Occasionally I get invited to respond to an on-line query or comment and I always do my best to do so in a open minded and helpful way. I responded to one such request recently from UK Business Labs and the following comment appeared:

“And I have seen so many companies saying they are green but when you look at what they are doing (recycling plastic for example) they only do it to reduce their costs…. Not to save the planet!”

This is an intriguing point of view. My initial response was that this is a false OR – money or planet. There is nothing wrong with improving your environmental performance in a way that benefits your business – money AND planet – in fact it is the best way to do it.

But it betrays a deeper distrust of the motivations of businesses wishing to go green. When I interviewed Richard Gillies of Marks & Spencer about the retail giant’s Plan A sustainability programme for The Green Executive, he told me that they were coy about how much in the way of savings they had made from Plan A. They weren’t expected to make any return on the initial £200m when the programme was set up and were pleasantly surprised when it paid for itself and provided a surplus.

So the question is, how do you deal with this paradox? The short answer is brutal honesty: “we are doing this because it is the right thing to do AND it is good for our business – we find that one follows the other.” Of course hardened cynics will remain cynical, but I learnt a long time ago not to worry about hardened cynics.