The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY
On April 30, 1994, two days after the South African elections had finished, I stepped off an airplane from Johannesburg in New York. As I made my way through the hallways to the plane to Boston, I stopped at a newsstand to pick up the Boston Globe. A few days before I had drafted an op-ed column for the Globe and faxed it in the middle of the night. I had no idea if it would run. Opening the newspaper to the editorial pages, I found my piece printed at the top. Titled “Where’s the Passion?” the piece contrasted what I had just witnessed in South Africa with the discontent in Massachusetts.
“In Massachusetts hundreds of thousands of adults have become so skeptical of public leaders that they neglect to register, refuse to sign nomination papers, or simply do not bother to vote,” I wrote. “We have allowed ourselves to be deterred by inconvenience. This apathy grows from watching one’s ideals repeatedly manipulated by others for their personal and political gain. However often we have been disappointed, we must not add to this cycle of cynicism by concluding that the right to vote means nothing.” Nowhere had ideals been more grossly betrayed than in South Africa, I pointed out, yet that had driven citizens not to despair but to the ballot box. Their actions raised a question for Massachusetts. “Are South Africans displaying only a rash and youthful hope in democracy,” I asked, “or have they shown us how far we have drifted from the enthusiasm and principles on which we built our commonwealth?”
Five weeks later I appeared at the Democratic Party’s state nominating convention and discovered that democracy was not completely dead in Massachusetts. In the five minutes I was allotted on the podium, I asked the delegates to give me enough votes to put me on the ballot for lieutenant governor. To everyone’s surprise, I received not only the necessary 15 percent but a decisive 24 percent, even though I had, up to that point, been a complete political unknown. After almost a decade of analyzing, teaching, and writing about social change, as well as witnessing it firsthand on the most profound possible level in South Africa, I had set something important in motion—something that had seemed almost impossible, even foolish, when I began the campaign eight months before.
Over the next four months I rocketed around the state, meeting thousands of people, speaking on topics that moved me, learning the mechanics of elections, defending my views before editorial boards and on television, and working with an exceptional staff and team of volunteers. Eventually I teamed up with a particularly talented driver, Graham Wik, the son of my campaign manager, Lynda. The two of us spent weeks traveling from town to town to town, like two astronauts sent on a distant mission.
I still needed infusions for my hemophilia, so we occasionally had to pull over by the side of the road to do a quick intravenous injection, and we often speculated about how hard it would be to explain to a police officer why I was shooting up. Politically prominent people increasingly returned my calls, so I found myself talking to congressmen and senators and governors, active and retired, about strategy. On one occasion I picked up the phone and the callers were Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, with whom I had worked years before in New York City on a project for Habitat for Humanity.
“We just wanted you to know that we’re both thinking of you. We believe that you are a wonderful candidate,” said Carter.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, watching the telephone poles fly by as Graham and I sped down the highway.
Politics is a strange and often wonderful business, I thought as I hung up.
As we moved out of the doldrums of summer, I built up steam. Even though my opponent, a hardworking state representative named Marc Draisen, had the official allegiance of 129 of the 130 Democratic state representatives in the State House, I continued to attract support. A month before the primary, a major feature story appeared in Boston magazine. Then the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and a host of other newspapers endorsed me. “I wonder if this is what momentum feels like?” I asked Evelyn Murphy, a former lieutenant governor, at one point.
“It is, Bob, it is,” she replied.
On primary day I had nothing to do but go to various polling places to greet people, and when even the workers from other campaigns, including Republican ones, wanted to shake my hand, I sensed that I was doing well. That night I won the primary with just under 53 percent of the vote. After fewer than ten months, starting from nowhere, I was now the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. I was immediately paired with the winner of the gubernatorial primary, Mark Roosevelt (great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), to form the Democratic ticket against the incumbents, Governor Bill Weld and Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci.
Weld had no primary opposition and had raised millions of dollars, which he spent ridiculing Roosevelt. I was not even considered worthy of criticism. Weld, it turned out, had a secret agenda; he wanted to win by such a devastatingly large margin that he could take on U.S. senator John Kerry in 1996. To do that, he needed to crush the Roosevelt-Massie ticket.
The White House looked at the race and decided, probably correctly, that with only seven weeks left in the campaign, there was not much that could be done. Nonetheless, President Clinton flew to Massachusetts and spoke on behalf of all the Democratic candidates on a stage in Framingham. I remember arriving early on the stage and seeing pieces of tape on the floor identifying where we should stand. The piece that said “MASSIE” was about eight feet away from a piece of tape that said “POTUS.”
“Who’s Potus?” I asked a Secret Service man.
He looked at me as if I were a moron. “The President Of The United States,” he said laconically.
