As my wife shopped in a branch of Hobby Lobby, a giant American craft shop, I picked up a copy of the founder’s autobiography which was languishing near the tills. David Green’s book, ‘Giving It All Away... and Getting It All Back Again: The Way of Living Generously,’ recounts how he started his company by making picture frames in his garage in 1970. His firm now has over 700 stores and he is worth around US$7.9Bn. He seems to be a humble man, despite his vast wealth, and is seeking to give away much of his money – and not necessarily to the people who might expect to receive it. He says that it is never too early to consider what your legacy may be. He considers that one of his own legacies (apart from a precedent-setting US Supreme Court case), are the values that he has instilled in his own family.
I was intrigued by this idea and mentioned it to my teenage daughters, Elizabeth (19) and Jemima (17). I asked them what they considered to be our own family’s values. I was somewhat shocked to hear that they thought that we did not have any, but digging a little deeper I managed to extract a few general ideas that they thought that we had inculcated into them over the years. These include the following:
- Respect for everyone;
- Being kind;
- Being polite (saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’);
- Being considerate (of other people’s feelings);
- Telling the truth (but my elder daughter said that we, as parents, should be relieved at some of the ‘non-truths’ that she has told us over the years);
- Loyalty as a family and to each other;
- Reliability, doing what you say you are going to do;
- Trying not to hurt one another’s feelings (or ‘diplomacy’ more generally);
- Trying your best;
- Doing the right thing;
- ‘Thinking outside the box;’
- Being (or at least pretending to be) civilised (on the basis that if you pretend to be civilised often enough, you will actually become civilised);
- Speaking clearly;
- Self-respect (looking after yourself, eating healthily, brushing your teeth, getting enough sleep, etc);
- Doing your fair share of the chores;
- Sitting up at the table to eat;
- Eating with good table manners;
- Not having any devices at the table during mealtimes (breakfast, for some reason, is excepted);
- Not having any devices in their bedrooms.
I have to say that we do not stick to all of the rules all of the time, and it’s arguable that despite our exhortations that some/several/all of these values are more often broken than achieved. Some of them are perhaps just my own wishful thinking. I wonder if you have your own list of family values?
Anyway, you may be wondering what this has to do with the building materials industry. Well, a new trend of companies having wider ‘values’ is now upon us (wider values than just maximising returns to shareholders, that is).
For example, the US ‘Business Roundtable’ has just updated its ‘Statement on the purpose of a corporation.’ Previously it had stated that ‘corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.’1 Now though, the organisation (and the 181 CEOs that form the ‘Roundtable’) has committed to:
- Delivering value to customers;
- Investing in employees;
- Dealing fairly with suppliers;
- Supporting communities;
- Generating long-term value for shareholders.
This all sounds to me like a good idea to build long-term value into companies, but apparently it has been viewed as revolutionary, bordering on ‘socialism’ (a controversial idea in today’s America). I noted that National Gypsum Company, Owens Corning, Rockwell Automation and Siemens USA were among the signatories (as were Apple, Amazon and IBM). Some companies are conspicuous by their absence.
In another ongoing trend, companies are having themselves certified as a ‘B Corp,’ by the B Corporation2, provided that they believe that ‘we must be the change we seek in the world,’ that ‘all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered’ and that ‘businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.’ Again, all of this seems self-evident to me.
After all this talk about values, you might be interested to hear about our own Mission Statement, which is (in its shortened form): ‘Pro Global Media aims to be the most-trusted, most highly-regarded and market-leading provider of information and events to the heavy building materials industries.’ It’s a start!
1 https://opportunity.businessroundtable.org/ourcommitment/
2 https://bcorporation.net/about-b-corps
