Positive Sum

CHAPTER FOURWELCOME TO STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM: DOING WELL BY DOING GOOD

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

—Henry Ford¹

Summer 1994. It's a sticky, hot, humid Georgia afternoon, and Ray Anderson, a 60‐year‐old CEO, is sitting in his air‐conditioned corner office at Interface, Inc., a respected carpet manufacturer. His company is the world's largest producer of carpet tiles. With help from thousands of employees, it generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, annually. By every conventional measure, he's won the game of capitalism and arrived at the “American dream”—wealth, success, and respect. From his place at the corporate pinnacle, there's no apparent reason to change anything.

Until now.

On his desk sits a copy of the book The Ecology of Commerce, by economist Paul Hawken. Anderson flips it open and starts to read. “We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air, and sea have been functionally transformed from life‐supporting systems into repositories for waste,” Hawken says on page three. “There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.”

The words hit Anderson with an impact he later compared to “a spear in the chest.” He kept on reeling as he read on and the truth of Hawken's argument hit home. Quite simply, the production of disposable goods such as the carpets made by Interface was not just harmful to the planet. It was ...