I bounced around the state with national Democrats. I spoke from the same stage as Hillary Clinton in Springfield and was touched to discover that she had read my parents’ book Journey. I introduced Teddy Kennedy (who was running for reelection against political newcomer Mitt Romney). I learned how to whip up a crowd so that they would greet him with a huge roar as he came chugging up to the stage, with a broad smile and a great slap on the back for me. On one occasion Teddy went out of his way to introduce me. Listening to his resonant baritone talking about this “remarkable young man,” I found myself staring at my shoes in disbelief. Finally, just before the election, Vice President Gore flew to Boston to speak at a major fund-raising lunch. This was a special act of friendship, going back to my grandmother’s strong support for his father, Al Gore, Sr., during his first Senate race in Tennessee. Though the White House political office counseled against it and Gore was on crutches after tearing an Achilles tendon while playing basketball, the vice president overruled his advisers and came anyway.
All this did not stem the tide, either locally or nationally. The Republican Party had seized on President Clinton’s efforts to establish national health insurance and attempted to tear him limb from limb. Newt Gingrich announced his solemn support of the “Contract for America” and got the Republican members of the House of Representatives to line up to sign it. I debated the incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, Paul Cellucci, and learned what it was like to have a political opponent lean within inches of my face when on television to bellow out his answers. Bill Weld kept up his on-air humiliation of Mark.
The night of the election was sobering. I knew that we were going to lose, so I spent a long time preparing my very brief concession speech. We met in the Copley Plaza Hotel, just down the hall from the ballroom where Teddy Kennedy was celebrating his election to a sixth term in the United States Senate. As the numbers rolled, it was clear that we had lost by a large margin: 40 points (70 percent to 30 percent).
To my immense surprise, Rosalynn Carter appeared in person to thank me for my race and to urge me to run again. John Kerry, a long-time friend, came to the room with Teresa Heinz and took me aside. His long face looked worried.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “You did a great job. But this was a super-tough year. The Republicans are winning across the country.”
“Did we lose the Senate?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “and the House.” That came as a profound surprise and far outweighed my own anticipated loss. He was describing the arrival of what became the 104th Congress, the first House of Representatives controlled by the Republican Party since the 1950s.
When it came time to speak, I delivered my carefully worded critique of the grotesque financial and media carpet-bombing that Bill Weld had inflicted on Mark Roosevelt.
“Just as there is no honor in a mercenary victory,” I said, “there is no shame in a principled defeat.”
The party ended and I went home.
Though I enjoyed myself greatly in politics, the previous few months had been marked by the shock of a completely unexpected action by Dana, to whom I had been married for nearly eleven years. In South Africa we had divided up our time and the care of the children so that we could each make research trips, and she had disappeared for many weekends. She worried more and more intensely that at any moment I would begin my inevitable slide toward AIDS and death. Every cold or cough became in her mind a sign of impending doom. I later learned that at one point, when we both fell ill for several days with a bronchial infection, she was sending secret e-mail messages to my family and friends to say that I was failing and they should prepare for the worst.
We increasingly lived in two worlds, one in which I was happily pursuing my life with my family, whom I loved very much, and the other, in which Dana felt isolated and sorry for me that I was in denial about my fate. At the time there was little in the way of support services for spouses of people with HIV, and our rare efforts to talk about these different experiences of life failed. We stopped trying. I became more outgoing and energetic while she withdrew into a cocoon of loneliness and fear. Eventually she found others from whom she could find support, including someone she came to care about deeply. I knew nothing of all this.
One night in 1994, after my campaign had been well launched, Dana came to me and announced that she had made an irrevocable decision to divorce me. I had no idea that this was coming. My first thought was that somehow she was reacting to the campaign, and I offered to end it instantly, the next day if necessary. She made it clear at that moment and over the following weeks that the campaign had nothing to do with it. Indeed, she said bluntly, she didn’t want me around the house trying to persuade her to reconsider. Her decision was final, though she would wait until the campaign was over to announce it. Together we went through many hard months while I did everything I could think of to find another solution. She listened, and she sometimes talked, but from the moment of her announcement she never showed a single sign of changing her mind.
She had been preparing for another life for years, and now she wanted to live it. Her emotional connection to me had been cauterized by my health problems. For years she felt that she had no one to talk to and no one who understood. Originally she had thought that our marriage would end with my death and that she would endure a period of widowhood before moving on. Now, given that I appeared to be so well, the only alternative in her mind was divorce. During the months after the campaign we moved toward this outcome, which finally took place in early 1996. A few weeks after our divorce became final, Dana married the South African professor and missionary whom she had known for more than twelve years.
I went back to Harvard Divinity School and started teaching and planning the development of the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy into something bigger and more university-wide. After my experience in politics, my courses focused not just on what should be done but on how. It was perfectly acceptable to oppose a company’s policies on infant formula or South Africa, I pointed out to my students, but how could you transform that opposition into real improvements? What combination of power and persuasion could be applied to get people to change their minds and their actions?
