For Better Or Worse
Several weeks ago my old friend Marc Rosenbaum 
arrived on Martha’s Vineyard. He often arrives on Martha’s Vineyard. For 20 years this distinguished, nationally recognized building performance engineer has been arriving here to consult with us – to help us make better buildings. For 30 years he has been responsible for some of the most advanced buildings in New England.
When he arrived here last Tuesday, it was different than most times. First of all, his partner Jill DeLaHunt was with him. Second, her dog Leela was with him. Third – they had a big U-Haul truck with them, and inside were most of their belongings (including their nine bicycles, 
but not including the bicycle he built in 1974 as his senior thesis in engineering at MIT. At the time, it was the world’s lightest bicycle, at 12 pounds – today, it hangs in the MIT museum).
Finally, it was different because it has now been more than three weeks and he hasn’t left yet! That’s because, for better or worse, Marc and Jill have moved here, and Marc is joining forces with SMC, and will be running our Energy Services department (as well as continuing, part-time, through South Mountain to satisfy the needs of his clients throughout New England). We are thrilled to be able to add his expertise and wealth of experience to our own, and to offer his services to island (and off-island) residents, businesses, and towns. He and Jill are also neighbors; they live four houses down from us here at Island Cohousing.
This is an important development for our company. It expands what we able to do in the realm of energy and building performance and it sharpens and refines our abilities. Not only does Marc bring an incisive mind and a tremendous range of knowledge and experience, but he also brings a fierce sense of purpose, an intensely focused moral compass, a profound dedication to professionalism, and a remarkable spirit of deep inquiry.
Marc enhances our connections to the world of building science, which is changing at breakneck speed. We are rapidly learning much that we never knew before. Recently Alex Wilson of Environmental Building News (quite simply THE most thorough and impeccable source of information for the green building industry) reported that a Canadian researcher discovered that the blowing agents used to make a familiar insulation product (extruded polystyrene [XPS], which people in the building industry know as the blue rigid board Styrofoam, made by Dow Chemical, and the pink rigid board Foamular, made by Owens Corning) gradually seeps from the board over its lifetime and is a powerful contributor to global warming. Depending on thickness used and climate zone, insulating with these materials might take 40+ years of energy savings to “payback” the global warming potential. Our zero energy homes, therefore (if they use these common materials) may, in fact, use no energy, but they may at the same time have a large carbon footprint!
That’s big news; it’s hardly what we’re after.
New information like this is coming all the time. But there is also a ton of green building mis-information floating around out there. Often, the nuances and subtleties and variables make it impossible to know what’s right and what’s not, what will work long term and what won’t, what makes the most sense, what might cause problems, what needs monitoring over time, what requires experimentation.
When we get reliable new information we must change our practices. Marc helps us figure out what’s what because he keeps up with new developments, because he understands the engineering and the science, because he knows who and what are reliable sources of information, and because he knows who to talk to when he doesn’t know (and, just as important, he KNOWS when he doesn’t know – - and, of course, sometimes NOBODY knows).
Marc is constantly examining our practices. He’s an insurance policy against big mistakes. He’s a creative force in pursuit of better buildings. He’s also a superb educator, and has been responsible for explaining complex building performance information (and making it understandable without dumbing it down) to thousands of New England building professionals, helping them to improve their practices.
But he’s a stickler, too. He’s fussy. He doesn’t let anything go and he makes damn sure we get away with nothing. That’s good for us, good for our clients, good for our community.
But it’s not easy.
He’s not easy.
His arrival is the culmination of a year of planning. It’s very exciting. But it’s one of those things – sometimes you get what you wish for.
For better or worse.
Here Comes the Island Plan
The Island Plan is complete.
For now.
Four years in the making, this long-term plan for the future of Martha’s Vineyard, initiated by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, engaged hundreds of people in the collaborative process of its production. 
To quote from the plan: “ The purpose of the Island Plan is to chart a course to the kind of future the Vineyard community wants, and to outline a series of actions to help us navigate that course. The Island Plan is both a blueprint and a call to action.”
