The Sustainability Challenge

Mazur and Miles: Why is sustainability so important to Timberland?

Jeffrey Swartz: We operate our business around the notion that commerce and justice don’t need to be antithetical notions. We think we can make high-quality products and delight our shareholders, we think we can make consumers see that this is a really great company with really great products and create a context where people are proud to come to work and feel dignified in the work they do. And we can do that in a way that’s accountable in terms of running a for-profit business environmentally, socially and in terms of human rights. As a steward of the third generation, I know that if there wasn’t a mission at the heart of what we do it would be hard to sustain it.

There are two kinds of challenges in general. Challenge number one is: ‘I believe, but I can’t do what you can do. Because in my organisation the CEO doesn’t care as you care’. And the corollary to that question is: ‘Can you give me the math that says your investment in sustainable business practice pays off in the short term?’ But that assumes that every investment you make has to pay off in a year or two. So if you buy that assumption, you’re trapped.

When it comes to sustainability, yes, there are some obvious ones like change the lightbulbs. That’s what I always tell people when they get into the frame of mind that says ‘but the sky is so big and the stars are so far away and how can we do sustainability?’ Change the lightbulb!

I can’t bring the stars down and I can’t make the sky smaller. And so I don't know if you can optimise the business model from a sustainable perspective to the point of perfection but I do know that if your CFO is on the ball and he or she is paying attention, then you explain to me why your lighting fixtures wear out and aren’t generating cost savings. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not the same thing as saying we all have to move back into a cave and everything will be OK. This is straightforward: change the lightbulbs. The payout is clear and yet people don’t.

And, by the way, the core of the outcome of everybody changing the lightbulb is unpredictable in terms of its substance but clear in terms of its impact. Because if all of a sudden there’s a buck to be made in low energy lights, then there will be people thinking, OK, maybe I’ve missed the lightbulb thing but maybe I can get in early into something else. And then the market mechanism will create eco-systemic change. Someone’s got to go first. And someone’s got to be buying it. That takes faith and not intellect.

Take the solar array on my house in the suburbs. It added so much cost to the house somebody without my resources couldn’t do it. It would be irrational to do it. I told my kids we’re going to do it even though it’s irrational, because we can afford it and some day it will be rational. The only way it will be rational is if the market starts to engage. And I don’t argue with rational.

Then you read that retailers in America are putting solar arrays on their roof. This also shows what governments can do. None of them, including Timberland, would have done it without an incentive from the government. It will still be irrational; but at Timberland, we can make it palatably irrational.

As a CEO I get to make a choice about, and be accountable for, how many palatably irrational choices I make. If the sum of my choices is not palatably irrational, I get fired. Whereas if you make a palatably irrational choice about the solar array in California and then you make a palatably irrational choice to be less eco-friendly in another dimension, then you balance it out. It’s about transparency so no-one can think it is greenwashing. So we still have polyvinyl chloride - PVC - in some of our boots. It’s a terrible chemical. Yes, there is a way to take it out. But we can't afford to do it right now.

So those are the two big challenges. One is ‘prove it’. That’s a math point. The other is about ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’. In other words, pursuing the ‘best’ solution may end up doing less actual good than accepting a solution that, while not perfect, is effective.

With the latter, I raise the question by saying at the start: to be clear, we are ravagers and pillagers of the physical environment. We make boots and shoes and clothes for a living. We take rubber, which is a natural extract from a tree, and we turn it into a sole. It doesn’t happen without noise and light and energy and sweat, and our value chain encompasses the environment and the developing world. So we have human rights concerns. We have physical environmental concerns. We have energy and chemicals. It’s all a fundamental part of making boots and shoes and clothes. And so let me start from the point that it’s not perfect and never will be.

But we’ll also never relent in our drive to be better. Judge us on that basis and we can have a dialogue. Don’t throw a brick through my window. I hope instead what you’ll do, when you want a pair of shoes, is to see an array of choices in front of you and partially discriminate between the choices on the basis of Timberland’s commitment to be better.

Conversations with Green Gurus: The Collective Wisdom of Environmental Movers and Shakers by Laura Mazur and Louella Miles is available in hardback from John Wiley.