INTRO
Graduates, and parents and family of graduates, I know that many
of you overcame incredible odds to be here today—you have juggled
family, jobs, money and time to make this day possible.
I am here to honor you.
And I come here to honor a school that can use a little honoring.
UNH is an amazing place, one that is largely unappreciated by the
citizens of our great state. Whenever I have had the opportunity
to visit this or your other campuses, I have been truly stunned by
the caliber of your faculty, administration and staff, and the seemingly
bottomless wells of ingenuity and excellence despite a political
environment that perpetually favors cutting spending over investing.
In business terms, a UNH degree is an amazingly high value product,
and that is testament not to the dollars invested, but to the quality
and spirit of the dedicated people who make this place work. UNH
is one of NH’s true jewels.
But my primary agenda today is to honor you graduates.
We have a lot more in common than our affection, gratitude and appreciation
for this school.
In fact, in reflecting on your situations and on my 26-year business
career, I recognize that you are beginning your journeys, exactly
as I began my business: Broke, clueless about the future and in debt.
And since you are graduating into the worst economy and jobs picture
since the Great Depression, I think it is reasonable, as you leave
the security of your dorms and apartments and your relatively predictable
schedules, for you to be completely terrified.
And parents and family members, it is no less a day for you. Mixed
in with your justified pride over your child’s achievement are a
wide range of emotions:
* Disbelief that he or she made it
* Shock at how fast this phase sped by, and
* Terror that they might in fact be moving back in with you.
In short, for perhaps the first time in your recent memory, graduates
and family actually can agree on something: the future is scary as
heck. Let me offer up a couple of other sobering reports about the
world that awaits you.
The scariest part of the current economic malaise is that, while
it has many names, it is certainly not just a credit crisis and in
fact economists really can’t agree on the root causes. But what we
know is that we allowed ourselves to believe in a sort of modern
day mythology about the infinite resilience of our finance system,
and to allow greedy, short-term thinking to get the upper hand. In
a nutshell, we borrowed money we didn’t have, to buy stuff we didn’t
need. We and our regulators have lived in a fantasy land, but we
all allowed our better judgments to take a back seat. It will likely
take a long while for us to get back to a system of placing real
monetary value on real material value and hard work, and purging
the recklessness from our systems of commerce.
But the challenges we face are not just economic, they are also deeply
and profoundly ecologic. Indeed, we are seeing signs of failure in
every single aspect of our relationship to the planet.
For instance, let’s check in with what we now know about climate
change.
There is now global consensus that we are warming the planet at an
alarming rate that will spell catastrophe for generations to come.
400,000 years of ice core records confirm that we have entered a
zone that is unprecedented in human history in terms of atmospheric
CO-2 concentrations. Hurricane Katrina is widely understood to have
been a global warming event, and we’ve got more coming.
And this spells special challenges for the 42% of our fellow humans
who already don’t have access to clean water, the 20% of who live
at or near sea level, and indeed all aspects of agriculture and public
health.
In fact, if we stopped all fossil fuel burning this afternoon, the
Earth’s fever would continue to mount for 40 more years before it
began to break. Moreover, necessary efforts to reduce our fossil
fuel burning through efficiency and conservation will still leave
our atmosphere at levels of greenhouse gasses twice as high as has
ever been recorded. So we need to go much, much farther, into a whole
new technological wave of renewable energy.
The climate change that is resulting from our well-intended but unconscious
behaviors of releasing carbon, methane and other global warming gasses
is just a metaphor for the deeper “cul de sac” in which we have found
ourselves as a society and as a species. I say “cul de sac” because
it is most definitely not a dead end. That is, we can come back out
of this place, but we will not emerge into a more sustainable, healthful
and hopeful world until we become humble and wise about how we got
here in the first place. In other words, our relationship to the
planet requires the same medicine that is needed to get back to a
stable economy.
Another example is how reckless we’ve been with toxic chemicals resulting
from a 70-year chemical spree.
