This article appeared in the Sept./Oct 2003 issue of Spirituality & Health.

One day Ray Anderson realized with a jolt that he was part of the problem.

It was August 1994, and the CEO and founder of Interface, Inc., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, understood how much environmental degradation his company caused simply by following perfectly legal, commonly accepted methods of operation.

“We do take a lot of petrol-derived materials from non-renewable sources -- natural gas, oil, coal -- and we use a lot of energy that today comes from those same fossil fuels that generate greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming,” he says. And back then, “we weren’t too terribly mindful of what was coming out of our smokestacks, either. Or what was coming into our factories.”

Anderson came to his shattering understanding while reading The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken. It had landed on his desk as he was struggling to write a speech for Interface’s newly formed environmental task force. He didn’t know what to say. He had never considered corporate environmental issues beyond complying with the law. Yet the book became “a spear in my chest that remains to this day,” he explains. “I was reading passages in bed at night to my wife, and we would weep together.”


Becoming a Restorative Enterprise
Anderson used his epiphany to begin transforming the company he created in 1973. He assigned the task force a Herculean mission: Convert Interface to a restorative enterprise, first by reaching sustainability in its practices and then by becoming truly restorative -- a company that returns more to the earth than it takes. In addition to retaining its high ranking as a supplier of commercial carpeting, he later vowed, Interface will be “the first name in industrial ecology worldwide through actions, not words” by 2020.

How does Interface, headquartered in Atlanta, plan to achieve this lofty goal? By harvesting used carpets, recycling old petrochemicals into new materials, and converting sunlight into energy -- much of which will require developing new technology, not to mention educating customers, suppliers, and partners. “There will be zero scrap going into landfills and zero emissions into the biosphere,” Anderson wrote for the corporate Web site. “Literally, our company will grow by cleaning up the world, not by polluting or degrading it.”

Not a typical corporate strategy. Not at all, unfortunately.

When Corporations Behave Like Addicts
With signs of environmental destruction -- from species extinction to global warming -- mounting daily, why aren’t more companies following Interface’s example? According to Bill Veltrop, self-described “generative change architect” and founder of the International Center for Organization Change in Soquel Calif., many large businesses possess addictive characteristics that lead to “collective denial of the negative consequences of what it is they’re addicted to and the myopia that goes along with that.”

If his analogy feels like a stretch, remember: Under the law, corporations are treated as individuals. The law serves to protect living, breathing individuals from personal liability, but it’s fair to ask just how healthy a corporate “individual” has been created.

Veltrop’s list of corporate addictions includes workaholism and downsizing, both of which deplete creativity and awareness, particularly in a time of competitive pressures and economic downturn. These addictions “pretty much disappear their capacity for reflection and creative intention, so that keeps them trapped in the vicious action/reaction cycle,” he explains. “There is less time to step out of the squirrel cage to see beyond next quarter.”

Underlying everything else, however, is the mechanistic worldview held by most corporations. That is, they are designed and expected to function as efficient machines “not built to self-evolve,” says Veltrop. If, instead, corporations were generative -- a design that inherently embraces sustainability, evolution, and improvement, along with the messiness such a view entails -- they would make “the growing of a collective consciousness a strategic imperative, saying it’s healthy for us to be conscious not only of the choices we have in various levels of the system but also to be more conscious of the consequences of our choices.”

While Ray Anderson exemplifies how a conscious corporate leader can inject an organization with a generative worldview and create long-term, top-down change, a growing number of entrepreneurs are using similar philosophies from the start. Many people are familiar with the pioneers: the Body Shop’s Anita Roddick; Tom and

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