Times are changing, and the way companies measure their success is too. Now in addition to watching financial outcomes, companies are assessing their impact on their physical surroundings and their community as well. When companies pay attention to the people they touch, the environment they impact, and the profits they make, leaders make more sustainable decisions overall. In fact, this way of doing business is causing companies to rethink how they produce their products and provide their services. In the process, the entire company system is becoming stronger.

Although the term triple bottom line may refer to specific reporting requirements, often it is used as shorthand for ventures that are socially responsible, green, and profitable.

Finding Triple Bottom Line Companies

With your desire to work for a sustainable, triple-bottom-line company — one that pays attention not just to profit but also to social and environmental impact — and that matches your career goals, you need a strategy to uncover companies in your area that fit the bill.

However, there aren’t many green/sustainable/triple bottom line company lists out there yet. To find these organizations, you must do your own legwork. To put yourself in the right frame of mind for this project, retire your job seeker persona for now and step into your detective alter ego. During this phase, you must be driven to uncover clues and follow them up to find what you’re looking for.

As you begin this process, create a spreadsheet and enter each potential company name as you find it. Include as much information as you can about each company’s Web site address, location, and type of business.

Let’s consider how to research each company to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you and your needs.

Surveying media coverage

Media sources are valuable tools as you collect company names for your list. Consider the following sources:

*  Major media sources: If you’re looking for names of cutting-edge companies, look to lists of hot green companies put out by magazines and blogs. Newsweek and Fast Company are two media outlets that come to mind. Use these lists to spot trends, find company names, and take a fascinating look into the future.

* Local media: To find companies in your area, check local media sources to see if they’ve profiled any interesting green businesses or compiled a list of green companies in your area.

*  Niche media: Web sites that cater to a particular demographic group or geographic region may also provide valuable lists of green careers.

*  Press releases: Companies that have just launched, received funding, released a new product, or been included on a top green companies list are bound to distribute press releases to celebrate their achievement. In your favorite search engine, use terms such as “target industry” + “press release” to find relevant press releases.

Following the money

Financial news is also a source of information about green or sustainable companies.

*  Green investor information: Companies that help individual investors make good financial decisions often provide information about the companies that qualify for their green lists. Some financial entities show you stock quotes, whereas others tell you which companies are included in their funds. The Global 100 provides investors with a list of the 100 most sustainable corporations worldwide.

*  Venture capital updates: Where venture capitalists are investing gives you a broad sense of which industries are growing, staying stable, and contracting. If you dig into the blogs that report on companies that are getting new funding or additional rounds of funding, you can then track the company’s progress as they move their product to market.

*  Stimulus fund distributions: Until 2012, various governmental agencies will be awarding grants and distributing money to local governments, state governments, agency projects, and companies. Here is a place to track money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Finding the right lists and directories

Slowly but surely blogs and media sources are publishing lists of the top companies in various fields. When you find a list that matches your targeted industry, celebrate — you’ve just struck a vein of gold! To locate such a list for your industry, try a search using “target industry” + “company list.”

If you haven’t found a targeted list, you may be able to find the kinds of companies you’re looking for on a number of other lists:

*  Green energy/power lists: Several organizations, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on companies that are purchasing the most green energy. This is actually a fairly good objective measure of a company’s green mission. Businessweek recently published a list of companies that have reduced their carbon footprint significantly.

*  Green business organizations: Another intriguing way to discover green or socially responsible companies is to identify associations where green businesses are members. Often these organizations, such as the Social Venture Network, include a list of their members on their Web sites.

*  Green business directories: Although some directories are like typical phone directories, where green businesses can purchase a listing, there are other green directories in which companies are screened to ensure that they meet the directory’s standards for sustainability. The Green Pages Directory is a good example.

*  Job boards: Although most people use job boards to find job openings, you can also use green job boards to research green/sustainable companies in a particular profession, industry, or geographic area. Most of the larger green/sustainable job boards include an advanced search function that allows you to filter results according to your criteria. If your profession or field has a job board of its own, check that one out too.

*  Sponsors: Another productive source of business names is to look at who is sponsoring your industry’s conference or your local community’s Earth Day celebration. Any company paying to sponsor an event is either brand new and trying to gain exposure or doing well enough to be able to afford the sponsorship fees.

Excerpt adapted from Green Careers For Dummies® by Carol McClelland, PhD, provided with permission by John Wiley & Sons. Available wherever books are sold.

