To the Editor:

In their insightful essay on the Clorox Company's attempt to "go green," Jacquelyn Ottman and Sydnee Grushack write that the maker of bleach-based products "is not strongly associated with green, so why should customers believe them?" Consumers are certainly wise to hold Clorox accountable. But the biggest challenge for Clorox is not whether the company can “bring green to the mainstream.” It’s whether Clorox can bring itself to become genuinely green.

Originally published in the Harvard Business Review
co-authored with Bill Breen

Any organization that aspires to be sustainable must have the courage to publicly bare, for all to see, its good, bad, and ugly impacts on society and the environment. Stakeholders expect--and the Web's sprawling influence demands--that values-driven companies reveal their shortcomings and engage the outside world on how best to fix them. We were recently reminded of the "see-through" imperative when our company, Seventh Generation, was greeted with a nightmarish collection of headlines: