Excerpt
In 1985, our family sold M&M Supermarkets, our grocery business of forty-five years. It was time. It’s a tough business, based on slim margins of between 1 and 2 percent. My father, Norton Melaver, had been running the company since college, had grown the business from one small downtown store to a chain of fourteen supermarkets around Savannah, and he was tired. At a time when independents were closing left and right in the presence of major chains, our business had two-thirds of the local market. When our family (six of us: my parents, Norton and Betty Melaver, my two sisters and I, and Millie Melaver, my father’s sister) sold M&M Supermarkets, we discovered that we didn’t just sell a business. We parted company with something that was closely associated with all of us.
We discovered something else as well: We had been in the real estate business all along, developing stores and warehouses that we then operated. We also discovered that we didn’t all like the real estate business very much. In fact, our family was split between those who felt we should become a socially responsible real estate company (whatever that was) and those who felt that as long as we gave back to the community, how we made our profits wasn’t an issue; means versus ends.
Our family would come together in the late 1980s for quarterly meetings and argue about doing real estate differently. There were tenants some family members felt we should not rent to, places we shouldn’t develop, ways of building that we shouldn’t imitate. In the meantime, I was trying to shape consensus from the two sides of this familial debate. Shape is a misnomer. What I was trying to do was placate Tovah, the elder of my two younger sisters. You might have a member of your own family like my sister Tovah: someone who comes to a family gathering—Thanksgiving or Christmas/Hanukkah or New Year’s—and serves as the conscience of the family, reminding the rest of us of our responsibilities regarding social and environmental justice.
And quite frankly, back then, fifteen or twenty years ago, I didn’t want to hear it. I was just starting out overseeing the company in the early nineties, and here was my little sister popping into town every three months saying she disliked what the real estate world was doing to our communities, to our land. She disliked the sprawl that put people in cars for major parts of the day. She couldn’t stand the fact that every development she saw—whether it was an office or industrial park, a retail shopping center or mall, or a residential community—all looked the same. She hated the idea of cutting down trees; not just clear-cutting a site, but cutting down any trees at all.
Here I was trying to learn a new business. I wanted this business to be successful and I was determined that this business—the legacy of my grandmother and father—was not going to tank on my watch. About the last thing I wanted was for my sister to look over my shoulder and ask me to do real estate differently. I felt a knot in my stomach every time she rolled into town for our quarterly meetings.
But I went through the motions as we debated. We decided that there were certain types of tenants that we would not lease space to (pet shops; tenants involved in some aspect of the defense industry) and certain areas where we would not develop (counties, for example, that formally or informally espoused antigay practices). But it wasn’t enough. Tovah began voting against my proposals to develop in other areas because they would entail cutting down trees or because they seemed to contribute to sprawl. She was an impediment to doing business as usual, to the point where I was meeting with our family CPA to discuss buying Tovah’s shares in the family business.
As a company, we were beginning to move slowly in a more environmentally sensitive direction, researching energy-efficient HVAC systems and plumbing fixtures that would use less water. But the research was slow going, with the daily demands of growing the business taking precedence over the larger issues Tovah was driving us to consider. I can’t say that I was doing much to hasten the direction toward more sustainable practices.
I’m not proud of those early days when I first became CEO of the company, and it does not give me much pleasure to write about them now. But the experience of those days helps illustrate a number of key management practices that are critical for a sustainable business, namely the ethics of beginning at home through a process of self-reflection, cultivation of leadership from others throughout an organization, and use of this leadership of diverse voices to shape alignment within a business culture. Ultimately, these practices boil down to the principle of restraint: learning to restrain one’s own unbridled ambitions, learning to restrain oneself from imposing a monolithic vision of a business upon an entire staff, learning how to enable a company to grow within its own natural limits. . . .
