EPISODE #4.1:
Eileen Fisher Story
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Business leaders are famous for making bold claims that they either cannot or do not back up with actions. Maybe their words are merely empty. Or perhaps they mean to keep their promises, but they do not know how.
Eileen Fisher, the person and EILEEN FISHER, her iconic fashion company, don’t make any promises they can’t keep. My guests today share how EILEEN FISHER set and met audacious social justice and environmental sustainability goals.
Amy Hall, former VP of Social Consciousness at EILEEN FISHER and now a strategic advisor for the company, along with Sara Schley, Cofounder of consulting firm Seed Systems, share how they guided the company in their phenomenally successful sustainability quest. Their secret: Bring the system in the room.
Sara and Amy share the step-by-step process with us in this episode. You too can achieve bold sustainability goals!
Schley and Hall begin by providing us with the context for their work.
When the company was founded in 1984, Eileen had a strong foundational commitment to natural fibers and timeless design. And, at the same time, she focused on caring for the company’s employees. Her sustainability vision started with a strong commitment to human rights.
Eileen’s great aha came in 2012 while she was visiting suppliers in China. She listened to them describe how global challenges, such as water shortages, impacted their businesses. When she returned to the company headquarters, she brought with her a new commitment to environmental and social sustainability.
The challenge for Eileen, and those who worked with her, was how to act so intentions could lead to actions with impact.
At the time, Amy was the VP of Social Consciousness for Eileen Fisher. Upon meeting Sara at a conference and following up by joining one of her podcasts, Amy concluded the company could get to a workable plan better and faster with Sara’s help.
Amy recalls thinking that the company could benefit immensely from Sara’s systems thinking expertise. At that point, Sara had been working in systems thinking in sustainability, creating sustainability strategies for business for about 20 years. She had a book out on it and had facilitated a consortium of Fortune 500 companies for a decade.
Sara believes you can’t change any complex issue in isolation, in silos. Any complex issue is going to require the system to make change happen. If you want it to reduce your carbon footprint, you can’t just change the lightbulbs. The entire business model must change. And to do that, you must get the system in the room.
What does that mean? Amy and Sara explained you must think about the product from concept to closet and back again. They needed to get the vice-president of design, of manufacturing, of business planning, and others to work on the issues.
Sara organized a completely electronics-free retreat at a Buddhist retreat center in the Catskills for EILEEN FISHER’s key staff.
Next, Sara shares a few outcomes that came to light by the end of the three-day retreat. Seed Systems’s company model is to marry audacious visions with practical accountabilities by defining three specific factors: thing (x), time (y) and person (z). The head of the design team ultimately agreed to work with the sustainability team towards creating products with less impact on the environment. They realized the necessity of establishing specific boundaries which wouldn’t be crossed.
After the retreat, each team leader returned home and worked with their respective teams to make the company vision real.
The team leaders also formed a new sustainability team to keep each other accountable and motivated. The enthusiasm and commitment for sustainability didn’t soon dissipate, and Amy believes their goals began to come to fruition during just the first year. A large shift for the company was when they became a certified B Corporation. They stress the importance of championing small victories and considering sustainability to be a lifelong journey rather than a specific destination.
Both Amy and Sara emphasize the importance of authenticity and the importance they feel in being able to back up their claims. And they give examples of what authenticity looks like at EILEEN FISHER.
They share stories, give examples, and talk in detail about how to define metrics, hold people accountable, and make a vision into reality.
More about Amy Hall
Amy Hall is the former Vice President of Social Consciousness (and now the Social Consciousness Strategic Advisor) for clothing designer EILEEN FISHER. She also runs a consultancy called Impactorum, where she hosts two webcasts – “Impact Matters” and “Careers with Impact” – and helps individuals have greater social and environmental impact through their work.
More about Sara Schley
Sara Schley is the co-creator with her husband Joe Laur of the B Corp Seed Systems, an international consulting company established in 1994. Pioneering in the field of sustainability in business, Seed Systems has served over 50 enterprises and 1000s of individuals in corporate, non-profit, government and academic sectors, including such luminaries as EILEEN FISHER, Nike, MIT and Ben&Jerry’s. Sara is co-founder of WETheChange, a women B Corp CEO’ds. Versatile and innovative with expertise refined over 25 years of practice in designing, facilitating, teaching and coaching, Sara is your go to partner for leading with integrity and impact. She believes change happens from the inside out. Sara is also a mom of twins, a step mom, a wife, a spiritual teacher, an outdoor leader, a Shadow Work healer, a social entrepreneur, and a published author. She lives with the woods in Western Massachusetts with her husband and an aging yellowlab….the kids just sprung the nest.
Timestamps:
02:10 – Amy contextualizes Eileen Fisher’s background
04:15 – How Sara’s company became involved with Eileen Fisher
06:30 – Bringing the system in the room
15:10 – How they kicked off the retreat by sending everyone out into the woods to contemplate
21:47 – The outcomes surfaced by the end of the retreat
25:00 – Conflicts and challenges
28:53 – How were the outcomes of the retreat relayed to the rest of the company?
39:40- Discussion of women leading EILEEN FISHER and the effect on results
44:00 – EILEEN FISHER’S authenticity
49:10 – Advice for anyone on a sustainability journey
Links:
- Learn more about Eileen Fisher’s commitments.
- Learn more about Sara Schley.
- Visit the Seed System website.
- Learn more about Amy Hall.
- Visit Impactorum website.
- Read the Case Study.
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EPISODE #4.1 TRANSCRIPT
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Welcome to the Conscious Culture Cafe, the podcast that explores how you can lean into your purpose, live your values, and enhance your social impact through your work. I’m your host, Kathy Miller Perkins.
Welcome friends. So you and I know that many business leaders over the past year have made bold statements about their commitments to sustainability and social justice. Yet what I want to know is where is the plan, and when will we see actions to support their words? My guests today work with a company that set audacious goals many years ago, both environmental and social sustainability goals. And they developed a plan to achieve those goals and they continue to up the ante, clothing brand, Eileen Fisher and Eileen Fisher herself have kept their commitments. And it all started at a Buddhist retreat where the company brought the system in the room.
