What's the best way for a corporation to sustain its green commitments during an economic downturn? Stanley S. Litow, IBM's vice president for corporate citizenship and president of the IBM Foundation, offers this zen-like precept: Don't wait till winter to store your grain.

There's a lot of business wisdom packed into this maxim, but before getting to that, let's focus for a moment on the messenger.

Litow is a recognized leader in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) arena, having received CRO Magazine's 2008 CEO of the year award for his role in helping create what CRO's announcement called a "new model for large-company foundation work."

As for his employer, it also gets kudos for its sustainability and CSR commitment. The company ranked 21st in CRO's list of Best 100 Corporate Citizens for 2008. The company also recently received the top score in a report issued by non-profit Ceres rating 63 corporations' climate-change commitment.

In addition, the company is cutting-edge strategically. According to Gil Friend, president and CEO of the green business consultancy Natural Logic, Inc., "For a company to be a bonafide sustainability leader, it has to do more than reduce its own eco-footprint. It needs to enable significant sustainability-oriented changes for its customers. That's how society will be transformed, and it's also how the corporations themselves will succeed. The companies that take this approach are the ones that will make money in the new economy."

IBM meets this definition big-time. For instance, its $1 billion Green Data Center initiative delivers energy efficiency technologies to global businesses facing skyrocketing energy costs. Under the program, IBM has engaged with more than 2,000 clients and built more than 40 green data centers around the world, in the process helping its customers reduce data center energy costs by up to 50%. The company has also introduced essentially miniature versions of its data centers, which increase computing capacity while simultaneously reducing energy bills by up to 50%.

The bottom line: if a message is only as good as the messenger, then the counsel of IBM's chief responsibility officer is well worth listening to.

So what did Litow mean when he talked about storing the grain before winter? This: "From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, you're in trouble if you wait for an economic downturn to prove that you're strategically important to the company. You need to establish that beforehand. When cutbacks become necessary, managers look to preserve what's most important, and they identify that by looking to what is most strategic, easiest to measure, and produces the biggest financial benefits."

IBM's CSR initiatives meet these criteria. Observes Litow, "For years, people saw CSR as somehow distinct from other aspects of doing business. You were judged by how generous you were, not by how smart you were. But that's not how you really make a difference. You make a difference by being smart. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, refers to this as the difference between 'spare change" and 'real change.' We do a careful ROI analysis for all our CSR programs."

IBM's social and environmental programs are steeped in the logic of business. Litow cites the following rationales for the company's CSR initiatives: risk mitigation, new business opportunities, cost savings, increased productivity, and attracting and retaining talent. "Why would we police our $40 billion supply chain?" he asks rhetorically, and then answers his own question. "Because if you don't, you create risks for your shareholders, and you might also run into trouble in certain geographic areas to the extent that people there wouldn't do business with you."

This policy of comprehensive strategic integration explains why the economic downturn has not put IBM's CSR initiatives at particular risk--with the emphasis on particular. "While all (of) our expenditures are being re-examined to ensure the highest return for shareholders, in the aggregate we don't foresee a reduced allocation of resources for our corporate social responsibility commitments," says Litow. "We wouldn't diminish our investment there any more than we would in research or other critical areas."

If anything, Litow sees the coming period as a time of enhanced potential for IBM's green and CSR initiatives. "A period of crisis is often a period of opportunity," he notes. "When we look at what the government will be doing to stimulate the economy, we see an opportunity to connect to that. We also see benefit to IBM in the increased interest in green technologies. This is a time of dramatic transformation. We believe we can play a significant role in helping drive that change."

For years, corporations as a class have had a mixed reputation. For some they've been the bearers of progress, while for others they've been the legions of Darth Vader. If we take Litow's vision to its logical conclusion, it suggests we could be heading toward a time when this historic dichotomy comes to an end, as IBM and similarly-inclined corporations dedicate themselves to leading the charge to bring about the change the world so badly needs.

It's still an unlikely scenario given the reality that corporations will be corporations, existing to maximize shareholder value with the associated short-term pressures. Still, if there were ever a moment for this to be a plausible vision, that time is now, with the winds of transformation blowing as hard as they are.

"The value of your brand is all-important during times like these," says Litow. "After Coca-Cola, we have the second most valuable brand in the world. Intangibles are critical to maintaining brand value. That's another reason CSR programs are so important. Why would a company with this kind of brand value and reputation not want to use every ounce of energy and creativity to take advantage of this opportunity?"

Is Litow simply making lemonade out of lemons? Not in this observer's opinion. It's more like it's the dead of winter, and he's enjoying his well-stocked larder.