By Paul Dolan
Today it's different. The corporation remains a great vehicle for generating wealth and spreading it around. It's the world that has changed. Nonrenewable resources are running out. Economic imbalances are becoming social, political, and even military threats to world order. Nothing takes place in isolation, especially not in a world with a twenty-four-hour news cycle. We now see that there are more stakeholders in a business than its owners, and the interests of the various stakeholders can diverge sharply.
The new possibility for business is to see this as a positive, not negative. Business has resources, organization, an orientation toward goals and results--everything we need to help make the world a better place. It may be that business is now the most powerful institution on Earth, the one institution capable of steering humanity onto profitable pathways that don't lead to humanity's demise. For business to play that role, we need to shift our awareness and act from a new premise: that the business of business is sustaining its long-term success.
So what does sustainable success look like?
For me, a successful sustainable business is one that provides steady shareholder returns while improving the quality of life of its workers, the communities it calls home, and the environment it touches. Its strategic perspective reaches out beyond the next four quarters, beyond the next five years, to consider what's ahead for the next generation. It is prosperous without being wasteful. It grows without mortgaging its future. It shares its discoveries without giving up its leadership. A successful business lives by its principles, and each new challenge is an opportunity to express those principles more fully, not abandon them conveniently.
Today I can understand what sets Fetzer's way of working apart from most other businesses. Here are the distinguishing features, which I believe any organization can emulate.
At Fetzer, we proceed from the principle that we are part of a huge, interconnected web of relationships. None of us is alone. Every one of us, all our communities, and all our businesses share one planet and one future. All our actions, and their consequences, remain inside this larger system, reverberating and creating new consequences--for better or worse.
Everything in life gets its meaning from its context. We used to think that the larger system we live in, planet Earth, offered us an unlimited natural wealth. Now we see diminishing resources and accelerating species extinction. One of the first things we did at Fetzer Vineyards was to consciously set a context that inspired people to respond, in a personal way, to the challenge of building a sustainable business. With the right culture, sustainability shifted from a concept to concerted action; it was woven into the fabric of the company, not dictated from above.
One of the turning points for us was when people began shifting from accountability to responsibility--from delivering the predefined results in their job descriptions to taking up the larger challenge of transforming the business. Leaders can inspire that shift by seeing people as the source of sustainability, not a resource for it, and by constantly acknowledging their contributions.
Once we saw our business within a larger system, once we had a context for making a difference, and once we were encouraged to make that difference in our jobs, everyone at Fetzer found a new source of personal and organization power. The source of that power was integrity. Living what we knew about the land, our people, and our community generated a wealth of new understanding--a virtuous cycle of knowledge and empowerment. Now that we see our examples can inspire and enable others, we share whatever we can.
Many companies are oriented toward short-term goals rather than a larger purpose. Sustainability requires that we orient ourselves toward the larger purpose, because this orientation will naturally organize the process for achieving it. At Fetzer, we create the future by visualizing the future and then painting a vivid picture of new possibilities and managing our business from that perspective.
Many businesses have taken positions on the environment, or social issues. We have found that to really make an idea's time come, we have to take more than a position. We have to take a stand. Positions are relative and reactive, stands are absolute and proactive. Now that our business has taken a stand for sustainability, everyone in the company is personally engaged, responsible for its realization, and open to whatever path that completion might take. Taking a stand publicly produced immediate results in the wine industry, by expanding people's understanding of what's possible for them, their companies, and their world.
I'll be exploring each of these distinguishing features of sustainable business in its own chapter. Some readers might find one or more principles that they can begin applying and incorporating into their business right away. Others might take more time to think and talk about. The most important thing is to explore them for yourself and discover how they can serve you in the cause of sustainable business.
