Material Detail

The Weinreb Group released its first Chief Sustainability Officer report, CSO Back Story: How Chief Sustainability Officers Reached the C-Suite, in September 2011. CSO Back Story included a list of 29 CSOs and was the first data-driven analysis of the  characteristics and evolution of the CSO title.

Since its release, the report has been widely read, and we have enjoyed receiving feedback from many people who benefited from it. It also led to the publication of a report about CSR leadership, Making the Pitch: Selling Sustainability from Inside Corporate America, coauthored with VOX Global and Net Impact, Berkeley, CA, in 2012.

The shifts in corporate CSR over the past three years prompted us to take a fresh look and capture the evolving nature of the CSO landscape in the United States. This report features an updated list of Chief Sustainability Officers as well as our perspective on the important shifts impacting the CSO role over the last three years. The data that fed these trends were gleaned from a survey completed by our panel of CSOs.

As with prior reports, to be eligible for the CSO list, professionals must:

• Be based in the U.S., • Work for a company traded publicly in the U.S. 1, and,

• Have “Chief Sustainability Officer” in their official current title.

A total of 36 CSOs were identified for this report. We are well aware that many sustainability leaders hold titles other than “Chief Sustainability Officer”. Consider this a study of U.S. heads of sustainability whose titles happen to be “Chief Sustainability Officer”. With that title is an implication that the position sits high in the organization and comes with a strong amount of authority in the company.

We first conducted comprehensive web and word-of-mouth research to identify the CSOs, and then confirmed their current title on their company’s website. We crunched the numbers to better understand the statistics that underlie this evolving landscape. Finally, we reached out to all of the CSOs to ask them to describe the shifts they have observed in the past 3 years. Those shifts are the foundation of this report.