Conscious Capitalism. John Mackey

Чтение книги онлайн.

      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