FEMALE SPEAKER: Hello, everyone.
Welcome, fellow Googlers and guests.
I am delighted to introduce to you
today an extremely inspiring, thoughtful, and genuine person,
the chairman and CEO of The Container Store,
and the author of "Uncontainable," Kip Tindell.
Kip has been the helm of The Container Store
since its stores opened in Dallas in 1978.
This is the first store that was devoted solely
to organizational and storage products.
The Container Store has stores nationwide now
and a thriving website.
But for Kip, the goal has never been growth for growth's sakes,
but rather to adhere to the company's
value-based foundation principles, which
center around an employee-first culture, superior customer
service, and strict merchandising.
In November 2013 under Kip's leadership,
The Container Store became a public company.
The primary reason again for this being
to get more stock into the hands of employees,
to maximize the autonomy for the company's culture
and management team and to have a more visible stage
to create a conscious company that
inspires others to emulate.
Kip is also very actively involved
in the community, dedicating time and resources
to the Salesmanship Club of Dallas,
serving on the board of Whole Foods Market.
He is also the first vice chairman of the board,
chairman of finance committee, and treasurer
of the National Retail Federation.
And last, but certainly not least, he is passionately
involved as a leader in Conscious Capitalism, Inc.,
which is a community of like-minded business
thought and academic leaders who are working to elevate humanity
through a conscious approach to business.
And before Kip begins telling us about his book,
we have a short video to watch.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-How do you build a business where everyone can thrive?
By simultaneously creating value for everyone involved.
For us, that starts with our employees.
-Everything that I do and don't do
matters and affects someone around me.
And when you feel that kind of responsibility, going to work
is exciting.
I can't wait to get up and get my day started.
That's what I love about working at The Container Store.
I don't just sell products.
I solve problems by helping our customers get organized,
which I know can improve their lives.
I can really focus on helping them,
because I get the communication, training, and support I need
from the company, my managers and team, I absolutely love--
-Walking into the store.
No matter what my day's been like,
I can always find a little bit of calm to take home.
The employees are so happy and helpful,
you can't help but smile.
-And let me tell you, my kids notice when I'm less stressed.
When I can find what I'm looking for, I have more energy
and I can get everyone out the door on time.
-The Container Store is more like a--
- --friend than a company.
I'm not just a vendor to them.
We're partners in success.
They looked beyond the fact that I was just starting my business
and they saw the potential in my product and in me.
Because of our partnership, my business
has grown tremendously.
We've hired more people, developed new products,
and even taken on a new factory.
Together--
- --we've impacted so many lives.
Our unique partnership over the years
has impacted the way thousands of people
think about their minds-- increasing creativity,
organizing their minds, and increasing their capacity
to think smarter.
Our connection with The Container Store--
- --has helped us support many conscious businesses.
Their commitment to their foundation principles,
employee-first culture, and conscious capitalism
is not just marketing spin.
It's making a difference.
The idea that you can make business decisions based
on love and still be highly profitable
is gaining momentum and credibility.
And profits aren't a bad thing.
They're what give businesses the ability
to take better care of their employees
and give more to their communities.
It's not altruism.
It's capitalism being done in a conscious way that
ensures everyone--
- --All the customers--
- --the employees--
- --all the vendors--
- --the entire community--
- --and the shareholders--
- --can all thrive together.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
FEMALE SPEAKER: Now if you can all
help me in extending a warm welcome to Kip Tindell.
[APPLAUSE]
KIP TINDELL: Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Well, that's what we're trying to do at The Container Store
is a create a business where everyone thrives.
And we spend more time working than any other waking endeavor.
And so I just think it's probably
the best thing you can do with all those hours
that you spend working, create a business where
everyone thrives.
And that means very much in the conscious capitalist
stakeholder model, the employee thrives, the community thrives,
the vendor thrives, the shareholder thrives.
Everyone associated with the business thrives.
How many of you have shopped at The Container Store?
OK, that's pretty good.
We have to work on you too.
Well, we began in 1978 with one tiny little 1600-square-foot
store in Dallas, Texas, with a whopping $35,000 in capital.
And somehow we knew-- I don't know how,
but somehow we knew that-- I mean,
people think of The Container Store as saving space,
getting you organized.
But what I think we're really doing
is giving our customers the gift of organization.
You really have no choice but to be reasonably
well-organized in your life if you're
going to accomplish half of what you want to accomplish.
Something as simple as getting two children ready for school
in the morning is either a nightmare or a pleasure,
depending upon how organized you are and they are.
