Win/Win

Do I gain only if you lose? Must boards choose between enriching their stockholders and enhancing the well-being of those who clean their office buildings and buy their products? Is life, in other words, a zero-sum-game in which win/win solutions are rare—the occasional good luck stories—little more than exceptions that prove the darker rule?

I was enormously encouraged recently to discover Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson’s book Reimagining Capitalism. It is full of win/win stories. Here is one.

In October 2005 Walmart CEO Lee Scott announced a major commitment to sustainability. Henderson writes: “He introduced three goals: to be supplied 100% by renewable energy, to create zero waste, and ‘to sell products that sustain our resources and environment.’”

These commitments were costly. Walmart spent, for example, $500 million in 2007 and 2009 on reducing GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in their transportation fleet.

But two enormously positive things happened to the company as a result. First, its reputation soared—from last place in the ranking of twenty-seven retail companies by ethical reputation in 2007 to third place in just one year. Second, it began to save enormous amounts of money: “By 2017 Walmart had met its goal of doubling the transportation fleet’s efficiency and was saving more than a billion dollars a year in transportation costs—around 4 percent of net income.”

I don’t tell this story to get you to buy Walmart stock. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is nothing about Walmart that warrants critique. I do so simply because I find the story encouraging and hope you do as well.

I am on the lookout for win/win solutions because I am tired of the depressing and destructively adversarial spirit of our time. Collaboration is always better, whatever we are disagreeing about—whether as parents over the best way to discipline a child, or as a community over which books should be in a school’s library, or as a nation over what our immigration policy should be. Win/wins are not always easy to land, but they are better than pitched battles.

Walmart’s 2005 initiative has a suggestive back story.

The company had just thrown itself wholeheartedly into addressing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which had blown through the Gulf region six weeks earlier, leaving a million people homeless and inflicting $135 million in damages in the region of New Orleans (the head of one of the local parishes said that Walmart’s engagement put the American government to shame).

Local stores had given away enormous amounts of inventory. Henderson reports that one local Walmart store manager “took a bulldozer and cleared a path into and through that store, and began finding every dry item she could to give to neighbors who needed shoes, socks, food, and water.” Corporate headquarters had begun what would eventuate in donations of $20 million (ten times their initial pledge), along with one hundred truckloads of goods and one hundred thousand meals.

Here is what I find suggestive. I suspect that what triggered Walmart’s long-term, costly structural change was the grass-roots, spontaneous experience of responding to the Katrina disaster.

When we start with love, we find ourselves loving more—which I think Jesus was getting at when he said, “Give and it will be given to you.” One of the many gifts that fall upon a generous heart is increased generosity.

Lee Scott (Walmart’s CEO at the time) was a good businessman. But he was also human. I’m guessing that being caught up in his company’s spontaneous generosity had nudged him to undertake the grander project.

Often the first step towards finding a win/win solution is loving the “opposition” enough to give them a win. What is apt to follow is a new kind of relationship, one characterized by talking, listening, and working together, even when collaboration is costly. And such relationships make the world a better place.