A Song in the Night (28 page)

I went back to Harvard Divinity School and started teaching and planning the development of the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy into something bigger and more university-wide. After my experience in politics, my courses focused not just on what should be done but on
how
. It was perfectly acceptable to oppose a company’s policies on infant formula or South Africa, I pointed out to my students, but how could you transform that opposition into real improvements? What combination of power and persuasion could be applied to get people to change their minds and their actions?

In approaching these problems I was influenced by the
intensive course on negotiation that I took at Harvard Law School. Taught by the illustrious professor Roger Fisher and a team of talented faculty, the course was built on the groundbreaking insights of Fisher’s book with William Ury,
Getting to Yes
. The book revealed the inner structure of most disagreements—for example, that while most people argue about
positions
, they are governed more directly by their unarticulated and underlying
interests
. It swiftly occurred to me that the Divinity School, which tended to focus on the psychological tensions between two people, was missing a major opportunity to talk about how to manage and resolve conflict at the community level. I went back to my dean and proposed that I create a course called “Advocacy, Negotiation, and Reconciliation,” which would consist of two hours of theory and two hours of practice every week. He approved it, and suddenly I was teaching the skills that I had only just mastered.

In this course and in all the others I taught I made liberal use of guests from the outside world. During a class on the institutional relationships between churches and corporations, I invited two people to listen to the students make presentations about a particular dispute. One was a senior executive from a major chemical company. The other was Joan Bavaria, the founder of an organization called the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, or Ceres. Because she lived in the Boston area, she came for lunch beforehand at the Harvard Faculty Club. Within minutes we were fast friends, discussing not only all the points of our common history but all the things we wanted to see happen in the future.

In class, Bavaria did a brilliant job of discussing the challenges of negotiating with large companies about the environment. A few days later she called.

“I don’t know how much you know about what Ceres is doing these days,” she said, coming straight to the point, “but it has been a board-managed coalition since its inception. We are now ready to bring on a full-time executive director. I would like to sit down with you soon to discuss this job.”

Ceres had been formed in 1989 out of discussions among major investment leaders and pension funds on how to apply the lessons of the ongoing South African shareholder campaign to the environment. Ceres had become a powerful force in the aftermath of the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill that devastated Prince William Sound in Alaska; it had originated the definition of an “environmental ethic”—a code of conduct—for corporations modeled in some ways on the Sullivan Principles introduced in South Africa. Ceres had also pioneered the use of an environmental scorecard that asked companies to measure and report their performance against specific goals, and it used a combination of skillful persuasion and raw shareholder power to move companies to make substantial commitments to new environmental and energy plans.

Within a few more months I had made the jump, leaving Harvard Divinity School to become the full-time executive director of Ceres. I was the newest and most senior member of a staff of five, tucked away in cubicles in the back of Joan Bavaria’s investment shop. During my first six months, my desk was literally in the stockroom area, so that my phone
conversations with foundation program officers and business executives were often interrupted by staff members from the extended company entering the area to get pencils or use the copy machine. I did not even have a computer. I went to work during the day and did my computer work at home at night. To exchange files among our staff, we copied files to a floppy drive and tossed disks over the dividers between our desks.

Despite the modest resources, I realized that I was the head of an unusually broad coalition with enormous potential power. We were the only entity in the United States that brought together the grassroots power of environmental and union groups and the financial clout of major investors and pension funds. Our board and membership were made up of senior representatives of virtually all of America’s largest environmental groups: the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. We also included pension funds with hundreds of billions in endowment assets, such as those of both New York City and New York State, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, a large number of Roman Catholic orders and institutions, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. We had a strong tie to labor through the AFL-CIO. Over time the coalition added even more powerful allies, including the California state public employees and teachers funds, along with funds from Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, and many other denominations and states.

In addition to the unusual alliance between investors and environmental groups, two things made Ceres unique. The
first was that we engaged directly with corporations, asking them to commit to an environmental program, measure their performance, and disclose their results. Second, the size and expanse of the funds around the table meant that someone in our network was bound to hold stock in virtually any publicly traded company in America. Thus, for every issue we wanted to discuss we had a very large shareholder who would join us in ringing the doorbell of the company with a request to talk.

