Until 1994, Ray Anderson, the founder of the industrial carpet firm Interface, had lived every entrepreneur’s dream. He’d grown his company from nothing to roughly $800 million in annual revenue. He’d taken it public. Then came a moment that gave him grave doubts about what he’d accomplished.
Raised in a small town in Georgia, Anderson attended Georgia Tech on a football scholarship and spent his early career in the carpet industry. In 1969, on a trip to Kidderminster, England, he saw modular carpet tiles for the first time, and it was love at first sight.
Traditional broadloom carpet came in bulky rolls that might be 12 feet wide or more, which meant that any alteration in an office—say, rearranging the floorplan, or replacing a stained area—required a huge stretch of carpet to be ripped up and replaced. But 18-inch-square modular carpet tiles made changes easy. The tiles could be pulled up and reassembled painlessly. They didn’t even require glue.
Anderson founded Interface in 1973, at age 38, to bring carpet tiles to the US on a broad scale. By 1994, after two decades of extraordinary growth, Interface was one of the largest carpet companies in the world. That year, he was invited to speak to an internal group that was working to define the company’s stance on “environmental sustainability,” a relatively new term at that time. Customers were starting to ask about the issue. Anderson wasn’t sure what he would say—his environmental vision up to that point had been nothing more ambitious than staying compliant with the law.
Shortly after receiving the invitation, serendipitously, Anderson received a copy of Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce. In the book, Hawken assailed corporate leaders for their environmentally destructive practices. Hawken was an entrepreneur himself—the cofounder of the retail garden chain Smith & Hawken—and he insisted that business leaders had an obligation to reverse course and steer the global economy away from the brink of man-made environmental collapse.
Another corporate leader might have scoffed at the sentiment. Anderson wept.
He was 60 years old. Retirement was in sight. Interface’s success was his greatest professional achievement, but now he wondered whether that success had come at too great a cost. He considered his legacy: Ray Anderson, the man who plundered the earth’s resources in order to make himself and his investors wealthy. “Hawken’s message was a spear in my chest that is still there,” he wrote in his memoir.
But, realistically, what could he do? Interface’s core business was to sell carpet tile, made from nylon yarn—and nylon is a plastic made from chemicals found in coal or petroleum. In short, Interface burned fossil fuel to make products out of fossil fuel. A double whammy of unsustainability.
Anderson was devastated. What do you do when you realize that the cause of an enormous problem is… your own actions?
Jeannie Forrest, an associate dean at Yale Law School, was sitting in the back row of a faculty meeting. There was a guy with a big head in the front row who was blocking her view of the presenter.
“The big head was one of those friendly ones,” she said. “You know the kind, tilting first to one side and then another in an attentive way. Driving me nuts. I kept tilting in the reverse to accommodate: He’d tilt left and I’d tilt right. Then he’d tilt right, and I would swivel left. I could feel myself getting aggravated… Suddenly it occurred to me that I was completely capable of moving my chair instead of getting further annoyed. I did,” she said. Problem solved.
It frustrated her that it had taken so long to figure out what should have been obvious: that she had full control over the “problem.” Her memory of the chair-moving moment became a kind of instructional metaphor: “Whenever I start to get aggravated about some inane problem, I think, ‘Hey, move your chair, why don’t you?’ and it’s an internal code for trying a new approach,” she said.
At first, Forrest had perceived the problem—i.e., the presenter-blocked-by-big-head problem—as outside her control. External to her. But then, in a quick mental shift, she claimed ownership of the situation. Move your chair, why don’t you? This shift mirrors what happens in preventive work.
What’s odd about upstream work is that, despite the enormous stakes, it’s often optional. With downstream activity—the rescues and responses and reactions—the work is demanded of us. A doctor can’t opt out of a heart surgery; a day care worker can’t opt out of a diaper change. By contrast, upstream work is chosen, not demanded.
A corollary of that insight is that if the work is not chosen by someone, the underlying problem won’t get solved. This lack of ownership is the second force that keeps us downstream. The first force, problem blindness, means: I don’t see the problem. (Or, This problem is inevitable.) A lack of ownership, though, means that the parties who are capable of addressing a problem are saying, That’s not mine to fix.
These two forces often go together. Consider the leaders at Chicago Public Schools. In the beginning, what held back work on the graduation rate was problem blindness: Yes, a lot of students drop out—that’s just the way it is. On top of that, though, was the sense among some teachers and administrators that, even if the poor graduation rate was a problem, it wasn’t theirs to fix: It’s the kids’ problem to fix. Or their parents’. Or society’s.