In approaching these problems I was influenced by the intensive course on negotiation that I took at Harvard Law School. Taught by the illustrious professor Roger Fisher and a team of talented faculty, the course was built on the groundbreaking insights of Fisher’s book with William Ury, Getting to Yes. The book revealed the inner structure of most disagreements—for example, that while most people argue about positions, they are governed more directly by their unarticulated and underlying interests. It swiftly occurred to me that the Divinity School, which tended to focus on the psychological tensions between two people, was missing a major opportunity to talk about how to manage and resolve conflict at the community level. I went back to my dean and proposed that I create a course called “Advocacy, Negotiation, and Reconciliation,” which would consist of two hours of theory and two hours of practice every week. He approved it, and suddenly I was teaching the skills that I had only just mastered.
In this course and in all the others I taught I made liberal use of guests from the outside world. During a class on the institutional relationships between churches and corporations, I invited two people to listen to the students make presentations about a particular dispute. One was a senior executive from a major chemical company. The other was Joan Bavaria, the founder of an organization called the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, or Ceres. Because she lived in the Boston area, she came for lunch beforehand at the Harvard Faculty Club. Within minutes we were fast friends, discussing not only all the points of our common history but all the things we wanted to see happen in the future.
In class, Bavaria did a brilliant job of discussing the challenges of negotiating with large companies about the environment. A few days later she called.
“I don’t know how much you know about what Ceres is doing these days,” she said, coming straight to the point, “but it has been a board-managed coalition since its inception. We are now ready to bring on a full-time executive director. I would like to sit down with you soon to discuss this job.”
Ceres had been formed in 1989 out of discussions among major investment leaders and pension funds on how to apply the lessons of the ongoing South African shareholder campaign to the environment. Ceres had become a powerful force in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Prince William Sound in Alaska; it had originated the definition of an “environmental ethic”—a code of conduct—for corporations modeled in some ways on the Sullivan Principles introduced in South Africa. Ceres had also pioneered the use of an environmental scorecard that asked companies to measure and report their performance against specific goals, and it used a combination of skillful persuasion and raw shareholder power to move companies to make substantial commitments to new environmental and energy plans.
Within a few more months I had made the jump, leaving Harvard Divinity School to become the full-time executive director of Ceres. I was the newest and most senior member of a staff of five, tucked away in cubicles in the back of Joan Bavaria’s investment shop. During my first six months, my desk was literally in the stockroom area, so that my phone conversations with foundation program officers and business executives were often interrupted by staff members from the extended company entering the area to get pencils or use the copy machine. I did not even have a computer. I went to work during the day and did my computer work at home at night. To exchange files among our staff, we copied files to a floppy drive and tossed disks over the dividers between our desks.
Despite the modest resources, I realized that I was the head of an unusually broad coalition with enormous potential power. We were the only entity in the United States that brought together the grassroots power of environmental and union groups and the financial clout of major investors and pension funds. Our board and membership were made up of senior representatives of virtually all of America’s largest environmental groups: the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. We also included pension funds with hundreds of billions in endowment assets, such as those of both New York City and New York State, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, a large number of Roman Catholic orders and institutions, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. We had a strong tie to labor through the AFL-CIO. Over time the coalition added even more powerful allies, including the California state public employees and teachers funds, along with funds from Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, and many other denominations and states.
In addition to the unusual alliance between investors and environmental groups, two things made Ceres unique. The first was that we engaged directly with corporations, asking them to commit to an environmental program, measure their performance, and disclose their results. Second, the size and expanse of the funds around the table meant that someone in our network was bound to hold stock in virtually any publicly traded company in America. Thus, for every issue we wanted to discuss we had a very large shareholder who would join us in ringing the doorbell of the company with a request to talk.
Corporations were initially hostile to engaging with us. Their lawyers thought that the firm should maintain maximum independence and combat every potentially encroaching force: state governments, federal regulators, private lawsuits, public-interest groups. When they looked at our ten proposed “Ceres Principles,” they saw nothing but trouble. If the principles were in any way binding, they would cause terrible new precedents and problems in the courts. If they were not binding, why go through the exercise of discussing and embracing them?
The principles are worth reprinting here as they appeared in the early 1990s. To some people these sounded like the bare minimum of environmental responsibility, and to others like an aggressive attack on free enterprise.
1) PROTECTION OF THE BIOSPHERE
We will reduce and make continual progress toward eliminating the release of any substance that may cause environmental damage to the air, water, or the earth or its inhabitants. We will safeguard all habitats affected by our operations and will protect open spaces and wilderness while preserving biodiversity.
2) SUSTAINABLE USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES
We will make sustainable use of renewable natural resources, such as water, soils, and forests. We will conserve non-renewable natural resources through efficient use and careful planning.
3) REDUCTION AND DISPOSAL OF WASTES
We will reduce and where possible eliminate waste through source reduction and recycling. All waste will be handled and disposed of through safe and responsible methods.
4) ENERGY CONSERVATION
We will conserve energy and improve the energy efficiency of our internal operations and of the goods and services we sell. We will make every effort to use environmentally safe and sustainable energy sources.
5) RISK REDUCTION
We will strive to minimize the environmental, health, and safety risks to our employees and the communities in which we operate through safe technologies, facilities, and operating procedures, and by being prepared for emergencies.
