Discovering the Organization's Core Identity

GETTING STARTED: FINDING OUT WHO WE ARE

There is no fixed formula for connecting the core identity of an organization to something that has no precedent in its history. But the approach starts with believing such an identity exists—that the organization is not just about making money, or whatever products or services it currently makes or provides. This requires a real spirit of discovery, of being willing to be guided by your heart and being prepared to see what has always been there, unseen.

In the period Senge describes, Nike developed a "design for environment" network of product managers and designers. It started when Darcy Winslow, who was heading Nike's advanced R&D, began thinking, "there must be more to this business than the next cool gadget." About that time, environmental designers Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough, after designing Nike's European headquarters, studied one of Nike's shoes against their toxicity measures for product components and processes. The results, according to Winslow, "really opened up my eyes. I thought, 'Do we really understand the products we—and our whole industry—are creating?'" Her question eventually led to the creation of a new position, general manager of sustainable business strategies. "Sustainability was something that Nike management was starting to talk about, but it was still primarily from a compliance standpoint, in terms of policies and working with manufacturing partners around labor practices. I told them, 'If we are really serious about sustainability, it has to happen within product creation. We have to find a way to eliminate waste and toxicity in our products. Consumers experience Nike through our products.'[12] They said, 'Great, go do it,' and we created this new job."

As is the case with many people in new jobs focused on emerging issues, Winslow had a big mandate but not a lot of authority. None of the product development teams actually reported to her, and she was working with large, amorphous questions, like "What would it take to embed sustainability into what we do as a company?" and "How do we communicate that to our customers?" But the whole idea of sustainability, she says, "connected with me so deeply, so personally. It was not like I needed to think about whether this was important to me. I just knew 'We have to do this.' It became one of the most energizing and complicated challenges in my work."

About that time she read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. "Gladwell says that if you can get 20 percent of the population moving in the same direction, you've reached the tipping point. So, I was thinking, 20 percent of twenty-five thousand people in Nike—that's going to be tough." But she was not alone. Together with a few other women in parallel but different jobs in the company, she hosted a two-day meeting for about two hundred of Nike's key managers, and brought in Braungart and McDonough, along with other business leaders and luminaries in the sustainability field, just to get sustainability into everyone's awareness.

"I watched people's reactions to our initial efforts and was so encouraged; I was getting in touch again with why I love this company. We have all the problems of any big company, but as I rediscovered 'who' Nike is, I realized that we are people who innovate. This company is all about innovation. That is what really turns people on, and we were all seeing that the whole sustainability arena offers untold opportunities for innovation."

Would-be change leaders often limit themselves through encountering two subtle barriers that they fail to recognize: They do not go deeply enough into themselves to discover what is truly calling them, and they do not go deeply enough into the organization to discover what it stands for. When people fail to go deeply enough into themselves, they pursue "good ideas" that fail to tap their own passions. When they do not go deeply enough into what the company stands for, they end up trying to "push" their ideas into the organization.

It may seem a bit odd to talk about "who" an organization is, or what an organization "stands for," but it is not odd if you look at it as a human community. As a community, the organization came into being because there were enough people who cared about something to pursue it together. Nike, for example, was created by runners who were passionate about running and about creating better shoes for runners. As time went on, the business evolved beyond running, and it became necessary to reach down to a deeper level to connect with a core or essence that included but was not limited by this original vision. In Senge’s account, Nike had eleven maxims; the first was "It is in our nature to innovate." When Winslow could see how her passion for sustainability was really all about innovation, her whole change strategy shifted.