Las Vegas who wants to help his relatives get hired as Best Buy expands into Mexico, and another about a woman who used Skype connections to talk with her husband, a soldier stationed overseas.

The idea that Best Buy helps people live more connected lives sounds geeky, he said, but it’s a very human, very emotional idea. “I travel a ton. It’s the thing I hate about my job,” he said. “I would not, could not do this job if I didn’t have this technology.” He talked about watching basketball on TV and sharing the experience with his three sons while on a business trip to London. “The only thing I couldn’t do was put my arm around them,” he said.

Using social media as well as Town Hall-style meetings, Brian spends lots of time talking with and, more important, listening to Best Buy’s people. He writes a blog, called Brian’s Whiteboard, he has a  Twitter account with about 9,000 followers and he’s got 5,000 Facebook friends, the maximum allowed, despite his personal request to FB’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for more. “I really do love these vehicles,” he said. “We’re nuts about listening.” It’s important for him to connect directly with employees and customers, he says, because “people don’t like to tell you stuff that’s bad” once you become CEO.

Several years ago, for example, Best Buy executives decided to save money — about $10 million a year — by cutting back on employee discounts. The reaction from workers was swfit and negative, and the company pulled back. “What can sound smart in a conference room…is maybe not so smart at all,” he says.

All of this connects with sustainability because the environment matters to Best Buy’s people. “Remember,” Brian told me, “better than 60% of employees are 24 years old or less. They’re very in tune with what kind of planet they’re going to have.”

Best Buy’s most visible environmental work has been around product stewardship and e-waste. (See my 2009 FORTUNE story, Best Buy Wants Your Electronic Junk.) The company now recycles about 387 pounds of e-waste a minute, 80 million pounds a year, and the good news is that the value of the commodities that Best Buy collects after taking apart and breaking down all those computers, TV sets, phones, etc., just about pays for the recycling program. “It’s neutral on the p-and-l,” Brian told me. That’s “very, very encouraging to us” because it enables the company can help customers, address an environmental problem and satisfy its employees and shareholders, all at once.

There’s another benefit no one expected. Some Friday afternoons, Brian heads to a nearby store and grabs a hammer, to smashing up other people’s discarded gear.

“I find it enormously therapeutic,” he says.

To my surprise, I’ve become visible enough in the world of “green business” that students and young professionals  frequently approach me because they want to learn more about sustainability, corporate responsibility or clean energy. Unfortunately, I can’t take the time to speak with all of them, so we typically exchange a couple of emails, and that’s it.

Leo Xiao

Occasionally, though, the student is unusually persistent, which is how I found myself having breakfast this morning at 6:45 a.m. in Laguna Niguel, Ca., with Leo Xiao, a 30-year-old immigrant from China who is studying for an MBA at UCLA. I’m here for FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, which begins later today, (Monday, April 4) and is available online here.

In any event, Leo Xiao learned that I would be in California for the event. He invited me to speak at UCLA. No thanks, I said. He offered to drive me from LAX to Laguna Niguel so we could talk. That won’t work either, I said. He offered to pay me $200 for a meeting, Absolutely not, I told him. But he was so relentless that I agreed to meet with him if he wanted to drive the 65 miles or so from LA to Laguna very early in the morning, which, not surprisingly, he did.

“Once I decide I want to learn something, I’m pretty committed,” he told me, unnecessarily. “I’m single minded.”

We had a good talk. Leo’s interested in the business of delivering and financing solar energy for homes, and he wanted to dig into issues surrounding the business model, management and risks associated with several start-ups that deliver solar to the home–Sun Run, Solar City and Sungevity. He asked a lot of good questions. It turns out that he’s working on his own iPhone app about solar for the home, but he couldn’t say much about it because he’s in “stealth mode.” Leo has a degree in computer science from UC Riverside, and he spent about a year and a half working at Zynga, the social gaming company the developed Farmville, before business school. He told me, proudly, that Zynga had used its platform to raise money for earthquake victims in Haiti. “Social games can be about more than killing time,” he said. “They can have a social benefit.”

I tell this story for a couple of reasons. First, I want to recognize Leo’s persistence, preparation and desire to learn. Second, I want to say that any immigration policy that makes it hard for people like Leo to work in the U.S. is nuts. He’s been educated here and would like to stay–”I love Silicon Valley,” he told me–and surely his brains and energy will add value to our economy. Free labor markets, like free trade, generate wealth and growth.