And, in a way, those skeptics were right! Dropping out of school is certainly going to hurt the student and her parents more than anyone. But the question is not: Who suffers most from the problem? The question is: Who’s best positioned to fix it, and will they step up? The leaders at CPS made the graduation rate their problem. They took ownership.
Why do some problems lack “owners”? Sometimes self-interest is to blame: Tobacco companies are in the best position to prevent the millions of deaths caused by their products, but of course doing so would interfere with their ability to make money. Other times the lack of ownership is more innocent, the result of fragmented responsibilities: At Expedia, remember, many groups were involved in the issue of customer support calls, but no single group owned the problem of reducing call volume.
In some cases, people may resist acting on a perceived problem because they feel as though it’s not their place to do so. Think of a young man in college who is appalled by the incidence of date rape on campus but wonders if it’s appropriate for him to join protests led by women. The Stanford researchers Dale Miller, Daniel Effron, and Sonya Zak, in a paper exploring this sense of reluctance, wrote “what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.”
They call this sense of legitimacy “psychological standing,” inspired by the concept of legal standing. You can’t bring a suit in the justice system simply because something offended your sensibilities—you’ve got to show that it affected you. The evidence that you were harmed gives you standing to bring a case. The young man who’s reluctant to join a protest against date rape may feel he lacks psychological standing, since he hasn’t been affected personally by the issue.
How could the college women leading the protest extend psychological standing to the young man, assuming they wanted to? It might be surprisingly simple. In a study by Miller and Rebecca Ratner, Princeton students were presented with a proposal—called Proposition 174—that was designed to “offend their sense of justice.” It proposed reallocating government funds from a worthy cause to an unworthy one. Some students were told the shift would hurt women in particular; others were told it would hurt men.
Both men and women shared the same opinions on the proposition—they both strongly opposed it. But the researchers were interested in whether their opinions would lead to action. So the students were given the opportunity to assist a group called Princeton Opponents of Proposition 174. When students had a vested interest in the outcome (that is, when male students were told it would hurt men and women were told it would hurt women), 94% agreed to sign a petition against the proposition, and 50% agreed to write a statement opposing it. When students lacked a vested interest, those numbers declined to 78% and 22%, respectively. The researchers attributed this drop-off not to selfishness—remember, both sexes opposed the measure equally—but to a lack of psychological standing. The men didn’t feel quite right fighting for a “woman’s cause,” and vice versa.
To confirm this intuition, the researchers changed the name of the organization, in another condition of the study, to Princeton Men and Women Opposed to Proposition 174. The addition of the words Men and Women was a simple way to extend psychological standing to both genders, and it was effective. As a result, students with a vested interest and those without one agreed to sign the petition and write statements in equivalent numbers.
Granted, this is Princeton we’re talking about, an academic oasis where student life affords plenty of time to sign hypothetical petitions and be opposed to things. Could this idea of extending psychological standing work outside academia? In 1975—long before the term psychological standing had been coined—the auto safety advocate Annemarie Shelness and the pediatrician Seymour Charles wrote an article in Pediatrics that was intended to motivate pediatricians to take ownership of a problem that they hadn’t seen as theirs to fix: the deaths and injuries caused by automobile accidents. The number one killer of kids (older than newborns) was the automobile, and the epidemic was being ignored. More young children, the authors wrote, were killed and injured inside vehicles than outside.
At the time of the Pediatrics article, all new cars were required to have seat belts for drivers and front passengers, but the great majority of people didn’t use them. And car seats for children were available but not widely adopted. (Car seats had actually been in existence since the 1930s, but those early seats had been designed not to boost safety but to elevate kids so they could see out the windows, in hopes that they wouldn’t pester the driver.) This may be hard for present-day parents to understand. In today’s world, it is difficult to imagine what social and legal sanctions would befall a parent who drove around with a bunch of unsecured toddlers flopping around in the backseat. In the 1970s, that sight was commonplace. Our current obsessiveness about child safety in automobiles is a relatively new phenomenon—and due, in no small part, to the story that follows.
Shelness and Charles insisted that pediatricians were well positioned to be auto safety advocates: “The use of restraints is as much preventive medicine as immunization.… No one is in a better position to alert parents to the danger of allowing children to ride ‘loose’ than the child’s doctor,” they wrote. Note that the authors were trying to extend psychological standing to pediatricians: You are the right people to lead action on this problem. It’s yours to own.