I served on the Steering Committee and chaired one of the nine work groups – Livelihood & Commerce (the others are Development & Growth, Natural Environment, the Built Environment, Energy & Waste, Affordable Housing, Transportation, Water Resources, and Social Environment).
I spent more time working on the plan than I wished to and less time than I should have.
The Plan is not what I hoped it would be when we first began work. I hoped we could create something that would knock our socks off – a plan that people would embrace wholeheartedly because How Could You Not? So compelling it didn’t even seem like a plan but a great never-ending story. A truly inspiring plan. A mouth-watering five-course meal.
That was unrealistic, of course. It’s not one person’s dream meal; it’s a stew, added to and stirred by many. At times, during the process, I found myself somewhat heartbroken, because the opportunity was so great and I felt we were falling short, but toward the end it got better, and I got better, and it’s not a bad stew.
Here are some important things about the Island Plan:
• It has created a new lexicon and new awareness – obscure terms like “multiplier effect”, “economic leakage”, “ecosystem services”, “minimum viable landscape”, “undevelopment”, and “carrying capacity” have become commonplace.
• It’s an iterative plan, not a Final Solution study that’s going to sit on a shelf collecting dust. There is a commitment to implement, to measure, to assess, to re-work, to “freshen up” the plan and add ingredients as the years go by, and to make alterations as conditions change in our rapidly changing world.
• People are thinking about it as 50 year plan. In a way it really isn’t. Early on we started saying “We need to think long term” – not a five or ten year plan but a 50 or 100 year plan. The local papers started writing stuff like “these guys must be nuts – you can’t do a 50 year plan” but the idea tickled peoples’ imagination. Now people say, proudly, we’ve got a 50 year plan. And the papers refer to “the island’s 50 year plan.” So what if it isn’t? As long as we think we’ve got a 50 year plan we do. And in many ways it really is.
• The 207 recommended strategies are a wealth of possibilities that we can dig into over time, each as its time comes.
One of these – a community owned electrical cooperative that uses local renewable resources to generate a large fraction of the Vineyard’s energy – has become the most immediate and visible direct outgrowth of the plan. A small group of people got so excited about the idea that when they got done with their work in the Island Plan Energy & Waste Group they went right to work on Vineyard Power 
and now, less than a year later, the cooperative has formed and begun to assemble a membership, create financing opportunities, and consider sites for an offshore wind farm.
It’s a bold idea and a challenging project that will take years to implement. It combines the need to create a membership of thousands, and manage it, with the goal of completing the biggest development project in the history of the Vineyard. Big job. But as the nascent membership approaches 500, I’m beginning to think it may be possible.
If the Island Plan stimulates nothing else, it will have been a success.
Here’s something I wish about the plan. I wish it connected the dots more. It is good at recognizing interdependencies, but less good at making them come alive. Here’s the kind of thing that’s not in the Island Plan that I now wish was. It’s an idea – which I’m going to call Hogtied Brewery for the moment – which could work just fine here on the Vineyard:
• People like beer, especially local beer from a place they like.
• So an MV brewery (like Offshore Ale, our local brewery) produces beer & the process produces waste mash.
• The waste mash is used to feed pigs.
• The pigs make meat and manure.
• The meat feeds people hungry for local food – everybody loves that – and the manure powers a bio-gas digester.
• The bio-gas digester makes electricity.
• The electricity is used to run the brewery.
Round and round it goes. Makes sense, doesn’t it? An unbroken circle of synergies. There’s no reason we can’t do things this way. There’s no reason we can’t keep making improvements to the Island Plan. There’s no reason we can’t implement its most promising strategies.
The result?
As Jim Athearn, who chaired the Steering Committee says,
“ In many ways, the Island Plan’s proposals for the next generation will help keep the Vineyard much as it is today – characterized by carefully protected open spaces, vistas, and historic neighborhoods, and provided with great services and recreational opportunities. In many ways, however, it will be different and greatly improved. Although tourism and construction will still be important parts of the economy, many people will have transitioned to well-paying, year-round “green” and knowledge-based jobs, encouraging young people to stay on the island. Farming and fishing will be expanded and feeding more of the population. Our energy will come from a community-owned offshore wind farm. There will be an Island-wide greenway and trail network. New buildings will fit their neighborhoods. It will be an even more vital year-round community, as our families can live here affordably. The Island Plan is a guide to keeping the Island safe, beautiful, healthy, and culturally rich – the best place it can be for our children and grandchildren.”
Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
All it takes is insisting on the future we want instead of settling for the future we get.
Living Local & The Next Generation
The third annual Martha’s Vineyard Living Local and Harvest Festival just ended. It began with a Friday night forum called Opportunities and Challenges – a Panel Discussion with Next Generation Island Leaders.
It was about youth. 
Having just turned 60, I am acutely aware of the role of young people (in their 20’s and 30’s) in my work life and civic life. At work they are a constant theme and a growing force. There is a great transition in process at South Mountain Company – from first generation leadership to the next. It’s a long, gradual journey, sometimes a bit frightening but mostly thrilling, and it’s gathering steam.
In Vineyard politics and civic affairs the young are quieter. Those of us in our fifties and sixties have been active, but we’re graying. Sometimes, in the rooms where policies are being shaped that will shape our future, there’s very little representation from the next generation. What does that mean? I know they’re here – it’s not like some places where the young have jumped ship – and I know they’re active and vital, but where are they? What are they doing? What are they thinking?
The forum was an attempt to find out by putting four of them up on the stage in a public setting and asking the following questions:
• How could your age group be more engaged in next generation leadership and governance of the Island?
• In considering our Island’s future, what do you care about the most that’s not being done now, or could be done better?
• What’s your one or two sentence dream for the island in 25 years?
And one other, a beauty that came from one of the panelists, Jeanette Vanderhoop, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah:
• How do we keep the young and idealistic still idealistic when they’re no longer young?
And, of course, how do we keep them here? My friend Tom Chase, who grew up here, says that his father once told him that the Vineyard has two exports: fish and brains. As he tells it, his dad told him that just after Tom told him he’d decided to stay on the Vineyard (hmmm). Re-localization is about keeping our fish AND our brains right here where we’ve raised them. And doing more to do what we can within our local economy.
It was a lively evening. Besides the diverse panelists, we had two born-and-raised “elder” questioners and an engaged audience. I was the moderator. The panel consisted of a farmer, a boatbuilder, a Wampanoag environmentalist, and a mother of two with many civic responsibilities. Three of them were born and raised here; the fourth summered here and then married into an old island family. They all seemed a bit nervous, but they spoke beautifully, from the heart.
Each of the four individuals is so different that I hesitate to lump them together, but themes developed quickly: the appreciation each has for their many mentors and the community that has nurtured them; their love for the island and the delicate mix of their attachment to the “way it was” and their pragmatic sense that change must come; their understanding that sufficient affordable housing, meaningful work, and limits to growth are all keys to the future; their shared certainty that the time has come for them to take the ball and run with it.
It became a celebration of a way of life that they want to preserve, renew, and re-make. But not only a celebration. They also stirred the pot, and were clear that when we talk about the wonders of this place we also have to talk about the painful parts – the homelessness, the alcoholism, the fractiousness. Jeanette said “I always read the court report in the paper to remind me.” And they subscribed to the belief that you “can’t complain unless you’re willing to change it.”
The most poignant moment for me was when one of the panelists, Myles Thurlow, who described himself as “more interested in boats than school” when he was growing up, fielded a question. The question, from an audience member, was “How do you feel about Wind?”
Big question. There’s no hotter topic on the Vineyard right now. I will say more in a future post about this, but this piece isn’t about the topic, or the content of the response (although I will mention that all basically responded that “we gotta get real; this is an important, necessary, and desirable part of our future”).
It’s about what happened when Myles answered. As I listened to him, speaking off the cuff, I heard a compelling, coherent, elegantly worded statement. And I saw something in his face. It appeared to me that he was saying to himself “I said that? Wow.” And I sensed that he was feeling the stirring empowerment that comes from expressing yourself well, in public, about a controversial topic that you feel deeply about.
