A Conversation with Ray Anderson
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)

Ray Anderson is the founder and CEO of Interface, Inc. (www.interfaceinc.com), the world leader in the design and production of modular carpet.  Ray has embarked on a corporate mission to “be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: people, process, product, place and profits – by 2020 – and in doing so, to become restorative through the power of influence.”  He’s leading a worldwide effort to pioneer the processes of sustainable development.

Today, Ray is recognized as one of the world’s most environmentally progressive chief executives, having served as cochairman of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development during the Clinton administration; and was recognized by Mikhail Gorbachev with a Millennium Award from Global Green in 1996.  We asked Ray about the nature and origins of his business, Interface. 

“Back in 1973, the carpet industry was very much broad loom-based,” Ray recalled.  “We started Interface as a new company to make the world’s first free-lay (no glue required) carpet tile.  That turned out to be a great platform for an environmentally sensitive product.  One of its selling features was extended useful life because damaged tiles could be selectively replaced without having to rip up a whole room. 

“Modular carpeting was a revolutionary idea.  We had to create a market where none existed.  You might say that launch was sort of a warm-up for the main event twenty years later, when we put Interface on the course toward sustainability.  But at the time it was pure economics. Carpet tiles were merely the basis for a return on investment.”

We asked if there was a personal catalyst that caused Ray to transform his company to a model of corporate stewardship.  “There probably was a lurking sense of legacy in my subconscious. I was sixty years old.  The company had succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams.  The next generation of management was onboard and battle tested and it was a time when my thoughts might have turned to retirement to the mountains or the seashore.  At the same time, I was searching myself to see if I had a continuing role in the company I had founded.  And then we began to hear this question from our customers, ‘What’s your company doing for the environment?’

“I was not aware of any egregious things that we were doing to the environment.  We were in compliance and that, to me, was sufficient at that point.  Why didn’t everyone just appreciate our products for what they were – the best in the field?  And why were these customers asking about the environment?  I didn’t get it.  But the questions kept coming, and then this guy in California named John Picard, who was an environmental consultant, left a book on my desk called The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken.  It was a propitious moment because I had to make a speech I didn’t want to make and I didn’t have a clue what to say.  I could not get beyond ‘we obey the law and company bylaws,’ which was not sufficient and not what people were looking for.  I was in a frustrated mood.  I picked the book up with no idea what it was about and just started thumbing, and I came to a chapter “The Death of Birth,” and it hit me right between the eyes.  It was an epiphany experience.  And my epiphany was that I was a plunderer.  I was part of this problem.  I realized that this company that I’m so proud of, that had succeeded on so many levels, had missed a key measurement of success all along.  It totally eluded us.  I felt this sense of legacy, which was ‘what’s this thing, this child prodigy of mine, going to grow up to be?’”

Curious, we asked Ray what happened after his epiphany.  “Well, I needed to voice what I’d realized.  And I made a speech to a task force that had been assembled from our businesses around the world, and I used Hawken’s material and had that little group of people in tears because I was in tears.

“From there, we defined this challenge as a mountain to climb, a mountain taller than Everest that we’ve got to figure out.  It took us two years to understand that there were seven faces to the mountain.  So how do you climb that mountain?  You climb every face and you meet at the top.  That summit represents zero footprint on the environment.  ‘Up to Zero!’  That was the challenge.

“So the first thing was to send a task force back to their businesses to begin to sensitize their associates and their individual businesses to get something going.  And it became a journey of a thousand miles with one little step at a time, and we finally figured out if you do something, you feel really good about that, then you go do something else, and then it builds on itself.

“We had a thousand things to do.  The first face of the mountain is eliminating waste.  We had four hundred teams working all through our company on waste elimination – many, many hundreds of projects.  And we realized early on that the way we’ll pay for this whole mountain climbing adventure was by the cost avoidance we were able to create through waste elimination.

