Transcription of Jay Friedlander for the show Sustainability Ed #189
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 189, Sustainability Ed, airing for the first time on Sunday, April 26, 2015. We’ve all heard the word sustainability and become familiar with the concept, but what does it mean to put sustainability into practice and how do we educate tomorrow’s leaders? Today, we address these questions with College of the Atlantic Professor Jay Friedlander and University of Maine School of Law Professor Sara Schindler. Thank you for joining us.
One of the wonderful things about Maine and being in Maine is the opportunity to continually reconnect with people that we’ve met earlier in our lives, and one such individual is Jay Friedlander. He’s a friend of mine and he’s also the founder of the Sustainable Business Program and the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. As chair of the program, Jay has developed a sustainable business curriculum focusing on how building social, economic, and environmental capital sparks innovation and creates competitive advantage.
It’s really great to see you again.
Jay: It’s great to see you as well. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Thank you for being here. I know you had to drive down from College of the Atlantic, and that’s 3 hours?
Jay: Yeah, about 3 hours, depending on the weather.
Lisa: It’s a beautiful place that you’ve chosen to live up in Bar Harbor, but it’s a little different than where you last lived, which was right here in Portland.
Jay: Yeah. It’s a lovely place. There’s tradeoffs. We have a quiet time in the winter, really busy summers. Acadia National Park and the College of the Atlantic is right on the ocean, so it’s a beautiful place. It’s also a great place to raise our son, Max, who is 9. He walks to school every day. It feels like a little combination of the ’50s and the ’70s mashed together.
Lisa: Wait a minute. In what way would it be the ’70s, then?
Jay: It’s sort of the ’50s because you have the small town and Max walks to school, says “Good morning” to the crossing guard. Everyone in the town looks out for each other’s kids. Then it’s sort of the ’70s because you’ve got College of the Atlantic up there. You have Jackson Lab, you’ve got MDI Bio Lab, so it’s a very educated, very progressive community.
Lisa: I like it, and obviously you know something about the ’70s because that’s about the time you and I both grew up.
Jay: Right. Yeah, absolutely.
Lisa: Did you ever see yourself living essentially on a large Maine island when you hit our age?
Jay: Perhaps. Ironically enough, Ursula, my spouse, and I were up in Bar Harbor for a weekend and we were really enjoying ourselves. We were coming off of a camping trip up in Canada and we had just gone canoeing for a week. We came back and we were driving through Bar Harbor and she turned to me and said, “You know, some day wouldn’t it be great to live here?” About 3 or 4 years later, lo and behold, there we were. It’s been a great move. We definitely miss Portland, miss our friends here, but it’s a pretty magical place.
Lisa: Tell me a little bit about your background. You’re not originally from Maine.
Jay: I’m not originally from Maine. I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Went to Colgate University in upstate New York and then did a lot of things, everything from counseling and tutoring Native American students to being a ski bum to eventually ending up in the Peace Corps in West Africa. Then I came back. It was in West Africa, actually, I figured out that I wanted to do business because I saw business as the greatest lever of change. When I was in West Africa, I was in Mauritania, which had abolished slavery in 1980. You saw on the one hand the worst of business, that people were being enslaved for the enrichment of others. Then on the other hand you saw these small women’s cooperatives usually. They had gotten together and women were able to make money, able to provide healthcare, good nutrition for their families and you saw business as this tool that could really lift people up.
When I got back to the United States, I decided that was what I wanted to do, was figure out how you could do business in a way that really lifted people up. At the time, that was called socially responsible business. I came back, got an MBA, then did a little bit of consulting in New York City for Fortune 100 companies and then was one of the early folks on O’Naturals, which is a natural and organic food restaurant here based out of Maine.
Lisa: O’Naturals is a … I miss it. I still miss it to this day.
Jay: I do, too.
Lisa: It closed down maybe 3, 4 years ago, something like that.
Jay: Yeah.
Lisa: I remember going to the Falmouth location, going to the Old Port location. Just the soups and the … I don’t know, there was so much about it that was so great.
