Page 47 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

26 CHAPTER 1

Jefferson understood that well, noting that no generation has the right to encumber the
future with debt, 41 something we clearly violate today as we deplete our natural cap-
ital to the detriment of those who will succeed us.
Part of the problem lies in our ever-shrinking sense of time. We change jobs with
ever-increasing frequency, hold stocks for barely six months, fire CEOs who do not
measure up to quarterly expectations. We need a more positive vision for work and
business, one that takes the longer view and challenges us now to be positive stewards
of that longer time frame. Marco Polo, in his travels in the Far East in the fourteenth
century, encountered just such a long-term vision that is relevant for us today:

In a city called Tinju, they make bowls of porcelain, large and small, of incomparable
beauty. They are made nowhere else except in this city, and from here are exported all
over the world.... These dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as
though from a mine and then stacked in huge mounds and left for thirty or forty years
exposed to wind, rain, and sun. By this time the earth is so refined that dishes made of
it are of an azure tint with a very brilliant sheen. You must understand that when a man
makes a mound of this earth he does so for his children; the time of maturing is so long
that he cannot hope to draw any profit from it himself or put it to use, but the son who
succeeds him will reap the fruit.

Work that takes such a long view is at the heart of the values-centric business.
Thus far, we have discussed two layers of the values-driven business: guiding prin-
ciples that serve as a bill of rights for all and structural concepts that can shape a com-
pany’s values. Together, they are the machine language of a business system, serving
as a foundation for the more concrete “software” of a company, the more visible, artic-
ulated values that a company embraces. It now remains to address this third layer,
albeit briefly since this layer is very company-specific.

Layer Three: Shared Core Values
If you ask members of Melaver, Inc. about our company values, they will not talk
about guiding principles or structural concepts. However, everyone at our company
will tell you that we have four core values: ethical behavior, learning, service, and
profitability. They might also tell you that each core value has a belief statement that
elucidates the concept and that everyone at the company had a hand in writing those
belief statements. And they will also be able to tell you a story about how these core
values and belief statements were shaped, a process that involved everyone at the
company meeting regularly for almost a year until we all agreed these were the values
we all felt strongly about.
While the process a business engages in to elucidate shared values will differ with
every company, there are a few guidelines worth keeping in mind as the process unfolds.

1. Realize the Process Takes Time: Be prepared to devote considerable time, at
least initially, to the process. We devoted a good bit of time to talking about what each
of us felt was of particular importance. The overall process took the better part of a
year. In the early going, we probably spent two to four hours a week, which amounts to