I was glad for him, and glad for us. In these perilous times, when these young men and women will be facing and contending with global climate destabilization and its monumental effects, they gave us Hope.
Thank you Chris Fischer, and Katie Carroll, and Myles Thurlow, and Jeanette Vanderhoop. We’ll have to do this again. You guys want to organize the next one? I’ll be glad to help.
Values and Principles
A group of friends was here for a post-Labor Day vacation, enjoying the last harmonies of Vineyard summer – warm water, cool breezes, and empty roads. Devon Hartman runs a design/build company in L.A. and Jamie Wolfe is a design/builder from Connecticut. Dennis Allen runs a building company in Santa Barbara, CA. Sal Alfano is the editor of both the Journal of Light Construction and Remodeling Magazine. Each is remarkable in his own way. Each has much to teach. All agreed to do a panel discussion for an SMC company meeting.
The following questions were put to the four of them: what happened to your business (and you) between last September and this September, what lasting effects has the economic crisis had, and what’s next for you and your enterprise?
They spoke about the troubles of these times, but they also spoke – compellingly – about the possibilities, and new doors that are opening.
Jamie, whose business had severely tanked, talked about the opening that has come with the lack of work – a rare opportunity to “re-boot” his business from Powered Down to Re-New. Dennis spoke of the perfect occasion for providing greater service and paying closer attention to clients, and told about the risks they have taken, like promoting two young employees to positions of General Manager and (I think) Production Coordinator, guys who, Dennis said “think a lot faster than I do.” Devon talked about the utter necessity of relentless, effective, and widespread communication within his market area, and the need to expand the breadth of both terrain and service. He pointed out that you never know how little people know about what you do and what your capabilities are. Just recently his own brother asked him to recommend someone who could help him figure out how to reduce energy use (a new specialty of his own company!). And when he ran into a client in the supermarket who he hadn’t seen in 25 years she said, ” So. . . how’s the painting business going?” They haven’t been a painting company for a quarter century. And Sal, with the great overview that his position in the industry affords him, said that nobody is immune to these times. Everyone is affected. He said we’re thinking less about what we’d like to do and more about what we have to do. It’s a mold-shattering time.
We have had many company meetings with a variety of stimulating people, topics and exchanges, but this one seemed to touch more people, in more ways, than usual. I think it’s because all four were speaking, from the heart, about making the most of hard times and holding true to our values at the same time. 
It was also a moment for all of us to toast and celebrate the recent marriage of one of my partners, COO Deirdre Bohan, with Deirdre and her new husband Dave.
While they were here I happened to be in the middle of an extraordinary book called Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. It’s an epic adventure about the reclusive Tarahumara Indians who live deep in the Copper Canyons (a canyon system larger than, and in some places deeper than, the Grand Canyon) in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. The Tarahumaras may be the greatest runners on the planet, but they’re far more than that. And no, the book isn’t really about them either, it’s about human endeavor and community and evolution and it is full of more great stories than I’ve come across in any one place in a long time. I don’t even like to run and I couldn’t put it down.
It’s especially about values.
McDougall tells the story of a Czech runner named Emil Zatopek who set world’s records and won gold medals in two events in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and then decided to run in the Olympic Marathon. He’d never run a marathon, but he won that too, and set a new world record in that event as well!! He ran with “infectious joy”, and he was beloved – even his opponents loved to see him win. Says McDougall, “You can’t pay someone to run with such infectious joy.
You can’t bully them into it, either, which Zatopek would unfortunately have to prove. When the Red Army marched into Prague in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy movement, Zatopek was given a choice: he could get on board with the Soviets and become a sports ambassador, or he could spend the rest of his life cleaning toilets in a uranium mine.” He took the toilets. And disappeared.
At the same time Ron Clarke, an Australian, broke Zatopek’s records but never managed to win the big one. He had become known as “the bloke who choked”. In the summer of ’68 he blew his final chance in the Mexico City Olympics. On the way home he stopped in Prague to pay a courtesy call to the “bloke who never lost”. During the visit, he noticed Zatopek slipping something into his suitcase; assuming he was smuggling some message to the world, he didn’t dare open it until he was long gone. 