With us today are two women who are going to talk about bringing the system in the room. These two women have been instrumental in the process of assisting the Eileen Fisher brand in their ongoing quest to make business a movement. They have stories to tell and advice to offer to help you with your own sustainability journey. First, meet Sara Schley, the co-creator of B-Corp Seed Systems, where she designs, facilitates and coaches to help individuals and businesses change from the inside out.
Second, meet Amy Hall. Amy is the former vice president and now advisor of social consciousness at Eileen Fisher. Amy also has a consulting company, Impactorian, where she helps individuals have greater social and environmental impact through their work. Let’s get started. Amy, let’s start with you. Where did all of this start? How did Eileen Fisher become so committed to business as a movement?
Amy Hall:
So just to a quick context setting, when the company was founded back in 1984, so that was 37 years ago, Eileen did have a really clear commitment at that time to natural fibers and timeless design, and she didn’t think of them at that time as kind of sustainability attributes but they have come to be known as such over the years. And I joined the company 10 years in, so now I’ve been with company for over 27 years. And I’d say for the first 10 or 15 years of my time with the company, we were really just experimenting with different things, anything that seemed to appeal to us. We were still small and very flexible and adaptable. So we were trying, one season we would try wool that wasn’t dyed or another season we might try cotton that grows in colors, but this was never with a grand kind of strategic effort behind it.
And then our real first step into this was actually on the human rights side. So that was first time we started thinking about our supply chain in any kind of systemic way was because of the people issue. That people were really Eileen’s first kind of conscious commitment, both for employees and then eventually for supply chain. So I would say that this kind of new switch turned when Eileen took a supply chain trip back in, around 2012 now, so we had already been in business for a number of years. And that’s when she came back, she had spoken to some suppliers along the way. She started learning about how global issues were impacting individual suppliers in our own supply chain. Water, in particular, she’d never thought about water from the perspective of a supplier or from the perspective of Eileen Fisher product, and that’s when she came back and came back all fired up.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh really? 2012, what’s happened since 2012? And so, how did you get involved, Sara?
Sara Schley:
Well lucky for me actually, it was pretty much right after Eileen came back from China, that Amy happened to join a webinar, podcast I was doing at the time on leadership from the inside out. And it turns out unbeknownst to me, Amy and I had met briefly, or she had come to a business for sustainability conference we’d done many years earlier at Ford Motor Company with Henry’s great-grandson at the helm, at that point. So we had had a brief contact, but it wasn’t until Amy came to the webinar, and then I looked at the list of folks on the webinar and I’m like, “Oh, I love Eileen Fisher.”
My mother had given me Eileen’s clothes back in the early eighties when I got out of college and she thought my wardrobe was pretty pathetic. So I’ve been, I’d like to say a poster child for Eileen Fisher ever since. I loved her clothes. But then I had met her, I’d seen her on stage a few years prior, the Women and Power conference, and I was just so moved and impressed by who she is as a human being, and so many people are who meet her, just how genuine she is, her humility, her kindness. And she had funded a bunch of youth, women, from around the world to come to this particular conference, and I just thought that was really moving that she did that. So anyway, I had Eileen Fisher sort of on my radar screen. And then when Amy came to webinars like, “Okay, I need to talk to them.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah, really.
Sara Schley:
We had a conversation and Amy invited me to meet her colleagues. Right, Amy? Later that year, it was in December of 2012, I remember.
Amy Hall:
Yeah, that sounds about right. Going right into 2013. 2013 was the year things started to fall into place. We started to form a plan together with Sara and that’s how the rest of the story unfolds.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So Sara, you were involved from the beginning of the plan, the planning process then.
Sara Schley:
I think, I mean, as Amy said, they were already underway, under Amy’s brilliant leadership and more in the social domain, but Eileen Fisher, herself, had just gotten this passion for water and looking at other environmental issues. And so I think I kind of came into the stream, so to speak, right at the beginning of that. Let’s bump it up a notch. Eileen really wants to accelerate our progress. And Amy has said, I remember you said to me Amy, “We’ll get there without you, but I think we’ll get there faster with you,” which was lovely.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So how did the two of you work together, in terms of this visioning process? What was that like? Amy, what was your role in this?
Amy Hall:
Well, Sara’s particular skillset, aside from, in addition to being just a fabulous human being and very aligned with us philosophically, is that she’s a systems thinking expert. And when we invited her in to meet a few of the senior leaders in the company and make sure that there was chemistry, that’s really important to us at Eileen Fisher. Do we kind of see eye to eye? Do we enjoy being with each other? Is this new person entering our group, does she kind of fit in? And we definitely saw that right from the beginning. So we started talking about, what would it take to move this big ship? I think at the time we were probably about 800 employees, something like that. We’ve grown a bit since then, and the book, The Tipping Point, had come out recently right before that. And so we kind of had this idea about 10%, takes about 10% within a population to kind of shift behaviors or shift culture.
And so we were thinking, what does that mean inside our company? And Sara said, “If we’re going to do this, we need to get the system in the room.” And then we were like, “Oh, what’s that? And what system? How do we even think about a system within this company?” And she helped us think through what the right system would be. And for us, we knew it’s our product, and it’s true from pretty much any company that makes a product. It’s a product where the biggest impact is, negative impact. So we had to get the system of the product in the room.
So we thought about the designers, the people who sell, the people who merchandise, the people who, of course the people involved in the making of the product, or supply chain people and production people. And then my team, which is social consciousness and Eileen or her team, so kind of that whole system. Can we do it? We had never brought all these people together. What would that look like? What’s the ideal environment to bring them into? And Sara helped us think through all of that.
