Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit, Revised Third Edition

The Gift of Authorship

For Ray Anderson, the founding CEO of Interface Carpet, the epiphany came in the mid-1990s after he read Paul Hawken’s influential Ecology of Commerce.⁹ By the time he put down the book, Anderson could not escape the uncomfortable conclusion that he and his firm were environmental criminals, participants in an unsustainable cycle of extraction, manufacture, and waste. He took a dramatic leap of faith, convening a task force and charging the group to find ways to reinvent the business to make it environmentally sustainable. Many people both inside and outside of his business thought Anderson was naive or crazy, but he was convinced that the company’s business model was flawed—“turning petrochemicals into carpets that last ...