The late Ray Anderson, Founder & CEO of one of the world’s largest makers of carpets, Interface, said he used to be a typical industrialist – a ‘plunderer of the Earth’. In 1994 he was asked by a staff member to prepare a presentation on sustainability, and he went away and read Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce as research. He described it as an epiphany, a “spear to the chest” awakening to the urgent need to stop being part of the problem and instead set a new course toward sustainability for Interface.
He enlisted his global team with the challenge of making Interface a “restorative enterprise” – a business that returns more than it takes. Interface decided to take from the earth only what the earth could rapidly renew. Anderson took a risk, but it paid off – Interface is still the world’s largest maker of commercial carpeting, with factories in 34 countries, annual sales well over $1 billion, and rated by Fortune magazine as one of the best 100 US companies to work for. Thirteen years on from the moment Ray decided to fundamentally change his company, Interface has reduced the energy used to manufacture carpet by 43%, reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 44% in absolute terms (94% when factoring in offsets) and grown net sales by 27%.
We can all be Ray Andersons. We can help the organisations we work in and the communities we live in go through change management processes to respond to climate change. But we’re the last generation with the ability – in terms of the timeframe – to do this. So let’s go create and manage some change! In doing so, what lessons can we learn from the corporate change management sector?
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