Читать книгу Conscious Capitalism - John Mackey - Страница 11

CHAPTER 4

Discovering and Growing Purpose

Some companies are born with a sense of higher purpose. Others are created because their founders see a market opportunity they can profitably exploit. As such companies reach maturity, they often find themselves in a sort of existential crisis, much in the same way that many adults start asking questions about meaning and purpose when they reach midlife.

Higher Purpose Discovered: A Heartwarming Story About Trash

An example of a company whose founders saw a market opportunity to exploit is Waste Management, the leader in the mundane but essential business of disposing of our trash. Founded in 1968, the company had a growth strategy of “rolling up” the fragmented trash collection business by acquiring local trash haulers around the country. Until a few years ago, its tagline was utilitarian and uninspiring: “Helping the world dispose of its problems.” According to financial analysts, the company’s most valuable assets were its 271 landfills, enough to bury over forty years’ worth of trash at its current rate of growth.

As the sustainability movement gained speed, it presented major challenges to the company. People and companies started throwing fewer things away. For example, Walmart made a commitment to eventually reduce the amount of trash it sends to landfills to zero, threatening a core revenue stream for Waste Management.

Under CEO David Steiner, Waste Management has turned these challenges into opportunities and discovered a higher purpose for itself: as a company that looks for innovative ways to extract value (in the form of energy and materials) from the waste stream. It has set up a consulting division that helps companies like Alcoa and Caterpillar reduce their waste, in effect cannibalizing its own landfill business. It is moving capital investment away from landfills and into materials recovery facilities that use sophisticated technologies to separate comingled recyclable materials. It has invested in over a hundred waste-to-energy projects that already generate enough clean energy to supply 1.1 million homes (more than the entire U.S. solar industry). The company sees huge potential in treating waste as a valuable asset rather than a problem to be buried for future generations to deal with. It generates about $13 billion in revenues annually but estimates that the waste it handles contains about $10 billion of value, most of it not yet extracted. The company may soon start paying customers for certain kinds of waste (such as organic waste) even as its competitors charge them to haul it away. Steiner says the future of the company lies in joining and leading the sustainability movement.¹

Not surprisingly, financial analysts firmly wedded to the traditional trash business model see all this as a distraction. A Credit Suisse First Boston analyst downgraded the stock in 2009, saying the company “does not want to be a trash company but instead a one-stop ‘green’ environmental services shop, and that transformation requires both a lot of patience and capital.”² The company’s new tagline is “Think Green,” and it now describes itself as “North America’s leading provider of integrated environmental solutions.” That’s a long way from just hauling your trash and putting it “out of sight, out of mind.” You can bet the company’s team members are now a lot more excited about going to work in the morning.

Great Companies Have Great Purposes

There is no “right” purpose for every business; there are as many potential purposes as there are enterprises or organizations. Each business must strive to find and fulfill the purpose that is embedded within its own collective DNA. Just as each individual person is unique and valuable, so too can every business be unique and valuable. But just as some individuals set great purposes for themselves and eventually achieve greatness, we believe that the best companies in the world have great purposes too. These great purposes are usually discovered or created by the founders and endure at the core of their business philosophy. Great purposes are transcendent, energizing, and inspiring for all the interdependent stakeholders.³

While great purposes have unique expressions at each business, we find it helpful to group them into a set of well-known and timeless categories (table 4-1). There’s no intrinsic reason why business should be different from any other human endeavor. The same enduring ideals that animate art, science, education, and many nonprofit organizations can and should also animate business. These were articulated by Plato as the transcendent ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Humankind has been seeking to create, discover, and express these transcendent ideals for thousands of years.