“As we identified the other faces of the mountain, we realized almost every one of them was a technological challenge.  Eliminating harmful emissions means re-engineering the processes.  If you’re going to go to renewable energy, the cheapest energy there is, it’s a real challenge.  You have to become energy efficient to reduce energy usage.  These successes built upon themselves.  We’ve done a lot with efficiencies, and a little bit with renewable sources, and a lot with offsets.  All told, we’ve reduced our use of energy derived from fossil fuels by 43 percent.”

Impressed by the progress of Ray and his teams, we asked where businesses of the future are headed.  “I think with any paradigm shift, the early movers win.  Sustainability started out as an altruistic goal – the right thing for us to do – but overnight it became clear that it was also the smart thing to do.  It was a better way to make a bigger profit.  We just woke up to the benefits faster than other people.  You always have the early movers, then you have the fast followers, then at the other end you have the never-followers, and that’s who the regulatory system is for, to push them along to catch up.

“Then you have the vast middle ground of people who eventually move, too, when they see it’s the thing to do.  This is the way it happens in any paradigm shift.  We consider ourselves among the earliest of the early movers and we’re benefiting enormously from it.  The goodwill of the marketplace is unbelievable.  Our costs are down, not up, disproving the myth that sustainability is a costly thing to do.  If you take an industrial enterprise like ours and approach it in the round as a total system, you find that savings here can fund improvements there, and, overall, you optimize the total system as opposed to optimizing a component of the system.

“We’ve approached it in the round with the idea of optimizing the total system, which means we’re not sucking every drop of blood out of waste savings, we’re reinvesting some of it into renewable energy and recycling technologies.  In my view, the triple bottom line all comes together in one superior financial bottom line if you do it right.  And that is what will attract other industries.

“Customers ultimately determine your success, and this is a way to engage customers on a different level.  Your people make a difference.  This is the way to galvanize people around a higher purpose.  Your products can be better because the whole sustainability approach opens up undreamed of sources of inspiration.  This is a better way to make a bigger profit.  And all the rest, the other two bottom lines fall into place as means to an end, and the end is to show a truly better industrial model.

“This is the flip you’re talking about in this book.  And believe me, it will happen because the marketplace will make it happen.  Our customers responded positively to what we were doing.  Our competitors woke up, and they all had to do something.  Everybody is trying to get a little greener because the marketplace is now demanding it.  So we shifted a market, and we’ve begun to shift an industry.  Our ideal is to be so successful that we begin to shift the whole industrial system.  Businesses need to stop thriving at the Earth’s expense with their traditional take-make-waste approach to production.

 “Other industries are making progress,” Ray notes.  “The aluminum industry has done a lot to recapture its products from the field, significantly eliminating waste and saving energy through recycling.  There are wonderful technologies emerging in the automotive industry, like the hybrid gas and electric drives that Toyota and now Ford and others are beginning to offer.  These are huge shifts.”

Does Ray see most future gains springing from voluntary customer and industry efforts?  “I also think government regulation has a huge role to play,” responded Ray.  “We’re in an economic system that largely ignores externalities in its pricing.  Companies are practically encouraged to externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow them to.  Regulatory compliance and penalties at least partially force industries to reflect external costs in the prices they charge for their products.  They have the effect of truing the market a little bit, but not nearly enough.  We’ll never have an honest market until we get prices to reflect each product’s full cost – including societal and environmental costs.  For example, what should the price of oil be today?  Easily $200/barrel, if the costs of the war in the Middle East and the impacts of global warming were included in the price.  At that honest price, consumer demand would drive the market in a constructive direction. 

“An enlightened taxation system could true up prices.  It could create an honest market by shifting taxes from good things to bad things.  If the price of each barrel of oil was $200, of which $150 was tax, that tax revenue could fund a more enlightened transportation policy or the development of renewable energy – particularly in the automobile area, where the gasoline is used.  Wait a minute,’ you say.  ‘I don’t want to pay more for gasoline!’  Well, at the same time income taxes could be reduced by a comparable amount.  That would be an example of shifting taxes from good things (like our income) to bad things (like global warming) in a revenue-neutral way that would change the incentives.  It could change the world as we know it.”

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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.

To read more about The Flip and additional interviews from other luminaries, experts and bestselling authors, please visit www.theflip.net

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