Page 249 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

REALIZING THE VALUE OF GREEN FOR KEY USERS 227

to each person’s job if we want the business to achieve truly great things. For me to
do my job well, to make of my job what it truly is, a vocation, it is important to con-
nect the values I believe my company offers to others with values I hold dear.
On February 1, 1968, I was a six-year-old boy living in Sydney, Australia, very
happy with a wonderful family. That night, I went to bed a fundamentally different per-
son, because during the course of the day, I’d found my four-year-old sister drowned
in our swimming pool. We took Kathy to the hospital and by all accounts, she fought
valiantly. Still, it was her time, and God called her home.
All of us have experienced loss. Some in the abrupt, dramatic way I lost my sister,
some in more gradual, time-softened ways. It’s striking to me the degree to which the
powerful, significant events in our personal lives are typically excised from our pro-
fessional lives, as if those critical events are somehow not meant to intrude upon our
workaday existence. Think for a minute about your immediate reaction to the para-
graph preceding this one: Did it seem jarring, a bit misplaced, perhaps too personal for
a book on business practices? I think most people would say, “Yes, it’s too personal.”
And that is precisely my point: It shouldn’t be.
Sustainable practices, above all, call for the integration of all things: economic,
social, and environmental aspects of business activities, a professional sense of pro-
viding added value to the various stakeholders in a business melded to a personal
sense of finding meaning in what one does. It literally makes no sense to be one per-
son at work and another person at home. Just as it makes no sense for a business to
focus solely on its economic bottom line without integrating social and environmen-
tal performance into the mix.
Losing Kathy was a life-defining moment for me. We all have such moments. What
do we do with them? How do we integrate them into all that we do in ways that are
deeply authentic, particularly in our culture, which seems structured to maintain silos
among the disparate parts of our lives?
For me, such integration starts with a few basic beliefs:

1 Everything we love can be taken away in a heartbeat.
2 We don’t have time to be lost in anger and bitterness and blame. We only have time
to think, to feel, to do.
3 In those rare circumstances when we have the chance to get back that which we
love and was taken, we must fight like hell to get it back.

These three personal touchstones imbue every aspect of my work, day-in and day-
out. I connect them to the presentations I make to tenant prospects and to civic govern-
ments like the City of Birmingham, and to potential institutional investors. I connect
them to the sense I have of a planet deeply degraded, and of time running out in
which to reverse that degradation. I suspect that if we enable ourselves to let down
our guard and jettison our ill-conceived notions of professional decorum, most of us
would have a similar sense of things larger than ourselves that are worth struggling for.
Sustainability is more than just a “green” thing. It’s really about understanding our
role as stewards of the future. Seeing the world this way allows us to grasp the idea that