Traveling is so much simpler if you're
reasonably well-organized.
So I really do feel like we're giving the gift of an organized
life to our customers.
It was interesting starting the business.
I mean, my dad, who's like, he's kind of a Texas oil man, right?
He was like, you're going to open
a store that sells empty boxes?
I mean, he was really concerned about all that.
But that's not really the target customer at all.
So it all worked out.
We run our company on seven foundation principles,
which I won't be able to go into all in this little talk.
But they're all available online at our blog,
whatwestandfor.com.
And these seven foundation principles
are identical to the four tenants
of conscious capitalism.
And we've been operating that way since 1978.
We just didn't know to call it conscious capitalism back then.
And so they're simple, almost corny,
"do unto others" type things that everybody agrees on.
How many of you don't really agree
with that "do unto others" thing?
You think that's a bad idea?
So see, everybody agrees with these simple things.
One of them is Andrew Carnegie's statement.
The great industrialist Andrew Carnegie
was laying on his deathbed and attributed all
his business success to the one credo, the one guiding
light that fill the other guy's basket to the brim-- making
money then becomes an easy proposition.
Fill the other guy's basket to the brim-- making money then
becomes an easy proposition.
That's the exact opposite of what
people are raised to believe, that business is somehow
a zero sum game, where someone has to lose in order for you
to win.
And so that one foundation principle,
fill the other guy's basket, has us creatively
crafting mutually beneficial relationships with our vendors.
And being able to compete with the giant,
mass merchant retailers in America,
because we can't beat them on volume necessarily.
But we can beat them on relationship
synergistic win-win, fill the other guy's basket relationship
with these vendors.
And you become your vendor's favorite customer.
And you don't have to beat up your vendor to get ahead.
It's far better to creatively craft that mutually beneficial
relationship, which is only limited by your imagination
and how much you can learn about each other's businesses.
And then you form this synergistic relationship
that is immensely more profitable than just
the old power struggle, the tug and back and forth
of trying to sort of beat up the vendor.
And it's much more enjoyable.
If you look at the companies that
are dominating their niches-- and Google
is a great example-- Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods,
Costco-- they're very good at those synergistic
relationships.
That's where actually more money is made.
Conscious capitalism is not a sacrifice.
Conscious capitalism actually makes you more profitable than
if you were trying to do it the other way.
And that's why I think that eventually, people
like John Mackey, the Whole Foods guy,
and I can quit trying to spread the word
about conscious capitalism, because I think
a good capitalist is going to eventually adopt
that methodology which is most successful.
And it's kind of a movement.
And it's kind of beginning to happen like that.
Skepticism is vanishing.
Much to my delight and surprise, when
we did our IPO roadshow, the largest institutional investors
on Wall Street, all they really wanted to talk about
was conscious capitalism and the quirky, yummy culture
of The Container Store.
I thought when I tried to talk about culture,
they would roll their eyes and get impatient and think
"Kumbaya" and all that.
But I mean, skepticism is vanishing on this.
And it's fun to give a presentation at Google
because Google is a great example of it.
So I encourage you to read about the foundation principles.
They're simple.
You can read about them on the blog, what we stand for.
And they were created as a means to the end.
We have 6,000 employees.
We don't want to be 6,000 yahoos going
in 6,000 different directions.
So we agree on the ends, like fill the other guy's basket
to the brim.
And then everybody's enabled to choose their own means
to the end.
I don't think I'm smart enough.
No one's smart enough to tell that many people
how to handle any given situation.
Because life's too situational.
And certainly retail is too situational.
So that unharnesses everybody to use
their own individual creative genius
to figure out how to get to that end.
And you'll hear things like, well, why do we do it that way?
Well, that's because of the Andrew Carnegie thing, the fill
the other guy's basket to the brim.
And what's remarkable about that,
and it kind of surprised me how true
it is, even though he never told all these people how
to handle a particular circumstance, just
liberating everybody to agree on these ends
and choose their own means causes a circumstance that
arises in the Miami store to be handled miraculously,
the same as it is in the Seattle store.
People are people.
They're using individual means, but the ends are the same.
Does that makes sense?
I mean, it's just the old means to the end thing.
I think it's oppressive to try to tell people
how to get to the end.
Let them figure out-- let them be themselves.
Let them be their own beautiful, unique personalities.
And then just kind of agree on the ends.
Conscious capitalism is something I'm passionate about.
Weirdly and oddly enough, John Mackey,
the quirky, wonderful founder and CEO of Whole Foods and I
were actually college roommates at University of Texas.
It's just bizarre.