Oh and I should also mention, I had a very important key partner in the company to work with me on this. It was somebody who sat on the senior leadership team. Her name is Candice and she and I were really kind of established as co-facilitators of this work on the inside of the company, working together with Sara and I think that was really important. Somebody she held are the creative teams. I held the kind of sustainability side of things. And together we worked on this with Sara.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s great.
Sara Schley:
Yeah.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So, Sara, so you were the facilitator of this process. Tell us about the process a little bit.
Sara Schley:
Okay, sure. Well, by the time that Amy and I reconnected in 2012, 13, I had been working in systems thinking in sustainability, creating sustainability strategies for business for about 20 years at that point. So I’d had a book out on it and I had facilitated a consortium of Fortune 500 companies for a decade. And so I had a lot of mistakes under my belt, so to speak. I had done a lot of projects that had failed. Some that have been pretty good, Nike and others. But I had a sense at that point of what I thought might be effective. And it turns out, Eileen Fisher because of all the good qualities we’ve been mentioning, Amy and Candace, Eileen, the culture, there was just really a fertile soil, if you will, for the work that we were about to embark on.
The methodology, I guess, just to kick it off to be in where Amy was, was that the notion is that you can’t change any complex issue in isolation, in silos, right? Any complex issue is going to require the system to make change happen. And so when, I’ve learned over the years that the very well-intentioned, brilliant heads of sustainability or corporate social responsibility didn’t really have the leverage to get much done in the companies. They really needed to be able to partner with people like for manufacturing, design, etc., like Amy said. So if you want it to reduce your carbon footprint, it wasn’t going to be enough for somebody from social consciousness to say, “Can we change the light bulbs?” It’s really going to involve changing the whole business model.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah. And I’ve seen a lot of companies that just wanted to change the light bulb.
Sara Schley:
It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Over and over. And with systems thinking, you see that there are repeating patterns in human systems and they’re repeating patterns in companies. And over and over, because you see the same thing, really well intentioned and brilliant, powerful thinkers in a corporate sustainability who really could not get very far. So to have that more paradigm shift, quantum change, system in the room. So what does that mean? As Amy said, think about the product from concept to closet and back again. It was also a circular system and who would that take? All right, we need to get the vice-president of design, of manufacturing, of business planning, of, later, the marketing folks got their take back. So if we could get those leaders in the room and have them think about not only problem, but first start with the vision.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes. Right.
Sara Schley:
So that’s what I always do. It’s kind of the secret sauce and it’s not just me, it’s a lot of my colleagues who come from the same cloth. But we always start with, what do you want to create? What’s the most audacious thing you could do? Kennedy said man on the moon by the end of the decade, it was never going to happen. It happened.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
So I really want to start with vision and we do that through like, we actually did an embodied thing in nature, where they went out in nature and spend some time out there.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh, I’d love to hear some funny stories about that. I just envisioned that in my head.
Sara Schley:
Right.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
I just envisioned these people with heels, going out.
Sara Schley:
Exactly. I know. And it takes a little hutzpah if you will, to get them to go out there but-
Kathy Miller Perkins:
I bet it did.
Sara Schley:
… So Amy was game and Candice, and they’re like, all right. I said, “Look, just give me three days back to back, offsite in the woods somewhere and we’ll do vision the first day, will be systems thinking and leverage the second day. We’ll do action accountability, the third day. And if we haven’t fallen in love by then we’ll say goodbye. And if we have-
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
… we’re going to be in it for the long haul.” At that point, I really don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. But thankfully back in the day, Amy was like, “Okay.” Amy and Candice said, let’s do it.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
Willing to take the time. So let me just take a breath and just say from Amy, from your perspective, what was that invitation like and what were you thinking?
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah, please.
Amy Hall:
Well, I just want to say that up to this point I mentioned I’ve been with the company now… Well, at that point, gosh, about, I don’t know, 17, 18 years, something like that. And my team had always been working kind of on its own chugging along, trying to draw people in as we could, but again based on a grand master plan. And so, the fact that Sara was talking about bringing these diverse people together, we were just so excited. And I’m already a kind of a nature person so the idea of starting in nature made total sense to me, but I was a little skeptical, frankly.
I wasn’t sure if by the end of three days, we could turn some of these people around who in my experience had been really staunch supporters, had firm stakes in the ground, around their belief systems, around what we should be doing with the product. This is prior to the system thinking prep conversation. And it had been real… We had had some very challenging conversations in the prior years around, that illustrated how my team’s vision and their vision for the product were kind of not, we’re at odds with each other. So I was hopeful, but a little bit guarded. But at the same time, really grateful that everybody we invited said yes, and that was the key. And they all showed up too, and there was no alcohol served at this place.
Sara Schley:
One of our designer named Julie Rubiner actually found this place, and it turns out it’s a Buddhist retreat center that was owned by Samsung, the Japanese technology company of all people. Korean, I’m not sure. But at any rate, it was this gorgeous place in the Catskills, beautiful views of the mountains. Two hours up the Hudson for Eileen Fisher folks in the city to jump on the train. And they were willing to say yes to the invitation while also requested people to leave their electronics behind.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Really? No phones. No iPads, nothing. Oh my gosh.
Sara Schley:
Yeah. I mean, now it’s eight years ago, you could do it. It seems even harder to do it now.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
But people are willing. We said, tell people… Have the folks that are your key contacts, your family, your kids let them know you’re out of touch for a couple days.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
Then people were game. But the thing about doing it that way is they’re really engaged.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah. Oh, sure.
Sara Schley:
If it come down-
Kathy Miller Perkins:
You sent them out, what did you do at the beginning? How did you kick this off? Kicked it off.
