In Search of The Sustainability Pill

“The preachers will tell you how you ought to behave, specifically what you should do and what you should not do, but they never tell you how to become the kind of person who can do those things.” Alan Watts

Alan Watts’s observation about preachers could be applied with equal poignancy to the preachers of the sustainability movement. How do we move from telling others what they should and shouldn’t do, to showing them how to become the person that does those things naturally? How do we create, not merely educate, a nation of sustainable thinkers? How do we become a consciously self-restoring society?

Dr. George Basile, senior scientist of The Natural Step, and I have discussed this issue for some time. It’s a challenging task to address these questions. We can’t even agree on a name for what we are trying to create. At times we call it, The Sustainability Pill, or The Sustainability Virus, Meme, or Inoculation. How do we make sustainability hip? How do we go about the daunting task of reordering status in our culture? How does a society learn, and how can its evolution be coaxed? How can a fifty million strong “fringe” of cultural creatives consciously effect the belief system of its culture?

To have a concept of sustainability one must have a concept of time, of time larger than oneself. Man is the only time-binding animal, communicating experience, ideas, and belief systems across generations. We are seemingly the only animal that can anticipate a variety of possible futures. Along with our tool-making brilliance, it is our ability to think beyond the short-term that has allowed us to adapt and prosper. Though individually we can have a concept of a seventh generation, it is our culture which tells us its collective import. We evolve through our stories.

It is here that I believe we need to begin our work. Understanding that we learn and evolve
from the stories we tell ourselves provides the fulcrum for change. And the lever bar is a new set of stories about our stories. This is a good first step toward changing our collective world view. Daniel Quinn did a pretty good job of it with Ishmael, a book that’s basically a story about our stories. Its great success lies less in the uniqueness of its message and more in the presentation of its message as an engaging story.

Alan Watts is best known for his endearing and passionate methods of distilling Eastern thought – Zen in particular – into forms that Western minds can easily grasp. He spent his life doing the opposite of the preachers from the quote at the beginning of this column. He didn’t tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do. He instead helped his readers and listeners by presenting them with the skills and the mind set (or non-mind set) to authentically become a person who could determine for themselves what should or shouldn’t be done. Alan’s son, Mark Watts, says his father “used words and thoughts to guide us beyond our words and thoughts.” In a similar way, we must use new stories to guide ourselves beyond our old stories to effect a paradigm shift.

I’ve been reading some fascinating essays by Jim Collins, a researcher, story teller, and paradigm shifter extraordinaire. In two articles for the Harvard Business Review, Collins codifies two concepts; Catalytic Mechanisms and Level 5 Leadership. In the first he applies the science of catalytic mechanisms to management techniques to create a powerful new tool for businesses that want to turn goals into results. Collins explains catalytic mechanisms as, “the crucial link between objectives and performance; they are a galvanizing, non-bureaucratic means to turn one into the other.”

In other words, catalytic mechanisms are ways in which to assure that your story comes true. A family-owned, 100- year old company in California, Granite Rock, which sells crushed gravel, concrete, and sand, decided it would provide total customer satisfaction and achieve a reputation for service that met or exceeded that of Nordstrom, the upscale department store that is world famous for its customer service. How did Granite Rock achieve this ambitious goal? Granite Rock instituted a radical policy called “Short Pay.” The bottom of every Granite Rock invoice reads, “If you are not satisfied for any reason, don’t pay us for it. Simply scratch out the line item, write a brief note about the problem, and return a copy of this invoice along with your check for the balance.” This is not a refund policy. Customers are not required to return any merchandise. They have complete discretionary power to decide whether and how much to pay based on their level of satisfaction.

What has it done for Granite Rock? It has had a profound and positive impact. It serves as a warning system that provides impossible-to-ignore feedback, it impels managers to relentlessly track down the root causes of problems, it signals to employees and customers that Granite Rock is dead serious about customer satisfaction, and it keeps the company from resting on its laurels. How has it worked? In a business dominated by giants, little Granite Rock has consistently gained market shares in the years since the project’s implementation. It has won prestigious awards, and has increased its previously razor-thin margins to a whopping 10 percent.

Another example involves an individual. He made the difficult decision to leave his comfortable corporate position and start his own company. To make sure it happened, he entreated several respected friends to mail a pre-dated letter of resignation for him exactly three months hence. Well before the date arrived the individual had already left and started his own firm.

The power of catalytic mechanisms is that they tilt the balance of power away from inertia and toward change. They are a conscious attempt to drive a company’s or an individual’s evolution, and can be applied to our earlier questions about making sustainability second nature, of consciously driving society’s evolution. What catalytic mechanisms can we put in place to help our story come true? I invite all of us to work on this question – in our lives, in our companies, in our culture.

The second area of study for renowned management researcher Jim Collins is the corporate CEO’s office. In a study of 1,435 Fortune 500 companies, Collins found that only 11 achieved and sustained financial greatness – garnering stock returns at least three times the market’s – for 15 years after a major transition period. What did Collins find these 11 companies had in common? Each had what Collins defines as a Level 5 Leader.

Level 5 leaders blend the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will. This unusual combination contradicts traditional assumptions of what makes a great leader, and may signify an evolutionary change in what defines successful corporate leadership in the 21st century. Level 5 leaders tend to address people first, strategy second. They tend to be capable of holding to two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time. While accepting the most brutal facts of their current reality, they simultaneously maintain absolute faith that they will prevail in the end.

If the description of a Level 5 leader sounds more like that of Gandhi, Martin L
uther King Jr., Mother Theresa, or Yoda than Donald Trump or Lee Iacocca, it’s for good reason. Collins’s research uncovers the reality underlying the myth of the cowboy CEO story that predominates corporate America, and replaces it with a new story. This new story explains that CEOs of the very top long-term producing corporations have personalities closer to the heroes of social change than the heroes of military battles or comic book tales. Collins found that the most powerfully transformative executives have ambition not for themselves but for their companies; they were after long-term goals. They are the first to look in the mirror for the source of poor results, never blaming others, external factors, or bad luck. Conversely they do look to others when it’s time to apportion credit for the success of the company.

To me this is good news for the evolution of corporate America. It is likely some of those Level 5 leaders of large corporations who are presently working with Dr. George Basile and his colleagues at The Natural Step on issues of sustainability and longevity. One cannot envision one’s company 100 years from now without envisioning what world it will and can, exist in. As I said earlier, to have a concept of sustainability one must have a concept of time, of time larger than oneself. These visionary CEOs are finding out how they can keep on doing what they do best, sustainably and dynamically, within the dimension of time. Are these top CEOs an evolutionary fringe? I think so. If that is true, then they are the meme planters of a new story and we are in good hands. They are the silent preachers, not interested in telling us what should or shouldn’t be done, but simply doing it.

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For reprints of either study, contact Harvard Business Review reprints:
(617) 496-1449 or custserv@hbsp.harvard.edu ; www.hbsp.harvard.edu“
Turning Goals in Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms”, Jim Collins, Product number: 99401
“Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve”, Jim Collins, Product number: 5831