Companies are being called to assume their part of responsibility in the social environmental context of the planet. More demanding customers start to observe this responsibility as a purchasing decision making factor, banks and other financial institutions condition the credit to their clients' social environmental activities, licenses to operate are screened by communities and environment organizations. Financial profit must not be the corporations' sole objective any longer, their responsibility being much broader. The corporate world is more complex.

In this context appear Business Social Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Sustainability, Sustainable Development, etc…, demanding new postures and offering new tools for the companies adequate to this new reality. There are new reports which must be published, new indicators that need to be created, a wider multiplicity of interests to be considered, new requirements to be fulfilled. The search for sustainability is no longer exotic in the Brazilian scenario. It is now part of the Corporate Reality.

Nevertheless, new tools with old mental models do not generate transformation. On the contrary, they generate greater distance between speech and practice. In the eagerness to appear sustainable, many companies have already adjusted their speeches, recreated their codes of conduct, their missions and principles, they published sustainability reports and changed their communication style. In practical terms, however, they still operate their businesses as they always have, and sooner or later become frustrated for not understanding well how to be truly sustainable. There are social investment projects in one hand, environment friendly projects on the other, but they do not know how to make this sustainability permeate the organization and become part of their strategy.

To be Sustainable is to think beyond isolated social projects, beyond the generation of reports and publicity, beyond ecological initiatives. To be Sustainable demand deep changes in the form of visioning and acting, both individually and organizationally. The challenge is to operate with much different competences from what we became used to. We need sharing more than dealing, we must be useful more than able to sell, we have to dialog more than just communicating. It is a cultural paradigmatic change that demands plenty of reflexive capacity, organizational learning and systemic view. We are in a path with no return. To act in a sustainable way is, more and more, a sine qua non condition for our survival, and consequently, for the corporations' as well.

Yes, the corporate world seems to be more complex. We may have cultivated the capacity to look at it this way; or it could have been born alike already. By becoming able to see the reality with other eyes, we should than start to act under a different prism, targeting to transform it in a continuous process of team evolution, in which all of us shall promote conscience, health, happiness and peace to all stakeholders and beyond.