And then we both went off and started
these conscious capitalist retail businesses.
We saw each other a little bit, but not that much after school.
We were so busy being entrepreneurs
and growing our businesses.
And after about 20 years, we got together
for this really extensive, almost all-day-long Time
Magazine article.
And we were rolling on the floor,
laughing hysterically at how identical our business
philosophies have become, even though we hadn't-- I mean,
that's not what we talked about in college.
You know what we talked about in college,
and it wasn't conscious capitalism.
It was girls.
It wasn't retail.
And so many identical things that we thought no one
believed or no one thought and it was just hysterical.
And that article is still out there on the internet-- Time
Magazine with John Mackey and Kip Tindell.
The four tenets of conscious capitalism-- number one,
you have a higher purpose as a business.
You have a higher purpose than just profit or just
making money for your business.
I don't know any entrepreneurs-- I
don't think I've ever met an entrepreneur that
said the reason they did what they did
was to make a lot of money.
Doctors don't say the reason I became
a doctor was to make a lot of money, right?
I mean, it's you have a higher purpose besides just profits.
That's one of the four tenets of conscious capitalism.
The other is conscious leadership.
Conscious leadership-- I think CEOs get too much credit.
They're kind of in this celebrity culture.
I think they're a little overglamorized.
It's really the people behind them,
people around them, the management team
and the part-time worker in the store that
really makes the business what it is.
But with conscious capitalism, that person who is in that top
role and the top management team needs to really genuinely
believe, in their heart and soul, in conscious capitalism,
or it cannot and will not happen in that organization.
Because there's too many forces to push against it.
It has to be OK to behave like that thoroughly.
And it really helps for that individual leader
to understand and embody the whole servant leadership
aspect of leadership, and not be particularly
in it for themselves.
What really helps is if they're kind of
pretty high on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
It's hard to manage that way if you're cold or hungry or lonely
or still trying to prove to your dead father
that you're a great businessman.
You know?
I mean, deep-seated insecurities get
in the way of that type of leadership.
Servant leadership is a key component
of conscious capitalism.
I think it sums it up very well.
And one thing I've learned is I used
to just think we needed the smartest
person to take that big, important job.
And I love intelligence, and you look for that.
But the social IQ is even more important
than the intellectual IQ-- something I've really learned.
And so having those qualities, those understanding
and being good at nurturing and communication, social IQ,
being calmly self-confident but in a very servant leadership,
giving way, so that you're not-- you
can't give if you're that needy.
You can't be a good leader and you
can't do much for the world around you
if you don't have anything to give.
So that type of conscious leadership's the second point
that I think is so important in conscious leadership.
The other's a stakeholder model.
And I love the stakeholder model.
And Ed Freeman at University of Virginia Darden School
of Business is credited with having created
the conscious capitalism stakeholder model.
You're optimizing the needs of all the stakeholders
of the business.
Let's see-- Milton Friedman, the famous economist, once said,
the only reason a corporation exists
is to maximize the return of the shareholder.
And we're like, you know what, Milton?
I know you won a Nobel Prize and everything.
With all due respect, at The Container Store,
we actually put the employee first.
And if you take better care-- I mean,
if you really take better care of the employee than anybody
else, she's going to really take care
of the customer than anybody else.
And of those two people are ecstatic-- let's face it,
if your employees are ecstatic, you're
getting remarkable productivity.
If your customers are ecstatic, you're
getting remarkable sales.
So if those two people are ecstatic,
your shareholders are going to be ecstatic too.
So I'm not sure we really refute or disagree
with Milton Friedman on the end.
We just have a different means to the end.
And it's more joyful to do it that way.
And if you myopically focus only on the shareholder,
the magic is lost and very often the employees are unhappy
and the customers are unhappy and the shareholder's
going to be unhappy too.
So the stakeholder model allows us to put they employee first
and to never rest while we try to see how much more we
can do for that employee.
And I can't wait for my tour of Google headquarters
here in a minute.
I can see so much of that here.
It's a joy to see.
It really-- I mean, of course, I love it.
It's so great.
And like Google, The Container Store's
been on the Fortune 100 Best Companies
To Work For in America list for, in our case, 15 straight years.
We were number one twice, number two twice.
I think Google was number one at least once.
It's a never-ending game.
You're constantly trying to see what
else you can do for the employee.
As a result, after 36 years I think our employee morale
is the highest it's ever been right now.
One of the reasons we went public
was to get more stock in the hands of employees.
It's standard operating procedure
to do options when you're public.
