Red Roads and White Roads

Sometimes getting sick can be a blessing in disguise. After being surrounded by the ill and infirmed throughout the holidays, it finally caught up with me at the start of the new year in the form of a mostly irritating (as opposed to debilitating) head cold. Taking it as an early test of my intent to slow down and do fewer things better, I stayed in bed (instead of trying, literally, to work through it) and attacked the rising stack of books beside my bed.

One book that I'd been dying to get through for a while was
Raising the Bar by Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson. As a cycling and outdoor sports fanatic, I've tried just about every bar and supplement on the market and I'm an unabashed Clif Bar loyalist. But there's always been some elusive "something else" that has always connected me to the product and, by extension, to the company. An authenticity, a simplicity, an engaging Horatio Alger story perhaps ... "something else".

The book helped to clear up the "something else" by using a map metaphor of "red roads" and "white roads" to describe the company's distinctiveness. A company on the red road:

"... believes business is about the destination ... [it's] primary reason for being, its destination, is maximizing shareholder value. When shareholder value and the bottom line become the reasons for being in business, everything else feeds that agenda."

Alternatively, on the white road, the moment -- the journey itself -- matters most. There is no set or final destination. The trip could end anywhere. As Erickson points out:

"We plan like any company does, but we center our discussion on what roads we'd like to travel and the type of business we'd like to become. The road, not the destination, drives Clif Bar."

I think that there are some fundamental societal, cultural, demographic, and global trends that portend the rise of a different kind of enterprise, one that can do well and do good. One that inspires passion in employees, is low-drag in operations, and intimately connected to, as Erickson puts it, natural demand in the marketplace, not demand generated by expensive marketing campaigns driven by guilt or inadequacy or materialism for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses. Sure, there will always be a role for red road companies in the marketplace -- after all, sharks are part of the ocean's ecosystem for a reason. But I have a feeling (and it's not much more developed than that right now) that the 21st century will demand a model for earned-income generating organizations (both nonprofit and for-profit which, after all, are mostly just a legal designations) that is radically different than what we expect one of these enterprises to look like and act like today.

I guess trying to figure out what that model looks like and putting it into practice with our ventures is my white road. The Clif Bar story is as good a place as any to start looking for some answers.