Sara Schley:
… Okay. So here’s what we did. First, my partner in crime, Mira and I had reconnaissance, that’s a verb, the place, and we knew that there were some… We wanted locations in the woods that people could spend some time alone. So why do we want to do that? This is a piece around environmental and social sustainability, around our big vision for the planet. We wanted people to have like an embodied experience of that, to help them remember the time they were a little kid and fishing or something.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
When was the last time they had time in the woods? And we also wanted it to be accessible, not too scary. So it was going to be like one hour alone with your journal and a pen and a glass, and a bottle of water. And that was going to be a lot for people who have done this for a while.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
But we took them out one-by-one and we set them down. We start off with a Mary Oliver poem. I think it was around your wild, what the wild geese do, a poem later. And folks went out into the woods. And I have to say that the funny story I wanted to tell you earlier that Amy may remember is there’s this one woman, her name was Danielle, beautiful mother of two, from the city, brilliant business planning team, I think. And she was like, “There’s no way I’m going out there.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
[crosstalk 00:16:42].
Sara Schley:
I am not doing this. She’s looking really stylish. And, but then she was willing. She accepted the idea.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
And she kind of went out there really resistant. And then at one point, when she came back telling the story, laughing, literally an acorn fell on her head.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh no. What a metaphor.
Sara Schley:
The acorn fell on her head. The Newton’s acorn. And she said, “I realized that means it’s time for me to wake up to this process.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh, that’s great.
Sara Schley:
So, that was fun.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s great. That’s a great story.
Sara Schley:
And we all laughed.
Amy Hall:
And just let me add that later on, it was revealed that Danielle, the kind of transformation that happened for her during the three-day period was, she was reflecting on her children, who were very young at the time and really deeply concerned about the future, the world planet of their future and what kind of world were they going to grow up into. And that became a major incentive for her to consider the possibilities for the company and what we could do for this planet.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So it sounds like there are some personal turning points in addition to company wide turning points.
Sara Schley:
Yes.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Partly started with the retreat, but probably ongoing, I would think.
Sara Schley:
Yeah, I think the retreat was a big deal for a lot of people. I mean, it is a place you’re immersed in nature.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
You’re having this powerful experience with your colleagues. There was one, the woman I mentioned who had found the place, she wrote a beautiful essay, which Amy and I excerpted with her permission this article we wrote, where she said, like there was just a moment where she got that this was a paradigm shift for her and her career. Like this, she was going to be all in now.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Really?
Sara Schley:
And hadn’t been before.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
What happened to bring that about, do you think?
Amy Hall:
I think what happened for a lot of people was on day two… Well, toward the end of day one, we were gathering together after this embodied experience out in nature and then we were coming together and we did a series of visioning exercises where we were first on our own, and then in small groups. And we were thinking about the future that we envisioned for just on the planet. But anyway, the point is at certain points we were envisioning what’s the future we imagine just for ourselves on this planet and then in general for the planet, and then what’s the role of the company in helping to bridge that gap.
But there was a point in there where we came together, created a shared vision and I would just say that it was a series of exercises that went through all of these different versions that caused each of us to have a moment where we were like, “Huh.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Really?
Amy Hall:
Once you know it, and once you think about it, you can’t turn back. You can’t say, “I think that today, but tomorrow I’m going to go back to throwing all my plastic bags away.” It just doesn’t happen like that. You go through an actual kind of physical change in your body.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. Yeah, that must’ve been an amazing experience for everybody. So is this all women? Is it all women or were there…
Sara Schley:
Turns out it was, just by coincidence. I mean, it was. I have to say again, I’ve been a lot of corporate off-sites at that point and when they walked in, I was like, “O-M-G.” Vice president of manufacturing, vice-president of design, vice president of business planning, all these folks who you typically might have a preconceived notion would tend to be the other gender, showed up as women.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes.
Sara Schley:
So I think it still would have worked if there had been men there. But one of the other key things was that Eileen was there, as founder and CEO. And she came, she said later that she came planning to come for an hour and she stayed for three days. She stayed for the whole thing.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Wow. She was that impressed.
Sara Schley:
She was moved, yeah. And she went with it. And that, of course her presence as the founder and leader of the company spoke volumes. And she was all in on the exercises and all in on the process, like any other participant. So that was powerful too. But you know back to Julie’s transformation or others, I think like Amy said, you’re on this journey, you’re out in nature. Then you’re doing a huge visioning, like where I want to be at the end of my life. I think we did the end of our lives.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Individually? Thinking individually?
Sara Schley:
No, I do it as a visualization, guided visualization. Everybody’s in their own space, right?
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Sara Schley:
And it’s like, “What’s the legacy I’m leaving for my children?” That’s kind of… It’s emotional. It grabs you by the heart and mind and spirit. And then we work back to, “Okay, so what’s the company doing? And what’s your unique, out of your constellation of gifts, what’s the unique thing that you’re giving to this system?” So there’s that visioning that kind of captures us. And then later on, after we determined the gap, we’re not there yet. Here’s where we want to be, here’s where we are.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes.
Sara Schley:
Let’s build a system to get us from here to there, because like I was saying, silos won’t do it. And then once you see that system, “Oh, it’s going to take each of us here. I can’t do it alone in manufacturing. I can’t do it alone in design. I can’t do it alone in-“
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Sure. That stuff is an a-ha.
Sara Schley:
… Yeah, as one of the store managers. And then you see, “Oh, I’m essential to this team.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
What actually came out at the end of the third day? Was it some kind of commitment? Was it a planning process? What were the outcomes at the end of the three days?
Sara Schley:
Yep. Okay so Amy’s laughing, she knows what I’m going to say. So one of the kind of signatures of this work is that we marry audacious, high in the sky vision with very practical, on the ground, rubber meets the road accountabilities. And it’s a model that’s deceptively simple, XYZ, which is defining thing X, by time Y, by person Z. Each one of those X, Y, and Z, they’re not obvious.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
For example, we say, “Okay, we need to get our biggest wholesale account. We’re going to get our biggest wholesale account on board.” Okay. Well, great. Nothing’s going to happen until you determine X, what specifically does that mean? Y, who specifically is doing it? And Z, when? And so that was a difficult, challenging, but important process.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
I still remember putting initials of folks in the room up there and hearing groans.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
You mean they didn’t volunteer?