TABLE 4-1

Four categories of great purposes

The Good	Service to others—improving health, education, communication, and quality of life
The True	Discovery and furthering human knowledge
The Beautiful	Excellence and the creation of beauty
The Heroic	Courage to do what is right to change and improve the world

Plato considered these three ideals ends in themselves, not as means to other higher ends. Those who pursue the Good want to serve others because it is intrinsically rewarding to do so, not because they anticipate some favorable consequences from doing so. The pursuit of Knowledge or Truth is its own reward, whether or not that knowledge is ever used in a particular way. The creation of Beauty is an intensely soul-satisfying, uniquely human experience. People create beauty because their desire to do so arises from deep within. Their creation need not be seen or experienced by anyone else to make it worthwhile; it need only please its creator.

To these three, we have added the Heroic to complete a framework of higher purposes that we find most great businesses seek to express in some form. The following examples illustrate how these four enduring ideals are being expressed by great businesses in the world today.

The Good

The first great purpose that great businesses often express is the Good. The most common way this ideal manifests itself in business is through service to others. This is a deeply motivating purpose that is emotionally very fulfilling to individuals who truly embrace this ideal. Authentic service is based on genuine empathy with the needs and desires of others. Genuine empathy leads to the development, growth, and expression of love, care, and compassion. Businesses dedicated to the great purpose of service to others seek ways to grow the emotional intelligence of their organizations so they can nourish and encourage love, care, and compassion toward customers, team members, and the larger community.

While any category of business can be motivated by the heartfelt purpose of service to others, we find that service and retail businesses that depend greatly on the goodwill of their customers are most likely to express this particular purpose and devote themselves to it wholeheartedly. An excellent example is The Container Store, which creates value for its customers by providing excellent service and quality products that help people better organize their lives. The company thinks of itself as a business that helps people have a higher quality of life, expressed in the statement “Get organized, be happy.”

Zappos defines its purpose as “delivering happiness.” It does this through great customer service, high-quality products, competitive prices, and fast delivery. In a sense, the quest for delivering happiness is a fairly accurate synonym for the pursuit of the Good. Other examples of service-oriented businesses that exemplify the great purpose of the Good include Amazon.com, Nordstrom, JetBlue, Wegmans, Bright Horizons, Starbucks, The Motley Fool, and Trader Joe’s.

The True

The second great transcendent purpose that animates many great businesses is the True, which we define as the “search for truth and the pursuit of knowledge.” Think about how exciting it is to discover and learn something that no one has ever known before, which advances humankind’s collective knowledge. Through such advancements, the quality of human life is improved, the cost of our lifestyles declines, and we can live healthier and more fulfilling lives. We are collectively better off as a result of that pursuit of knowledge.

This great purpose is at the core of some of the most creative and dynamic companies in the world today. Google is an excellent example of a company with this kind of purpose, expressed early on in the company’s history as “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This purpose statement is clear and simple, yet profound. It makes clear why the company exists and how it creates value. The statement also provides managers with a great deal of strategic direction. Google started out by simply indexing the Web and allowing for fast searches of textual information. Over time, it has expanded into books, audio information, video content, still images, personal picture collections, maps (recently adding indoor maps for shopping malls and airports), the skies, the ocean floor, medical records, your own desktop, company Web sites, and so on, all the while remaining true to its original purpose. Few of us can get through a day without googling at least once and usually multiple times. Google makes us feel like the entire knowledge of the world is available to us whenever and wherever we want it, with the touch of a few buttons or clicks.

Wikipedia is another organization that has enabled people to pursue knowledge quickly and efficiently. Companies like Intel and Genentech have invented new and incredible technologies such as the microprocessor and biotechnology, furthering humankind’s potential in numerous ways. In fact, many businesses in biotechnology or computer hardware and software are good examples of companies whose highest purpose is the discovery of new knowledge that enhances, extends, or otherwise improves our lives. Amgen and Medtronic are other examples of great companies motivated by the excitement of discovery and the pursuit of knowledge. These companies have greatly benefited humankind through their successful pursuit of this great purpose.

