Page 35 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

14 CHAPTER 1

Shaping Values

Every once in a while, I come across a piece of art—a painting, a story, a musical com-
position—that just stops me in my tracks. A comment by John Abrams, founder of the
build/design firm South Mountain Company on Martha’s Vineyard and author of The
Company We Keep, has this effect on me. I find myself reading and re-reading it:

The question at hand is this: can small business, supported by strong underlying prin-
ciples, help make better lives and better communities? To go farther, and perhaps too
far, can business conducted this way help us be kinder to ourselves and to one another,
to the planet, and especially to our children? Is it a stretch to say that the more fully we
are fulfilled in our work, the more fully we can love both our children and our com-
munity? And that the more fulfilled we are, the more we can help build a future that’s
sane and just? If I overreach, it is only my enthusiasm for the possibility that is at
fault. 21

If I had to choose one passage that for me summed up the essence of managing a
sustainable business, it would be this. For me, any discussion of capitalism with a dif-
ference boils down to the set of values embraced by a company and the uses to which
those values are put. A green bottom line is rooted in people and the values they fully
express. Abrams understands that about as well as any business person today writing
about a company’s responsibility to land and community.

THREE SYSTEMIC LAYERS OF THE
VALUES-DRIVEN COMPANY
It has become trendy among various writers on triple bottom line practices to address
first the financial benefits that accrue to a sustainably oriented company and then, only
as an afterthought, to examine the deeper, underlying motivations for a business doing
the right thing. Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston, in their book Green to Gold, argue
that the case for thinking and acting environmentally is not based primarily on values
but on the business opportunities such thinking affords to create competitive advan-
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tage. Andrew Savitz and Karl Weber, in The Triple Bottom Line, devote virtually their
entire focus to the pragmatics of managing a broad array of stakeholders, drawing upon
a case study of the almost-sale of Hershey as a moral lesson that “bad things can hap-
pen when companies fail to take a broad view of accountability.” Only late in their
study do the authors get around to leadership and values. 23 I believe these writers are
well intentioned. They are largely trying to bring sustainable practices and beliefs into
the mainstream business community. As such, they are speaking the language of busi-
ness to business people, which is all about what is in it for them. As the economist
Steven D. Levitt trenchantly points out, “Morality, it could be argued, represents the
way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it
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actually does work.” Most current writings on sustainable business practices are sim-
ply a pragmatic recognition of how best to make the business case stick.