As a company we have forged a set of practices that suggest a go-slow business of restraint. We devote considerable time to fostering a bottom-up culture, built on the needs of each staff member and radiating outward. We take time hiring, using consensual processes to add folks who will be new classics on the bookshelf, serving to sharpen our own sensibilities and renewing our sense of collective purpose. We engage with one another socratically . . . .. We leverage leadership from all tiers, taking counsel from wherever it comes. We utilize a Dialectical Process Map to give voice to all opinions. In the face of deadlock, uncertainty, or lack of consensus, we lean in the direction of restraint, drawing on the wisdom of the precautionary principle. These tools and management practices are informed by a set of core values embedded at the very center of our organizational chart, core values focused on the health and well-being of both our land and community.
But this set of go-slow tools and management practices begs the question of growth. Can we grow as a company with such (seemingly) painstaking processes embedded in the company culture? Are we, to use business shorthand, scalable, meaning, Can we use our business model to grow efficiently and effectively?
It’s not an academic question. Our business is real estate, with a significant portion devoted to development. We can always develop more projects than we do. From time to time, we are approached by large investment firms interested in providing additional capital to develop green buildings. These firms wish to know how scalable we are. Can we handle the additional project load? Can we develop and replicate each year a quantity of projects equal to our total current inventory? Can we take a boatload of cash from these investment houses and put it into play for them in the form of financially performing, green development projects?
The question is not could we grow or do we want to grow, but rather should we grow (and why or why not)? The answer becomes clearer when it’s reframed around the issue of quality rather than quantity—the quality of growth of the individuals who make up our company as well as the quality of the products we develop. We are not interested in simply adding {x} more buildings to the more than 4.6 million commercial buildings in the United States, green or not. We want more cogent reasons for putting up a building than the availability of capital and our capacity for doing so. Our business philosophy calls for restrained building and management practices that emphasize nurture over churn. Our business philosophy and management practices reinforce one another. We are indeed scalable, but we try to grow at a pace that meshes with our sense of purpose.
We use our management practices as a mechanism for both reinforcing our business philosophy and providing a brake. We know that if we start adding people in droves and make decisions through top-down fiat, ignoring the wealth of leadership in the middle, our collective sense of purpose will attenuate.
It’s a sentiment shared by numerous other small businesses that have a social mission, such as Anchor Brewing (San Francisco), W. L. Butler Construction (Redwood City, California), New Hope Contracting (Dorchester, Massachusetts), and Rhythm and Hues Studio (Los Angeles).i Each of these companies is determined to be the best at what they do, providing exemplary service to customers, having great relationships with their vendors, and making significant contributions to the communities in which they are located. They are also willing to forgo economic and geographical growth in order to achieve their value-centric ends.ii
As a company we are starting to wrap our heads around the sense that we don’t know as much as we thought we did—and that is a good thing. And while we still have staff members who worry about being thought of by others as starry-eyed idealists, my colleagues and I are more comfortable with the notion that a sustainable business inherently carries with it an emotional component. As biologist Stephen Jay Gould eloquently put it: "We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love."iii Managing a sustainable business is dependent on fostering a company culture in which voices of emotion are as valid (and as validated) as voices of rational discourse.
From the perspective of consumption, we are moving away from our earlier, more wasteful practices. We do the usual things environmentally oriented companies do: recycle, purchase recycled products, carpool, provide financial incentives for hybrid vehicles, purchase green tags for energy that help offset our carbon emissions and promote alternative energy, create programs for reducing our overall environmental footprint, and so forth. But we are also beginning to take a deeper look at the deployment of ourselves in the context of community health, developing strategies not only to give back to community but also immerse ourselves in the overall health of where we live and work and play.
i Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big (New York: Portfolio, 2005), pp. 93–117. Jeffrey Hollender and Stephen Fenishcell, What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers Is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business and Why Big Business Is Listening (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 19, 233, 266, and concluding chapter.
ii Ibid. pp. xv, xvii, xix.
iii Quoted in David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), p. 140.
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