6) SAFE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
We will reduce and where possible eliminate the use, manufacture, or sale of products and services that cause environmental damage or health or safety hazards. We will inform our customers of the environmental impacts of our products or services and try to correct unsafe use.
7) ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION
We will promptly and responsibly correct conditions we have caused that endanger health, safety, or the environment. To the extent feasible, we will redress injuries we have caused to persons or damage we have caused to the environment and will restore the environment.
8) INFORMING THE PUBLIC
We will inform in a timely manner everyone who may be affected by conditions caused by our company that might endanger health, safety, or the environment. We will regularly seek advice and counsel through dialogue with persons in communities near our facilities. We will not take any action against employees for reporting dangerous incidents or conditions to management or to appropriate authorities.
9) MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT
We will implement these Principles and sustain a process that ensures that the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer are fully informed about pertinent environmental issues and are fully responsible for environmental policy. In selecting our Board of Directors, we will consider demonstrated environmental commitment as a factor.
10) AUDITS AND REPORTS
We will conduct an annual self-evaluation of our progress in implementing these Principles. We will support the timely creation of generally accepted environmental audit procedures. We will annually complete the Ceres Report, which will be made available to the public.
Before I had arrived, Joan Bavaria and some of the large shareholders had sat down with a few companies to talk about whether they might endorse the Ceres Principles. Some companies began to move in our direction. Robert Campbell, the CEO of Sunoco, an oil-refining firm, came up to Joan after one meeting and told her that he might be the head of an oil-refining and marketing company, but he shared many of her goals. And he didn’t think that there was anything wrong with a company setting targets and trying to meet them. “That’s how we do everything else in the firm,” he told Bavaria. “We pick a target, we decide how we are going to measure our performance against that target, and then we pursue it. This is pretty much the same.”
Joan was delighted to hear this. She had quickly learned that “we manage what we measure” was one of the most powerful mantras in modern business. Two things became clear from this simple phrase. If we could persuade a firm to measure and disclose its performance, we tapped into one of the most powerful internal mechanisms for lasting change within the corporation. However, the reverse was also true: if something was not measured, it often was impossible to manage. This fit with everything I had learned since I was a boy about the relationship between sight and sound and words. If a person—or in this case an entire collection of people—had a specific word or measurement that he or she could systematically apply across a vast amount of behavior, then one could both see and change that practice. If not, the actions and consequences were invisible, even to insiders, and especially to anyone outside the organization. So creating change and agreement required developing the ability to imagine how one’s apparent opponents saw (or didn’t see) parts of the world. Sometimes this meant learning their vocabulary and using it in a way they could understand. Sometimes it meant teaching them a vocabulary that was new to them.
As the board of Ceres realized the power of the idea of measurement, we built our strategy around three steps that we believed could actually move corporate America on to a more environmentally sustainable path. Our process was straightforward. We asked senior executives at a corporation to commit to continuous environmental improvement in partnership with Ceres. Most corporations, in fact, believed in this. What executives fear is abrupt change: a sudden shift in the market, a major disruption in supply or technology, or the random imposition of a new regulation that would change their business model. In the phrase “continuous improvement,” we found words that they could embrace.
We then urged them, as a condition of their participation, to set up measurements, following the ten Ceres Principles, to see whether they were making progress. After many years of negotiating with executives I learned that their initial reluctance to take on new challenges is often due not to a lack of energy or courage; instead, they want to take on only those challenges at which they have a reasonable chance of succeeding.
Corporate life is built around selecting a strategy, picking the right indicators, and then aggressively pursuing their targets. One of the problems with integrating the environment was that these ideas had no place in the vast scheme of company strategies, targets, tactics, internal investments, and compensation. If we could graft this new information and these new approaches onto the hugely powerful and effective corporate system for getting things done on an enormous scale, we knew we would have tapped an immense force.
Finally, it was important to ask companies not just to set targets and to measure their performance but to release that information to the public. We assumed that being required to show whether they had improved or slipped would prompt corporate leaders to pursue better results over the years. By releasing the information, the corporation was driving a deeper stake into the ground, not only with outside groups like the activists and investors who made up Ceres but also with the press, with their competitors, and, perhaps most important of all, with their boards of directors and their employees. We also believed that they would gain from the exercise by saving money through eliminating waste, by pushing themselves to innovate into new technologies, by winning new customers and developing new product lines. Environmental improvements also inspired employees, who wanted to believe that they were going to work every day for a reason larger than their own personal paychecks. The positive experience would then strengthen their desire to intensify their efforts and their commitments.
Every negotiation with every company followed its own course. Some jumped on the idea. Some took years to persuade. Some worried that a commitment would mean too much time, energy, and expense. Some thought that they wouldn’t really be expected to do very much and could get the public relations benefit of signing without the need for follow-up action. Through dozens of presentations, meetings, and meals, either at Ceres or in conference rooms around the country, we systematically made our case. We reviewed sectors of the economy, chose the most likely corporate participants, and then analyzed each team of executives to understand the arguments they would present and the benefits they could obtain. We asked leaders who had already joined in our effort to speak to those who had not. We acknowledged that some members of the Ceres coalition had different values and objectives from those of these huge firms, but we pointed out why it was to everyone’s advantage for us to be in conversation. Over time, more and more executives listened—and signed up.
