Doing Well By Doing Good

The list of issues impacting Earth’s rapid decline continues to grow at a highly alarming rate. Environmental concerns are entering the world of politics and business. Our quality of life will not be the same five years or ten years in the future; we are nearing the point of having to think about simply surviving as a species.

The following is an excerpt from Mid-Course Correction Revisited by Ray Anderson & John A. Lanier. It has been adapted for the web.

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Listen to the following excerpt from the audiobook of Mid-Course Correction Revisited.

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The Earth will be around for another five billion years or more, but meanwhile it is hurting. We are killing species by taking more than our share, fouling our own nest, and in the process diminishing the quality of life for our species and perhaps even dooming ourselves to extinction. That sounds harsh, but many thoughtful people believe this, the unthinkable, is true. St. Matthew Island is a metaphor for Earth. Perhaps, too, is the Fraser fir. It’s only a matter of time.

That is the danger.

I’m often asked to define the business case for sustainability. How about, for starters: survival? Without sustainability, our descendants will watch society disintegrate and markets evaporate before their eyes. We cannot live without the life support systems of the biosphere any more than the other species can, and we continue to seriously over-stress those systems. The stress must stop for society, much less business, to thrive.

Now what about the opportunity?

First, you must understand that I am focused on the tiny corner where I live and work. If I cannot make a difference there, I surely cannot make a difference anywhere else. I have thought long and hard, and strategically, about how to make a difference through Interface, and I have read a lot about what has gone wrong and what seems necessary to make it right. Once I understood what Rachel Carson started, I felt morally obligated to help advance her legacy. Once you understand this crisis, no thinking person can stand idly by and do nothing. Denial is alluring, even seductive, but once you get past denial, you know you must do whatever you can. Conscience demands it; psychological liabilities begin to accrue.

But who will lead?

The question demands an answer. Who can do something about all of this? Paul Hawken said that it must be business and industry; that they (that is, we) must take the lead. I look in the mirror, and I think he’s right.

It’s not the church, sadly. Though there are some encouraging signs that this could change, the church doesn’t quite get it yet, even though in my church we sing:

This is my Father’s world,

And to my listening ears

All nature sings and ’round me rings

The music of the spheres.

Too often, still, the church dogmatically helps perpetuate the myth Daniel Quinn identifies in Ishmael, the myth that the Earth was made for humans to conquer and rule. We have lived that myth, Ishmael reminds us, and sure enough there the Earth lies at our feet, bloody, broken, and conquered. Good people with awakened hearts could change this.

It’s not government.

The government never seems to lead, it always seems to follow, waiting for the people to create the parade, though it has a vital role to play with taxation policy: increasing taxes on “bad” things and relieving taxes on “good” things. What if our income taxes were reduced and our gasoline taxes were increased, but in an overall revenue-neutral way? How much better off we and the Earth would be!

How much better still if the price of a barrel of oil, through taxation if necessary, reflected its true costs, including all of its externalized costs. Yet at this writing, the subject of tax shifts is not on Congress’s radar scope, much less the legislative agenda. I saw a great bumper sticker the other day: if the people will lead, the leaders will follow. It’s time for the people to step up and create that parade the politicians will run to get in front of.

It’s not education

Though education has a very important role to play in raising awareness and sensitivity in students, helping to draw the map to sustainability for all the disciplines, providing critical research to get the facts straight, and integrating the disciplines in a holistic vision of a new civilization. My school, Georgia Tech, is taking a leading role. I’ll come back to what that is and how it came to be.

But if it’s true that only business and industry can lead effectively and quickly, then how do you move the largest institution on Earth when it’s actually millions and millions of separate entities? I tell my associates at Interface that if we (not just I, but we) get together as a company and take the lead, we can set an example for the entire industrial world, by first examining and understanding some basic things that Paul Hawken has pointed out for us:

• What we take from the Earth (those 1.2 billion pounds in 1995).
• What we make and what we do to the Earth in the making of it (products, stack gases, effluents).
• What we waste along the way (waste in all its forms).

What we take, what we make, what we waste—first to understand, then to do something about it, showing that it is good business to challenge and change all of these with Earth’s benefit as the controlling criterion.

To expand the business case for sustainability, I believe that through EcoSense and QUEST we are pioneering a new business paradigm for success: doing well by doing good.

Doing well by doing good

There are two sides to that coin: (1) doing well (in a strict, moneymaking, business sense), and (2) doing good. To be clear, we want to do good because it’s the right thing to do. We have to get our hearts right. But doing good may, at first blush, seem altruistic, softhearted, softheaded, even unbusinesslike. (Has Anderson gone ’round the bend? Well, yes, to see what’s around there on the other side.

