what but then we sat down and talked to them for a couple of hours and you know we gave them tea and coffee and they had lunch on our lawn sorry there's one there's another coffee coming and there's no who wanted sorry about the Sawyer anyway I've not put no need for you to be deceitful why didn't you just ask me whether I was in I can we hang a murderous B after about 20 minutes they said well the problem is not you you know it's sh I said wait a minute let's uh talk about
what is shell you know it's made up of people like me in the end what we found in that discussion was all the things that they were worried about I was worried about as well climate you know oppressive regimes human rights the big difference between us was I feel that I actually can make a contribution to this these people were frustrated because they felt they had no nothing to do so an individual CEO let's say may really care about the environment and in fact since they have such extraordinary resources they can even devote some of
their resources to that without violating their responsibility to be totally inhuman which is why as the Moody Stewart serve Tia protesters shell Nigeria can flare unrivaled amounts of gas making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution and all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare kenar a wewa and eight other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Nitro [Music] Delta a corporation is not a person it doesn't think people in it think and for them it is legitimate to create Terminator technology so that farmers are not
able to save their seeds SE seeds that will destroy themselves through a suicide gene seeds that are designed to only produce crop in one season you really need to have a brutal mind it's a war against Evolution to even think in those terms but quite clearly profits are so much higher in their minds the prophet motive which drove fudy to accomplish so much may bring out the evil as well as the [Music] hello my work spans all industry sectors I mean I I virtually have worked for like I'd say 25% of the Fortune 500 I've
posed as an investment banker I've posed as uh a venture capitalist um I set up front companies that are uh executive recruiting firms essentially at I'm a spy I'll locate your employees and I will tell them that I'm calling from Acme recruiting agency and that I've got a job that pays them considerably more than what they're paying would they mind meeting me for an interview and when the executive shows up what he doesn't realize is I'm actually debriefing him on behalf of a competitor and that there is no job and that the office that he's
at uh has been rented and and the the picture on my desk of my family is a phony and it's it's all just a big elaborate Rose to glean competitive information from from him I don't feel any guilt it's you know what I mean you have to expect that guys like me are out there we're predators it's about competition I mean it's about market share it's about being aggressive it's about shareholder value what is your stock at today if you're a CEO I mean do you think your your your your shareholders really care whether you're
Billy Buttercup or not you know do you think that they really they would prefer you to be a nice guy over uh over having money in their pocket I don't think so I think people want money that's the bottom line the fact that most of these companies are run by white men white rich men uh means that they are out of touch with what the majority of the world is because the majority of this planet are not a bunch of rich white guys uh they're people of other colors they're the majority women are the majority
and the poor and Working Poor make up the majority of this planet so uh the decisions that they make uh come from uh not the reality that exists uh throughout the world how much is enough you know how much is enough if if if you are a billionaire would it be okay just to be a half a billionaire wouldn't it be okay for your company to make a little less money if it meant when I bought those two airplane tickets for Phil Knight and myself to fly to Indonesia I was prepared for him to say
okay let's go oh no not a chance not a chance no they're transferable I can change it to another day call me on it call my bluff he's a smart guy I mean he's not he's not stupid and so I thought okay get ready for this especially because you know I bought first class ticket so you know would be a comfortable ride at least you know uh and of course he tells me then on camera I've never been to Indonesia I'm like taken aback by this I can't believe that the guy is the head of
the company has never walked through his own factories oh you've got to go I can't go now and the rest of this year when when we were done filming he calls me up um a couple weeks later and he goes I I may have a chance to go there with you to the factories I'm I'm going to the Australian Open to watch some tennis and uh you know maybe I can get up there or at least you can go there would you like to go to the Australian [Laughter] Open for 21 years I never gave
a thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the Earth in the making of our products and then in the summer of 1994 we began to hear questions from our customers we had never heard before what's your company doing for the environment and we didn't have answers the real answer was not very much and it really Disturbed many of our people not me so much as them and a group in our research Department uh decided to convene us a task force and bring people from our businesses around the world to come
together to assess our company's worldwide environmental position to begin to frame answers for those customers they asked me if I would come and speak to that group and give them a kickoff speech a launch this new task force with an environmental vision and I didn't have an environmental Vision I did not want to make that speech and at sort of the propitious moment the this book landed on my desk it was Paul Hawkins book The Ecology of Commerce and I began to read the Ecology of Comm really desperate for inspiration and very quickly in into
that book I found the phrase the death of birth it was EO Wilson's expression for species Extinction the death of birth and it was a point of a spear into my chest and I read on and the spear went deeper and and it became an epiphany experience a total change of mindset for myself and uh a change of Paradigm can any product be made sustainably well not any and every product can you make landmines sustainably well I don't think so there's a more fundamental question than that about landmines some products ought not be made at
all unless we can make carpets sustainably you know perhaps we don't have a place in a sustainable world but neither does anybody else making products unsustainably one day at early in this journey it dawned on me that uh the way I've been running interface is the way of the plunderer plundering something that's not mine something that belongs to every creature on earth and I said to myself my goodness