It was Zatopek’s 1952 Olympic 10,000 meter gold metal. He thought Clarke was the one who deserved it. For Zatopek to give the medal to the man who had replaced his name in the record books at precisely the moment when he was losing everything else was, as McDougall said, “an act of almost unimaginable compassion.”
I don’t mean to over-dramatize, or to diminish the passionate adherence to deep values and unthinkable sacrifice of Zatopek, but the generous sharing of stories and personal truth by Jamie, Dennis, Devon and Sal seemed somehow related. Times of adversity are when our values are tested. I once heard a visionary businessman named Paul Saginaw of Zingerman’s say, “Principles aren’t principles until they cost something.” Simple as that.
All Is Forgiven
I managed to get through the Martha’s Vineyard summer attending only one fundraiser. That’s a record. And, for the first time in at least a decade, I did no fundraising for the causes I care about. I must admit it felt good. Fundraising is hard.
The single event I went to – for our Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick – was a good one,. It happened to be scheduled for the day after we found out Ted Kennedy died. Deval spoke about Kennedy. He said, “ I knew him before I ever met him because my mother used to say, to no one in particular” (and here he slipped into a drawl), “I just love me some Kennedy.”
An extraordinary number of people “loved some Kennedy.” His passion for life was unique, complete, and inclusive, but his commitment and dogged perseverance did not seem to overwhelm his humility or make him take himself too seriously. I liked what his son Teddy said, “He used to say that it didn’t bother him that he wasn’t president; it just bothered him that someone else was.”
I’ve always been a big admirer, but Kennedy disappointed me the last few years by opposing Cape Wind. The stories, these past few days, about his deep and enduring connection to Nantucket Sound, have brought me greater understanding. I no longer feel that his opposition was hypocritical; rather, I think it came from his fear that something inside him would be injured and his inability to overcome that fear. His capacity to overcome fear and adversity was mighty, but we all have our limits. Even Ted Kennedy.
All is forgiven.
Early Morning Meeting
My wife and daughter and I recently had the great good fortune to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The occasion was the one-year sobriety celebration of a close friend. We were invited to witness her achievement. This wasn’t just a celebration; it was a regular AA meeting. There were 35 people there, many of whom we knew (this is a very small place) and all of them no longer anonymous to us (as a friend says, in a small community like this there is no AA, just A). How brave, and generous, for them to welcome us and allow us to share their meeting.
I’ve always wanted to witness first hand the workings and organizational structure of this remarkably effective and superbly networked (without – even – the need of the internet!) institution. The amazing part – it has no leaders!
In the early 1930’s, when a Vermonter named Rowland visited the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung for help with his alcoholism, a sequence of events began which led to the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Today, millions of people attend AA meetings at over 100,000 locations in communities across America and around the world. It cuts across all lines: age, class, race, and gender. Everyone is welcome.
AA encourages each participant to heal themselves by staying sober one day at a time and by receiving the support of others who are engaged in the same difficult effort. Rather than leaders, it relies on the inner resources and strengths of a cooperative group. The only requirement for admission is a desire to stop drinking.
But who organizes? Who manages disruptive personalities? Who’s in charge?
Nobody.
There are administrative roles, but they come with no power. The group holds the power. Individual attendance implies acceptance of the “12 traditions” which comprise the strong but flexible underlying organizational structure. And that’s it. There are no rules, just this set of shared understandings that create and support an atmosphere of extraordinary healing.
It’s astonishing that it works and I know there must be important organizational lessons embedded in the AA success story. I would be curious to hear from those who have had longtime association with the process. How has it changed the way you work and do business? What has it taught you about the importance of community? How has it helped you to manage relationships in your life?
Not all organizations can be leaderless, and it is not necessarily an achievable goal (there is an important place for leadership), but perhaps there is value in thinking about how to be“leader-LESS” – that is, to bring greater democratization to all those organizations – work, home, social – that are part of the fabric of our lives.