When you're private, you have to depend
upon your private partners believing enough and getting
stock in the hands of employees to dilute themselves.
I've always believed in doing that.
My wife, Sharon, is our chief merchant.
And we were lucky enough to get a bunch of stock in 1978
in this company that turned out to be kind of a fairy tale
success story.
And so we can dilute ourselves in order to get people,
like these two wonderful vice presidents here, more stock.
And I think the happiest, most devoted employee in the world
still does better if they own some of the company.
But if you're private, you have to-- see,
people don't understand that it's better
to own 50% of a dollar than 100% of a nickel.
And your beautiful private investors usually
have some lawyer or spouse or accountant
that really won't let them do that.
So that's one of the major reasons we went public.
Also in that stakeholder model, you
have the vendor stakeholder.
You can't tell the difference between a vendor and a employee
at The Container Store.
I love elevating the relationships
that we have with these manufacturers.
We really are-- somebody gets the lowest
price in the country.
Somebody gets the last pallet of a very hot item
that holiday season.
We create products with these vendors.
This guy's the best at wire.
This guy's the best at wood.
OK, let's create the wood in Estonia, where all the wood is.
And the same people for 5, 15, 25 years,
you're creating products that nobody else carries
that's exclusive to The Container Store.
And these relationships build, and they
become your best friend.
You travel the world with them and you
create product that is so fun.
I mean, we get excited about silly things.
We get excited about having-- we just recently created
the world's absolutely best shoe boxes and sweater boxes.
I mean, it was ecstasy to us.
It was just fun.
But you pick these people that are the most talented,
manufacturing certain types of products.
And then since The Container Store has its finger
closer to the pulse of the consumer than most
manufacturers, you can create great product
that the big mass merchants don't have.
You have no reason to exist if you're selling the same thing
everybody else is.
And that's creatively crafting a mutually beneficial
relationship with the vendor.
And then when you do well, when you
have very high financial performance,
you can do wonderful things for the community.
Communities go out of their way to do anything
they can with The Container Store.
This one wants our headquarters in its town,
because they really see us as embodying family values,
and they do that.
So they make it impossible for us to not locate that
in that community.
It's so nice when the communities
that you serve, with open arms help you.
And in fact, conscious capitalism what it really does
is it causes the universe to conspire to assist you.
And it's a lot easier to be successful in business
when the universe is conspiring to assist you
than it is if people are laying awake at night trying
to figure out how to get back at you.
And it makes life so pleasant to be loved rather than hated.
I think the universe conspires to assist
an individual or a company when it behaves this way.
The fourth tenet of conscious capitalism
is a conscious culture.
The culture drives the value of the business.
I believe the culture drives the value of Google.
It certainly drives the value of The Container Store.
Much to my happiness, I discovered
that most of the institutional investors on Wall Street
accept the notion that the culture drives
the value of the business.
Drucker said that culture eats strategy
for breakfast in the morning.
And it's really true.
And so those are the four tenets of conscious capitalism.
And they happen to be exactly the same thing as our seven
foundation principles, which you're
going to go onto whatwestandfor.com to learn
more about, I hope.
So capitalism has a public relations problem.
It really does.
I mean, I'm a capitalist.
If you ask a bunch of millennial people,
or even a bunch of baby boomers whether they
want to be a capitalist, most of them will say no.
You ask them if they want to be an entrepreneur,
they'll all say yes.
But they don't want to be a capitalist.
But capitalism is actually good.
When I talk about this, it makes me
sound like some kind of a libertarian or something.
Mackey is, but I'm not.
I'm kind of a moderate Democrat.
But capitalism is the most efficient system ever devised
to move goods and services and get them
where they needed to be to the betterment of humanity.
Communism didn't work.
200 million people died, right?
Socialism isn't working that well.
200 years ago, a little more than 85%
of the world's population lived on $1 a day.
200 years ago, including in this country--
most people lived on $1 a day.
Now only 16% of the world lives on $1 a day.
That type of abject poverty is certainly
moving in a good trend.
And by the time-- the age group in this room,
by the time you're at the end of the lifespan of your children,
that number is thought to be-- will be like 1/100 of 1%,
it's really thought will be that negligible.
Bill Clinton is running around the world giving
a speech that's roughly entitled,
Charity Won't Save the World.
Business Will.
Business is so much more powerful
than all the nonprofits and charities of the world
that if we could harness the good of business
to make the world and the planet better than it's been,
not only would those businesses do better,
but the world would be quite a bit better off as well.
So that's really the power of conscious capitalism.
