Businesses in the 21st century trying to practice sustainability -- balancing environmental and social concerns with generating profits -- would do well to open their U.S. history books and study the contributions of inventor, author and diplomat Benjamin Franklin.

"He was the epitome of values-based leadership," Walter Isaacson, former media executive and author of a 2003 biography of the Philadelphia statesman, told a Pittsburgh audience yesterday.

From his early published maxims such as, "If you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas," to his efforts to promote civic and community tolerance among Colonial shopkeepers, Mr. Franklin laid a framework for the ethics- and values-based way of doing business that corporations are so eager to embrace today, Mr. Isaacson said.

The author, former chairman of cable television giant CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, has since 2003 been president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit, leadership development organization based in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Isaacson was the keynote speaker at a symposium on sustainable business sponsored by Duquesne University's Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics and Palumbo Donahue School of Business. About 200 attended the event in the Hilton Pittsburgh, Downtown.

As the proprietor of a print shop in Philadelphia, Mr. Isaacson said, Mr. Franklin spearheaded the Leather Apron Society -- a group of tradesmen who met every Friday to talk about how they could best serve their community. "They asked themselves the moral questions of the day," which are the same moral questions facing business owners today, Mr. Isaacson said.

Mr. Franklin believed that successful business people had an obligation to be civic and community leaders, "And that's a key to sustainability," said Mr. Isaacson, whose most recent book is a biography of Albert Einstein.

To meet the growing demand for business leaders better versed in the concepts of sustainability, Duquesne's business school this fall began offering a master's degree in the topic and has earned high ratings by the Aspen Institute for its program and for being among the few small universities in the United States to have one.

Also at yesterday's symposium, several top executives of large Pittsburgh companies discussed how they are implementing best practices for sustainable business.

David Shapira, chairman of Giant Eagle Inc., said that while his supermarket chain was privately held, it had adopted the guidelines set by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that holds publicly held companies to stricter accounting and reporting standards.

"It doesn't apply to us, but we adopted it anyway," he said. Giant Eagle was the victim of a financial scandal because of its Phar-Mor affiliate in the early 1990s, long before scandals involving Enron Corp., Adelphia Communications and WorldCom grabbed national headlines. "So we are especially sensitive to ethical things," he said.

John Surma, chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Steel Corp., and J. Brett Harvey, president and CEO of Consol Energy, both said employee safety was among the top core values they wanted to instill in their employees.

"Take care of safety and productivity, and trust will come with it," Mr. Harvey said.