Sara Schley:
Well they were somewhat coerced. No, a lot of times they volunteered, but sometimes it’s kind of like, “Well, what do you think, Amy, Candace? Who should it be?” You know, call you out. So there was that, but then there was also this notion, I think we had an advanced, but we needed to go through the offsite for people to want to commit, was that there would be what later became called the sustainability design team, which was a microcosm, a subset of this group that represented one of the key aspects of the system. We had them all. So again, it was the system in the room and the design team.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Okay.
Sara Schley:
If that makes sense.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
But the design team was in place when you left the retreat.
Sara Schley:
Pretty much.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Okay.
Sara Schley:
I think we made invitations. We made requests. We knew who they should be.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
We knew I wanted them to be.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
And I remember they came to my house because I have a little retreat center, in our company. Three months later, they all showed up. And that’s when it proved that this was real. It wasn’t just an offsite, I think.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
What do you think, Amy? How was that?
Amy Hall:
The thing that really stands out for me as far as accomplishment by the end of the three days was, we had our design team, the head of our design team at that time said, “Okay, we agree to wanting to work towards environmentally less impactful clothing and product. I want to work with you, social consciousness, to help us figure out how we’re going to do that.” Because they knew that it was going to mean they were going to have to source fabrics differently. They were going to have to design different fabrics differently, maybe design product differently, but they didn’t know exactly how to go about that. And so, by the end of the three days, there was an agreement that we were going to be working together to actually spell out what those steps would be to get there and we did it. But having that commitment from the senior leader of that team was extraordinarily meaningful and very rare in my world at that time.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
I bet.
Sara Schley:
Yeah.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Was there any conflict getting to the shared vision?
Sara Schley:
Because what happens is that, I think, the experience is that once you have the shared vision, you all have this aspirational experience. Then that’s not too difficult to get to. Yeah, we want to be the preeminent fashion leader in environmental and social product, or it’s a big picture. Where the challenges could come is like specific metrics there, I think, measureables. And that’s something else I wanted to share that when it came out of the offsite, in addition to the vision and system, and then that sustainable design team was this notion around stretch goals and we have a little in jargon for that called the river banks. And why was the river banks, is that it’s a metaphor about in order for that river to flow, you have to have the banks, that’s the boundaries that you won’t go beyond.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh.
Sara Schley:
And we’re going to have a zero toxicity.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Metaphor.
Sara Schley:
We’re going to have zero to landfill or whatever that is. Those are the banks. And then the rivers, it’s going to flow faster because of those solid banks to where we want to get. So the river banks became a metaphor and a concept around stretch goals. And what was great was that the same designer that Amy mentioned, her name’s Jackie and I don’t think she’d mind because she told us she’s happy to tell a story. She had said that if they got stretch goals from social consciousness and from senior leadership, that would be really helpful. Because if it’s murky and mushy, you don’t really know what to design too.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s right.
Sara Schley:
But if we say zero to landfill, a hundred percent organic, a hundred percent recyclable, whatever it is that we pick, then it’s just another design challenge.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes, exactly.
Sara Schley:
So that was really something they wanted to do. And then the nitty gritty about what specifically those were, I think that might’ve been somewhat of where the challenge came. But Amy, how was the process of defining the river banks?
Amy Hall:
Yeah, the process of that is what happened after the offsite. We spent about the next year and a half, it took us about a year and a half to kind of get the river banks fleshed out. The river banks turned out to be about a hundred or so individual steps, on both the environmental side and on the human rights side, that would get us to more, greater sustainability, if you will. I use quotation marks because is anything really sustainable. I think not but we can continue to get better. And when we were working on those river banks, it wasn’t just social consciousness saying, “Okay, here design. Here manufacturing. Here are your river banks.” But we would meet with them and over a number of times and say, “So what do you think, what is a realistic goal around organic?” Just to take that example. It’s really easy to understand.
Amy Hall:
We’re currently at 20%, let’s say organic fiber in cotton. How far can we get by the year 2020? And maybe they’d say, “I don’t know, maybe 80 or 90%.” We’d say, “Can we just say a hundred percent? What if we aim for a hundred percent, how would that feel to you?” “Well, okay. It’s a stretch goal. We don’t know if we can a hundred percent get there, but we can try for it. It doesn’t sound completely off the table.” And that’s how we did every single… So we had a goal for every one of our top volume fibers. We had goals around the chemistry that was going into those fibers, the kind of dyes, the kind of finishes.
We eventually had goals around water and carbon, those took a little longer. And we also had general goals, it was hard to quantify, but we finally got there, around worker wellbeing, worker happiness, conscious business practices. These were much more, these required a little more nuance and we had to find some expertise outside the company to help us with those. But we got there and it was all in partnership with the individual teams that were being impacted because they’d be doing the work.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That was one of the things that I wondered about the retreat. So you had a wonderful experience at the retreat, came out with some very concrete plans from the retreat and a design team. But you had a whole organization, I think you said you had how many people at the retreat? 20 some.
Sara Schley:
20.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah. Okay. And you had 800 people to go back to. So, how did that work? I mean, were people invested from the beginning? Was there a lot of convincing? How did it become part of the DNA of the culture?
Sara Schley:
Two things. One is, because I have the evidence because it’s still up in my retreat center up here. In that first, the second offsite with just the design team, the sustainability design team in January of 2014, that group came up with eight big buckets of the river banks.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Okay.
