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Mid-Course Correction Revisited: The Story of a Radical Industrialist and His Quest for Authentic Change, by Ray C. Anderson and John A. Lanier (Chelsea Green, 2019)
As CEO of Interface, a global B2B carpet and flooring company, Ray Anderson took it as a personal challenge to “climb Mount Sustainability” and make his company not just green but regenerative, after an epiphany reading one of Paul Hawken’s books in 1994. By 1998, Interface was already recognized as a world leader in sustainable manufacturing—but it continued (and continues) to raise the bar. I’ve known about his work for years, but never really thought of the special challenges of taking leadership on green manufacturing when your products are made from fossil fuels. Nylon is the main ingredient in Interface’s carpet tiles. This book explores that challenge in detail.
Anderson spearheaded a dramatic change in the company culture, and created an innovation-friendly, mission-driven environment that rewarded both big systemic changes and little Kaizen-style improvements, allowing the company to make impressive strides even in those first few years. Now, it’s a model for manufacturing companies around the world. Even back in the 1990s, he set a goal to turn Interface into the first restorative industrial company (p. 9).
Anderson died in 2011. Part 1 of this book is a reprint of his original 1998 Mid-Course Correction. Part 2, the Revisited portion, is written by his grandson, the executive director of Anderson’s foundation. Hawken wrote the foreword.
Part 1 is fascinating, because Anderson and his company were inventing a whole new paradigm from scratch. If anything, the newer part is even better than the original, because it goes through the nitty-gritty of processes and recognizes that even as green business has become mainstream, regenerative business is still rare—and they benefit from their good deeds, just as Interface continues to do.
If the laws change to catch up with this new mindset, those well-adapted companies will benefit even more. As an example, if your manufacturing processes already sequester carbon, you won’t feel the pain when the inevitable carbon-output tax (p. 232) finally becomes reality.
In many instances, both authors identify concepts and processes that I discuss in my own tenth book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. This is not a big surprise; Anderson’s brain trust includes many of the thought-leaders I drew from in my research. But it’s so exciting to see their ideas applied hands-on, in the real world, over and over, resulting in lower costs AND a more eager market. As well, to see the impact Interface has had in greening its own suppliers—even including mighty DuPont (p. 93)—customers, competitors…and the business world in general. Lanier even says, “driving waste to zero is a risk-management strategy” (p. 150). It’s also a great human resources tool: Interface’s values-motivated employees don‘t spend time on petty feuds. They collaborate across teams and departments. They don’t just innovate, but see their innovations adopted around the world (p. 167).
Both men show that going green, and then taking it regenerative (making things better than they were), can be profitable. But some of that requires changing the way we account for various pieces of the economy. In particular, we have to stop letting companies internalize the income and profit while externalizing the costs, such as the military structure necessary to rely on fossil fuels, or the health costs of those fuels—or the waste involved in processing 40,000 pounds of raw material into a single 10-pound laptop (p. 10; this was the 90s, remember).
This forward-thinking company is looking deeply at biomimicry (modeling nature’s solutions), seeing its factories as the functional equivalent of a forest (p. 230), and creating changes in the wider culture so we all start thinking differently—seeing carbon as a resource/raw material, for instance (pp. 229-230). And the little things add up, too. Interface’s Carbon Challenge for Georgia Tech students downsized a bank’s default rental car and saved them $40,000 and 45 tons of carbon per year (p. 239).
I took five pages of notes and could write three times as much. But like Interface, I’ll downsize, and just tell you to go and read it. |
