Page 18 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

INTRODUCTION xvii

The Green Building Bottom Line has served as a virtual meeting place for me and my
colleagues, with serendipitous results.
Frankly, the results of the financial analysis undertaken in this book surprised me.
My colleagues and I have long felt that we were doing well financially by doing the
right things. But until we all pooled our knowledge, we had never verified our assump-
tions. This book has, among other things, provided us with the opportunity to exam-
ine critically every aspect of what we do, integrate those findings, and objectively
assess our intuitive sense of creating value through a values-centric orientation. I had
assumed that someday, perhaps far in the distant future, our early investment in green
practices would make financial sense. I’m pleased to discover that this value realiza-
tion has occurred much sooner than I would have believed possible.
How is it that the CEO of a company was not specifically aware of the financial
benefits derived from the sustainable orientation of his company? Isn’t that just a lit-
tle irresponsible (not to say unacceptable)? Maybe. My group of family shareholders
by and large is less focused on quarter-to-quarter performance and more attuned to
long-term value creation. As such, we have been able to invest time and resources in
various ways that, from time to time, have made our quarterly performance look
rather miserable. Nevertheless, our year-to-year returns have been in line with stan-
dard benchmarks for our industry, enough so that we were comfortable with the feel-
ing that our investment in green was making sense even if we didn’t take the time to
quantify it.
This book has enabled us to see that shorter-term and longer-term value creation are
not as distinct in time as we had always thought them to be. That is good news for us,
for the real estate development profession, and for a whole new paradigm for how this
profession conducts its business. The story of our green bottom line is partially about
the community we have created within our business, a community we think other busi-
nesses should at least consider as part of their overall strategy. Our story is partially
about creating time and space for imagination and creativity to take hold.
It is also about the powerful hold of place and the need to help nurture communi-
ties that are beloved. Our story, told in the multiple voices of colleagues and associ-
ates, is about nurturing specific places through the sustainable projects we develop. It
is a story of a business trying to restore its sense of wonder for the world around it.
And it is a story of a community of individuals trying to serve the larger community.

NOTES
1 David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), p. 203.
2 David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (Bloomfield, Ct. and San Francisco,
Calif.: Kumerian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995), p. 36.
3 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1998),
p. 311.
4 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 151.
5 Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Every-
day Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 171.