Innovative thinking can provide the solutions that will revolutionise business

I come from the private sector. My job has always been to find solutions and put them into practice, beginning with my own company. The transformation of Interface is, I believe – and I hope will continue to be – a phenomenon of the first order, and provides ultimate meaning to the company’s original creation.

It is a business-school case study brought to life, and one that other businesses would be smart to take a good look at. For what company, what economy, what civilisation can exist without the services provided by nature: air; water purification and distribution (the hydrologic cycle); soil creation and maintenance, thus food; energy; raw materials; climate regulation; pollination; seed dispersal; nutrient cycling; an ultraviolet radiation shield; flood and insect control; and net primary production, the product of photosynthesis?

Without any of them, provided by nature, there would be no economy in the first place.

Beginning at the headwaters of my personal journey, framed to some unknowable extent from my earliest days growing up in tiny West Point, Georgia, to that milestone moment of my epiphany in 1994, I have come at last to a remarkable and fulfilling place: a perch more than halfway to the summit of a mountain whose top I could scarcely imagine when my associates and I began this climb.

From this place, this perch, I can see clearly what we might accomplish as we shed the kind of thinking that had us nearly, but not quite, trapped. I can spot the dangers – and there are plenty of them – but I see even more opportunities. I have seen remarkable examples of the kind of new thinking the industrial systems absolutely must have.

I have seen a mechanical engineer design a new production line to manufacture the same product at the same rate as one he designed ten years earlier. Except this time he designs it to use 93% less horse power (one-fourteenth as much!) by using large straight pipes on one level rather than small, curved ones that span several levels. Friction losses are cut dramatically, allowing for small pumps rather than large ones.

Doing the job well 

And yes, the new production line cost less to build than the one built 10 years earlier, and far less to operate. He has practised whole-system optimisation, in which getting the job done well has replaced just getting the job done.

I have seen another factory engineer ask his counterpart at city hall how much methane gas was being produced at the local landfill. The city engineer checks, and he is amazed at how much there is, and at how offensive it is to the nearby African American neighbourhood and the people who live there, in what Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable Bronx, calls an environmental injustice zone.

The two engineers collaborate, and a year later a public-private partnership is born. The city commits $3m to capture and pipe the methane to a factory. The factory commits $50,000 to adapt its boilers. The two agree on a price for gas that is 30% less than natural gas. With a calculated life of the landfill gas project of 40 years, that translates into a financial value for the city (at present value) of some $35m for a $3m investment.

As methane is drawn down, the capacity of the landfill is expanded, allowing the city to postpone opening a new one for an estimated 15 years. The smell of methane that used to blanket the adjoining neighbourhoods? It’s gone. And the earth is spared enough greenhouse gas emissions (methane is especially potent) to render the engineer’s factory entirely climate neutral.

And I’ve seen the marketing arm of that factory realise the appeal of a climate- neutral product and dub it Cool Carpet, and I have watched that product become a huge success, contributing incremental sales and lifting the company’s image in ways no amount of advertising ever could.

I’ve also seen a factory manager in southern California muse over the possibility of using solar photovoltaics to produce some of his plant’s electricity. He uncovers state and federal assistance for such a system, but the accountants (who are only looking at costs) tell him it still won’t “pencil out”. That manager doesn’t give up. His sales people are sure that a product made with the help of sunlight will generate new sales, and they are right.

The result? The solar-power system connects 120 kilowatts of peak voltage to the California grid, and generates enough energy to tuft a million square yards of Solarmade carpet, which generates incremental sales the accountant overlooked in his preoccupation with costs.

I have seen a product designer, frustrated with the lack of progress in implementing sustainable design, plead, “Let’s do something, anything!” So his team redesigns a product to use 4% less of its most expensive and energy-intensive material component (in this case, DuPont nylon).

The redesigned product performs well in all the usual tests, but an engineer is still curious. He wonders what the effect of that 4% savings means upstream (in other words, incorporating the embodied energy expended by the maker of that nylon). So he asks DuPont a question DuPont has never been asked before, and gets a very big number for an answer.

When that number is applied theoretically across the entire product line, it turns out that eliminating just 4% of the nylon used each year saves enough energy (not used by DuPont) to run the designer’s entire factory for half a year. I have seen that saving grow over the years, until that theoretical 4% reduction now stands at a real 17%, and it even has a name all its own: dematerialisation through conscious design, a concept with far-reaching implications for a voracious industrial system.

Innovation that delivers 

I’ve seen a multidisciplinary team of engineers, production people, and product designers collaborate to find a new way to produce patterned carpet. The old way was to print the pattern on a plain-coloured carpet base. But printing was very water intensive and required harsh dyes, energy to fix the dyes, washing to remove the excess (where the dyes become chemically hazardous waste), energy-intensive drying to remove the wash water, and chemical treatment to the wash water and dyes before they could be released into a river.

