Building those values into your business model is hard, he acknowledged, but it also leads to more meaningful work for each person within the company. Fostering real connections to environmental work and social issues builds both employee satisfaction and brand affinity.

Think long term

Finally, companies must begin to think beyond the next quarter, factoring in the social and environmental impacts of business long after the next earnings call.

“Concentrating on short-term results is going to give you long-term problems,” Stanley said. “If you look at the interest of the company long-term and the interest of society, the interests of the planet long-term, they line up.”

When Patagonia switched to organic cotton, it had to develop new relationships with spinners, mills and assembly factories, Stanley recounted. Spinning organic cotton required a cooler temperature to avoid gumming up the machines—something they were able to determine working with a small factory in Bangkok that saw the opportunity in organic.

“It’s a combination of appealing to the better angels of our nature and coming up with a new product line or a new opportunity for product,” he said. While innovations like this aren’t quick wins, they represent possibilities that are often overlooked because they don’t offer short-term profit.

“Business can create an economically self-sustaining way to do this,” Stanley said. “It’s a missed opportunity. It’s a failure of imagination.”