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Can making business more sustainable result in better products, reduced costs, and increased profits? Plenty of companies are discovering that doing good means doing well. And they are finding their workers more motivated, too—many people consider a higher purpose to be an essential part of job satisfaction.
A godfather of such thinking is Ray Anderson, the chair of Interface Inc., an Atlanta–based carpet designer renowned for its public journey toward sustainable principles. The Interface model includes efficiency, renewable energy, closed loops, carbon neutrality, service, community, and selling intangibles. Anderson calls his company’s ascent of Mount Sustainability a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG). The journey began in 1994. At the summit, in 2020, will be a footprint measuring zero.
I’ve heard Anderson speak a few times. He asks: If business and industry must lead the way toward a more sustainable society, who will lead business and industry? The key is articulating the BHAG you face and being open to ideas that might come in from left field. Anderson recently spoke to Robert Martin; you can read about it on page 13.
Great leaders are constantly open to learning: when alone, with a friend or with an employee; when uncomfortable, when feeling tired or powerless. Anderson used to get irked when customers challenged his company’s environmental record. His change of heart was gradual, partly inspired by a poem, a book, and thoughts of his grandchildren. Now he is trying to change the world, one changed mind at a time.
What part can entrepreneurs play? By carefully selecting the businesses that you choose to launch and grow, as Back Page essayist Bill Stanley has done, you can lead the way to a more sustainable society.
In this issue of Progress, we see lots of new thinking. A software company in |
Fredericton, for example, is helping forestry managers all over the world operate at peak sustainable efficiency. Its owners were heartened to discover that their model can be applied to improve other sectors as well.
Jim Reid was a successful executive in the U.K. who happened to be flying to New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Safely landing in Nova Scotia, he and his wife asked themselves if their lifestyle was sustainable, both personally and career-wise. Reid decided to move to Bridgewater, N.S., and launch the North American arm of a business that helps CEOs discover the benefits of corporate social responsibility. How? By helping them get rid of redundant stuff and give it a second life. The venture, Green Standards, diverts office equipment from landfills by donating it to the underprivileged.
How do we in Atlantic Canada apply new thinking to a big, hairy, audacious problem like climate change? Wanting to find out, David Holt attended a recent Solving Tough Problems module at the Shambhala Instititue for Authentic Leadership. The annual Summer Program attracts leading thinkers, futurists, artists, entrepreneurs, and civil servants who want to create a better society.
For a week, David experienced the “U-process”, a three-step application designed to tackle huge systemic crises. Apartheid, for example. For David, the experiential part of the “U-process” was the most powerful—learning that no shred of information is too trivial to be part of a solution.
Solving Tough Problems was taught in part by Adam Kahane, an economist and physicist, and by a dancer, Arawana Hayashi. Kahane’s essential insight: We can’t solve a problem if we can’t see our own role in it. Hayashi’s: Everything new is created from empty space. Stop what you are doing and look around.
You’ll be surprised by what you see. |