It was not an obvious role for pediatricians to play. Pediatricians were trained to diagnose and treat illness, not to lobby for public safety. But the call to take ownership of the issue was well received. One of the people who answered the call was Dr. Bob Sanders. “That article was a stunner to me and I think to other pediatricians across this country,” said Sanders in an oral history taken in 2004. Sanders was a pediatrician and county health director who lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was passionate about prevention. While a medical student, he had delivered one of the first polio vaccine shots ever administered in Tennessee. Later, serving as a resident in an emergency room, he watched a baby die as a result of swallowing an open safety pin. He was devastated; it was a needless, preventable death. “The whole idea of prevention and care was just a big, big part of him,” said his wife, Pat, in 2018.
Sanders had joined a statewide safety council, and in 1975, the council’s members had begun discussing legislation to require the use of car seats in Tennessee. When the Pediatrics article was published, it sparked the council to move more quickly.
The council drew up legislation requiring car seat use for those under four. In 1976, the bill found a sponsor but never made it to the floor for a vote. Following the failure, Bob and Pat Sanders began to step up their lobbying efforts. They transformed their dining room into a war room, with the table covered with the names of the lawmakers and pediatricians they wanted to reach. On the weekends, Bob Sanders would call them in their home districts to make his case.
Opponents of Sanders’s bill argued that it encroached on the freedom of parents. “This is a Ralph Nader kind of bill that would take the parents’ rights away from them,” said State Representative Roscoe Pickering. “I don’t want poor people to have to buy these expensive seats.” Looking back on the time, Pat Sanders remembers reading a letter written by a parent who complained, “I have the right to send my child in a rocket to the Moon.”
In 1977, after intense lobbying, the Child Passenger Protection Act finally made it to the floor of the legislature for a vote, and it passed with about two-thirds support.I On January 1, 1978, Tennessee became the first state in the US to require car seats for children under the age of four.
But there was an unfortunate loophole. Representative Pickering—the parents’ rights advocate—had attached to the bill a “Babes-in-Arms” amendment, which allowed parents to keep babies in their arms while driving. “One of the greatest thrills a young mother with a new baby can have is to hold and visit with it on the ride home from the hospital,” Pickering said in a 1978 article in the Tennessean. “Now why go and strap it into a seat belt?”
Because of Pickering’s amendment, Sanders knew he had won only a partial victory. Essentially, the law guaranteed safety for young children but made it optional for babies. Sanders started referring to the “Babes-in-Arms” amendment as the “Child Crusher” amendment. In the years that followed the bill’s passage, Sanders kept fighting to overturn the amendment, but opponents weren’t budging. Then, at a transportation committee hearing in 1981, two parents testified. One was a mother whose 11-week-old infant had survived a crash in a car seat. The other was a father whose month-old baby, unsecured, had died after colliding with the dash in an accident. “We were the unlucky ones who didn’t have the seat,” the father said. Sanders found that, in 1980, 11 children under the age of 3 died in car crashes. Nine of them were in their parents’ arms at the time.
This evidence shifted opinion against the amendment, and in 1981, it was repealed. That same year, West Virginia became the third state to require car seats for young children. By 1985, all 50 states had passed child restraint laws.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that from 1975 to 2016, 11,274 children under the age of four had their lives saved by car seats. Think of the cascade of impact: Two automobile safety champions write a pediatric journal article about a problem. The article spurs a Tennessee pediatrician to take ownership of the problem. He motivates a state to act, and that state influences 49 other states, and four decades later, thousands of children are alive who otherwise would have met violent, preventable deaths.
Just as the Pediatrics article had spurred Sanders to act, Paul Hawken’s book had shaken up Ray Anderson of the carpet-tile company Interface. “I read it, and it changed my life,” he said in his memoir. “It hit me right between the eyes.… I wasn’t halfway through it before I had the vision I was looking for, not only for that speech but for my company, and a powerful sense of urgency to do something.”
Anderson had a disadvantage relative to Sanders: He wasn’t just perceiving a problem that merited action. His company had exacerbated the environmental problems Hawken railed against. And at that moment, Anderson had no idea how to undo the harm. But he also had an advantage over Sanders: He could make things happen quickly. He was the boss.
When Anderson arrived to speak to his environmental task force leaders about sustainability in 1994, they had no idea what was coming. They expected to get a stock speech. What they got instead was a call to arms.
Anderson proposed a radical idea: to eliminate Interface’s negative impact on the earth. All those destructive things we’re doing to the environment—we’re going to prevent them. And we’ll do that while still running a great carpet business. “I gave that task force a kick-off speech that, frankly, surprised me, stunned them, and then galvanized all of us into action,” said Anderson. “Unless somebody leads, nobody will. That’s axiomatic. I asked, ‘Why not us?’ ”
“When he first came up with this idea, I have to admit I thought he’d gone around the bend,” Daniel Hendrix, then the company’s chief financial officer, told the New York Times. Interface was still recovering from a recession that had battered the company for the previous three years. Was Interface really healthy enough, financially, to take on a new mission of uncertain promise?