Jay: Yeah, it was wonderful. When we started it back in 2001, it was way, way ahead of its time. You see the potential now that it had when you look at companies like Chipotle or even what Panera Bread is doing. Part of the reason it was started was to just show that you could have a place that had quick service and high-quality food, because everything was local, organic or wild or all natural. It’s sad that it’s gone, but it’s also good to see that a lot of the ethos of it is living on in other things.
Lisa: Yes. I was just in the Old Port b.good, which is a organic and a natural restaurant. My daughters and my son and I, we enjoy that. It’s not exactly like O’Naturals, but it has the same sort of idea, and every time we are in there, it’s packed.
Jay: Yeah. Like I said, I think it’s an idea whose time has come. With a restaurant, and there are so many restaurants in town, and you see the constant churn and turnover. If you ignore it for any small period of time, you rapidly descend into entropy and you don’t really get a second chance, especially in a food town like Portland.
Lisa: I always like to think about the business aspect of all of this and this idea that we live in this culture where you’re supposed to be “successful” at everything. O’Naturals did close, but it’s not really a failure. It did exactly what it needed to do for the amount of time that it was in existence.
Jay: Yeah, and it was around for 10 years. If you look back at the history of businesses, there was a huge cycle of what they call creative destruction, so new things are always being created and old things are being destroyed as you go on. The birth, growth, and then failure of a business is part of the cycle. Obviously, we’re sad to see it go, there’s lots of lessons learned, but what I think is really wonderful is to see the value set living on in other concepts in other places.
Lisa: We just did an interview with people from Wolfe’s Neck Farm, which is doing this big thing with dairy cows, and Stonyfield is actually sponsoring this program. I think that’s an example of exactly what you’re talking about, that you have to create the interest early on and then eventually things catch up and there’s enough economic groundswell that you can actually make a go of it.
Jay: Yeah. You see that happening all over the place, on all kinds of different industries, everything from the automobile industry to the food industry. You see this kind of movement and groundswell towards a kind of new economy that’s valuing people in the communities they’re in as well as the environment and also making really viable, profitable businesses as well. It’s no guarantee of “success” or it’s no guarantee that the business will make it, because you still have to deal with all the other pieces that go into operating a business.
Lisa: It’s fun for me to think of College of the Atlantic as having this Sustainable Business Program, because a lot of people think of College of the Atlantic for its ecological bent and for its sustainability tenets, which are really important. We also know that part of sustainability is being able to make a living for oneself.
Jay: Sure.
Lisa: What you’re doing is really helping people to utilize multiple aspects of their lives to create something sustainable.
Jay: Yeah. If you look back at the founding principles of the college and what we still practice today, the idea is that you want to create the people who are going to go out and create the change. The college was founded to give people both the knowledge and the skills to go out and effect change in the world. What you see is business is the most ubiquitous activity on the planet, so if you really want to create change, you need to be engaging with businesses.
The other thing that they’ve found at the college is a huge percentage of students go out and become entrepreneurs because they’re at the school to have a self-directed curriculum, it’s completely interdisciplinary. They’re looking to have a different perspective, so they’re looking to make their own mark in the world, and as a result, many of them become entrepreneurs. I would say the school is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. They left off all of the traditional trappings of higher ed when they were founded. With all those things, it makes sense that there’s business in the curriculum.
Lisa: You and I worked on a project together because we were supporting the organization Safe Passage in a book that I had participated in editing and writing for Our Daily Tread. I had asked you to get your marketing students involved and help us market, and this was pretty early on in the social media timeframe. It’s interesting to me that the students came back with these great plans. I’ve got to say this was at least 7 years ago, something like that. You were doing things that were utilizing the latest technologies and also used business and marketing ideas.
Jay: Yeah. So much of what we do there and a lot of what we do in the Sustainable Business Program, but also throughout the college, is this idea of merging thought and action. With the Daily Tread project, students can talk about the theory of marketing and social media, but when you experience it, something a little different happens. People get more … When they have something real to latch onto, they get more excited, they want to study more deeply, and then they want to apply those things and see, wait, where does this idea and the practice of it match up and what are the …?