Through listening to the men and women who represented the companies in our discussions, I realized that though they initially came across as fierce advocates for their corporation’s position, they were often relatively weak within their organizations, without the line or budget authority that would give them real clout. Some of the executives we engaged were, ironically, seen as leftist environmental advocates within their own firms. Some of those who argued against us in public were advocating for us in private. Gradually we learned the subtle truth that a person who appears to be an opponent can sometimes be a hidden ally.
Measurement and accounting are strange worlds, somewhat like engineering. To outsiders they seem like hopelessly technical and boring fields. To insiders, however, these details determine whether an entire system succeeds or collapses. Much like an engineer knowing the exact degree of lift and thrust necessary to put a massive airliner into the sky, so accounting experts need the specific application of measurement. We realized that even though the technical details might seem obscure, their overall effect could be immense. We learned to speak the corporate language so that we could persuade companies to make adjustments that would alter their interactions with the world. I understood that change was about more than glossy speeches and the affirmation of values, as important as those could often be; it was also about the hard work of proposing the exact, detailed modifications that would cause corporations to behave differently.
After listening to squabbling among different activist and environmental organizations about whose measurement system was best, I asked the heads of ten key groups to meet me at a conference center outside Washington, D.C., to forge a common approach to working with companies. We were spending too much time and energy pointing out small differences between our approaches, I said. There were plenty of times when I appeared before a program officer at a foundation, was asked about all the different proposals for environmental measurement, and found myself saying, “Theirs is good but ours is better.” Instead, I suggested, we needed to talk about each other’s strengths and find a way to work together. We had to act more like a movement and less like competitors.
In late 1996 and early 1997 I was traveling all around the country as the new head of Ceres, and I asked people what they thought most needed to happen in the field. I spoke to business leaders, environmental activists, investors, academics, and many others. They usually talked about some tactical improvement they wanted to see—a small change in this approach or that questionnaire.
“No, that’s not what I’m looking for,” I said to dozens of people. “I am asking: What would you like to happen in the field of environmental reporting if you could have anything? What is our ultimate goal?”
Business executives said they were tired of being deluged with queries and that they wanted to be able to fill out a single questionnaire that would be accepted by multiple activist groups. Activists, for their part, deeply distrusted the current information that companies released, believing that they would report only on the things that made them look good. And investors pointed to the uselessness of corporate data that could not be compared from company to company.
The disagreements were sharp, but when I asked about the best solution, I discovered to my surprise that there was strong agreement. Every party wanted to develop a single tool for disclosure that would simultaneously meet the needs of executives, activists, and investors. This was, after all, what happened in the financial markets. There had been a time when companies reported their financial results any way they wanted to, but this had contributed to several market collapses. Today companies accept—and the government requires—a single standard. Known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), these rules allow for measurement and comparison that make sense and thus enable all of American business to function smoothly.
As I listened, an idea became clearer in my head. If creating a standard for finance helped everyone both inside and outside business, why not a standard for measuring all the pieces of sustainability, everything from labor and human rights to energy and the environment? When I suggested this to people, they agreed that this would represent a major advance for business in the world. But no one believed it could happen. There was no group that was willing to lead on this, and governments could never successfully take it on.
I have never been inclined to accept the impossibility of a great idea, so I started to plan how we could create what everyone said they wanted. I arranged for a workshop to explore the topic at our next small Ceres annual conference in Chicago in the fall of 1996. The conference went well but the workshop was a bust. To my memory just three people showed up: me, my dear friend and colleague Allen White (a distinguished social scientist at the Tellus Institute), and one other person, who left after it became clear that the workshop was not going to take place.
I was tired after a long day, and I proposed to Allen that we just stay and get a beer in the hotel and use that time to do some forward planning. I told him about the common reaction that I was getting from my queries, and he told me that the research that he was doing on environmental reporting showed that the groups were really not far apart.
“Why don’t we just try to do what everyone really wants?” I asked Allen. “People are all saying the same thing, even when they are from very different backgrounds and have very different interests. That ought to give us the starting point to build a new cooperative agreement.”
“It’s worth a try,” said the ever-genial and thoughtful White.
So right then and there we decided to redirect the focus of Ceres, in cooperation with the Tellus Institute, toward developing a common framework for reporting. A key step would be to enlist a steering committee made up of representatives of all the groups who wanted to see the same thing.
To allay people’s fears, I set out some principles and rules from the beginning. Ceres would act as an honest broker, with a commitment to include virtually anyone who felt a desire to contribute. We would share information and documents widely on the Internet, which was just starting to become a tool in people’s daily work lives. Finally, we committed to spin the new standard-setting body off from Ceres if our efforts succeeded. This last guarantee turned out to be the most critical, because it helped people commit time and resources without the suspicion that they might be handing over a key initiative to a rival.
