Environmental business strategy: Corporate leaders’ perceptions

Do firms willingly address social objectives, or must they be coerced? This article examines the particular relationship between environmental objectives and business strategy using a survey of corporate leaders’ perceptions. Respondents from a set of companies listed in the U.S. Fortune 500 characterize their basic environmental strategy, the relevance of the natural environment to their management objectives, the drivers of their environmental decisions, and impacts on business outcomes. The results suggest that government and business negotiate over problems of environmental protection, proactive pollution prevention and green consumer concepts have only a toehold, traditional environmental management objectives of cost and risk reduction still dominate, and regulatory interventions by government are still the most important drivers of business environmental decisions.