But Anderson was relentless. In the short term, he challenged the company to focus on using less energy and consuming fewer resources. The mantra internally was: reduce, reuse, reclaim, and recycle. Some of the early victories came with astonishing quickness: In one division of Interface, simply adding new computer controls on the boilers in a fabric factory slashed carbon monoxide emissions—from two tons a week to a few hundred pounds per year.
Those victories added up. From 1995 to 1996, the company’s revenue increased from $800 million to $1 billion without increasing the amount of raw materials consumed. The revolution was working. Anderson told Fast Company, “The world just saw the first $200 million of sustainable business.”
In 1997, at a company meeting that would become famous in company lore, Anderson gave a speech that laid out what would eventually become known as Mission Zero: the quest to achieve an environmental footprint of zero by 2020.
Zero.
This was Interface’s “move your chair” moment. We must take responsibility for fixing this problem. Anderson had a seven-part plan for achieving Mission Zero: Eliminating waste. Making emissions benign. Running on renewable energy. Using resource-efficient transportation. Closing the loop (by reclaiming anything they put out in the world and reconstituting it as an input). Sensitizing stakeholders (explaining to people why sustainability is important so they will value it). And redesigning commerce, by focusing on delivering value rather than material.
Anderson prodded his team to think in new ways. As one example, he noted that when customers buy new carpets, they’re usually disposing of old ones. Could Interface reclaim the old carpets and recycle them into new products? It was an interesting idea with at least two key flaws. One: No one was aware of any technology that could recycle carpets. Two: Shipping recycled carpets to the home office in Georgia might run afoul of another Mission Zero principle, “using resource-efficient transportation.” Here’s why: A typical amount of carpet ripped up at a customer site, ready for disposal, might be 400 to 500 square yards. To recycle it, you’d have to ship it via truck to Interface’s plants in Georgia. But it’s horribly inefficient to send 400 square yards of carpet when a full trailer could hold 4,000 yards.
Given these obstacles, the carpet-recycling idea might have been abandoned at another manufacturer. But the team at Interface knew Anderson wanted them to figure it out. For the carpet-hauling problem, they organized a network of partners around the country that could store loads of carpet, 400 yards at a time, until they had a trailer’s worth to send to Georgia. Meanwhile, a global search was underway for a technology that could recycle carpets. They found and acquired an expensive backing machine from Germany that could break down old carpet tiles, transforming them into vinyl crumb, which could be remelted into a new carpet backing. Old carpets became new carpets. They had closed the loop.
Anderson’s new “save the world” mission had become intoxicating to employees. Somehow the employees found ways to maneuver around every roadblock. Even Daniel Hendrix, the CFO who’d been skeptical at first, became a convert: “We became a culture of dreamers and doers.”
Suddenly people were seeking out work at the boring carpet manufacturer. David Gerson cold-called the company in 2000 after hearing about the company’s work on sustainability. He’d grown up in New York City, and he said, “If you’d told me then that someday I’d be working for a carpet company in LaGrange, Georgia, I would have laughed. And been a little bit offended.” What he found at Interface surprised him. “It was the perfect outlet to enable me to be a part of something much bigger than I could do on my own.”
By 2007, Interface was well on the way to realizing Anderson’s vision. Fossil fuel use was down 45% even as sales had grown 49%. Interface used only a third of the water it had used previously, and its use of landfills had been cut by 80%. Anderson scored Interface as having traveled about halfway to where it needed to be. No one had demanded that Interface become more sustainable—they demanded it of themselves. They took ownership of their environmental impact. And it was working.
Four years later, in 2011, Anderson passed away at the age of 77. At his funeral, he was eulogized by Paul Hawken, whose book had sparked Anderson’s transformation. Hawken said that Anderson was “extraordinarily credible. He was also courageous. He stood up again and again in front of big audiences and told them that pretty much everything they knew, learned, and were doing was destroying the earth. He meant every word he spoke, and those words landed deeply in the hearts and minds of the hundreds of thousands of people he addressed.…”
What should we make of the Interface story? There are some aspects that read like fantasy. In 2012, the company helped to run a project in which fishermen were paid to retrieve abandoned fishing nets from the ocean—nets that polluted the waters and endangered wildlife—and those nets were shipped to a plant in Slovenia, transformed into nylon fiber, and woven into Interface carpet tile, which was subsequently purchased and installed in an office somewhere in the US, and right now there’s an employee walking across it to get a cup of coffee, and she has no idea that the supply chain for the carpet under her feet actually made the earth’s oceans cleaner. That’s magical.