Corporations were initially hostile to engaging with us. Their lawyers thought that the firm should maintain maximum independence and combat every potentially encroaching force: state governments, federal regulators, private lawsuits, public-interest groups. When they looked at our ten proposed “Ceres Principles,” they saw nothing but trouble. If the principles were in any way binding, they would cause terrible new precedents and problems in the courts. If they were not binding, why go through the exercise of discussing and embracing them?

The principles are worth reprinting here as they appeared in the early 1990s. To some people these sounded like the bare minimum of environmental responsibility, and to others like an aggressive attack on free enterprise.

Before I had arrived, Joan Bavaria and some of the large shareholders had sat down with a few companies to talk about whether they might endorse the Ceres Principles. Some companies began to move in our direction. Robert Campbell, the CEO of Sunoco, an oil-refining firm, came up to Joan after one meeting and told her that he might be the head of an oil-refining and marketing company, but he shared many of her goals. And he didn’t think that there was anything wrong with a company setting targets and trying to meet them. “That’s how we do everything else in the firm,” he told Bavaria. “We pick a target, we decide how we are going to measure our performance against that target, and then we pursue it. This is pretty much the same.”

Joan was delighted to hear this. She had quickly learned that “we manage what we measure” was one of the most powerful mantras in modern business. Two things became clear from this simple phrase. If we could persuade a firm to measure and disclose its performance, we tapped into one of the most powerful internal mechanisms for lasting change within the corporation. However, the reverse was also true: if something was
not
measured, it often was impossible to manage. This fit
with everything I had learned since I was a boy about the relationship between sight and sound and words. If a person—or in this case an entire collection of people—had a specific word or measurement that he or she could systematically apply across a vast amount of behavior, then one could both see and change that practice. If not, the actions and consequences were invisible, even to insiders, and especially to anyone outside the organization. So creating change and agreement required developing the ability to imagine how one’s apparent opponents saw (or didn’t see) parts of the world. Sometimes this meant learning their vocabulary and using it in a way they could understand. Sometimes it meant teaching them a vocabulary that was new to them.

As the board of Ceres realized the power of the idea of measurement, we built our strategy around three steps that we believed could actually move corporate America on to a more environmentally sustainable path. Our process was straightforward. We asked senior executives at a corporation to commit to continuous environmental improvement in partnership with Ceres. Most corporations, in fact, believed in this. What executives fear is abrupt change: a sudden shift in the market, a major disruption in supply or technology, or the random imposition of a new regulation that would change their business model. In the phrase “continuous improvement,” we found words that they could embrace.

We then urged them, as a condition of their participation, to set up measurements, following the ten Ceres Principles, to see whether they were making progress. After many years of
negotiating with executives I learned that their initial reluctance to take on new challenges is often due not to a lack of energy or courage; instead, they want to take on only those challenges at which they have a reasonable chance of succeeding.

Corporate life is built around selecting a strategy, picking the right indicators, and then aggressively pursuing their targets. One of the problems with integrating the environment was that these ideas had no place in the vast scheme of company strategies, targets, tactics, internal investments, and compensation. If we could graft this new information and these new approaches onto the hugely powerful and effective corporate system for getting things done on an enormous scale, we knew we would have tapped an immense force.

Finally, it was important to ask companies not just to set targets and to measure their performance but to release that information to the public. We assumed that being required to show whether they had improved or slipped would prompt corporate leaders to pursue better results over the years. By releasing the information, the corporation was driving a deeper stake into the ground, not only with outside groups like the activists and investors who made up Ceres but also with the press, with their competitors, and, perhaps most important of all, with their boards of directors and their employees. We also believed that they would gain from the exercise by saving money through eliminating waste, by pushing themselves to innovate into new technologies, by winning new customers and developing new product lines. Environmental improvements
also inspired employees, who wanted to believe that they were going to work every day for a reason larger than their own personal paychecks. The positive experience would then strengthen their desire to intensify their efforts and their commitments.