It’s not enough to talk about it, but you learn so much more by getting out there and doing it. Students become more engaged, and the learning is a lot deeper. We do that all over the curriculum and, actually, building off of that class, we now have students who are starting up businesses as part of their education rather than most schools where people who are interested in entrepreneurship and starting something up are doing it as a side to their classes or, rather, in spite of their education.
Lisa: You’re doing some interesting work with the outer islands.
Jay: Yeah. We just finished a project where we took a group of College of the Atlantic students … I co-taught this class with another COA professor, Anna Demeo, who teaches physics and sustainable energy. We took them and grouped up with the Island Institute and took folks from the outer islands and combined them with College of the Atlantic students and took them over to the carbon negative island of Samsø, Denmark, to see how they converted that island to become carbon negative, and now it’s moving towards fossil free. Then the students came back and worked on projects out on the outer islands. It was a pretty incredible experience.
Lisa: That’s such a great connecting of dots. You have Maine students, you have people who live on Maine islands, and then you’re going over to Denmark and you’re looking at a model that already exists that maybe we could learn from.
Jay: Yeah. It’s not about taking what they did on Denmark and just copying it, but understanding how do they garner all these resources, what did they do and what are the resources we have in our communities? The problem out on the Maine islands was particularly poignant because they have some of the most expensive electricity and heating costs in the country, so they’re really motivated to make change. For the students, they could work with these islanders and also on Mount Desert Island on projects they could get their arms around and make real suggestions and be real participants in over the course of the term, and they stayed connected with them after the term was over. That project just ended in the fall, but there’s lots of pieces that are continuing to ripple out from it.
Lisa: Talk to me about the Abundance Cycle and what that looks like.
Jay: The Abundance Cycle is a model and a framework that I developed essentially when I was at O’Naturals and I was also teaching MBA students down at Babson College, where I still teach down there as well. What I was trying to do is merge together all this stuff I was seeing every day around sustainability and what people were talking about and then merging those with business models and frameworks that MBA students were using, essentially to unite the languages and the thinking so that an MBA student could see this and say, “Oh, wow, I get it. This is a framework that I’m familiar with and a way that I could find new opportunities. I could innovate; I could save costs and as well have all these positive other effects like solving social problems. We’re building natural capital.”
It was really bringing together these two things in a common language, because so often it’s the language barrier that creates the problem. You have someone talking about sustainability speaking one language around carbon or around environmental problems, and then you have a business person over here speaking another language around profits. As a result, even though they may be saying the same things, they don’t hear each other. It was about bridging those gaps and putting them together.
It’s been really interesting now as the model has been developed to see the reception that it’s got. I’ve been giving talks on a pretty wide range of places from Japan, going over to the UK and Switzerland this winter to give some talks there. It’s interesting to see as it’s gaining some traction.
Lisa: I like the idea because I believe that one of the, I guess, marketing issues that the ecological movement has had is that there’s a perception of scarcity. There’s a perception that we need to buckle down and not do things and not consume things. What you’re talking about is just redirecting resources and being mindful, really.
Jay: Yeah. That notion of scarcity, that to be sustainable has to be a tradeoff is exactly the wrong idea. What you’re looking for and I think what you want to do and what most folks who are entrepreneurs want to do is it’s not about that idea of scarcity; it’s about new opportunities and finding new ways to do things and doing them in ways where you can have your cake and eat it too, so you have win-win-win all the way around. You have something that’s profitable, new enterprise that’s using less resources, that’s restoring the environment.
You see this happening all over the world in huge Fortune 500 companies to small, teeny startups to projects in the U.S. to overseas. The reason we talk about abundance versus sustainability is exactly what you’re talking about. It’s this idea of just sustaining where you are and like, “Oh, I have to take a shorter shower; therefore, I’m saving resources” versus “Wow, I’m going to have to come up with entirely new ways of doing things” that’s so exciting.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Bangor Savings Bank. For over 150 years, Bangor Savings has believed in the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams. Whether it’s personal finance, business banking, or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor Savings Bank you matter more. For more information visit www.bangor.com.