Sharing cake and stories at 7 AM, I felt swept into a powerful community of shared interest, support, and caring. For a few moments at that early-morning before-work Vineyard meeting, we were permitted to join forces with the others and participate in their remarkable healing journey. Their pain, laughter, honesty, and ability to share remain with me. I can’t remember many names or faces, but I remember, viscerally, the experience of intense humanity embodied in that room.
When the meeting was over we walked out carrying whatever troubles we brought when we entered. But we were wiser. The others in that meeting walked out to face a day of struggle to stay sober. As one person said, “Have a nice day, unless, of course, you’ve made other plans.” And another: “The world’s record for sobriety is 24 hours.”
One day at a time. Under the guidance of the serenity prayer, which begins by asking a higher power – whatever yours might be – to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Could there be a better lesson for everyday life, for all aspects of life, than that?
I’m grateful to our friend for exposing us to the heart and soul of such a remarkable healing organization.
Sharing Ownership of the Future
One more post (which might become two) about employee ownership and workplace democracy before I veer off toward some related topics. . . .
Despite the Obama administration’s recent shift in emphasis from homeownership to rental housing (which I will discuss in detail in a future post), homeownership is at the very heart of the American dream. Owning our work, and finding meaning there, seems as essential to a good life as owning our homes. But although many of us own homes, far fewer own our work.
But the idea that the people who use our productive assets should own them is as old as America. As John Logue of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center says in The Real World of Employee Ownership, “Thomas Jefferson argued passionately that what set this country apart from the Old World and made it so suitable for democracy was the fact that the ownership of productive property was widely dispersed: farmers owned their land in the countryside; artisans owned their tools and shopkeepers their shops in the towns.”
Employee ownership is emerging from beneath the radar. There is an awakening interest in the potential of broadly shared ownership of enterprise. The idea is beginning to surface all over the world in companies small and large. Today over 11,000 companies nationally, with over 13 million employees, have some form of employee ownership. In fact, today more Americans work in firms partly or wholly owned by employees than are members of unions in the private sector. Most of these do not share the SMC co-op model, and many can hardly be characterized as democratic, but all indicate that we may be learning something as we try to assemble the components of a restorative future.
The context is important. My fellow baby boomers own several million businesses, and during the next two decades, most of these founders will exit. The businesses will either be shut down, or sold to outsiders, or passed on. Selling to employees is an option that deserves to be more widely understood, for it offers powerful benefits to all parties. There is a need for more information as employee ownership becomes an important entity of choice, not only for aging boomers but for the millions of young people intent on finding real meaning in their work. Employee ownership is one way to open that door. There is new knowledge and there are new practices that make employee ownership more widely applicable, and growing interest among these business owners.
Tom Greer is one of them.
Many people pass through Martha’s Vineyard (how’s that for understatement?). Some of them want to visit our facility, or see some of our work, or talk business. 
Each of these visits takes time, so we have to be careful. It’s a delicate balance because, mostly, these are well-meaning people with good stories and legitimate interest. How can you possibly turn them away, how can you possibly not generously accept? Maybe someday we’ll have designated visiting days, but for now we field the e-mails and calls and decide whether time will allow and the inquiry is serious enough to warrant the time.
Tom Greer, a builder from Charlottesville, Virginia, was on the island. He asked to visit, and and wanted to ask a few questions. Turns out his successful, stable business 31 years old, has 25 employees and annual revenues of $8 million (about our size). A decade ago he took two longtime colleagues in a partners; each owns 20% and Tom owns 60%.
He is interested in examining the possibility of becoming a co-op. I asked him why, given the success story, he is interested in rocking this stable boat by considering a shift to co-operative ownership. He responded, “As I have grown up with my people, I have wondered what it is like for them to give their working life to a company, and then upon retirement walk away from their life’s work with only Social Security. I have benefited greatly from their sweat, loved every minute of my ownership, and think that with the co-op concept I can help paint a better picture.” As he digs deeper he’s beginning to understand the challenges. Whether they ultimately make the shift or not, Tom Greer is the kind of person who will change the way we do business.
He knows that it’s about sharing ownership of the future.
Are We Different Enough??
At the recent conference of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC) in Burlington, VEOC board president Paul Millman asked an important question to the attendees, who represented some of the many remarkably progressive companies in the Green Mountain State. “Are we different enough?” he wondered.
