Paul Hawken's provocative approach to corporate strategy is more than just small talk.
At the age of 16, after he had already left home and high school to begin his true education on the streets of California's Bay Area, Paul Hawken apprenticed himself to a building contractor, a West Indian named Leonard Gordon. He taught Hawken how to swing a hammer and string electrical wire and master an array of craft skills. He also taught him how to read the signs and live by his wits.
"We were tearing down an old building once," Hawken recalls 22 years later. Hawken was inside whacking away at the walls of one of the upper floors. Suddenly, Gordon bellowed to Hawken that the building was about to collapse and that he should make a run for it. Hawken bounded a few strides to the open window and vaulted the sill to alight on the scaffolding just outside. The trouble is, the horizontal plank was missing. Hawken plunged 20 feet to the sandy ground.
As he shook off a daze and blinked away the stars, Hawken realized he had just been tricked by one of his mentor's object lessons. "Aha, Mister Hawken," cackled Gordon in his West Indies lilt, "Pay attention!"
Hawken has taken Gordon's deceptively simple advice. He has paid attention, close attention, ever since. In fact, he owes his entrepreneurial success to his facility for observing the world and its economic shifts with a special clarity and then applying those observations to the mundane, day-to-day decisions of business.
Hawken's guileless face and lanky frame don't suggest the rib-crunching vigor of his building-trade days, but seeing the 38-year-old entrepreneur in action in his catalog marketing company, Smith & Hawken Ltd. of Mill Valley, Calif., gives a sense of the subtler, agile sort of toughness in him. Clad for the Marin County spring in jeans and a knit shirt, Hawken plays his position in the busy office as if he were a free wheeling shortstop. Up on his feet, with his knees loose and his hands up, with his jaw working and his amused eyes sweeping a 300-degree range, Hawken rocks on the soles of his running shoes. He seems ready to move in any direction to field the tasks as they arise: an employee's question, a balky computer terminal, a ringing telephone, a customer in the retail store a few steps away. The strength in Hawken isn't brute; it is tensile, tempered to bend, but to snap back with surprising speed and force.
"Don't let the gentle manner fool you," cautions a friend, writer David Harris, a graduate of Stanford University and the La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas. Harris did time for draft resistance, and he passed some of it by competing at penitentiary handball. A few years ago, he taught the game to Hawken. Says Harris: "On the court, he's an absolutely ferocious son-of-a-bitch."
But Hawken is willing to credit and follow a spiritual and even mystical dimension in life and to use it in business, even if he can't record it in a business plan. Thus, as he pays attention and reads the signs around him, he is open to heeding evidence as concrete as the earth we walk on or as abstract as the music of the spheres. This unusual cast of mind and diverse body of learning is what accounts for the three sides of his remarkable success:
* He is co-founder of a highly successful company, Smith & Hawken, an importer and direct marketer of high-quality garden tools. Its success lies in its novel approach to marketing. As Hawken puts it, "Our marketing strategy is really an educational strategy." Through a meticulously detailed catalog and an unusually well-informed group of employees handling customer service, the company provides its actual and prospective customers with a body of information on methods and schools of thought in gardening and on the tools themselves -- where they come from, how they are made, how they can be used, why they are good. "Then we just sit back and let our customers decide," Hawken says. Enough of them have made the Smith & Hawken decision in its four years to bring its annual revenues from $40,000 to a projected $4 million.
* He is creating the means for bringing a strategic outlook to small businesses. To Hawken, strategic thinking isn't and shouldn't be the sole preserve of the large corporation. Individuals and small businesses should and do think and plan in strategic terms. Through his writings and his speeches, and through his own consultations to scores of smaller companies, Hawken has shaped and tested a simple but distinctive set of strategic principles. These can be found in his current book, The Next Economy, which sold around 40,000 copies in hard-cover and has just been issued in paperback ($3.50; Ballantine Books; New York). The book argues that smaller companies are particularly well suited to capitalize on the reshaped world economy that is emerging, and it shows small companies how to make use of that advantage. Hawken's book also caught the eye of the corporate world, garnering favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
* Finally, he is a philosopher in the formal sense of the word. Entrepreneurs cite many factors for their success: a brilliant idea, elbow grease, stamina, good timing, the right location, patient creditors, dedicated employees. A few will also cite such intangibles as faith in God or in themselves. Rarely, however, will an entrepreneur say, "What has worked for me is my philosophy." Hawken says precisely this. And this is where his story should begin.
At 19, Hawken returned to the Bay Area after a trip abroad and a tour as a civil rights worker in the South to enroll for the 1965-66 academic year at San Francisco State University's experimental college. Plagued from birth by a chronic health problem, Hawken that year became interested in natural foods as a possible cure.
