Page 38 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

NARRATING VALUES, SHAPING VALUES, CREATING VALUE 17

matters (call it meaning or spiritual contentment or salvation) until much later in the
game. Most of us simply refer to it nonchalantly, even proudly, as our Protestant work
ethic. It’s not that we are unaware that we are deferring what we really value. We are.
The problem, as Paulo Coelho points out in the introductory essay to his allegorical
novel The Alchemist, is fear. 29
When our company first began in the early 1990s to discuss changing the way we
practiced real estate to become more in tune with our vision of a sustainable business,
we found all sorts of reasons to drag our feet: It seemed to be impossible, other com-
panies weren’t doing those sorts of things, we were likely to fail, what would happen
if others viewed us as tree-huggers, etc. Later on, when we debated whether or not to
commit all of our development to adhere to LEED criteria, a similar resistance was
found. More recently, as we considered the pros and cons to signing on to the 2030
Challenge (committing to progressive reductions in carbon emissions over a twenty-
plus year period), these same fears and concerns again surfaced.
These moments of resistance within our own company remind me that the fear of
change will always be with us, and that we might as well get accustomed to it as a part
of the furniture. It helps to have this longer term historical or institutional memory so
we can tell ourselves, Oh, we always go through this period of initial fear whenever
we think about trying something new. It’ll be OK. Typically, our fears are overstated
and things indeed are OK. Finally, it helps enormously that my colleagues and I are
able to mutually support one another, so the weight of fear and potential failure do not
inhibit us from deferring the valuable work that needs to be done today. We know that
we are all in this together. No sense putting off till tomorrow what needs doing now.

4. Authenticity Is Key: When I read John Abrams’ words, quoted above, I am
struck above all by the authenticity of his voice. Nothing seems to be held back. He
uses language few business leaders would dare give voice to, speaking about kindness
to ourselves and to others, building a world that is more sane and just, creating a com-
munity where love prevails. Here is a businessman talking about love, for god’s sake.
Abrams not only has found his voice, he has the courage to put it out there irrespec-
tive of the consequences. It’s powerful stuff. Abrams’ work would have been warmly
welcomed by the literary scholar Lionel Trilling, one of whose seminal studies was
about the search for authenticity in the modern world. In Sincerity and Authenticity,
Trilling writes about the process by which the effort to be true to one’s self—sincer-
ity—evolves into the much more challenging effort to be morally centered in an
increasingly complex world. “Now and then,” he notes, “it is possible to observe the
moral life in process of revising itself.” 30 One can see and feel that process at work at
South Mountain Company, the company John Abrams co-founded. Businesses simi-
larly aspiring to be values-centric need to find their own processes for enabling their
moral sensibility to evolve.
It probably takes most people at our company two to three years to find their voice.
Some take a good bit longer than that. I have no way of knowing for sure, no method
for evaluating this process objectively. It’s what I notice around me—a gradual
process of individuals, as Trilling would say, revising themselves. Newly hired