And if you look at-- John Mackey and Raj Sisodia
co-wrote the book "Conscious Capitalism."
Great book.
You should read "Conscious Capitalism" if you haven't.
I bet some of you have.
Raj is on our board at The Container Store-- college
professor, big rock star, international college
professor.
He did an exhaustive study that is so helpful
to have of all the companies, the public companies
in America, that have-- including Google-- that
have been public for a good long while.
And what he discovered is that those companies outperformed
the S&P Index 14 to 1 over the last 15 years.
I mean, 14 to 1.
Are you kidding me?
That's 1400-- it's not 20% better or 80% percent better.
It's 1,400% better.
And for a long time, 15 years.
And those companies like Google and Whole Foods
and Southwest Airlines-- The Container Store
is not on the list yet.
It's in the book.
He's studied us too, but we haven't
been public for long enough to be on that part of it.
We've been public for just under a year.
So if all you really want to do is make as much money
as humanly possible, as rapidly as possible,
I would submit to you that conscious capitalism's the way
to do it.
But further than that, it enriches
your lives and the lives of the people
you do business with hugely while it's doing that.
No wonder the universe conspires to help companies like that.
Everybody's proud of the way they behave themselves.
Everybody's proud of the fact that they
help their communities.
If a company nurtures its employees-- certainly
seems to be going on here-- makes them feel valued,
elevates their self-esteem rather than tearing down
their self-esteem, pays them well,
lets them be themselves at work, rewards the creativity
that comes from them being themselves,
spends money to train and develop them,
makes them thrive, that employee goes home at night
and he treats his family differently-- better.
Treats his golden retriever better.
Treats the guy at the 7-Eleven on the way home
totally differently.
Way up on Maslow-- he's is a fulfilled,
generous but self-confident human being
that behaves differently.
And when companies do that, when organizations do that,
they're just as attractive and they're just
as better able to help everyone and everything around them.
And so that's what the foundation principles do.
That's what conscious capitalism does.
That's when everybody's thriving is when you sort of get
that action, you get that type of thing.
I used to hate it when it happened,
but I have employees say things like, kept
working at The Container Store has made me a better father.
I'm like, oh, my God.
Don't say that.
It's embarrassing.
I mean, like, really?
Then they go into telling me why.
Or at company functions, happens all the time, somebody
will stand up and say, my husband
is a better father and a better spouse because
of the foundational principles of working at The Container
Store.
And it's like, you never get used to hearing that.
And it is embarrassing, but it is true.
And so I think businesses just to remember
that every single employee worldwide
is somebody's precious child that's
been nurtured and developed by parents.
And now we have a lot of control over their lives,
because you spend most of your waking hours working.
And people-- it's probably wrong,
but we put too much of our self-worth in what we
do at work.
Friends and family are more important,
but our self-esteem has a great deal to do with work.
So an oppressive workplace, an oppressive employer
is really bad for the human spirit and human psyche.
And a good one is really, really good.
Part of it is understanding the essence of the human spirit.
People don't want to come to work and goof off and do
as little as possible.
They want to come to work and do great things with people
they admire and love.
They love to work with great people
and then go home at night, feeling
wonderful about what they've accomplished.
And so a good boss recognizes that and nurtures and develops
that.
A bad boss is someone that thinks
that people don't want to do much.
And then they treat them that way
and then you kind of reap what you sow.
Another important thing is that people
love to work with people that are great.
At The Container Store, another foundation principle
is one equals three.
We only hire great people.
I know Google does the same thing.
How delightful it is to be able to work with people that
are wonderful, that you think are wonderful.
In fact, I think it's one the most important aspects of being
a great place to work, that you get
to work-- if we started a golf team
and we had Phil Mickelson on the golf team,
don't you think we'd feel better about being
on that team than if he wasn't there?
It's like, wow!
It's really great.
So that's something we really pay a lot of attention to.
One equals three.
One great person can easily do the business productivity
of three good people.
We don't have an HR department.
Our head of recruiting understands
that it's her job to make sure the rest of us
bring all of our friends and relatives in that are great.
We don't have any rules against family or relationships.
Sharon and I are married, so it's mayhem.
People get married.
They date, they whatever.
That's fine.
People bring in their relatives.
I mean, you know which of your cousins are great and which
ones aren't.
So I think that's how you find great people,
is finding people you care about and you know.
A pretty good summation of what we
do to try to make everybody thrive, what I believe Google
does, what conscious capitalism companies do,
is the wake thing.
W-A-K-E, like a boat's wake.