Good question. I wonder about that often when I think about South Mountain. Are we promoting a system that would, if widespread, create fundamental change in our broken economic system? Or are we just avoiding one avalanche chute by traversing to another with a slightly more gradual incline?
Hard to say.
In 1987 I re-structured my company from a sole proprietorship under my ownership to an employee owned co-operative corporation. It was a dramatic hinge point in the history of the company. Ownership became available to all employees, enabling people to own and guide their workplace. The responsibility, the power, and the profits all belong to the group of owners. There are no outside investors and no non-employee owners.
That’s different.
Profits are essential , but our cooperative ownership structure assigns the wealth we make to those who make it. Our democratic system of decision making offers everyone a voice. Our employees, who live in the community, and are raising their children here, and are part of the civic landscape, are making the decisions; therefore, community accountability is woven into the fabric of our system.
That’s different too.
Low environmental impact and principled corporate behavior share the same status as profits.
That’s different too.
But principles aren’t really principles until they cost something. And this year some of our principles began to cost something. Last fall, as we considered the re-building of our decimated work backlog, we re-considered some of those principles. Many of them. Here’s just one.
We have had a long-standing policy of only doing work on the Vineyard, the place that we know. That one flew the coop when we had the opportunity to do an extraordinary project across the water, for the Woods Hole Research Center, at a time when our future workload was less secure than usual. It wasn’t the first time we had such an opportunity, but this was the first time we forced ourselves – due to circumstances – to confront the logistical hurdles and internal complications we are faced with. I’ll talk more about this project – and its implications – in future posts.
As a company, we express many ideals. One that we express less often might be the most important of all – to assure that at all times the 30 families (and other associated individuals and companies) that rely on us for their incomes are secure in the knowledge that the work – and the income – will be there. Not so lofty. But this is the real deal, the rubber on the road, and other principles must work in service to that one.
That may be less different, but our democratic structure ensures that we will struggle, at least, to uphold our principles while we keep our business healthy. And struggle to be different enough, even when there is genuine conflict between our principles and the practical matters of doing business successfully.
The beginning of the Obama era is frustratingly slow; it’s not different enough. Each of us can have only a minor impact on the political process. Meanwhile, however, our democracy offers other choices. We have the liberty to invent the corporation of the future right now. We can make whatever kinds of companies we want.
Nothing stands in our way, except us. But we are a significant obstacle. It’s easy to say that we knew all the things the economic crisis, climate change, and the approach of peak oil are teaching us. We did, in a way, but it’s not different enough just to know these things. We have to act, to make fundamental change in the way we work, to learn these things in our hearts and in our guts.
The patterns that we had established over three decades no longer work, and the challenge is to do the work that we must – better service, tighter finances, deeper energy makeovers, higher performance buildings, new forms of old crafts – in this new economic climate. Maybe, eventually, we can be different enough to actually make a difference. Different enough to uphold our principles, even when it costs something.
It shouldn’t be so hard, I sometimes say. But it is. And we have only begun to scratch the surface of change. That’s scary.
But there’s an old Chinese saying that “Man stands for long time with mouth open before roast duck flies in.” We have to roast the duck.
Rosenbaum on Deep Energy
This is a post about a local event, so it may not mean much to those of you far away.
When it comes to houses, there’s plenty of talk these days about Zero Energy, Passive Houses, and even strange new terms like Deep Energy Retrofit.
It’s not just talk. For old friend Marc Rosenbaum, of Energysmiths, it’s practice. And it’s passion, too. Marc has been working closely with us for the past 20 years.
Marc’s projects include three of the American Institute of Architects Top Ten Green Projects.. An experienced and enthusiastic teacher and speaker, he has trained thousands of professionals., including several trainings of Vineyard architects and builders.
Come to the Chilmark Community Center and hear where we’re headed with housing and how we might get there. It’s free.
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JOHN ABRAMS is co-founder and CEO
of South Mountain Company and the author
of COMPANIES WE KEEP read more
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COMPANIES WE KEEP is published by Chelsea Green Publishing
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