One reason I like to host seminars at the Center for Ecoliteracy is that you never know who is going to show up.

Last August, one of the 80 people who participated in our "Short Course on Systems Thinking" with Fritjof Capra, David W. Orr and center staff was Claude Ouimet, a gracious gentleman who is senior vice president and general manager for Canada and Latin America at InterfaceFLOR, a division of Interface Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpets.

Why a carpet-manufacturing firm would be interested in systems thinking and education for sustainable living might not be immediately obvious. But Interface has been focused on environmental sustainability since 1994; in 2006, the firm announced its goal of eliminating any negative impact it has on the environment by 2020.

Moreover, when greening a company, Ouimet understands that it is essential for business leaders to address both the technical and what he calls the "softer side" of sustainability.

One way the Center for Ecoliteracy reflects the softer side of sustainability is our Smart by Nature initiative guiding principle, "Sustainability is a community practice." Sustainability, in other words, depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community.

Ouimet believes this idea is also essential to making a company sustainable.

"It's not so much about changing what we do," he says. "The goal is to change the way we think, and then we change what we do. We see lots of companies rushing in to change what they do without changing their ways of thinking. They go into a path with the same mindset, and they don't get very far."
"At Interface, we offer a higher purpose for people to come to work…beyond the salary and the bonus," Ouimet adds. "If you come to Interface in Canada or the U.S. and ask people on the line what they do, there is a high chance they won't say they are making carpets. They will probably say, 'I'm trying my best to make a difference.'"

The leadership that generates this kind of passion and commitment (the turnover rate at InterfaceFLOR's U.S. facility in Georgia is 5 percent, compared with an industrywide 32 percent in the region) emphasizes cooperation -- an ethic that encourages and invites people to look at their own strengths and talents to help resolve larger issues.

This attention to cooperation is very powerful, he says, because it unifies people. "When you have 5,000 people, all of them with different strengths, and you create a system that celebrates differences toward a common goal, then individual people's talents are a gift to the collective."

Ouimet recalls that during one business slump, senior employees were asked if they would rather lay off employees or reduce the hours of the total workforce.