Your wake and my wake-- your wake
is so much bigger and more powerful than you think it is.
It's really an interesting message.
Everybody wildly underestimates the power of their wake.
And even the most arrogant person you know wildly
underestimates the power of their wake.
My favorite movie's probably, corny
as it is, "It's a Wonderful Life."
Because the whole movie shows one guy,
George Bailey, the incredible power of his wake.
And he believed that his savings and loan
had such an amazing impact on Bedford Falls.
You're like that.
We're all like that.
Isn't nice to know that everything
you do and everything you do not do
has such an impact on the people around you and your business.
So I think that a person that's mindful of their wake
behaves differently and behaves a lot better.
And other people find her to be more honorable, easier to love,
exciting to be around.
An organization where everybody is mindful of its wake
is the same way.
That's an unassailable business advantage.
People want to work for that company.
They want to shop.
Consumers vote with their pocketbook.
You want to be a vendor to that company.
It's such an honor to be a vendor of Google,
or vendor of Container Store.
If you're a vendor of The Container Store,
then everybody that wants to do storage and organization
sees that.
Then they want your product, because The Container Store
leads that category.
So the power of your wake-- I think wake
is a really good summation of what conscious capitalism is
all about, just being mindful of the impact of what
we do as an organization.
So it's creating a business where
everyone associated with it thrives.
The stakeholder model can go to-- I've
talked to Ed Freeman about this.
And it can be your employee's, child's, school's, vendor's,
that ripple effect can go out so that the way that you deal
with that stakeholder is impacted way out there.
It's really a beautiful thought.
I mean, if you think the power of your wake's
is not just dramatically more, just think
about the ripple effect of things like that.
But conscious capitalism, our foundation principles,
creating a yummy, quirky culture where everybody thrives
and everybody can be themselves.
People join the company and they never leave.
We have turnover of less than 10%
in a retail industry that has an average turnover of over 100%.
Even though we have one ex-employee that just joined us
here that used to work for The Container Store
now works for Google.
But we still love her.
She's great.
She's part of that single digit turnover.
But I love retail.
I love The Container Store.
We're so nuts that my wife and I are still
working 70 or 80 hours a week after 36 years of it.
But we're doing what we love.
I really do believe that the true artist of life
blurs the distinction between work and play.
Vendors become friends.
Creating a new product is more fun than playing golf.
You're like Monet painting the water lilies.
You're doing what you want to do.
And I think that's when you can do great things
and leave the world a better place than you found it
and have an impact on your employees
and your stakeholders' lives.
And it's really fun just sharing some of these thoughts
with you here at Google.
I'm getting ready to get a tour of your campus
now, which I can't wait for.
And I thank you for being here.
We have a few minutes for questions
if anybody has some questions.
So the question is, how do you deal with it when you're
in a business environment, in a work culture where you believe
in the concepts of conscious capitalism or whatnot,
but the people you're working with do not.
They look at you like you're from a different planet
because they really don't believe in the stuff.
First of all, that's changing.
That's becoming less and less frequent,
but it's certainly still out there.
And I think sticking to your principles
in the face of all that is still important, sort
of almost leading by example.
We've had a lot of influence on getting all the best business
schools in the country to begin teaching conscious capitalism.
And I think it's important for people, when they get out
of their MBA program, to understand that business is not
a zero sum game.
It's not a zero sum game, and that's beginning to change.
It's not glacial.
It's happening pretty quickly.
The skepticism that I see about conscious capitalism
is a small fraction of what it was even five years ago.
And these models, like Google and The Container Store
are helping to persuade people.
It's very different-- it's very difficult if you're
working at a company that just refuses
to understand it or believe it.
It's easier if you're leading that company.
Then you can do something about it.
And I would tend to say maybe that culture
wasn't the right culture for you.
Maybe you could find a company that
behaved a little more that way and you might flourish
and be happier in that culture.
Or, you can doggedly try to turn it around from within.
I think that's the-- leaving the world better
place than you found it, you just might succeed.
I've seen that happen a few times.
And really working on the leadership of the business
to change their values and attitudes
is what's most important.
I think there are some really good stories about how
store managers were always asking
what their most important responsibility was.
And it wasn't sales.
It wasn't one equals three great people.
It was managing the values and attitudes of people
that they lead.
And I think you do that to a great extent as a co-worker
too.
It's really fun to work with people that you admire
and who are great.
You can do so much more, as we were talking about earlier.
So I hope that answers it a little bit.
It's a tough question.
But we're succeeding in getting it taught.
