Six companies reported reaching a level on which they were ready to take radical steps to transform their industries.

The Zero Impact Growth Monitor 2012 (PDF) found that Puma, Nike, Nestlé, Unilever, Natura and Ricoh were ready for transformation, but the majority of companies "are still vague about their strategic growth ambition in a world where ‘growth as usual’ is not an option anymore.”

The report found that four key gaps get in the way of companies' sustainability progress. GreenBiz.com summarized them:

• Comparability gap — a lack of consistent definitions and descriptions that companies use to explain their sustainability efforts in the various components examined.
• Implementation gap — a wide discrepency of implementation effectiveness among companies that have proposed ambitious sustainability strategies.
• Balance gap — an overall tendency that environmental goal-setting is more consistent than social goal-setting in supporting overall strategies, primarily because it is easier to monetize environmental benefits and, therefore, easier to assess their contributions to overall economic success.
• Gaps in and between industries — while the research focused only on the so-called “leading companies,” there are still considerable differences, even within the same industry.

Read more analysis of the report and examination of zero impact growth at GreenBiz.com.