The Beautiful

The third great transcendent purpose at the core of great businesses is the Beautiful, which can be expressed in business through “the pursuit of beauty and excellence, and the quest for perfection.” A company that expresses beauty in the world enriches our lives in numerous ways. While we more commonly experience the Beautiful through the work of creative artists in music, painting, film, and handicrafts, we also see it expressed through certain special companies that have tapped into this powerful purpose as they pursue perfection in their chosen field. True excellence expresses beauty in unique and inspiring ways that make our lives more enjoyable.

An excellent example is Apple, with its single-minded focus on creating “insanely great technology” that has made our lives better. People love the beauty of Apple’s products (such as the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone), not just in their appearance and the value they create for us, but also in the simplicity and fun of the interactions we have with them.

Four Seasons and BMW are other businesses that are motivated by excellence to create beautiful things and experiences that approach perfection.

The Heroic

The fourth type of purpose is the Heroic, describing businesses that are motivated by a desire to change the world, not necessarily through service to others or through discovery and the pursuit of truth, or through the quest for perfection, but through a powerful Promethean desire to really change things—to truly make the world better, to solve insoluble problems, to do the really courageous thing even when it is very risky, and to achieve what others say is impossible. When Henry Ford first created the Ford Motor Company, it was a heroic company whose purpose was “Opening the highways to all mankind.” At a time when only the wealthy could afford cars and the freedom they provided, Ford truly changed the world in the early part of the twentieth century.

A hero is defined as “a person of distinguished courage or ability, admired for brave deeds and noble qualities.” A heroic company takes risks and perseveres in the face of enormous odds. It maintains and strengthens its human qualities while doing so, all in service of changing the world for the better in some tangible way.

One of the best examples of a truly heroic enterprise is the Grameen Bank, started by Muhammad Yunus, in Bangladesh. His brilliant and beautiful vision was to help end poverty and transform the world by empowering the poorest of the poor. As we highlighted in chapter 1, the world has seen tremendous progress in ending poverty through free-enterprise capitalism. Yunus likes to say, “Someday poverty will be something that’s only seen in museums.” Yunus’s heroic dedication to ending poverty in Bangladesh and throughout the world resulted in his winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. His book Banker to the Poor is an inspiring tale of heroic enterprise.⁴

Over time, our higher purposes at Whole Foods Market have evolved toward the heroic category. As the company has grown, our purpose also has grown in both meaning and complexity. Every three years, approximately eight hundred store team leaders, coordinators, and star performers from all over the company come together in a “Tribal Gathering” for a long weekend dedicated to networking, education, and inspiration. At our 2011 meeting, the executive leadership articulated several higher purposes we wish to realize:

1 We want to help evolve the world’s agricultural system to be both efficient and sustainable. This includes a much higher level of livestock animal welfare, seafood sustainability, and upgraded efficiency and productivity of organic agriculture.

2 We want to raise the public’s collective awareness about the principles of healthy eating: a diet that is centered on whole foods, is primarily plant based, is nutrient dense, and includes mainly healthy fats (minimal animal fats and vegetable oils). We believe this diet will radically improve the health of millions of people by helping prevent and reverse the lifestyle diseases that are killing so many of us—heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.5

3 Through the Whole Planet Foundation, we want to help end poverty around the world by making microcredit working-capital loans to millions of impoverished people to help them create and improve their businesses.

4 We want to help make Conscious Capitalism the dominant economic and business paradigm in the world to spread human flourishing.

The purpose of a business does not have to be confined to only one of the four great ideals. Many businesses straddle multiple purposes. In some ways, Whole Foods Market is pursuing the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Heroic simultaneously. Ultimately, all four of these ideals are connected. When something is Good, it is also True, Beautiful, and Heroic in its own specific ways. Similarly, when something is Beautiful, it can also be seen as Good, True, and Heroic. There is always unity within the diversity if our minds are able to see the integration.

Searching for Purpose

Purpose usually exists when a company is first created. The entrepreneurs who create the company may not always make it explicit, but there is generally a tacit purpose that animates the entrepreneur. As a company grows, the founding entrepreneurs sometimes make the purpose explicit and articulate the company’s core values. That is part of becoming a more conscious business, a business that gradually becomes aware of its reason for being.