Informed estimates place the number of manmade chemical compounds
in our everyday lives as high as 104,000. And while they are at trace
levels, nobody has seriously looked at the synergistic impacts of
how they interact, since it represents some 3 billion potential combinations.
Only a fraction have ever been tested for toxicity in adults, let
alone children. Yet we walk around with somewhere between 200-400
toxins in each of our bodies and a baby born in Durham, Des Moines
or Dallas this morning will have 287 toxins in her cord blood, traced
to pesticides, stain removers, wood preservatives, heavy metals,
industrial lubricants, flame retardants.
Or we could talk about hypoxias, the result of excess nitrification
that is killing off 400 of the largest estuaries on earth.
The truth is that every aspect of humanity’s connection to the planet
reveals the same pattern of denial and delusion:
• a failure to recognize that we are part of nature and must understand
and respect her laws
• a failure to understand that the earth is not a subsidiary of our
economies, ie something that is here for the taking
• a failure to learn that the entire concept of waste is a uniquely
human phenomenon
(Recycling is nice, but the wrong end of the problem.
Through source reduction by using lighter weight plastic resins,
Stonyfield has avoided the production of many thousands of tons of
plastics that never have to be reused, let alone recycled, which
takes energy. But success will be when you finish eating the yogurt,
you will eat the cup)
• And the idea of a mythological place called “away” where we can
send our waste.
At Stonyfield, 5 years ago, we exceeded the local waste water treatment
capacity and had to build our own pretreatment plant for the residues
of our yogurt making and cleaning. We knew that the traditional approach
to biological waste treatment followed another flawed myth that the
solution to pollution is dilution. In our case, the net result of
traditional wastewater treatment would have yielded a truckload of
sludge every single week. When we asked the town officials what we
would do with that sludge, they had a simple answer—send it to
Vermont. I had images of Ben and Jerry’s sending their waste to NH,
and did not want to be any part of that. So we did something much
better, which I’ll mention in a minute.
Anyhow, we’ve got some big problems out there waiting for you. Now
aren’t you glad that you invited this really depressing guy to come
address you?
So, in the face of these challenging circumstances, what useful words
can I offer you?
First, I know the feeling. When I look back on 26 years in business,
I cannot remember ever feeling assured about what the future held,
especially today.
My career is best summed up by two quotes by Winston Churchill:
• Success is the ability to move from failure to failure with no
loss of enthusiasm.
And
• Wisdom is something that you get just after you needed it.
So since I began my journey as you are beginning yours, I thought
I would offer you as a couple of lessons I’ve learned that might
come in handy for you.
Always Endeavor for Superior Quality
I have learned that, whatever you choose to do, there is no point
in producing the same quality as anyone else. In fact, that is
likely a strategy for failure, for you are almost certain to be
out-competed by someone who is better capitalized. So we have always
prided ourselves in making yogurts, including our new organic greek
Oikos, that simply taste better than anything that is out there.
Confirmation of our superior quality came to us early. We started
our company shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis of the early
1980’s when every front page had a picture of Ayatollah Khomeni cursing
the US. An Iranian refugee had settled in our town and one day she
drove up the hill to tell us that she had not tasted a yogurt this
good since she left the old country. She strongly urged us to rename
it “ A taste of Iran”. We were honored, but chose to pass on her
marketing advice.
Even when the chips are down, you must believe in yourself
When we began, we had 7 cows, 2 families and my partner Samuel Kaymen’s
amazing yogurt recipe and a struggling organic farming school. We
knew nothing about business, but we knew a lot about the coming perils
of climate change and the importance of growing and eating organic
foods that avoid adding toxins to our soil, water, air and bodies,
and supports family farmers.
But talking about this stuff was pretty lonely.
Actually we had a wonderful business, the only problems were that
we had no supply and no demand. But we stuck with it and today have
produced over a billion dollars of business.
Make sure your decisions are evidence-based
We have met more than our share of “experts” and advisors who would
have led us right to, and over some cliff, charging us big daily
consulting fees as we plummeted to our death. There were venture
capitalists who smoothly spun sticky webs to trap us in their attractive
sounding, but ultimately (we learned later) deadly wrong strategies.