Sara Schley:
Four in environmental and four in social. So that’s where Amy said we ended up with a hundred. But you could remember eight. I can still remember that I think, materials, chemistry, carbon, water on the environmental side, and then on social side, as Amy was saying, and it was living wage, worker happiness, worker voice and conscious business practices. So you had those big buckets and then it was really, this is funny. The military metaphor is coming to me, it’s so bizarre, they never do. But then it was like deploying it. Well, why? Switch metaphors like the Russian dolls concept. You had the head of design. She had that experience at the offsite vision, current reality system, gap, filling in the XYZ. She took that to her team, so that there was a sustainable materials team in that first river bank around materials, and they just cranked it, because they know their work a lot better than any of us do around specific fibers.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
And so they went to work on that piece of it. And once they bought into a hundred percent, it was like, “Okay.” Another piece I want to share, when Amy said, “How about a hundred percent instead of 70?” If you go to a hundred, I like to say 50% of a hundred is a lot better than a hundred percent of 10, right?
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
So it’s always having the stretch goal. But also when you make it a hundred percent or zero, it requires the designers to do a paradigm shift. It’s not enough to do just incremental change.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s right.
Sara Schley:
We got to think this whole thing over again.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s right.
Sara Schley:
So that’s what we like to do, say the stretch goals. It’s not going to be business as usual. We have a whole new program.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah, really. So, each person on the design team went back and did something with her own team. How did that work? What was that process like?
Amy Hall:
Yeah, so it was each person from their own team went back and worked. So it wasn’t just design, but we had our manufacturing team, we had merchandising, we had business planning.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Okay.
Amy Hall:
They were all… So the leaders of each of those teams became part of a sustainability design team for one thing. So this was a key element because we would continue to get together as a small, tight entity for the next three years. So we got together once a month in person for a full day and once a week by phone for an hour. And just to keep checking in with each other, to support each other, to kind of talk about what was working well, where were things falling apart, what are new ideas we have, etc. Keep each other accountable also. We kept having those XYZ. Every time we had a meeting like that, we had XYZ.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Oh, that’s great. What a wonderful, simple, practical system. Just great.
Sara Schley:
Yes.
Amy Hall:
Well, so each person then had their own teams that they were guiding and leading and then they had their own working groups. So we had working groups on the design side, materials, chemistry, etc. We also had working groups in supply chain side around transportation and costing Those are the two I can think of off the top of my head. And there was one just around metrics. The business planning worked a lot with metrics. How are we going to know that this is actually having an impact on our business? How can we draw metrics from what’s selling? What do customer’s like, etc., so that we know that we’re actually having some kind of positive impact out there, positive effect out there. I wouldn’t call it impact particularly, but so we can understand the relationship between the business and this work. So that is, it started at the top with a few key people and then quickly fanned out because each of those people influenced a whole bunch of other people.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s great. And so how long did it take for this to really become part of the DNA of the company? Was it a year? Was it two? Was it longer? I mean, what was that like?
Amy Hall:
First year, we also had a few other off sites with other key people. We had a big offset with sales and marketing teams. I remember that took us to the Garrison Institute. I remember that one. We went to Edith Macey… Anyway, that’s your… Sorry, just went off on a tangent. We did have a few other… So the point was we did bring more teams together to try to fan out and reach that 10% tipping point. And I don’t know if we ever quite got exactly to that 10%, but we got enough people that the senior leadership team was completely bought in, just about everybody in the company understood what was going on.
We made sure to have engagement, announcements, updates at all the key meetings, whether they were the retail store leader meetings, the company-wide meetings, the leadership forum meetings, there was always something about vision 2020, or sustainability in there. Sometimes Sara would join us and do some kind of an exercise. Sometimes we would just provide an update. There were many, many touch points throughout the next several years, and it was really within that first year that I would say that things ramped up enough to say that it was filling out into the DNA. And Sara, I know you’ve been wanting to say something. Sorry.
Sara Schley:
Two things, I guess. One is there was also like this intrapreneurial stuff that happened as Amy was describing. There’s one of the folks on the team who was project manager, Rebecca McGee. She came up with a notion called sustainability ambassadors, which were people who throughout the company, who got word around vision 2020, Amy, correct me if I’m wrong. But then they would get to go on a year long program, which is a journey that Rebecca and some of her colleagues created. She’s younger, which was great and bringing in her peers to do a deep dive into sustainability. And they weren’t able to be on the first off site but now they were going to get a lot of content and a lot of expertise. Then they went on it became leaders within the company like, “Okay, my program for ambassadors is going to be to make this place completely plastic free,” or “My program’s going to be to fix this facility,” or whatever. But there were other little offshoots, like healthy mushrooms that popped up in the landscape.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
As a result of, that helped move it into the DNA too.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So it sounds like you’re talking a lot about culture. Did it affect the culture in other ways, in addition to the various specific targeted sustainability related metrics and goals that you had? Did the culture become more collaborative? Did it change in any way? Amy, what do you think?
Amy Hall:
I don’t know that this is going to answer your question directly, but I will say that along the way is when we first became B-certified as a company. So that didn’t happen until the very end of 2015, early 2016, for our first time to become certified as a B corporation and that was a massive shift for us because we hadn’t really… We never quantified how we were doing in terms of our relationship to the environment, to people in our landscape, etc. And here we were able to now say we had a score and actually we were among this elite group of companies that succeeded. And Sara’s firm, Seed Systems, is also a B corporation, which gave us even, it was even a happier connection that way.
And then we became a New York State benefit corporation, which means that legally we are now required to report out on how we are benefiting, not only our own bottom line, but also environmental issues and social issues. So, culturally did it change anything? We were already highly collaborative company. We were already partially employee-owned. We already have a culture of mutual support and mutual care. It’s very familial in our company. So, I think that this reinforced that and gave us a new way to be accountable to each other.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
To hear you talk about having that foundation, maybe that’s what made it, not easy but easier to move quickly as you did, it sounds like.
Amy Hall:
Well, and ironically though it still took us, what 17, or depending on how you look at it, 17 or 25 years to get there.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Amy Hall:
So, it was like having the culture, but also having the right set of conditions in place-
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
Yes.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
… to make it happen.
