The Industrialist

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It has not all been smooth sailing for Interface since the transition to sustainability, but Anderson blames only the business cycle. The recession of 2001 hit the company and the entire industry hard, when new office space construction declined by more than a third. Interface's stock fell from about $20 to as low as $2.66; it has recovered significantly since then and was trading early this fall at about $13 a share. "We never thought for a minute about abandoning sustainability," Anderson says.

These days Anderson spends much of his time on the road--151 speeches last year--spreading the gospel of sustainability. Typically, he will acknowledge whatever laudatory introduction he's been given and say, "I prefer to describe myself in simpler terms. I'm a husband, a father, and an industrialist. Some people call me a 'radical' industrialist, but I want to assure you that I am as competitive and profit-minded as anyone in this room." He goes on to offer the story of his conversion, an evocation of environmental crisis, and the description of a credo for industry. His inventory of the destruction of nature builds with a quiet force, but in truth, the environment has more thunderous Jeremiahs, more lyrical poets than Anderson. His message carries the peculiar gravity of someone whose life and company have been changed by his convictions. "I am a recovering plunderer," he says, "and an organization of more than 5,000 people, daily, is instrumental in that recovery."

According to his mentor Paul Hawken, it is Anderson's practicality that is his most impressive aspect. "Ray approaches things like an applications engineer. He didn't just look around, he said, 'Okay, what can we do?' and he took it step by step. Interface is in the details, at least a thousand small substantive initiatives that accumulate into a system."

What began as a response to customer inquiries has developed into a philosophy of business and indeed of economics, a philosophy that puts Anderson at odds with a lot of mainstream thought. In the Church of Capitalism, Ray Anderson manages to be both a faithful parishioner and a heretic.

If there is a single key economic concept in Anderson's thinking it is contained in the term "externalities"--all those costs of doing business that inure to society but never get charged to anyone's bottom line. If you figure in the externalities, he says, "the true cost of a barrel of oil is about $200."

In the book he published in 1999, Mid-Course Correction, Anderson takes a personal, even an impassioned view of the deceit built into the market economy: "…[T]he market, in its pricing of exchange value without regard to cost or use value, is, at the very least, opportunistic and permissive, if not dishonest. It will allow the externalization of any cost that an unwary, uncaring, or gullible public will permit to be externalized--caveat emptor in a perverse kind of way. My God! Am I a thief, too?"

"I am a recovering plunderer," Anderson says, "and an organization of more than 5,000 people, daily, is instrumental in that recovery."

There is a certain mystery about Ray Anderson's life story. When he had his environmental awakening he was already 60 years old. Lots of successful people have seen the error of their ways at that time of life, and have slipped away quietly to do good. Why did he put himself through all of this? Maybe you have to be an entrepreneur, a founder, to understand it. "Interface is my life," he remarked when asked recently about his decision. "And I think the greatest contribution I can make is to continue to lead this process that puts us at the top of the mountain. I'm always talking about climbing the mountain. Someone asked me the other day what I want to see when I get to the top. I said, I want to see hordes and hordes of people following us. This whole effort is about raising awareness."

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