We struggled with what to call this new project. ITT Industries had pointed out to us that the Ceres questionnaire was very much on U.S. data and U.S. questions. Since ITT was a global company that did more than two-thirds of its business outside the United States, it wanted us to consider developing a “global report” that would apply internationally. My Ceres colleague Judy Kuczewski and I kicked around several names, including “Global Report Initiative,” but that seemed too static. We wanted something more dynamic. “Let’s try ‘Global Reporting Initiative,’ ” one of us said, and the name stuck. And it quickly became known around the country and around the world by its initials, GRI.
The Ceres board agreed to our plan. I then had to raise the money to do it. Around Easter of 1997 I received a message from a college friend of mine, Ralph Taylor, who had been following my efforts for some time and had briefly participated on the board. In his note he said that he would contribute $80,000 of his own money to get us started and that he wanted me to meet his parents, who could potentially contribute more.
At this time in my life I again could not walk; I had slipped on my back steps at home and badly crushed my left knee, the one I had struggled with as a child. My doctors grimly told me that I would never use that joint again. They recommended a total knee replacement, and in early 1997 they took out the knee and replaced it with an artificial joint made of titanium. For several months I had to run Ceres from my home, using the early technology of e-mail to communicate with my staff, board, and network. I continued to negotiate with the executives of major companies on the phone, though I was grateful that we did not yet have video technology, since I was often in my pajamas with my leg extended in bed. To meet Ralph’s parents would require an arduous trip to Florida while the knee was still weak and I was on crutches. I felt the timing was critical, so I went.
I flew to Hobe Sound, one of the wealthiest towns in Florida, and spent two days with Ralph and his family. After twenty-four hours of small talk, his parents took me to their country club for dinner. As we were waiting to be seated, his father, who was sitting across from me on a couch, leaned forward, spun the ice cubes around in his glass, and looked me straight in the eye.
“So you’re telling me that if we give you $100,000, you will change the entire system of environmental accounting—and eventually financial accounting—for every business in the world?”
Put that way, the whole idea sounded crazy, especially for such a small sum. But I knew I could not back down.
I fixed my eyes on him. “Yes,” I said.
A month later we received the check.
One of the early tests of the organization came when Allen White and I went to London so that I could chair an organizing meeting of the GRI in partnership with a key section of the United Nations Environment Programme. The section was headed by a formidable UN division chief, Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel. We met as the institutional guests of Roger Adams, the director of research for the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants in London. Our meeting took place in a paneled board room with thousand-dollar leather chairs overlooking the spectacular little park called Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the home of many of England’s most distinguished law firms.
At the meeting one of Europe’s greatest visionaries on the relationship between the economy and the environment, John Elkington, wasted no time challenging me and the handful of Americans who had made the trip to state our purpose clearly. In his judgment, the project had to be truly ambitious.
“The United States is generally behind the world on environmental measurement, and we have little confidence that putting our time and effort into such a domestic enterprise would be useful,” he said.
I waited for him to continue.
“If, however, you are interested in tackling the whole question of a standard for sustainability—that is, taking the environment as a key foundation but also looking at human rights, labor practices, community impacts, and all the other ways that corporations and communities interact—then we believe that this could be very exciting.”
I said that this was my intention, and that I would work to win the support of my board. I returned to the United States with a sense of optimism. The logic for building international cooperation was powerful. The United Nations was striving to improve the social impact of businesses in many countries beyond the reach of an American organization like Ceres. At the same time, Ceres had a powerful presence in the United States, the world’s largest economy. It was a creative partnership that both sides decided to embrace.
The daily demand to solve the problems of logistics and diplomacy required steady and energetic leadership. Sometimes I didn’t have time to think. Yet every now and then I was able to pause and consider what we were really trying to do, which was to create a system that would help people and protect the planet. The passion within me was tied to an image that floated in my mind like a dream: a particular photograph of our fragile blue planet hanging in space.
I had first seen it and loved it when the Apollo 17 astronauts returned from the moon in 1970. Their picture showed the earth fully bathed in sunlight from the South Pole. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had become aware of the problem of greenhouse gases building up in our atmosphere, slowly creating the invisible blanket of heat-trapping gases that have been steadily distorting the climate of the entire planet. After attending a key meeting in 1991 of some of America’s top scientists and religious leaders at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I learned more about the dangerous path on which humanity had launched itself. Scientists from around the world were documenting the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, the resulting rise in average global temperature, the melting of polar ice, and other disturbing trends. Though planetary science is complex, it was clear that allowing human activity to raise the temperature of the planet would lead to more severe weather, including more violent storms, droughts, and floods, which could harm hundreds of millions of people and cost trillions of dollars in property and economic damage.