Sara Schley:
Yeah, like our saying fertile soil and the positive, perfect storm.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
A leader that wants to do it as dedicated. The culture that’s there and leaders like Amy and Candice that are ready to put their shoulder to the wheel.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
And you might say that the visionary and systems thinking process to go with it, and some of the structures around the sustainability design team, that’s just steady.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
We’re going to just keep the steady beat every month, every week. I wanted to mention something about the systems work and the sustainability design team, and I think of it as kind of like an accordion, where you have to… We brought the system in the room to on Dharma because in order to understand the whole picture of the company, we need everyone there, right. But then to implement, we’ve got to go back into our corners. I got to work with my expert and dive in.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s the point.
Sara Schley:
I got to work with my expert in manufacturing. But if we just go back to our corners, then we get siloed again.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
So then we have to come back as a design team and we see the whole and we hear from each other and what progress is being made and that’s cool. And then we understand like, “Oh yeah, that’s why I got to get my business process changed because that’s going to impact the factories overseas. I forgot about that.” So, that’s kind of accordion thing, where you go back and forth.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s a lovely way to put it.
Sara Schley:
Yeah, thank you.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
A lovely metaphor for it.
Sara Schley:
And then also that the culture that we had that was celebration within the sustainable design team. And to me, that’s really important because we’re never going to get to planet sustainability. It’s a lifelong journey every day we breathe, we’re still going to be working it.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Sara Schley:
So you got to have fun along the way.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
You have to champion your small victories.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So, Sara, you’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of companies. You’ve worked with… I keep wondering, because I’m very interested in women, the way that women lead.
Sara Schley:
Yeah.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s a major interest of mine. What have you found that was different about your work with Eileen Fisher versus a company that had either more equal men and women or fewer women? Any differences or do you think that there’s really not anything unique about 85% women?
Sara Schley:
Well, I’ll say it, I think in my career, I’ve worked with something like around 60 enterprises and Eileen is the only one that is majority women. So, and yes, it’s also, Kathy, it’s been a big interest of mine too, because are these qualities about gender, women versus men or non-binary folks? Are they about the feminine and masculine? The more, can we attribute qualities to one or the other? I definitely think when women are in leadership, there is kind of a qualitative difference. It’s certainly not a hundred percent one way, a hundred percent the other way. But if you did like a, what’s this kind of curve again called? You know this curve, I mean.
Amy Hall:
Bell curve.
Sara Schley:
Middle.
Amy Hall:
Bell curve.
Sara Schley:
Middle man, I think it’s different. The pieces that I noticed are a tendency towards a collaboration, a tendency towards co-creativity, listening, leading with curiosity. And it’s, again, it’s not that men don’t do this or all men don’t do this, but I think if you looked at a women’s culture, there may be more of that. And certainly at Eileen Fisher, there is. And as Amy said, if you go too far to the end of that spectrum, it can be a challenge. Like I use the metaphor of like a plate and a knife, circle and a straight edge. There’s a one focus that’s all about make things happen without more collaborations, take the hill. And then there’s a circle that’s let’s all be part of the decision together without any take the hill. And either those two extremes aren’t too helpful.
So I think Eileen Fisher was really strong on collaboration, co-creation, community, connectivity, listening, compassion. On the first offsite, I remember again, and I hadn’t seen the situation before, where there was one point in the meeting where people were feeding back about being burnt out and Eileen said, “You guys need to rest more.”
Amy Hall:
One thing that we are notoriously not very good at as a company is making decisions, but actually that XYZ process and that kind of just this idea of wanting to keep moving forward, because we’ve got that target date of 2020. It allowed us, and it forced us, and it gave us structure to actually make decisions that were all aligned toward a common goal.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
So it sharpened the system.
Amy Hall:
Sharpened us. Oh, that’s a great way of saying that. Yeah.
Sara Schley:
I know it’s kind of interesting because it’s different than what you might think would emerge from a sustainability process. As I’m thinking about that river banks metaphor, I think it really did focus, you might say, also the Eileen Fisher culture in a certain momentum building way, like the river flows towards this aspiration. And again, to what that designer, what Jackie had said is like, give me the boundaries, give me the metrics, give me the guideposts and then will they make it happen. And she hadn’t had that before. So a little different than some companies and what you might think. So that was wonderful.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
The other thing that you brought up briefly, and I didn’t pursue it enough is the whole thing about a movement and activism, corporate activism. And over the… And I don’t know how many years, because I’ve only become aware more recently of what Eileen Fisher has done the company and the individual, in terms of corporate activism, but it seems to me that there’s a lot of it. And a lot of the companies, I shouldn’t say a lot. Some of the companies that I have been researching or involved with in one way or another, it seems more performative than it does real. That it’s, some of the companies are trying to attract millennial employees. They’re trying to brand themselves a certain way. And yet, it’s really so surface. What they’re doing is so surface and I don’t get that impression at all about Eileen Fisher. Could you say something about the activism part of this, Amy, and how that came about and what that’s like?
Amy Hall:
That’s an interesting way of asking the question. When I think of the word activism to me means being politically active. I probably, I don’t think that’s what you’re implying here.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
No, I’m not.
Amy Hall:
Yeah. No, that’s okay. So the word that I hear most often used to describe Eileen Fisher the person, Eileen Fisher the company, and many of us individually inside the company is authentic. And I don’t know exactly how that comes through so clearly, but it is frequently used. And the one thing that I… A couple of things I’ll say about that. One is, I know for a fact, because I’m involved in this, on the inside of the company, whenever we are getting ready to talk about something outside the company, whether it’s the product, whether it’s a belief we have about recent action or some event in the news or anything that we’re doing, we always run it through kind of like the BS mill. Can we back this up? Is this statement that we’re about to say actually true and can we back it up with evidence, in case we’re called on it? Are there any loopholes in the statement? Is there anything that we are missing… That we could be overlooking that could be misconstrued about the statement? Because we always want to be stating what is actually true. So there’s that.