We're succeeding in getting countless business
organizations, entrepreneurs to start out
building businesses that way.
When you start a business, you get to kind of model
the culture around your own belief system.
It's a ridiculous privilege.
What a joy and what a responsibility and what
a privilege.
When you manage somebody, you have this huge responsibility
to where you have a lot of impact on their lives.
And so then you can do it.
As a worker, as a coworker, you're
not quite as powerful for that.
But I like to thank you can have some influence, some growing
influence.
Patience is probably important.
But I can see you doing that.
Any other questions, or another question?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: When you started the company, your store,
did you-- obviously the idea of conscious capitalism
is something you established from day one.
But did you start with knowing that you wanted
to start a company that had that kind of culture,
or did you start with the idea [INAUDIBLE] same time?
KIP TINDELL: I was always really interested in philosophy.
I wanted to major in philosophy in school
and my dad said no, you can't major in philosophy
or you'll have to pay your own way.
So I majored in English, which is exactly the same thing.
And the Whole Foods guy, John Mackey,
did major in philosophy.
And we did talk a lot about that-- idealistic 19-
or 21-year-olds talking about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
and all of that-- it was a blast.
What we do has absolutely nothing to do with religion,
but I did go to Jesuit High School in Dallas.
And we had a lot of young priests
at the time that were extremely into existential philosophy.
And they taught me a lot.
And I read everything and I kept a little file
of all the greatest thoughts I had ever heard of or been
taught or read or even thought of myself.
And 10 years into the business, we opened a store in Houston
at the corner of Post, Oak and Westheimer.
And we were doing three or four times what we expected to do.
It was mayhem.
We just couldn't keep up with it.
And people we were hiring weren't right.
The store scared me.
It wasn't our-- so we had a big meeting with all the staff
at the store manager's house.
And I was trying to figure out what
to do to teach them who we were, what we stood for.
See, before that you could take somebody out
to have Mexican food and a couple of margaritas
and explain everything to them in one evening.
And now it had to be something more formalized.
We were getting too big for that.
And I reached into that file I was describing
and brought out the seven foundation principles-- or six,
we've added one since then.
And the one we've added is communication is leadership.
Leadership and communication are the same thing,
which is a wonderful, wonderful thought.
That's what leadership is.
Communication can pretty well solve anything.
own And so leadership and communication
are the same thing.
And they went crazy.
They loved it.
I was so afraid to tell them, because these
were my most personally held philosophies.
And I think your life philosophy should
be your business philosophy.
See, people think that you can have a different code
of conduct in business than you can personal.
And that's ridiculous.
So what do you gotta do, treat all the people you do business
with worse than the people-- well, you have to understand,
it's just businesses.
Like, no I don't understand that at all.
I mean, you can't-- so we were very mindful of all this from
the very beginning.
We talked about it a lot.
It's just who we were and what we are
and then that's how it became formalized.
And now, it is so hard to believe
that people are teaching it in business schools.
We have employees that say, my favorite course
in my MBA program was the semester
we spent on The Container Store's business philosophies.
And I'm like, what?
That's what that book is, "Uncontainable."
"Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment and Conscious
Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives."
So the employees of The Container Store
have been wanting this book to be
written for many, many years.
They're proud of our business philosophies.
And I was like, oh, we don't have time for that.
We have to create more sweater boxes.
We have to get that store opened in Salt Lake.
We're opening a new store in Salt Lake Saturday.
And that will be number 68.
But Casey Shilling, our vice president
of public relations and I have been working together
for 17 years.
And she was a huge help.
The book would never happened without her.
Another guy, Paul Keegan, helped me write it.
So I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
I had two people forcing me to write it, to find the time.
And we did it together.
So it's only been out about a week.
The reviews have been embarrassingly fabulous.
And I'm getting all kinds of emails and calls
from people that have-- it's weird when you write a book.
People that you love and people that you admire
have read your book and they know all this personal stuff
about you.
So you have these remarkable conversations.
And it's a lot of fun.
Yes, sir?
So two questions.
I mean, given the business climate,
would do create a business like The Container Store
again today?
Yes, and I'll go into why.
And the first question was, I guess
I can only remember one question at a time.
AUDIENCE: How do you solve capitalism's--
KIP TINDELL: How do we solve capitalism's public relations
problem?
Well, I mean you're doing it every day at Google-- Southwest
Airlines.
Herb Kelleher is kind of a hero of mine.
He's a Southwest Airlines founder.
And he told me 30 or 35 years ago,
you can build a better organization.
You can build a better business organization on love
than you can fear.