Lisa: We at Love Maine Radio enjoy a special relationship with Apothecary by Design. Join us in the offices of Maine Magazine with Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience, which features photography by Smith Galtney, capturing the story, struggles, and victories that form the changing face of HIV and AIDS in Maine. This photography exhibit will be available from March 27 to April 24 at 75 Market Street, the offices of Maine Magazine. We hope you take the time to stop by.
Jay, when you and I first met, you … You’re my age, so I still consider myself relatively young. You were pretty young and you ended up with a cardiac event, a heart event that was pretty significant for you. Talk to me about that.
Jay: Yeah. No one still to this day really knows why it happened, but I had developed an atrial flutter. My resting heartbeat was 120 to 140 at different times, just would randomly pop up. It was something that I didn’t really know about and discovered one day when I was running on the East End. I was having trouble finishing the run and then went home. I lived on a third-floor walkup and walking up the stairs was a bit of a burden.
Then I just went to Brighton Medical Center to get checked out. I still remember when they said to me, after they checked me in and they were taking my heart rate, they were like, “Okay, we’re going to get you a wheelchair.” I was like, “A wheelchair? What are you talking about?” It was like, “Oh, we don’t think your heart should be under any more strain than it’s under.” I went in and they checked me into the hospital, brought me over in an ambulance, and then did what they call … They cardioverted me, which is basically they take paddles and shock your heart back into rhythm.
Lisa: That’s a big deal, and at the time, you had a young child and a wife and a pretty high-intensity career. Did that change your focus in the way that you approached your life?
Jay: The heart thing seemed really random. Then what ended up happening with the whole thing is I ended up getting some surgery; that really didn’t work. Then I went on some medication, and that seemed to get things stabilized. The heart thing, I have to say, was less of … The biggest adjustment I had with that was I don’t drink because apparently alcohol was a trigger, which was really odd and I guess just happens in some people. I think the bigger piece for me that caused change was having a small child and really assessing is … The life I was leading was crazy. I was running the franchising for O’Naturals. I was traveling all over the country, working really long hours. A lot of this became about is this a lifestyle that you can have if you really want to have a family and spend time with your family and be there and not be exhausted and all those things? That was a bigger impetus for change.
Lisa: The reason I ask is I believe this must have happened when you were somewhere in your 30s.
Jay: Yeah, probably late 30s or just about 40. Yeah.
Lisa: Which is a time when a lot of people have been doing what they think is expected of them, following a path, working hard. Then something happens, physically often, that reminds them that life is actually finite, that there are bigger factors at play and then whether it’s Max or whether it’s the heart thing. You have to really build your own sustainable life. You have to actually create in your life the thing that you’re talking about when it comes to business.
Jay: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. I think for us, for myself and Max and Ursula, that decision to move over to academia and go up to College of the Atlantic and pull back from the crazy life we were leading in Portland, where we were both working very long hours, traveling a lot … I was traveling a lot for work. It was definitely a very conscious decision. Took a huge pay cut, but deciding that, “Wow, let’s try a different style of life.” So far, it’s worked out great. We do a lot during the year when the school is in session, and in the summers we spend a lot of time traveling and going backpacking and canoeing and doing other things like that. That decision has been really good. Yeah, I think definitely an event like a heart thing or having a child in our case, it makes you step back and evaluate, “Wait a minute, what am I doing? Is this the life that I want?”
Lisa: There is a lot of resilience that comes along with being 20. There’s a big difference between when you’re 20 and when you’re 30 and when you’re 40, and life does evolve along. I don’t know that we do a great job with looking at lives and understanding what we can actually accomplish over the course of them, given our ages, which I think is interesting. We actually look at businesses and we say, “Okay, here’s a lifespan of the business,” but it’s almost as if we don’t do that as well with human beings.
Jay: Yeah, and the accounting. A blessing and a curse of the business, and I would say the life is accounting. Oftentimes, with business the accounting seems fairly straightforward. It grew, it multiplied, they were banging on the door. It enabled people to have a life and you can look at the numbers financially. With sustainability and abundance and a life, it oftentimes gets a lot more complicated and nuanced. This is for me where it becomes personal. Are you leading the life you want to lead? That life will change as your life changes and as you have new events. The life I led at 20- is not going to be the same, as you were saying, as the life I’m leading at 40 and the things I’d hope to accomplish are different.
