VALUES AS STRATEGY

What to Do When Being the Alternative Isn’t Enough

I worked with Seventh Generation for a number of years, guiding them through a transition that shook the company to its core. Seismic growth and high-level hires from global consumer package goods companies had fractured the previously close-knit culture, bringing collaboration, and sometimes civility, to a standstill. I got to know every one of the Seventh Generation team members through deep and difficult conversations, despite the company’s penchant for spitting out advisors. 

Like most organizations I’ve worked with, their instinct was to look for answers from somewhere else, even though the wisdom, and the reward, came from knowing themselves better. That’s why one of the foundational goals of our effort was to help the company reflect together, and articulate a new purpose, big enough to include everyone in it, yet concrete enough to be actionable. 

Everyone at Seventh Generation was drawn to work each day because the company believed in, and lived, the principles it was founded upon: a commitment to behave in a way that would benefit future generations. But as our conversations deepened, what became clear was that no scale of success as a “green” company would gratify them. Their ambitions were loftier; they wanted to change their status as an alternative choice.

They imagined supermarket aisles where products that didn’t reek of toxic chemicals were the standard offering; where “environmentally friendly” products were not relegated to a short shelf  — and where green products weren’t an expensive nice-to-have for those who could afford them. Their highest ambition wasn’t to win the green category, it was to eliminate the need for a green category altogether. Success, for them, meant seeing their values become simply the way things should be. In other words they wanted to be “normal.”

That insight has stayed with me. 

People who have dedicated their lives to sustainability, environmentalists, humanists, liberals, whatever we want to call ourselves, work very hard to distinguish our actions and principles from those who don’t share our commitment. We invent our own language, form our own clubs, read each other’s writing, buy our clothes from the same places. We take some comfort in believing that, while we may not be winning in the battle to save life on earth, we are morally superior to those who believe it’s not a priority. We can pretend that’s not true, but it is, including for me. 

What we can no longer pretend is that it’s working. Defining ourselves through difference has helped marginalize the values we want to be mainstream. 

So I wonder, at this moment when our work is under attack, when we are labeled far worse than “other,” when so many principled organizations have gone quiet about their values, and people who share this work inside those big, quiet companies are lonely, just where the creative opportunity within this ugly antipathy toward our values is hiding.

That’s what creativity is: the ability to recognize a larger reality beyond what we’ve been taught to expect, and then imagine the possibilities it affords. 

In this case, the opportunity is to treat values not only as statements of belief, but as instruments of perception. Values inform what we notice. They change the questions we ask, who we listen to, the challenges we deem worth overcoming and the opportunities we are open to seeing.

Seventh Generation’s insight came after many years of struggling to become the most successful “green” company ever. To hold tight to its unique principles and not compromise. Their insight changed them. It illuminated their path forward and inspired different thinking. They had a new framework to evaluate what products to develop, where to sell, how to price, whom to partner with. Most important of all, who to be.

Values are energy. When applied strategically, they become capabilities. Values and success are not binary choices, but parts of the same whole. There is lots of evidence that companies that create social value can also outperform financially , but perhaps the more interesting question is how. How can leaders see, invent and thrive because of their values, not in spite of them? 

There’s a lesson in this for me, too.

I’ve spent much of my life arguing that values shouldn’t sit apart from the practical business of making things happen. They should be tested there. If values really are a source of imagination, invention and economic possibility, they belong in the room where strategy is determined, products are conceived, investments are evaluated and difficult decisions are made.

Bucky Fuller proposed that the best way to change a system is to build an alternative that is more compelling. I agree that is how transformation starts. But the next problem after the alternative has been built is how we make it disappear into simply what is normal. That’s how transformation succeeds.

That’s the work Cheryl Kiser and I have been doing, separately and together, for most of our professional lives, with leaders and cohorts at Fortune 50 companies, entrepreneurs and everyone in between.

And this winter, at CENTRO in Mexico City, we’re going to put what we’ve learned to work around a question and an exec ed course to answer it:

What becomes possible when values stop being something an organization stands for and become a force it knows how to use?

We’ll begin together in Mexico City and finish the course online. 

Here’s where to find out more. And here is where to ask more questions.