REI went through this a few years ago. CEO Sally Jewell describes the process the company used:

We spent time as a large leadership group, 150 people, asking, “Why does REI exist?” Then we asked ourselves five times, “Why is that important?” And two more questions: “What would happen if REI went away?” and then, “Why do I devote my creative energies to this organization?” We took those couple hundred sheets and came up with our core purpose: to inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. While we make money by being an outfitter, what we really do is inspire people to do things they aspire to do—educate them so they can try something that they’ve been uncomfortable trying before. And if we do that well, it works its way into their everyday lives and they begin to give back, and that’s the stewardship component.⁶

Unfortunately, many businesses over time become so preoccupied with surviving, growing, reacting to marketplace changes, or just making money that they forget their purpose. The leadership of such an older business may need to go back and rediscover the company’s purpose, much as an archaeologist seeks to discover what brought about a city or a civilization.

At some point in their evolution, companies that started as opportunistic, money-making enterprises need to discover or create their higher purpose beyond profit maximization in order to realize their full potential. They can do this through a process we call purpose search. The process includes representatives of all the stakeholder groups: the senior leadership of the company and some board members, team members, customers, investors, suppliers, and members of the community. All have a stake in the flourishing of the business, and all have a vision of what the purpose of that enterprise could be. When we bring these major stakeholders together to discover or create a higher purpose, some amazing things can happen. The exchange of information, values, and unique perspectives about the business can result in the rediscovery or creation of the company’s higher purpose in a fairly short time—usually within a few days, and sometimes even in a single day if it is a really engaged process and is facilitated by a skilled consultant.

Once the purpose is articulated, it must live and breathe in the organization. This does not happen automatically; it requires strong determination by the senior leadership of the organization, especially the CEO. Conscious leaders have to embody the purpose in their own lives and lead by example. They must talk about the purpose at every opportunity when they engage with different stakeholder groups such as team members, investors, and customers.

Another key is perseverance. Some stakeholders are naturally skeptical; they may view the search for a purpose as just another management fad. To succeed, the business must work on the implementation of purpose on an ongoing basis. The work must involve all levels of the organization, so that the entire company feels invested and energized. The purpose must be integrated into orientation processes and new team member training programs. It also needs to be explained to customers and to the media. Leaders must take purpose into account in making all important decisions. For example, purpose should be integrated into performance evaluations, R&D, and strategic planning.

The Hero’s Journey

Many conscious businesses start out with a definition of purpose that aligns with one of Plato’s ideals: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But in some ways, the Heroic purpose is the ultimate destination for all conscious businesses.

As a company starts to fulfill its purpose more completely along the lines of the good, the true, and the beautiful and becomes a successful business, it finds that its impact on the world becomes larger and ultimately transformational. Southwest Airlines sought to deliver great service at affordable prices; in the process, it transformed the airline business and helped bring the benefits of air travel within the reach of hundreds of millions of people on the planet. Google pursued its truth-seeking purpose of organizing and making easily accessible the world’s information with such single-minded devotion and achieved such enormous success that the company has transformed and enriched our daily lives. Apple has created products as objets d’art that are beautiful to behold but also incredibly useful and functional. In doing so, it has had a transformational impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people and on not one but six industries: computing, music, telephony, retail, publishing, and entertainment.

As a company grows and evolves, its purpose, too, deepens and expands. All worthy purposes eventually take on a heroic character, because at some point, vision combines with scale to transform the world. In many cases, the purpose, too, becomes explicitly heroic, far grander in its scope and ambition than anything that could have been imagined at the company’s birth.

In the next part of the book, we turn our attention to the centerpiece of the conscious business philosophy: taking care of all the stakeholders and treating them as an integrated whole rather than as competing claimants on a fixed pool of value.