In her book, Escape from Corporate America, Pamela Skillings, a career coach and blogger, says that moving back and forth between solo ventures or startups and corporate jobs is “really the only way to develop, learn and grow.”

Why not take a break from corporate life? Skillings reasons: “So what if you fail? Or what if you discover that solopreneurship isn’t your calling after all?  Sure, it would suck. But you can probably always get a job similar to the one you’re thinking about quitting.”

Besides, she says, corporate jobs often lead to burnout.  One reason is that two out of five workers spend more than 50 hours per week on the job.

And there’s little chance to recuperate. American workers are allotted significantly fewer vacation days on average (8 for the first three years; 10 thereafter) than their peers in France (25), Germany (30) and Japan (18).

Those are good reasons to seek better work/life balance. However, what if you are your own worst boss? Some people don’t give themselves a break!  (No, that doesn’t apply to me; I love a spontaneous break.) You know when you’re slacking off – but then again you also know how to make it up to yourself by taking a longer lunch or taking some time off when necessary.

Skillings profiles a number of “escape artists” who have wandered off the corporate reservation – many of these stories are brief but well reported. One theme is doing more with less; individualists who shine when they’re no longer under the iron thumb of corporate hierarchy.  For every success story there are untold numbers of workers who return to the corporate fold. But there is no shame in that and as Skillings argues, these former soloists may return to become even stronger corporate contributors.

Unlike those of us who prefer to learn about companies by reading academic case studies or magazine articles, Frankel discovers firsthand how employees are indoctrinated into becoming brand evangelists. He gets his hands wet by whipping up Frappuccinos, delivering packages, folding merino sweaters and selling car rental insurance.

“Whenever I neared the UPS building in San Francisco I felt a strange pull inward, a longing for something I couldn’t articulate,” he writes. Frankel decides to experience “what it felt like to be part of an interconnected global workforce by becoming a piece of it.”

Does a hive-like mentality pervade American retail jobs? If so, many of the worker bees appear to be drones, but according to Frankel the chain stores look for certain types of employees. The Container Store, for instances prefers compulsive neat freaks.

A chapter on looking for work at Home Depot includes his take on the psychographic questions the retailer asks to assess the personality of job candidates. Home Depot: “Other than pens, paper, or other supplies, what is the total worth of all the items and money you have taken from employers in the last 3 years?”

Frankel thinks about it and replies, $0. “That had to be a trick question, right?” he reasons. He is weeded out without ever receiving an interview.

The process is arduous. At one point, Whole Foods asks more than 200 questions online about his work habits. “Trying to guess which answer would get me invited in for an interview was quite difficult,” he concedes.

Two years is a long time to immerse yourself in a field for which you feel improperly suited, but that’s what Frankel reports about his experience.  ”After just three days on the job, [at the Gap] I began to dread punching in,” he writes. The boredom of folding hundreds of garments each day makes him hungry.

Well, of course. I can’t say that I share Frankel’s curiosity about what it’s like to work entry-level jobs for America’s leading brands. I doubt I could last a day at Wal-Mart, but I think I’d make a good Starbucks Barista – except maybe during a rush. I’m not quite ready to turn pro yet.

Today, the money fueling climate-change management is found in scientific research and government sponsored grants. But corporations may consider hiring specialists to help them anticipate and mitigate the business impact of climate change.

Not only is climate-change management a relatively new course of study on campuses such as UC-Berkeley, it’s also a new career path, at least in the United Kingdom. A scan of several leading U.S. job boards shows a wide range of related environmental services jobs, drawn from diverse disciplines such as meteorology, geology and engineering.

Futurists, take note: Jobs that are today lumped into the environmental-services bucket may morph into something a bit more strategic.

When it comes to environmental planning or strategies, corporations hire specialists as needed but turn to consultants for strategic advice or project management. Yet driven by successes in creating “green” energy use strategies, many corporations that consume natural resources or have business operations in climate-sensitive locations are hiring environmentally-savvy managers.

Typical entry-level academic qualifications include a B.S. or B.A. in engineering or environmental fields or a science-related graduate degree with a business emphasis, too. That last part is a key. If you can mix environmental management with a business degree, you can write your own ticket. Climate problems won’t be cleared up any time soon.

While there’s no formal pedigree-setting standards body for climate-change management, as graduate schools begin to produce candidates adept in these technical areas employers – particularly environmental consultancies – will swoop in with job offers.