Innovation results in a patented invention, a new process that uses a computerised tufting machine to place yarn of specific colours precisely to form intricate patterns. The old wet-printing machines are scrapped, the bridge burned, the investment written off, and the old technology abandoned.

I have seen our people invent their way out of a water-, chemical-, and energy-intensive problem, and into a family of new products that give us a proprietary edge in our marketplace rather than a competitive handicap.

One of the first products to benefit from the new tufting machines has its origins in an outrageous assignment issued by our chief designer to his design team: go out into a forest and see how nature designs a floor covering. Looking to nature as a mentor and inspiration, that team spends a day studying forest floors and streambeds. They find it to be chaotic – no two sticks, no two stones, no two leaves, no two square feet are the same.

Yet there is a pleasant harmony in the disorder. They return to their studios and design a carpet tile in which no two tile faces are alike. All are similar, but none are identical, contrary to the prevailing industrial paradigm that demands cookie-cutter perfection from every mass-produced item. Nature, the inspiration, is anything but uniform, but she is very effective. This new product is given a name, Entropy,and in a year and a half it rises to the top of the bestseller list, faster than any other product ever has before.

Inspiration from nature

I have seen another design team address a weird challenge: how does a gecko cling to a ceiling?

The question arises in a session intended to figure out how to completely eliminate glue from the installation of carpet tiles. Glue uses harsh, petro-derived chemicals and can be a devilish source of an “off-gas” – a volatile organic compound – long after a carpet is installed. Not a pleasant smell, or a healthy place to work.

Though the answer to how a gecko manages to anchor himself is found in the most unlikely places – van der Waals forces – and is not the answer to the glue question, it gets people thinking new thoughts about the problem, and a solution is found: a small, 2.5 inch square of releasable adhesive tape is applied to the underside of tiles where the corners meet, with the sticky side facing up. This way all the tiles are connected laterally, not to the floor but to one another, and their own combined weight keeps them anchored in place. It accomplishes this using the special tape on less than 2% of each tile’s undersurface to produce a glue-and-chemical-free installation.

The bottom line? One more market differentiator for the company and its products, and no more glue fumes for its customers or workers.

New thought 

Upside-down thinking? At Interface this has become normal. I have seen firsthand how all of these examples evolved naturally from our Mission Zero drive. And they all represent new thinking, important aspects of sustainability in action on the factory floor:

• Whole system optimisation: big, short, straight, level pipes and small motors, not the opposite.
• Waste as “food”: polluting methane gas converted to a revenue stream, an energy source, a greenhouse gas offset, Cool Carpet, a multimillion-dollar cost avoidance for a city, and an environmental injustice removed.
• In-the-round investment decisions: justified by more than cost; considering customers, market demand, the value of leadership, and incremental sales as factors in the go/no-go decision.
• Dematerialisation through conscious design and upstream thinking (the real leverage may be up there).
• Burn the bridges: abandoning high-impact technologies for low-impact, sustainable technologies that also yield better, more innovative product designs.
• Biomimicry: using nature’s time- tested engineering to create products that appeal to our deep appreciation of the natural world.
• Thinking upside-down.

As I have heard environmental scientist and writer Amory Lovins say countless times, “the best way to have good new ideas is just to stop having bad old ideas”.

This is sustainability in action. Seventeen years of near total immersion in it has provided me with these and many other insights. These examples of new thinking are very definitely drawn from real life and represent the before-and-after views of reality that the people of Interface have experienced on our transformative journey.

As big as the challenge of sustainability is for one company like yours or mine – newer, better products and processes that help us in our climb toward sustainability rather than hold us back – a far bigger challenge remains for all of society. How in the world will we do it?

I am convinced that having a sustainable society for the indefinite future – whether that means seven generations or a thousand or more – depends totally and absolutely on the vast ethically-driven redesign of the industrial system about which I have written, triggered by an equally vast mind-shift.

But – and this is the hard part – that shift must happen one mind at a time, one organisation at a time, one technology at a time, one building, one company, one university curriculum, one community, one region, one industry at a time, one product at a time until we look around one day and see that there is a new norm at work, and that the entire system has been transformed.

I cling to an observation by Paul Paydos, an associate in our now-divested fabrics business. “I have never known an ex-environmentalist. Once you get it, you cannot unget it.”

The movement is like a ratchet; it only moves in one direction. There’s every reason for hope in that observation. By reading this you have created the possibility that perhaps another mind will be added to the green side of the balance sheet and the ratchet will go “click”.

Ray C Anderson is founder and chairman of floorings manufacturer Interface, Inc.

This essay is an excerpt from Anderson’s recently updated book “Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist”, which was first published in 2009, by St Martin’s Press in the US.