Then as you get in different areas and careers, those things change, too. In academia, now I’m starting to look at, well, do I want to publish and what does that look like? Or write a book? Those are things I hadn’t really thought about before and weren’t on my radar. Then having a kid was like, “Well, I’m spending time working on this presentation and my son, Max, is looking at me and saying, ‘Hey, I want to play. I want to build a house for the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day. I want to go outside and wrestle in the snow.'” There’s always this calculus of going back and forth, of what is it you want to lead and what life are you trying to build.
Lisa: Sometimes the life that you’re trying to build isn’t even really apparent to you because there is no model. I believe, though, what you’ve been doing as … You’re the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, so inaugural means you’re the very first one. You’re building a model that didn’t previously exist, and that’s an enormous leap of faith.
Jay: Yeah. Although I’d say if you looked at my past … Whereas I look at it and try to see themes in it and then look back, I have a large entrepreneurial trend myself, so taking something that was not there, was a tabula rasa, and then making something out of it is something I seem to enjoy doing and I seem to fall into it a lot. As I look back, it was that way in the Peace Corps. It was that way after I left school, after I left college. It was that way even in the consulting. It was a brand new practice area. It seems to be something I enjoy doing. Certainly, it was that way with O’Naturals, which was changing every day.
For me, that’s something that is fun. I keep ending up there, whether consciously or not. I also think the life is what you … Things are what you create and what you make of them, so going in something that’s a blank slate like the Sharpe-McNally Chair, to me is fun and exciting. I can create what I want to see.
Lisa: What exciting things do you have going on at College of the Atlantic right now?
Jay: I’d say after our trip out to Samsø, we’re taking a little bit of a breath because that was definitely a huge experience. I’d say the 2 big things that are happening right now is, (1) we have a sustainable enterprise incubator called The Hatchery, which students start businesses as part of their education. That’s about to start up in the spring, so it’s a really fun time because you have students who are testing out ideas. We have one person who is working on sustainability issues on MDI. We have another person who is working to create a hydrogen car conversion kit so a car could run on hydrogen fuel. Another person is starting a program in the arts, another person working on a food systems business. This is always a really fun time for me because I get to work with students who are thinking about starting something up and want to do entrepreneurship but with a net.
I’d say the other thing that’s been really fun is the Abundance Cycle, and I’ve got a book chapter I’m working on for that. I’m giving talks on that in the U.K. and in Switzerland in the coming weeks. That’s also been happening. Then it will be spring, which is always a good time on Mount Desert Island.
Lisa: I always enjoy conversations in which people feel passionate about the lives that they’re living, and in no small part because when we have these conversations on air, other people can hear them and say, “There’s that guy. I’m listening to this guy. He’s talking about living this life that resonates with him, that feels authentic to him.” I think that’s really important because sometimes we get locked into this idea of who we should be, who others want us to be. This has been a great conversation.
Jay: Thank you. Yeah, I think that piece is so important about living the life you want to lead. I know there’s been more than a few times, and especially during the first year of College of the Atlantic, my wife and I would look at each other and like, “Oh, my god, this is incredible that we get to do this and it’s there.” The thing we realize is you can always change. There’s always this fear of what if I do this, but you always have that option, so you should take it.
Lisa: Jay, how can people find out about the work that you’re doing at the College of the Atlantic or other work that you’re doing on the Abundance Cycle?
Jay: They could go to the College of the Atlantic website. There’s a whole page on the Sustainable Business Program. For the Abundance Cycle, they could go to abundancecycle.com and there’s a few things there. There’s a TED talk there as well, article from TriplePundit.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Jay Friedlander, who is the founder of the Sustainable Business Program and the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Social Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and also a friend of mine. It’s really great to have you in for this conversation. It’s great that you were able to come back to Portland.
Jay: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This has been wonderful.