To make sure that the religious community played an important role, I went to the dean of Harvard Divinity School early in 1991 to ask him to allow me to organize an event in Massachusetts that would enable faculty members from the nine seminaries in the Boston Theological Institute, a cooperative group, to learn more about the climate crisis and to consider how they could integrate these ideas into their curricula. Working with a talented group of graduate students, we secured permission to use the IMAX theater at the Boston Museum of Science, which was showing The Blue Planet, a mesmerizing film shot from space by the space shuttle astronauts. My goal was to combine these powerful images with both scientific information and practical reflections about what could be done by the schools. We scheduled the event for April 1992, and we invited Senator Al Gore, who had not yet been chosen for the vice presidential position by Governor Clinton, to come to Boston to speak. We titled the event “The Renewal of Reverence: Theological Education in the Environmental Era.” We filled the hall with well over three hundred people.
What has stayed with me ever since are the quiet moments of the evening, as we watched the shuttle fly silently through space and record the aching beauty of Earth. From far above the planet we saw no division of the blue of the atmosphere from the green of our vegetation. Sitting there, I realized that there should be no such divisions in human thinking. Blue might represent labor and green might represent the environmental movement, but we needed to bring them together. Blue might represent the earth and green might represent the economy, but we needed to bring them together. That became my goal and my task.
In asking how the Global Reporting Initiative actually got off the ground, people tend to wonder about three things: first, the mechanics; second, the people; and third, the problems that we overcame. Because of the eventual global success of the GRI, these have now been documented by scholars and academic researchers in many languages. As the cofounder and chair for those first years, I can offer a few insights.
First, the mechanics. We conducted an open-source process. Anyone who wanted to be part of the project could participate. The role of Ceres—and then the role of the secretariat, when it emerged—was to help anyone who desired to play a role to do so. Initially that meant that people who were interested in water use and pollution could come together and think about how to measure that. It meant that people who cared about the overall content of a sustainability report could offer their views on that. In the early days, we assigned people who had skills and interests directly to the relevant committees and let them hash out their concerns, without trying to dictate their decisions in any way. We were immensely aided by the sudden rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. If we had tried to create the GRI just a few years before, it would have been impossible for the far-flung participants to communicate with each other rapidly. Instead, we could hold an in-person meeting, carve out the basic ideas, and then circulate multiple iterations of a draft within weeks—all globally, instantly, and for free. The speed of our success created its own excitement, as people realized that something was really happening and that if they wanted to be involved, they should jump on now.
We also benefited from a marvelous steering committee from many disciplines and parts of the world. At the beginning we had strong representation from Europe and North America. We expanded to bring in representatives of Ford, General Motors, ITT Industries, and Royal Dutch Shell, major environment groups, top international labor officials, senior officials from accounting societies from Europe and Canada, and NGO leaders from Australia, Colombia, Japan, South Africa, India, and other countries.
The reaction I received from one Canadian participant, a nationally recognized leader in accounting, moved me particularly. He came to me and said, “You know, I was starting to reach the end of my career, and I realized that I wanted to be involved, if possible, in one more major effort to change the way the world works. I didn’t know if such a possibility would emerge. But I wrote down what I was looking for on a little piece of paper so that if I ever found it, I would remember to be grateful. I have kept that paper in my wallet ever since. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes,” I said.
He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and withdrew a sliver of paper. On it he had written, “I want to be involved with a major international effort to rewrite the rules of accounting so that business contributes to the true well-being and sustainability of our beautiful planet.” He put the paper away and looked at me with tears in his eyes.
“I wrote this before I had ever heard of you, Bob Massie,” he said, “so I thought you might like to know that this whole effort is, in part, the fulfillment of a middle-aged accountant’s deepest prayer for his life.”
We also encountered opposition. While Allen White did a brilliant job as cofounder, wrestling the technical details of the GRI to the ground, my function, particularly as chair of the steering committee, was to keep everyone focused on the same goal and moving productively in the same direction. Many people found the effort disturbing, even shocking, and they were more than happy to inform me of their objections.
Regularly I would be approached by someone with a face that expressed distaste or even anger and who would thrust a finger into my chest.
“I have to tell you, Bob, that this whole enterprise is poorly conceived and is likely to fail.”
“Why do you say that?” I would ask, knowing that this is what the person wanted to tell me.
Then the person would launch into a litany of complaints: this was being done wrong, this person had been left out, this other person was a fool who would destroy everything, we should have approached some other group to do some other thing instead—the list was always long and vehemently expressed. The conclusion was always that disaster was imminent. When the person stopped talking, he or she clearly expected me to defend myself. I tried a different approach.
“You know, I think you are probably right,” I said. “We may fail. Many of the problems you described are real problems that we need to address, and I don’t know if we are going to be able to do it in time.”
The person would nod with satisfaction.
“I do know one thing, though,” I continued, “which is that it would be less likely to fail if I had your participation in it. You obviously have given considerable thought to what needs to happen. You would be in an excellent position to help us figure out a solution.”
The transformation in the person’s attitude was often remarkable. Sometimes it came immediately, but usually it took about six months. At that point I would receive an abrupt e-mail: “Bob, I have given what you said a lot of thought, and now I am ready to help.”