And I thought, wow, who is this guy?
He's the smart guy in Dallas.
He's just awesome.
And so John Mackey, the Whole Foods guy, and I
talk a lot about love and business,
about coworkers having each other's backs
and truly loving the workplace.
And no fear.
And companies like that, I think,
are building the case for conscious capitalism every day.
And so I think we're making a lot of progress on that
and that pretty soon most of the most talented capitalists will
be able to perceive that companies they behave like that
make a lot more money than the ones that don't.
And they have more joyful stakeholders.
And so it is already becoming so much more prevalent
than it was five or eight years ago when
we had these weird little gatherings outside of Austin,
Texas and started talking about these strange concepts called
conscious capitalism.
Now you have the Unilever CEO and these giant business
executives carrying on about the stuff.
And I think we're definitely making progress.
Now I forgot the other question.
What was it?
AUDIENCE: Given the business--
KIP TINDELL: Yeah, I think we'd do it again.
You don't have a chance with a retail business,
as mass merchant as the economy is, you would think.
But when you do it this way, when you create a business
relationship with your vendor that is your vendor's
favorite business relationship, and they want to see you win
and they're doing everything they
can to creatively craft a synergistic relationship
with you so that you do better and they do better.
And that's when you start having a chance against all
the incredible competition, because most people aren't
doing that.
I don't know what happens once everybody starts doing that.
Then the little guy would have a hard time again, I guess.
But in the meantime, this is a really great way
for smaller entrepreneurs to do really
well so that it's not just the giant mass merchants dominating
everything.
And talent's the whole ballgame.
We try so hard to hire only the very, very, very best people
at whatever endeavor.
Because life's too short not to do things with excellence.
And it's so thrilling to do things with excellence.
And then that kind of self-monitors.
If somebody's kind of floating along and not really applying
themselves, they're very unpopular
and they leave after a while.
So I think we could do it again.
It was daunting in 1978.
You couldn't go start one little retail store
and expect to be able to make it, much less have everything
evolve how it is.
I mean, I would do that, because I love retail.
I think it's-- with all the creativity and all the people
orientation, I think it's the best profession in the world.
I'm getting ready to be the chairman of the National Retail
Federation January 1 for two years.
And I'm really looking forward to that
as the spokesperson for one in four American workers.
Retail employees, one in four of America's workers.
So, a big responsibility and something I'm
really looking forward to.
And I just like being an entrepreneur.
I couldn't wait to get out of school
so I could start something.
What would I do if it hadn't been The Container Store?
I always say, I'd probably be a fly fishing
guide somewhere in Colorado.
But I don't think so.
Like I say, creating the world's most perfect sweater box
is a lot more fun than fly fishing or playing golf.
Although you need to fly fish sometimes.
And I actually get some of my best ideas fly fishing.
Because the only thing you're worried about
is what fly that trout wants.
So it's not an earth-shaking problem.
It frees up your mind to think about a lot of things.
My old original partner, Garrett Boone,
this lady who used to work with us said we probably
would have gone into furniture.
And I think he would have.
What's ironic is that I probably would
have gone into some type of gourmet food thing.
I'm a big foodie.
I was taking courses at the LBJ School
of Public Affairs in Austin-- a lot
of grocery stores and stuff.
I was interested in that.
And then it was kind of funny that John Mackey
went off and did that.
But he actually met a girl that was really big into that.
That's what converted him.
I never did the food thing, but I'm
so proud that there's grocery stores like that in America
now.
Grocery stores in Texas of that-- New York's always
had a few.
France has them.
But I mean, you get a grocery store like that in Iowa.
That's quite a contribution.
Plus I think it's probably increased the life expectancy
of the average American by five or seven years,
because even someone who's never set foot in a Whole Foods,
Whole Foods has changed what the mass merchants sell
in their grocery stores, to the benefit of everybody.
That's a neat question.
But I do like the entrepreneur thing.
And I do try to encourage people to go off and do that.
What's important is that you do it right away,
as soon as you get out of school, as you get your MBA
or whatever.
Because once you are making-- particularly
if you're lucky enough to, at a young age,
make something like $150,000 or $200,000 a year
and then you get married and you have two kids,
you are not going to go start something.
You have to do it when you're poor,
when you first get out of school or whatever.
That's when you have the best chance of doing it.
I thank you all for being here.
I hope you'll read the book "Uncontainable."
We're really proud of it and delighted
that it's off to a great start.
Hope you'll go online and read about the foundation principles
and thank you for having me.
Thanks.
[APPPLAUSE]