Companies are looking at hiring talent to set and implement strategies in these areas:

• energy (including fuel, electricity) efficiency best practices
• low carbon emissions, aka carbon management (managing and trading credits)
• smart buildings/infrastructure
• sustainable business practices

If you’re prospecting for work, bear in mind that there’s no environmental job gold rush yet. “You have to realize the way this works is where is the money coming from to do these projects?” says Dan Eastman, principal, The Eastman Group, LLP, an environmental engineering recruiting firm in Baton Rouge, La. “Since Bush went to G-8 you may start to see more stuff coming out of it. But as for industry, I don’t see those kinds of jobs yet.” At least, not in the States.

Some companies will for competitive or PR reasons get out in front of this macro-trend. A Fast Company article in February called “Degree of Difficulty,” profiled Auden Schendler, director of environmental affairs at Aspen ski resort. He came to the resort from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a renowned environmental think tank.

In America, most of the climate-change management investment is found in government-funded research, alongside corporate or academic Research & Development. This investment could be characterized as more of a lava flow than a backwater. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has invested almost $20 billion in the areas of climate change and global change research.

If you are the type to plan ahead, this is a career path destined for important things.

In other words, why spend the prime time of your life at Hyundai when you could be at Honda? Or at Novo Nordisk when you could be at Pfizer? True, it helps focus your decision when one company wants you and its competitor does not.

The authors state that “people also choose jobs-and, more important, become engaged with their work-on the basis of how well their preferences and aspirations mesh with those of the organization.” I’m not sold on that thesis, however. It is difficult at best to both assess corporate culture before we take a job and determine whether it meshes with our sensibilities, too.

On the other hand, it’s nice when your personal and your employer’s “preferences and aspirations” are in alignment. Philosophically, have fun, get rich sounds appealing to me, but quite possibly that sentiment doesn’t guide senior executives.

Yahoo! is an example of corporation that offers excellent global career opportunities, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously. Libby Sartain, former VP People, at Yahoo! knows something about employee engagement. She was the head of human resources for Southwest Airlines in 1998 when it scored first in the annual 100 Best Companies to Work for in America competition. “Culture is still a competitive advantage,” wrote Sartain in Fast Company. “Identify what are your cultural imperatives. Embrace that. Not every company can have a purple cow in the lobby.”

Okay, that sounds a bit extreme, but what Sartain is talking about is a “signature experience,” one that is unique to an employer such as Yahoo! From any company’s standpoint, the payoff of obtaining your loyalty and commitment (called ‘engagement’) is considerable. When you’re highly committed, you often selflessly donate your discretionary time – longer hours and more creative output. But the catch is not that many of us are highly engaged. The Towers-Perrin Global Workforce study of 86,000 employees found that only 14 percent of workers are “willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed.”

Erickson and Gratton observe in the article that “engaged employees are the antithesis of hired guns rotating in and out of critical roles-they’re productive for the long term.” It’s a virtuous cycle that all of us hope to find. If you’re committed, you’re generally seeing the rewards and recognition that are keys to your career success.

Yet, one reality of the modern multinational company is that it is difficult for workers to feel engaged when ground zero of corporate culture is based thousands of miles away.

Rainmaker’s stated “goal is to transform you into a successful financial advisor running your own profitable practice in just three years.”

On the other hand, in three years you could become a PhD, an MBA, go to med school or become a master chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But being a stockbroker is kind of cool. If my stockbroker is reachable by phone past market close on the west coast it’s only because there’s an office party that day or he’s required to be there. Otherwise, one assumes, he has a regular 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. tee-time.

The payoff is appealing.

“Financial advisors employing wealth management earn substantially more: $881,000 per year on average, compared to $279,000 for financial advisors taking an investment generalist approach,” Morgan Stanley claims. Well, generalist or specialist, it looks like you’d be doing well and you can brush up on your golf game.

My favorite part of the description, which is surprisingly direct, is this: “The program focuses on the key business-building and client relationship management techniques.” Note that it doesn’t say we’ll teach you about financial services so that you can give worthy advice. That’s because advisors who work for the big firms are not allowed to choose their own investment vehicles – they must buy and sell whatever the firm’s market gurus are hot or cold on that day, that week or that year.

Of course, the devil is in the details. Are you willing to ask your former fraternity brothers, friends or relatives to invest with you? Do you socialize with wealthy people?

One reason why Morgan Stanley is trying this approach is that Wall Street firms have tried everything else to recruit and retain talented professionals – mostly without success.  A friend of mine in the brokerage field tells me that maybe one in twelve rookies survive, often by a thread. Of course, most of those novices are just starting out in their careers; what’s different about this program is its emphasis on mining well-seasoned careerists.