That’s part of my job. Having seen, I know I have never felt anything else that I have ever known in business to be, at once, so right and so smart. The closest thing was that first feeling when I fell in love with the idea of carpet tiles, a notable time when, once before, I went around the bend.) Who cares about that tree-hugging stuff? Well, I do, and many (maybe most, or all) of our people either do or are beginning to. And our customers—especially the architectural and interior design communities—do. They generally want to do the right thing, and want to do business with companies that are doing the right thing. And a growing number of end user and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers do, too.

I believe we can also do well by doing good. After all, we went into business in the first place to do well. But how do we do well by doing good?

In three ways, I believe:

First, as I’ve already suggested, by earning our customers’ goodwill and, hopefully, their predisposition to trade with us, to help us in this hard, hard climb. But to earn that goodwill we have to avoid greenwash. Do you understand the term? Think of whitewash being used to cover a rotten fence. We must avoid that cynical, holier-than-thou, superficial cloak of green insincerity—so obviously self-serving, promoting products as “green” when they are not. We must be genuine. Our actions must speak louder than our words. Greenwash (pseudo-green) is, and should be, business suicide. Our customers should and will see right through it.

Second, through achieving resource efficiency. Amory Lovins, the brilliant physicist at the Rocky Mountain Institute who is working on that super-efficient hypercar, used the automobile to illustrate the vast inefficiency of our industrial system. He said that the objective of the conventional automobile, which weighs about 4,000 pounds, is usually to deliver a cargo, averaging about 165 pounds, from Point A to Point B, maybe to pick up a 1-pound loaf of bread. What is the efficiency of that automobile? Lovins said that, with internal inefficiencies (feel the wasted heat from the engine block and the brakes), only 15 to 20 percent of the fuel energy reaches the wheels as traction. Most of that moves the car’s weight; only a small fraction, the driver’s. The net result: About 1 percent of the fuel energy moves the driver. The hypercar will increase that by a factor of ten—in time, more.

So what’s the point of the traditional approach of spending millions to improve the internal combustion engine’s efficiency by 1 or 2 percent? That’s the wrong problem, and its solution will have a minor impact. The National Academy of Engineering agrees, and has concluded, using similar logic, that the overall thermodynamic efficiency of our American economy is (are you sitting down?) about 2.5 percent. Europe and Asia aren’t much better. The Western economy is a waste machine, producing 97 percent waste!

When Interface takes petroleum or natural gas from the Earth and, with the help of our suppliers, converts it to carpet that gets used once and goes to a landfill ten to fifteen years later, I think of that as equivalent to about 2.5 percent efficiency in the use of those precious organic molecules. When we have increased that efficiency a minimum of ten times, we’ll still be only 25 percent efficient, with lots more room to improve. We are looking for those who will help us to do it. If you are one of our suppliers, or hope to be, take heed.

Where are we in this quest for resource efficiency?

The $1 billion of sales we recorded in 1996 consumed 19 percent less material per dollar of sales than we consumed in 1995, reflecting both increasing efficiency and our shift toward services, especially downstream distribution. This happened while we were realizing record profits, which was not an unconnected coincidence. Cumulative progress over three years is an increase of about 22.5 percent in resource efficiency; our share price has tripled.

I’ll say it again: I believe that in the twenty-first century, the most resource-efficient companies will win! The sustainable will win big when oil’s price finally reflects its cost and is $100, even $200 per barrel. Someday the market (and the economists) will wake up and the price will reflect the cost. That’s the day for which we, as a company, are preparing.

At whose expense will the resource-efficient win? At the expense of the resource-inefficient. So I tell my people: We will win and the Earth will win! The best win-win I can think of. Business, like technology, can emulate nature and eliminate the inefficient adapters.

The third way we can do well by doing good is by setting an example that other businesses cannot ignore. The target group to influence, other businesses, are also our customers or potential customers. If we do well enough through creating goodwill and becoming resource-efficient, to the point that we are kicking tail in the marketplace, then that is the example other companies will see and want to emulate.

Maybe they will become converts and, hopefully, customers, too. Then a positive feedback loop, the snowball effect, will take hold. The more good we do, the more well we will do. We can do the most good by doing the most well. By doing well, we will do more good through example. Then still others will see, and there will be that positive feedback loop—one of the few that is good for Earth.

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Our History: A Look at Oil, Power, and War