Can companies both do well and do good?

An increasingly common mantra among executive management is that a key to sustainable success is for companies to manage both toward their bottom line and toward delivering some kind of benefit to society at large. But are the most successful companies actually doing this? Is this goal even a realistic expectation? At present, data taken from some 1,100 of the world's leading companies shows a wide disparity between economic performance and environmental commitment (a leading benchmark in sustainability and commitment to the so-called "triple bottom line"). But for a rising generation of new business leaders, managing toward shared value is becoming a default philosophy.