| Humility with a global impact |
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| Tuesday, 07 October 2008 00:00 |
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Meera Atkinson
Unpack the issues...In the opening scenes of the multi-award winning 2004 documentary The Corporation, a bold critique of big business, a corporation is defined by law as a legal person. Noam Chomsky, linguist, author and political activist adds that a corporation is a special kind of person that has no moral conscience, designed to be concerned only for its stockholders. The Corporation presents a litany of examples of the injustice and damage, both social and ecological, resulting from typical profit-driven business practices before introducing a new breed of suit: the business hero — ethical, inventive, compassionate... humble. One of this new breed is Ray Anderson, chief executive officer of billion dollar carpet company, Interface, but he wasn’t always so enlightened. After founding it in 1973, Ray built his company up to be one of the world’s largest interior furnishings companies. Like most ambitious entrepreneurs he was driven in his quest for success. “I never gave a thought to what we were taking from the earth,” he said in The Corporation. “I didn’t have an environmental vision.” All that changed when, at 60, he read Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce. He made the radical decision to reinvent his company as a green operation. "It was an epiphanic spear in my heart, a life-changing moment; a new definition of success flooded my mind. I realised I was a plunderer and it was not a legacy I wanted to leave behind. I wept," he said in an article published in The Guardian. In essence, this constituted a spiritual awakening as much as an ethical one and, in an act of redemption, Ray gathered his staff, publicly condemned himself as a 'plunderer' of the earth, vowed to change, and challenged his employees to make their employer a leader in the industrial world and environmental movement. Nonetheless, as The Guardian points out, moving and significant as this 'I’ve seen the light' story is, Ray took a huge risk: he would have been a laughing stock had the transition from plunderer to healer not been successful. But successful it has been, as the company keeps working towards its commitment to leave a zero environmental footprint by 2020. Of course that success was not achieved by Ray Anderson alone. Almost as impressive as his personal turnaround was his ability to rouse the passions and commitment of his staff by building a personal relationship with them and inviting them to join him in his vision and goals. Others, such as Wal-Mart and Boeing, have followed suite. The website, My Hero, lists other business heroes who have taken a stand against the conventional wisdom of ego-driven business. These include Anita Roddick, whose business, The Body Shop, made cruelty free cosmetics a force to be reckoned with and the late Paul Newman, whose dressings and sauces contribute millions to numerous charities. How and where we spend our money sends a message to business about what we will, as individuals and society, tolerate. As Ray Anderson says in his interview with The Guardian, the call to be humble enough to recognise our limitations and responsibilities lies as much with the consumer as the business. “Each of us has a role in this transformation. We must all learn to make peace with the earth, not to make war on it, or we will lose.” Unpack the issues...
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Conventional wisdom would have us believe that only the arrogant and ruthless achieve spectacular success. Business is no place for niceties. Nowhere is this credo more evident than in that least humble of animals: the multi-national corporation. 
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