But the other side of it is, we are also willing to talk about what isn’t working. So yeah, we’ll go out there and talk about, “Okay, this garment is made out of recycled,” blah, blah, blah, or it’s organic, or it was made by artisans in this place. But we’ll also, sometimes we’ll talk about the shortcomings, the things that we weren’t able to accomplish. And most often you’ll see those stories on our website, or sometimes in media interviews. We didn’t achieve every single goal we wanted to for vision 2020, for example. Many of them were stretch goals and also the economy kind of started to take a dive right towards the end there and we had to make some tough choices. And we’re always willing to talk about that because we believe there’s something to be learned from the challenges and the difficulties. And I think that, that all just rolls up into this idea of authenticity. People just believe us for the most part. Obviously, there are some exceptions here and there.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Of course. Yeah, authenticity is a good word for it. Definitely. Sara, did you want to add to that? You’ve been watching this company, working with this company for the last two years.
Sara Schley:
Yeah.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
How are you feeling about it at this point?
Sara Schley:
I would just support what Amy said and say that as an outsider, very rigorous standards around authenticity, rigorous. To the point where I would say, “You know you guys, if you’re 98% there, it’s okay to say that you’re 98%.”
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah, exactly.
Sara Schley:
I mean, Shona, who is one of Amy’s leader in environmental sustainability and now social consciousness, she’s very strict and rigorous around this has to be truth. And again, willing to share vulnerability, which is wonderful because people learn from that. It invites people in. And in terms of the activism, Amy and Eileen would talk about business as a movement, right? Did we mention that yet? Eileen thinks of business as a movement.
Amy Hall:
We were one of the first companies ever to start taking back our own clothing, gently used clothing from our customers and employees. We started doing it in 2009 before it was really popular, trendy to do it. And we’ve set up a whole internal pipeline and system, if you will, to reuse or repurpose the clothing that we take back.
Sara Schley:
The gift that Eileen Fisher gave to the world through the B Corp community, which was like five years into this process and not directly related but I think related because of the relationships that we have, is that with Eileen Fisher and myself and a few other people, Stephanie Ryan from B Corp, we launched the first ever B Corp women CEOs gathering at Eileen Fisher site, which I facilitated and Eileen blessed and she came and Amy was there and a bunch of other folks. And then roughly a hundred women CEOs from other B Corps talking about sustainability and what can we all do together that none of us can do alone. And that network, I think that’s how we met you, Kathy.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes.
Sara Schley:
That network has grown also.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That is how we met.
Sara Schley:
So we come back around, because that’s now three years old and that’s grown from that 100 women to about 700 and there’s a way that… I like to think of concentric circles, the individuals at that offsite, the design team as a team, Eileen Fisher as a company, and then Eileen Fisher as a company’s influence on all these other companies.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right. This is so much fun to talk with both of you, and I’m sure that the people listening to the podcast are going to wonder what kind of advice you have for them, the entrepreneur, the ones, or the companies that are already established that are thinking they would like to go down a similar path. What kind of… I’m sure you’ve learned along the way, many, many things. So would each of you like to say a few things to the audience about what they should be aware of or what they should think about, things they should do, shouldn’t do?
Amy Hall:
I really think it’s important to know what your North Star is. What is the ultimate vision you have for yourself in relation to this planet? And no vision is too audacious, to use Sara’s word. But on top of that, you also need transparency. You need to understand where your stuff is coming from. That’s not a small feat. Just understanding where it comes from, where was the cotton grown, under what conditions, by whom, and then where was it transformed along the way into this final product? All of that will give you so much information from which then to build up your goals and your steps toward that vision.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
That’s great. Great advice. How about you, Sara, from your perspective, what advice would you give?
Sara Schley:
It’s funny because I don’t usually start with advice. I usually start with questions. If you’re coming to me and I would pretty much say what Amy said is like, “Okay, what do you want to create in this world? What’s your North Star, what’s your ideation piece? What’s the legacy you want to leave for your kids or theirs?” And then go through this kind of process we’ve been talking about, “Okay, who are the system of players that are going to make that happen? Let’s get them together.” And there are lots of other questions I would ask. I do think there’s something about that. I call it tracking through inquiry. There’s a humility to it, which is, I don’t have any answer for you. I have my own aspirations for the planet and I have practices that have worked and that have been useful, and it’s really going to filter through the unique constellation of you and your company and that’s where we have to inquire to what you want to have happen. And then-
Kathy Miller Perkins:
It’s interesting to hear you talk about a theme that seems to have gone through the entire conversation today is this individual values and individual transformation, as part of the bigger transformation, and the overlay of individual values with the company values. It seems that, that’s where we started, that’s where we’re ending up. It’s a matter of those values coinciding. Those values coming together in a way that creates a movement. And that’s very interesting to me, very unique, I think, in terms of what I’m hearing about this company.
Amy Hall:
If you don’t do that, then you can’t be authentic in this work. How can you go to work, I mean, with one set of values and leave them at home and then do something different here?
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Right.
Amy Hall:
It’s just not going to land in the right place. You’re not going to believe in it. You’re not going to be able to convince the others or bring people along. It has to come from here.
Sara Schley:
Authentic. I like to call it systems change from the inside out or radical transformation or innovation from the inside out, the pebble in the pond ripples me, we, world. I don’t know who came up with that, but it’s a good way to remember it. Me, we, the world.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
It is. It is.
Sara Schley:
And Kathy, when you came to that Eileen Fisher, We the Change gathering, we do it along those lines too.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah.
Sara Schley:
So yeah, very much so. And it doesn’t matter if you think about that as a system, me, we, world. It doesn’t matter where you start. If you start with the world, the big company you start with, we, the team, you start with the individual…
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yes.
Sara Schley:
Amy. But eventually you’re going to get to all three levels.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Yeah, yeah.
Sara Schley:
To be effective.
Kathy Miller Perkins:
Thanks for listening to the Conscious Culture Cafe. If you’d liked what you heard, connect with us at Millerconsultants.com. You can access the show notes and receive our free materials. See you next episode.