This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. And next year is the 25th anniversary of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which began placing the idea of sustainable development into the mainstream.

The boom in corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives may have been welcome in some areas, helping sensitise business to a growing range of economic, social and environmental challenges, but our progress to date towards true sustainability is equivalent to arriving at the first base camp for anyone climbing Mount Everest.

All of this was underscored for me as I read a fascinating book, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. Written by Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, the book compares the internet with the Gutenberg printing press, which transformed how we thought, read and remembered. The process is happening again, he argues.

With the Net, one of the key shifts has been acceleration or, in Carr's words, "we want to gather as much information as quickly as your eyes and fingers can move". We skim through websites, typically reading one or two pages, at most, before bouncing out or onward. The overall effect is that we pay more attention to many different topics simultaneously, "but at a more superficial level, with the result that we find it harder and harder to read or think deeply".

All this makes me wonder whether current definitions of corporate citizenship and social responsibility aren't shaping our thinking in similar ways, encouraging us to stick to the comfortable shallows rather than moving out into the deeper waters of transformative change? Which is why so much of my time these days involves working with long-sighted people at the edge of the economic system, the sort of innovators, entrepreneurs and investors who create sustainable products, business models and lifestyles.

Our challenge is to make sure that these people find a proper hearing at next year's Rio+20 Earth Summit and elsewhere, helping us all move beyond the shallows.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans (www.volans.com) and non-executive director at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com)