Page 36 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

NARRATING VALUES, SHAPING VALUES, CREATING VALUE 15

Despite the good intentions, such an approach is “bass ackwards,” as my kids would
say. While the remainder of this book is devoted to making the business case for sus-
tainability, we begin here with values. That’s the way our own company charted its
evolution. It’s how it continues to evolve. To do otherwise, to begin with a business
plan for a green bottom line and then perhaps later deepen that approach with ethical
considerations, is a bit like binge dieting before an important occasion: It is a short-
term strategy built around a specific moment in time and is likely to last only until the
next trendy occasion comes along. A business built around a truly substantive green
bottom line is about taking steps, behavior-altering steps that endure. It is a regimen
of diet and exercise for the long haul.
But how does this happen? How are a company’s values determined? Do they pass
from one generation of leadership to the next, unchanged? Should those values remain
unchanged over time? Or should each generation of company leaders be free to shape
the company’s values anew? What’s the role of employees in the process of deter-
mining values, if any? Do other stakeholders have a say in this process? Why or why
not? And how?

Layer One: Six Guiding Principles
Our company, Melaver, Inc., has gone through a formal values-determination process
three times in the fifteen years I have run the business, twice with staff and once with
shareholders. Each process has been somewhat different in terms of the length of time
involved (from one month to almost a year) and the methodologies utilized. All have
involved the use of an outside facilitator to guide the process along. And all have these
guiding principles in common.

1. Values Belong to People, Not to the Company: This concept runs contrary
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to numerous writings on business culture and even contradicts language our own com-
pany uses from time to time. We tend to speak about our company’s core values as if
the company itself were some anthropomorphic character having a unique set of beliefs
that are removed from the people who shape them. That’s unfortunate and potentially
harmful, removing human agency from our sense of what a business stands for. But a
company is nothing more and nothing less than the people who comprise it. Despite the
legal fiction that enables a company to abrogate to itself the rights of an individual, the
values a company articulates do not materialize out of thin air but arise out of actions
that individuals within the company put in motion. This principle is a critical founda-
tion stone. Without it, individuals within a company lack the sense that they are the ones
responsible for true leadership and vision. With it, individuals within a company feel
empowered to make something meaningful, purposive, and lasting. Peter Senge, author
of The Fifth Discipline, captures this sensibility as well as anyone when he notes:

The problem lies in our reactive orientation toward current reality. Vision becomes a
living force only when people truly believe they can shape their future. The simple fact
is that most managers do not experience that they are contributing to creating their cur-
rent reality. So they don’t see how they can contribute toward changing that reality. 26