We followed one such guy to Russia where we made yogurt and ice
cream for a while until he called me to help come over and get
him released from a gymnasium where he had been taken hostage by
thugs with uzi’s. I wrapped up that business pretty quickly leaving
behind $450,000 in losses, but at least getting away with our lives.
The lesson I took away from this experience is to be sure that we
always base our decisions on facts and not take lazy short-cuts based
on hopes, promises or fantasy. For instance, right now, everyone
has seized upon the idea of cutting down on food miles and eating
“local” food whenever possible as a solution to climate and other
challenges. And while Stonyfield and I certainly embrace the idea
of supporting local farmers whenever we can, we know through a rigorous
carbon measurement process that we use to guide our decision making
that food miles, how far an item travels, is actually a very minute
percentage of the footprint of an apple, yogurt or bottle of beer.
The far larger footprint is in how the product is grown, that is
the type of agriculture accounts for more like 50-60% of the carbon
footprint. In other words, buying organic from a long distance may
be far more carbon-friendly than buying non-organic locally. The
point is, we need to be sure our brains are as engaged as our hearts
when making big decisions.
Be Determined and Take Risks
Albert Einstein once said: "Anyone who has never made a mistake
has never tried anything new."
In 1984, we had been trying to get our yogurts into Bread and Circus
(now Whole Foods) in Cambridge for about a year to no avail. They
already had a half dozen organic or natural yogurts made by some
nice hippy in NH or Vermont and they did not feel they needed another.
So one July afternoon, about 20 of my Boston area friends came to
the farm to celebrate my 30th birthday, and when I blew out the candles,
I thanked them for coming, but told them that if they really wanted
to give me a great birthday gift, they should go to Bread and Circus
and ask for our yogurt. That was a Sunday. On Wednesday of that week,
the buyer called from Bread and Circus and told us that “demand for
Stonyfield yogurt had suddenly gone through the roof and would I
please make a delivery at once?” Naturally, we made our first delivery
that day, and soon after became their number one selling yogurt and
we have been ever since, for 25 years.
Challenge the Conventional Wisdom (ask Why Not)
A key tenet of our success has been to question authority, which
is often over-rated. Lily Tomlin says that “Reality is the leading
cause of stress for those who are in touch with it,” so we have
always found that reality needs to be challenged.
One morning in the 1980’s a couple of morning talk show guys named
Joe and Andy mentioned us on air. Joe, an athletic healthy guy had
been lecturing Andy, who was most definitely not into healthy eating,
that he ought to try eating Stonyfield. Andy replied that he would
rather eat camel manure than yogurt. Now most reasonable companies
would have tried to duck down and stay under the radar screen until
the camel manure reference had dissipated from the public’s consciousness,
but we saw this as an opportunity to strut our stuff. Bensons Animal
Farm was still operating in nearby Hudson, and they had camels. So
one wintry morning, Meg and I drove over to Bensons and filled a
large yogurt container with frozen camel “nuggets” and drove to the
studios in Boston with yogurt for Joe and camel manure for Andy.
Of course by the time we got to Boston, the manure had thawed and
the odors leaking out of the cup were especially noxious. We won
our first endorsement as Andy, faced with a menu choice, agreed that
Stonyfield did taste better than camel dung.
Questioning conventional authority is a powerful way to succeed in
business and in life. A couple of guys from UPS once asked “why not
try to avoid left-hand turns,” with their 95,000 big brown trucks.
Now you might ask what is wrong with a left-hand turn? Well, when
you are turning left, you have to wait for the on-coming traffic
to pass by before you can turn, and this burns a lot of gas while
idling. By the way, I tried to explain this in a speech in London
last winter and no one understood. But UPS found that by avoiding
left hand turns with 95,000 trucks, they could save 3.1 million gallons
of fuel in a year, or at that time, around $12 million dollars. Now
that is a powerful reward for thinking differently.
