Ray Anderson

Ray Anderson

Known in environmental circles as the most advanced and progressive CEO in the world, Ray was named co-chairman of the President's Council on Sustainable Development in 1997. He is the founder and chairman of Interface, Inc., the world's largest carpet manufacturer of commercial carpet. Interface no longer uses a drop of petroleum in the fabrication of its products and is rapidly approaching its goal of having zero environmental impact on the planet. Anderson credits this shift with a range of benefits: the very survival of his company, higher profitability, and a deeper sense of purpose and connection by its employees. Here is an edited version of his address at the World Business Academy conference “Be The Change” in London recently:

You should maybe understand that I speak as an industrialist; some would say as a radical industrialist, but one as competitive as anyone you know and as profit-minded as anyone you know….

But how would you have reacted if you had begun to hear from your sales force a strange new question from your customers to whom you had learned to listen very, very carefully 20 years before: “What is your company doing for the environment?" How would you have responded if you had begun to hear about requests-for-bid quotations that ask your company to state its environmental policies when it competed for the business?

What would you have said if a report had come to you through one of your top sales managers that a certain environmental consultant to a certain major customer had said, "Interface just doesn't get it." And that piece of business was slipping away.

You know what I said? "Interface doesn't get what?"--rather confirming the consultant's comment. Two of my managers approached me with the assertion that our sales force was begging for answers. What are we doing for the environment? What are our environmental policies? And they suggested convening a new taskforce from our businesses from around the world to come together to assess our company's environmental practices, to begin to frame some answers for those customers. "Sounds good to me," I say. "Go for it." Then the showstopper. They say, "We want you to address this new taskforce. Give it a kick-off speech and launch it with your environmental vision!"

"What...? What environmental vision?" In my whole life I have never given one thought to what my company or I are taking from the earth, or doing to the earth. I do not have an environmental vision. I do not want to make that speech.

I cannot get beyond, "We obey the law… comply." I drag my feet. They stay on my case and finally I relent and agree to speak. The date is set. August 31, 1994. Come the middle of August I have not a clue as what to say, but I know "comply" is not a vision.

I am sweating. It is a propitious moment. And at that very moment a book lands on my desk. It has come by a circuitous route. A young woman out of Seattle, Washington, working for the state of Washington's Environmental Protection Department, hears a guy speak…likes what he has to say… buys his book. After reading it she sends it to her mother, a sales manager for a carpet tile company who has had to endure and relay the message "Interface just doesn't get it" and also has had to choke on her CEO's response, "Interface doesn't get what?" The book is about "what." She sends it to her CEO, me, and the book lands on my desk. There is that propitious moment. It is entitled The Ecology of Commerce.

Its author is Paul Hawken. I've never heard of him. It is pure serendipity. Without a clue as to what is in it, I start to thumb it. On page 19 I come to an arresting chapter head, "The Death of Birth." I begin to read. On page 25 I find the full meaning of the chapter heading, and I counted four terms I have never before heard mentioned together in one paragraph: carrying capacity, overshoot, collapse, and extinction. That is, the death of birth. Species disappearing, never ever to be born again….

Reading this for the first time nearly 11 years ago, I knew, I knew it was a metaphor for the earth and humankind. It was an epiphanal moment, a spear in the chest. I read on and I was dumbfounded by how much I did not know about the environment and about the impacts of the industrial system on the environment…the industrial system of which my successful company and I were an integral part. A new definition of "success" began to creep into my consciousness, and the latent sense of legacy asserted itself. I was a plunderer of the earth, and that is not the legacy one wants to leave behind.

I wept.

Hawken made the central point of his book in three parts: one, the living systems, the life support systems of earth, that together make up the biosphere are in decline. We are degrading the biosphere. Unchecked it will continue to decline and we will lose the biosphere that contains and supports all of life. Secondly, the biggest culprit in this decline is the industrial system. The linear take – make – waste industrial system is driven by fossil-fuel-derived energy, wasteful and abusive. And three: the only institution on earth that is large enough, powerful enough, wealthy enough, pervasive enough, and influential to lead humankind out of the mess it's making for itself is the same institution that is doing the most damage -- the institution of business and industry, my institution.

I took that message to heart. I made that speech, drawing shamelessly on Hawken's material. I challenged that tiny gathering of only about 16 or 17 to lead our company to sustainability, which we defined as eventually operating our petrol –intensive company, that is, for energy and materials, in such a way as to eventually take nothing from the earth that is not naturally and rapidly renewable.

Not another fresh drop of oil and to do no harm to the biosphere. I just stunned that little group of people and shocked myself with a challenge, and I found for myself a whole new purpose in life in my 61st year. For nearly 11 years now we have been on this mission. We call it "Climbing Mt. Sustainability," a mountain higher than Everest, and to meet at the point at the top that symbolizes zero footprint, zero environmental impact, sustainable, taking nothing, doing no harm. I told that story in far greater detail in the book published in 1998 entitled Mid-Course Correction. Its title is intended to represent my own personal mid-course correction, my company's, and the one that I would wish for all of humankind, and especially its industrial system. And the amazing thing is, it has been incredibly good for business.

What started out as the right thing to do very quickly became clearly the smart thing as well. We are leaner. Our costs are down, not up. Cost savings from eliminating waste along the first face of the mountain represent 28% of our operating income over the last 10 years. Our products are better than they have ever been because sustainability has proven to be an unimagined source of inspiration and innovation.

Our people are galvanized around a higher purpose. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, had it right in his hierarchy of human needs: self-actualization is at the top and that translates into higher purpose (and by the way I would add parenthetically there is no more strategic issue for a company or any other organization than its ultimate purpose). And for those who think that business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist, and surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that.

To round out the business case, the goodwill of the marketplace has been nothing less than astounding. No amount of advertising could have generated as much, or contributed as much, to the top line, to winning business. There is a better way to bigger profits. In the last five years those four advantages - costs, products, people, and goodwill - have been the very salvation of Interface during a recession that saw our primary marketplace shrink by nearly 40% from peak to trough. Nearly 40 percent! The entire marketplace!

As a heavily leveraged company with over $400 million in debt we might not have made it without this initiative. This revised definition of success, the new paradigm, has a name and we learned this name well: Doing well by doing good.

Well, folks, everyday of my life tomorrow's child has spoken to me, getting me up, getting me going with a very simple but profound message which I would presume to share with you also. That is that we are each and everyone part of the web of life, a continuum of humanity for sure, yes, but also in the larger sense, the web of life itself. And we have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful planet. To hurt it or to help it. And for every human being it's her or his individual choice. It's your choice.

Featured in Soul Light #2