My father – a fraternity president in college – made this ‘transformation’ in the early 70s when he jumped from a stressful industrial services management job over to a leading brokerage firm. My dad’s internship in financial services wasn’t frictionless, let’s say, but ultimately he excelled at being a stockbroker, winning sales contests that brought him to Europe and S. America later that decade.

I can certainly understand why someone would reach for the “brass ring” of financial services. It’s not for me though – I prefer media gigs and tennis over sales calls and golf.

And in this particular office above Union Square in New York City, they throw the occasional staff party billed as the “Thursday Night Hang.” The workers in this firm called Connected Ventures run three pretty cool companies: a site called CollegeHumor.com; a t-shirt company called Busted Tees; and a video community site that predates YouTube called Vimeo.com.

One evening at a company party, they recorded the following video, for fun, on a single take. It wasn’t intended to be a recruitment video; it just turned out that way. Note, it takes about 40 seconds or more to get grooving and some of the words in a song you will hear are mature. Don’t worry, nothing else about the video is mature, it’s all in fun.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

There were unexpected outcomes to this exercise:

• Four million people have “viewed” this video since it was posted in May
• The video has been widely discussed on blogs around the world, including on Tech Crunch’s CrunchNotes site.  Many of the comments are variations of this: “I want to work there”
• In homage to Connected Ventures’ groundbreaking effort, an office of Paris-based designers (Heaven.fr) recorded a lip-dub to Weezer’s Sweater song. (Some say it is better, but I don’t think so.)
• Résumés are streaming into Connected Ventures

“We put it on online so we could share it with friends and so people,” says Ricky Van Veen, one of the founders of the company and Editor-in-Chief of CollegeHumor.com. “It didn’t occur to us that anybody outside of the office would want to see it.”

Amandalyn Ferri, who works in marketing at Busted Tees, has won a lot of admirers for her “performance” that marks the beginning of the video – a “lip-dub” to Harvey Danger’s Flagpole Sitta. “I work here and I think that people are under the impression that as a company we all just sit around and do nothing,” she says. “We definitely give off the impression that we hang out and it’s like a college dorm 24×7. Realistically it’s not a surprise to come back and see people working at 8 or 9 p.m.”

If most of us could stop working by 9 p.m. we would be pretty happy.

“It has been such a great recruiting tool for us,” says Van Veen, who performs in the video. “We saw a couple of hundred résumés just blindly. People said, ‘I don’t know what you do but I just want to work at your company.’” They’re hiring.

Editor’s Note: This is one of our Favs and it’s the start of a weekend. Enjoy!

Flash forward to 2007. That knock on the door is your Avon man.

One of Avon’s more successful male sales reps is Bobby McKinney, a 58-year-old fire code inspector from Winter Haven, Fla. Last year the dual-careerist tallied $800,000 in sales along with his wife. They reportedly have an astonishing 170 sales reps working for them.

A beauty career is in the eye of the beholder. Consider the fact that Yankee baseball superstar Derek Jeter recently teamed up with Avon to create “Driven,” a $25 cologne, sure to be a hit with all genders. Maybe it will open doors for Avon salesmen.

Okay, I kid, but beauty is big business. Last year Avon, the global beauty and consumer products company – with nearly five million independent sales reps – earned $8.7 billion in revenue. Men can’t afford to gloss over this career path anymore.

“Soon America’s most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a cool company isn’t always that hot.”

The reader comments made this series come alive. My favorite concerns what’s missing from the job description for the exec assistant to Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore. Meanwhile, an $80,000 a year support engineer job at Amazon.com also made the list. One wag reader commented that, for that salary, “I could afford anti-depressants.”

The China Investment Corp.’s $200 billion sovereign-wealth fund is looking for “global talent” to join them in Beijing. Apparently cash isn’t an issue. In May the new fund sank $3 billion into the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm.

Here are some of the two dozen available positions:

• Compliance Manager
• Risk Control Manager
• North America and Japan Market Equities Portfolio Manager
• Emerging Market Equities Portfolio Manager
• Fixed Income Portfolio Manager
• Public Relations Manager
• Senior IT Project Manager

There may be a catch or two, however. According to some accounts the fund might be used for “political and strategic purposes” that run counter to the best interests of the American consumer or economy. But I wouldn’t worry about that just yet.

What I would stress about is getting the job and living in a fishbowl 24/7, because it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to communicate as freely as you would like with your friends in the west. Governments will be watching these investments – and presumably the investors too – very closely indeed.