Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose - Doing Business by Respecting the Earth - Hardcover

Anderson, Ray C.

 
9780771007538: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose - Doing Business by Respecting the Earth
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0771007531 ISBN 13: 9780771007538
Verlag: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

“America’s greenest CEO” and the hero from the award-winning documentary The Corporation makes the urgent, compelling case that sustainable business pays.

His story is now legend. In 1994, after reading The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson felt a “spear in the chest”: the founder of Interface, Inc., a billion-dollar carpeting manufacturer, realized that his company was plundering the environment and he needed to steer it on a new course. Since then, Interface has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 82%, and the goal is to reach zero environmental footprint by 2020. Thoughtful and winning, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist shows how Anderson revolutionized his company, in the process bringing costs down, improving quality, making it one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” ― and driving up profits.



*The publisher has aimed for sustainability in all aspects of this book’s production, from the inks and glues to the trim size. The interior paper is 100% post-consumer recycled, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and ancient-forest friendly. Instead of a jacket, the cover boards are wrapped in 100% recycled paper stock coated in a biodegradable varnish – and these are just two examples among many.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ray Anderson is chairman and founder of Interface, Inc. He’s a sought-after speaker and adviser on environmental issues and serves on many boards, including that of the David Suzuki Foundation. In 2007 Time magazine called him a “Hero of the Environment.”

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1. Mission Zero

I am Ray Anderson, and in addition to being a husband, a father, and a grandfather, I’m an industrialist. Some would say a radical industrialist. Time magazine called me a “Hero of the Environment.” U.S. News & World Report said I was “America’s Greenest CEO.” Fortune magazine was kind and astute enough to include my company, Interface, in its annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For”–twice. The GlobeScan (2007) Survey of Sustainability Experts listed Interface, Inc., as leading the list of global companies with the greatest commitment to sustainability. Following Interface, in order of ranking, were: Toyota, GE, BP, and DuPont.

But I’ve also been called a hypocrite and a dreamer who pours his time, energy, and stockholder money into lofty ideas about ecology and sustainability instead of the bottom line. Yet I would reply that I’m as profit-minded and competitive as anyone you’re likely to meet.

I grew up in a small Georgia town during the tail end of the Great Depression and the Second World War. My father worked in the post office. My mother was a retired schoolteacher. I attended college on a football scholarship, graduated with highest honors, and spent seventeen years in industry working for someone else.

Then, in 1973, I took the entrepreneurial plunge and founded a company, Interface, with nothing more than a good idea, my life’s savings, and the faith of a few brave investors. We grew that company from scratch into the world leader in carpet tiles (modular carpet) with annual sales of more than a billion dollars.

In 1994, at age sixty and in my company’s twenty-second year, I steered Interface on a new course–one designed to reduce our environmental footprint while increasing our profits. I wanted Interface, a company so oil-intensive you could think of it as an extension of the petrochemical industry, to be the first enterprise in history to become truly sustainable–to shut down its smokestacks, close off its effluent pipes, to do no harm to the environment, and to take nothing from the earth not easily renewed by the earth. Believe me when I say that that goal is one enormous challenge.

But as I said, I’m profit-minded and extremely competitive. I thought “going green” would definitely enhance our standing with our customers and maybe give us some good press, too. But I also thought it just might be a way to earn bigger profits from doing what was right by the earth. No one had ever attempted that kind of transformation on such a large scale before. We aimed to turn the myth that you could do well in business or do good, but not both, on its head. Our goal was to prove–by example–that you could run a big business both profitably and in an environmentally responsible way. And we succeeded beyond my own high aspirations.

Not everyone at my company was happy with this in August 1994. It had been a very good year at Interface. We had weathered a deep recession, we were growing again and very profitable. Why should we conduct this grand experiment when nobody, not even I, knew how it would come out? It was a reasonable question.

We caught plenty of flak from outside the company, too. Wall Street heard “environment” and thought “costs.” Even after we showed them how reaching for sustainability could take a big bite out of waste and save us real money, even after we discovered that running a billion-dollar corporation with the earth in mind was a terrific new business model, there was still a lot of skepticism. There still is some, even though we now have over a decade of hard numbers that prove–beyond a doubt–that our course was both right and smart. Why, then, all the resistance?

I think it’s because our transformation flew in the face of all the old rules that still drive the “take-make-waste” economy, old rules that we inherited from the steam-driven days of the first industrial revolution and (many of us) unthinkingly accept as true. That old way of doing business seemed to work just fine when we thought the earth could provide endless resources, endless energy, and endless room to throw away all the stuff we make and waste.

But those rules don’t work anymore. Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, said that they’re like those badly designed wings of the early aircraft at the dawn of human flight. Our civilization is like that would-be “aeronaut” who jumps off a high cliff in his misbegotten craft. He’s pedaling away, wings flapping like mad; the wind is in his face, and the poor fool thinks he’s flying when he’s really in free fall. Though the ground seems far away at first, his flight is doomed because the design of his wings has ignored the laws of aerodynamics.

Like that high cliff, the vast resources available to our industrial civilization–the oceans, forests, fossil fuels, even the air we breathe–make the “ground” seem far away to us. But as sure as gravity, it’s rushing up fast. Our flight will end up no better than his. Why? Because our industrial civilization has ignored the laws of sustainability, laws that would enable humanity to pull out of our terminal dive and “fly.”

Whichever way we look, from global warming to deforestation, from empty water reservoirs to vanishing species, to the price of a gallon of gas at the pump, the evidence is all around us. The earth is finite and fragile, and we ignore these plain physical facts at our peril. That’s why we need a new industrial revolution and a new set of wings, ones properly designed according to the laws of “aerodynamics.” Wings that will allow our civilization–and our grandchildren’s–to fly, sustainably. To soar, not crash.

But conventional wisdom and the status quo are powerful sedatives. Like opiates, they dim our vision and blur our minds. They whisper, Maybe all those arguing experts are wrong. Maybe there’s nothing to worry about. Or, okay, so there’s a problem, but I surely can’t solve it. Why even try?

Maybe that’s why conventional wisdom, wed to the status quo, was certain there was no business case for sustainability, that what we started at Interface was misguided, tangential, and doomed to fail.

Conventional wisdom was wrong. Consider a few facts. Remember the Kyoto Protocol? It was designed to reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions by about 7 percent by 2012 here in the United States. Though a small reduction like that doesn’t even begin to address the problem of climate disruption, a lot of my peers in industry were sure that if the United States signed on to Kyoto, it would drive them right out of business. Really?

From 1996, our baseline year, through 2008, my business has cut its net green house gas emissions not by 7 percent, but by 71 percent (in absolute tons), while our sales increased by two-thirds and our earnings doubled. Profit margins expanded, not contracted, while GHG intensity, relative to sales, declined some 82 percent.

No business case for sustainability?

While some businesses fret and sweat over rising fuel bills, renewable energy, limitless and available right now, provides electricity to power eight of our ten factories. The electrical power for seven of them comes entirely from renewables. Our consumption of fossil fuels per square yard of carpet is down 60 percent. As I write this, the price of oil has broken all previous records. Will it stay up there? Will it keep on rising, or fall back? I don’t know. But go take a look at some of your recent fuel bills. Think you...

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Verlag
McClelland & Stewart Ltd
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0771007531
ISBN 13 
9780771007538
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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