Cut the fluff and climb

Seeing a well established, NASDAQ-quoted carpet manufacturer on the list of On Purpose placements, one might be forgiven for asking if On Purpose has any clue what social enterprise is about. Yet after taking a closer look, the person could be shocked again to find out that there really are examples of corporations that are serious about placing “doing good” at the centre of their core business.

Since the early 1990's Interface, the carpet manufacturer, has been climbing Mount Sustainability. Long before green wash tide flooded billboards and annual reports, Interface launched its expedition to reach zero negative impact on the environment by 2020. And as the slopes became steeper closer to the summit, they started realising that there was a social element, too, and it would have an important part to play in getting to the sustainable top.

Working for InterfaceFLOR on innovations around social sustainability has been a great learning experience. It is refreshing to see a profit maximising corporation of a decent size and age being dead serious about its mission to become fully sustainable; to experience the culture of the mission, starting with visionary leadership and cascading down to the very bottom; to hear the chairman always focusing his speech on the long-term mission and to find out that almost every single employee has a clear opinion of what it is about and is proud to be part of it. Sounds nice, but still a bit old school, top-down way of steering things? Sure, that's the legacy. But Interface is slowly finding its way towards greater participation by employees and the general public as well. It understands its culture must become open and inclusive if its mission is not to be a joke.

The credibility of the culture is only reinforced by the company's strong push towards transparency and measuring impact, or, as their marketing department would say, “Cut the fluff” and show the product life cycle data. But it is not just the product impact data that they try to make transparent. Their reporting on their progress towards the 2020 mission might make some charities feel ashamed. So, has Interface found the holy grail of social enterprise: earning healthy profits by focusing on “mission first”? Well, no.

Interface comes from the profit making side of the line, and profit needs to be sustained. They are working hard to find the points of synergy where mission and profit reinforce each other, but it is tough and no one really knows how it actually works. In practice it means that whenever a new project proposal is assessed, there is a question about how it delivers on each of the two dimensions. And often it costs extra time and investment. Yet somehow, the money and effort spent on the mission seems to be coming back - in the good will of people and stakeholders, in employees' loyalty, and in the end in sales.

Interface has no doubt a long and tough climb ahead of them, and there might be only few in the expedition with a clear vision of the summit and beyond. Yet there is one achievement none can take away from them. However half blind, clumsy, and exhausted they might appear on the slope of Mount Sustainability, they have pulled up with them whole industries quite some way up from the lowlands of indiscriminate destruction. No, Interface is not a poster child of a social enterprise, but it is an example inspiring confidence that some corporations might actually become one day genuinely restorative to their human societies and more-than-human ecosystems. And that is what social enterprise should be about, isn't it?