When the Demoulas Market Basket chain agreed to start selling our
yogurts in the 1980’s, their first question was what we were going
to do for advertising to help excite consumer interest. Needless
to say, we had no money for advertising, but at the time we did have
our then 19 cows (our herd had grown). So we decided to put cows
up for adoption. Consumers could send in 5 yogurt lids and receive
a photo of “their” cow, a certificate naming them the co-owner of
“their” cow and then twice per year their cow would send them letters
about life on the farm. That was then. Today, these carbon-conscious
cows send out 4 emails per year thus avoiding paper. Some of the
cows are twittering. Anyhow, hundreds of thousands of people have
adopted cows.
At a societal scale, those of you who question conventional thinking
will be in the best positions to seize the next wave of jobs and
economic opportunities. Consider for instance, that with the amount
of sunlight that strikes the US each day, we would need only 10 million
acres of land—or only 0.4% of the area of the United States—to supply
all of our nation’s electricity using solar photovoltaics.
When you consider that the US Govt pays to idle ~30 million acres
of farmland per year, you can see how confused our priorities have
become.
Solar isn’t just for Arizona anymore, either; right now in New Hampshire
there are homes powered completely off the grid – built at competitive
costs. For less than half the normal garage roof space, you can power
your house with no fuel, no pollution, and no ice storm outages.
Soon it’ll be down to one-quarter of that garage roof. And we haven’t
even talked about solar hot water, which is even cheaper than solar
cells, or wind power, which is cheaper too. Best yet, these power
sources are built, installed, and maintained locally, right here
in America, unlike the billion dollars per day we “export” out-of-country
for oil, for example.
And renewable technology isn’t just a energy issue, it’s a global
competition. We don’t have a natural monopoly on sunlight or wind,
and the Danes, Germans, and increasingly, the Chinese “get it.” They
aim to be the energy technology vendors to the world, and—having
paid more attention to it than we have—they’re as good or better
than we are. We now have states competing to site foreign-owned wind
and solar plants to produce technologies that we originally invented
and then ignored. So renewables are here, working today in my business,
and with greater demand will come dramatic drops in cost. And if
we don’t get equally aggressive in every business and home, we’ll
be technology buyers instead of technology builders.
Never underestimate the value of performing service and doing
“good”
The question we asked ourselves when we started the company in 1983
was: is it possible to create a business that could help be part
of the solutions to our planet’s ecological challenges while also
making money? The answer today is a resounding yes.
Today, we are partnered with 1400 organic dairy farms who currently
earn 3X what they would receive for non-organic milk.
Stonyfield purchases more than 300 million pounds of organic ingredients
annually, which in turn supports more than 60,000 chemical-free acres
of farmland. Our solid waste management program has kept more than
20 million pounds of waste from landfills and incinerators
Over the past 12 years, we’ve offset 100 percent of its CO2 emissions
from our Londonderry facility but have also shown businesses large
and small how to save millions of dollars through conservation and
efficiency measures. For instance, last year alone, despite producing
12 percent more yogurt, we actually reduced energy use by 8%.
Instead of building the wastewater plant I had mentioned and start
shipping sludge by night to Vermont, we built a facility that generates
a burnable biogas that replaces propane in our plant, uses 40% less
energy, 50% lower costs and generates essentially no sludge.
Indeed, what we discovered from doing good is a new business formula
that is now being mimicked by the largest companies on earth.
Simply put, the usual formula for producing consumer products is
to make items as cheap as possible. For instance, nothing in the
food industry is cheaper than gelatin, artificial stabilizers, colors
and dyes. These companies then generate a higher margin which they
use to purchase lots of advertising to blast us consumers with lots
of messages that will hopefully lead us to become aware, try the
products, purchase them and hopefully repeat purchase them, and possibly
eventually become loyal.
What we discovered is that when you make a better, higher quality
product, you leap all the way to loyalty without having to spend
as much on advertising. Let me illustrate this with an example.
A year and half ago, I was standing in a Florida supermarket holding
a competitor’s cup as I was reading an ingredient I still can’t pronounce.