On the other hand, Interface as a business enterprise has not been a roaring success for shareholders. If you’d invested your money in Interface at the beginning of 1994, the year of Ray Anderson’s epiphany, through the end of 2018, your annual return would have been 3.6%, compared to the market’s overall return of 9.06%. It’s possible that the company’s environmental work traded off directly with shareholders’ returns. It’s also possible, though, that without the product innovation and branding that came from the focus on sustainability, the company would have performed worse. It’s hard to judge. But it’s fair to say that this wasn’t a fairy-tale story where everyone won.
Perhaps what the Interface story illustrates is not that efforts at preventing problems always pay for themselves, or that good intentions are always rewarded—neither is true—but that we should push against complacency. What harms do we accept that we’re capable of changing?
It would have been effortless for Interface to assume that, as a carpet manufacturer, it would always be a polluter. And in Tennessee, Dr. Bob Sanders could have led a long, successful life as a pediatrician, never dipping his toe into politics, assuming it was beyond his influence.
The question they asked themselves was not: Can’t someone fix this problem? It was: Can we fix this problem? They volunteered to take ownership. Notice, though, that it wasn’t obvious to Ray Anderson or Bob Sanders that they should accept that burden. They were provoked. Challenged. Might the rest of us be unwittingly allowing problems to persist that we could help solve? How do we open our own eyes?
One idea comes from Jeannie Forrest, the “move your chair” woman. Before joining Yale, she was a clinical psychologist and executive coach, and that training in deciphering human motives has aided her work as a manager. In February 2019, for instance, she had to untangle a dispute between staff members. One woman—we’ll call her “Dawn”—reported to another woman, “Ellen.” Dawn had filed a complaint about Ellen, accusing her of constantly undermining and belittling her.
Forrest brought the two women together in her office. As she remembers the meeting, she started by stating, “I’m accountable for this. Let me tell you how I’m responsible. I’ve heard rumors that you weren’t getting along, and I’ve heard from your boss that there was trouble. You know what I did? I looked the other way. I thought, They’ll work it out. I ignored you and I’m sorry.”
Then she said, “I’d like each of you to tell the story of this situation as though you’re the only one in the world responsible for where we are.” Both of the women had a hard time honoring this request. They lapsed quickly into finger-pointing. “Every time I try to give you instructions,” said Ellen, “you shut me down. You ask a bunch of unnecessary questions.” Forrest would redirect her: No, that’s blaming Dawn. Tell me the story as if YOU were responsible.
Eventually, they got it. Ellen said, “Well, I assumed her questions were mean-spirited. I thought that, well, she should just take what I said without questioning me. But I could have explained what I wanted better.”
Dawn said, “I accepted her huffing and eye-rolling and didn’t address it immediately. I should have said, ‘Look, you’re huffing at me and I don’t understand what you want. Help me understand it better.’ ”
(To be clear, there are limits to this “find your accountability” approach. Imagine if the situation had involved a supervisor who sexually harassed a female subordinate. It would have been outrageous to ask the woman to “tell the story as if you were the only one responsible.” That’s victim-blaming. The strength of this tool is in helping to identify possible “levers of action” in situations where many factors may contribute to a problem.)
All three women (including Forrest) had initially handled the situation as though they were trapped in it. But when Forrest prodded them to explain the situation as if they were the ones responsible, they uncovered their power. They went from feeling like victims of the problem to feeling like co-owners of the solution. Six weeks after this mediation, Forrest reported, they were “working together productively and cheerfully. It’s a little insane.”
This, in essence, was the same thing Ray Anderson had demanded of his staff: Let’s tell our story as if we were 100% responsible for the environmental degradation we cause. And when you look at the world that way, you start to see angles of influence: computer controls on boilers, methods for melting down old carpet, incentives for dredging the seas of nylon nets. You start to surface strands of causation that were always there—but buried.
Forrest’s question can help us filter out the noise in complex situations. What if you told the story of your relationship problems as if you were the only one responsible? What if employers told the story of their employees’ health as if they were the only ones responsible? What if school districts told the story of high school dropouts as if they were the only ones responsible? Asking those questions might help us overcome indifference and complacency and see what’s possible: I choose to fix this problem, not because it’s demanded of me, but because I can, and because it’s worth fixing.
I. One clever bit of strategy: Bob Sanders recalled in his oral history a rumor that the Tennessee governor might not sign the bill. Sanders called on the pediatrician of the governor’s grandchildren to press his case. (Source: AAP oral history of Bob Sanders.)