One CEO’s Trip From Dismissive to Convinced
By Bruce G. Posner
September 25, 2009
When Interface’s Ray Anderson founded his commercial carpet company, he’d never heard of ‘sustainability.’ Now his company has turned it into a competitive advantage. Here, a timeline for how one CEO’s ‘mental model’ changed.
The Leading Question
How do you shift from a traditional manufacturing business to one focused on profitable growth and zero waste?
Findings
- You set high expec-tations and show an openness to new ideas wherever you can find them.
- You “figure out the mountain” and divide the challenge into pieces.
- You commit the organization to training and use every occasion as an opportunity for improvement.
For Ray Anderson in 1994, two decades into building his Atlanta-based commercial carpet company, the intellectual case for sustainability had suddenly become obvious. The writings of Paul Hawken and others had convinced him that man and nature were on a collision course. The signs of environmental degradation were multiplying. And as one-time industrial engineer Anderson — then 60 and Interface Inc.’s founder and CEO — began to think about his legacy, it made him uneasy. Deep down, Anderson realized Interface’s business model was based on “digging up the Earth and turning petroleum and other materials into polluting products that ended up in landfills” — not something he wanted his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to remember him by. So in 1994, Anderson broke with the old model and began anew. Standing up to naysayers (whose ranks...
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