A little older woman came up to me, tapped me on the elbow and said
“young man, someone your age really should be eating the Stonyfield
instead.”
When I asked her why, she told me that this company gives away 10%
of its profits to environmental causes, offsets its carbon emissions,
supports family farmers, etc. I interrupted her to ask how she knew
all of that.
She told me that her husband had recently died from colon cancer
and that she and “the girls” from her local bridge foursome all had
lost their spouses and all decided that they want to stick around
to see their grandchildren, so they go to the websites of companies
to learn which brands to support, and Stonyfield had passed the test.
In that one incident, I learned all one needs to know about business.
When you make it better, you get loyalty. And with loyalty comes
the most powerful purchase incentive in commerce—word of mouth.
Conclusion
So how is all of this relevant to you?
I hope that you will take away four key messages:
First, I know for certain that if we hadn’t baked our environmental
and sustainability mission into our DNA, I wouldn’t be here talking
to you. Be a force for positive change—it will pay off. The graduate
sitting here who can promote alternatives to many of the societal
myths I mentioned stands to create incredible opportunity, both financial
and societal. I can assure you that there will be more jobs in renewable
energy, energy efficiency, preventative health care, organic/non-toxic
agriculture, textiles and cleansers (I have yet to meet the consumer
who prefers to eat the yogurt with more pesticides or synthetic hormones
than in the traditional fields.)
Second, the whole notion of service is very attractive to smart employers.
From a practical perspective, those of you who volunteer and give
your time and energy to work on positive change are exactly who we
CEO’s want to hire.
Third, be clear, as you reflect on your educations, that the true
measure of your achievement here is not the facts you have absorbed
and what you know, but whether you have learned to learn, to adapt
to new realities. Einstein said: “Education is what remains after
one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
Fourth, be relevant. The world needs those of us who’ve had the
blessings of an education to attend to its needs. It doesn’t matter
where you set down a stake; it only matters that you contribute.
But don’t forget that as consumers, we wield enormous power to choose
the polluting, consumptive and failed ways of the past or the renewable
and sustainable ways of the future too. When we purchase anything,
we are voting for the kind of communities, society and planet we
want. And I have learned that corporations spend billions of dollars
to tally those votes.
Personally, I feel there is no greater societal priority than to
embrace the conversion to renewable energy and organic food production
with all of the climate, ecological and health benefits. When people
tell me that organics is not proven, I respond that it is the chemicals
that are not proven, but the early results are poor as we face an
epidemic of cancers and preventable disease. The same is true of
our energy policy, which has been driven by generations who have
grown up in the oil and coal business and believe that mining the
earth’s crust is the only way to fuel our needs.
Humanity has always progressed through waves of innovation. From
harnessing wind for transportation to water power to steam power
to internal combustion engines, petrochemicals, aviation, space travel
and digital technology.
I believe that we stand at the edge of the next wave, the sustainability
revolution in which we use green chemistry which leaves behind no
toxic residue, cradle to cradle technology which generates no waste,
renewable energy with no carbon footprint, industrial ecology with
waste from one process being the food for another, will be the norm.
We will use new language as we learn from nature through the emerging
science of biomimickry in which we can learn about mollusks pulling
carbon from their environment to build calcium carbonate shells that
hold hundreds of times their weight. This is how we will build buildings,
I am sure.
So whether as producers in the new economy or consumers, as you graduate
into the “real world”, this now becomes your moral obligation, but
also your opportunity.
Lilly Tomlin tells us that we’re all in this alone.
I don’t
know what the future holds and neither do you. But I do know
WHO holds the future.
But I do know that anyone who feels that they are too small to make
a difference has never been in bed with a mosquito.
And by the way, there is one last piece of advice. Have fun, take
time for yourselves and your family, and enjoy life. A friend of
mine says “don’t take life too seriously, it is just a temporary
condition.” The work is never done. Be sure to smell the flowers
along the way.
So, graduates, go forward, do good work. But for today, celebrate
your success. You’ve earned it.
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