So, over the next three years, we held dozens of meetings all over the world to enlist support. The steering committee made a point of rotating among different cities and institutions, and Allen and I traveled on special road trips that took us to India, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, and many other places. We met with business executives, government officials, academics, and NGO leaders. We received millions of dollars in funding from the United Nations Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the General Motors Foundation.
At one point my director of development, Tim Brennan, and I flew to Seattle for a forty-five-minute meeting with a program officer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss the possibility of a specialized project in which we would measure the prevalence of HIV in southern Africa among workers in labor-intensive industries like sugar and mining. They were interested and asked for a briefing from Allen White, who was leading the research. Allen and I called from separate phones a few days later. Allen brought up the topic of funding.
“Well, I don’t know,” said the program officer. “For this kind of thing it would have to be a discretionary grant.”
I knew Allen was disappointed. Discretionary grants usually amounted to only five to ten thousand dollars.
“How much would that be?” he asked tentatively.
“Well, it would have to be under one million dollars,” said the officer apologetically.
I thought I heard Allen stifle a cough on the other end of the line.
In the weeks ahead, we worked up a budget for $970,000 that would allow us to do a top-notch job. We sent off the proposal with great uncertainty. Three days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks a plain envelope arrived in the regular mail. I opened the letter and out fell a check for the full amount.
During this period various working groups were busy designing the guidelines. To demonstrate the clear compatibility of our effort with financial accounting, we worked with accounting experts to adopt the core principles of transparency, inclusiveness, auditability, and completeness. Differences in language and perspective required a delicate and careful hand. At one point relatively early in the process, I urged that the GRI commit to a certain “form” that would enable people to understand how the information was being collected and used. Roger Adams from England objected vehemently. The GRI did not need a form, he said. I continued: but how could the GRI function if we did not give it a particular structure?
“I’m all for structure,” he said. “I just don’t think that the GRI should have a form.”
A light bulb went off in my head. “What do you mean by the word ‘form’?” I asked.
“You know—a form, a questionnaire,” he said testily.
I laughed. I realized that though we were both English-speakers, we had stumbled on the different meanings of the same word. “ ‘Form’ does not automatically mean ‘questionnaire’ in American English,” I told Roger.
“Well, it does where I am from!” he said.
After several years it became clear that the original experiment to see whether organizations from around the world could be drawn into working on a common measurement for sustainability had been a success. The question then became whether it was now time to spin off the organization from Ceres into an independent group with a completely new board. We made the decision to “institutionalize” at a key meeting with board members and funders in Toronto in 2000, and within two years we had met that goal as well.
On April 4, 2002, hundreds of people assembled from around the world at United Nations headquarters in New York to celebrate the inauguration of the GRI as a permanent standard-setting body. To create a strong wind at its back, we had assembled a “charter group” of twenty-six international organizations, including huge activist organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, and the World Conservation Union, to participate. We also had the support of the United Nations, a host of global corporations, and major accounting and sustainability organizations everywhere. Leaders from around the world sent their best wishes and expressions of support. “Companies that win the public’s confidence and trust are open, visible, engaging, and create business value while delivering benefits to society and the environment,” wrote Bill Ford, the chairman of Ford Motor Company. “The Global Reporting Initiative guidelines … provide the disclosure framework that businesses need to report fully on their economic, environmental, and social performance.”
As I stood before the group that morning in the delegates’ dining room at the UN, I found it hard to get a grip on my emotions. In less than four years, we had taken an idea that seemed completely unreasonable and created a powerful new body that was already transforming the world economy. The guidelines had been translated into eight languages and were in use by hundreds of corporations; they were well on the way to becoming the standard for global measurement and performance.
Along with Timothy Wirth, the president of the United Nations Foundation, and the head of the United Nations Environment Programme, Klaus Töpfer, I was one of the main speakers. I started with a reference to the biblical story of the mustard seed, in which something impossibly small at the beginning grows into something impressively large at the end. How did that happen? I asked. “It grew whenever an individual human being decided to participate, to contribute something,” I told the group. “Every decision by every person to add an idea, to offer assistance, to articulate a critique in the spirit of improvement, helped it to grow.”
At the same time, this was still an inauguration, a beginning. We had started something important, but we were not finished. The challenges that we faced in the world were bigger than any one country or part of society; they reflected a challenge to our whole industrial civilization, as we attempted to create prosperity for the people without damaging the planet. I quoted a portion of a beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things …
We had engaged in the effort to create the GRI, I said, because even though we understood the value of work and growth and prosperity, we did not want to live in a world known only for being seared with trade and smeared with toil. We wanted to believe that human dignity and earthly beauty could also be protected and enhanced. “We have been bold,” I concluded, “but we must be bolder still.”
I stepped down from the podium—and thus from the chair of the first board—to an ovation, and I knew that one major piece of my life had just come to an end. I just didn’t realize how conclusive that end truly was or how hard would be the new challenges I was about to face.