Faith and Fortune: The Quiet Revolution to Reform American Business by Marc Gunther

Author:Marc Gunther
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-10-11T14:00:00+00:00

7

HOW DO YOU

MEASURE SUCCESS?

TIMBERLAND

Like most public schools in New York City, P.S. 19 in Queens is overcrowded and poor. Some twenty-two hundred pupils, who speak about fifty diffierent languages, attend classes, some of which are held in the cafeteria because there aren't enough classrooms. Until recently, the schoolyard was nothing but crumbling blacktop.

On April 22, 2003, which was Earth Day, I joined about a hundred volunteers to try to do something about that dreary yard. The day before we arrived, a volunteer crew had torn up the blacktop, carted most of it away, laid out gravel pathways and spread topsoil across the open areas. Our job was to plant trees, bushes, ground covers and flowering plants—thousands of them—alongside the paths, to create what would be called a Learning Garden. It was a gray, misty morning as we got started, but everyone approached the task with enthusiasm. We split up into work crews and dug holes for the trees, trucked plants around on wheelbarrows and laid down logs for seating.

My crew, which was led by a spirited young volunteer from a nonprofit group called City Year, included two volunteers from the Student Conservation Association, another from the Robin Hood Foundation, a man who works for the Porter Novelli public relations firm, a woman who produces special sections for GQ magazine and two twentysomething sales people who worked for Timberland—the company that helped to organize the volunteer project. And not just this project: for Earth Day, Timberland organized nature-oriented service projects at more than a hundred other sites in the United States, Europe and Asia. On Mount Agamenticus in York, Maine, Timberland volunteers cleared trails, erected signs and carted away debris. In Toronto, they cleared the land around a pond. In London, they cleaned up a stretch of the Thames River waterfront. All in all, it was an ambitious undertaking. Of Timberland's fifty-one hundred employees worldwide, nearly two thousand did community service on Earth Day.

This is business as usual at Timberland, although few of its customers are aware of the firm's commitment to voluntarism. The $1.2-billion-a-year company, which is headquartered in Stratham, New Hampshire, is better known as a designer, producer and marketer of boots, casual shoes, clothes and accessories. Until its best-selling product, a clunky yellow boot that's been around for decades, unexpectedly became a status symbol among black teenagers, Timberland projected a WASPy image and sold most of its shoes and clothes to suburbanites who think of themselves as outdoorsy. These days, the Timberland brand has cachet on Harlem's 125th Street as well. The company also sells more than $400 million of product overseas.

But Timberland is more than boots and clothes and a global brand. This company is explicitly committed to being a force for positive change in the world. Timberland tries to create social as well as economic value—by protecting the rights of workers at factories in China and Bangladesh where its products are made, by trying to minimize its environmental footprint, by sharing its profits and its marketing savvy with nonprofit groups and, most of all, by aggressively promoting community service.

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