www.forestethics.org www.rockwoodfund.org As a relatively small environmental advocacy group, ForestEthics can’t afford to waste time on things that don’t advance its mission. Its clear focus has yielded some striking achievements in the last few years. With a staff of 30 and an annual budget of less than $3 million, the San Francisco-based group persuaded Staples to phase out paper products originating from endangered forests. It got Home Depot to stop selling lumber cut from native woodlands. And it recently swayed Limited Brands, the $10 billion clothing retailer that owns Victoria’s Secret, to stop buying pulp from Canada’s Boreal Forest and start using more certified and recycled paper. For a company that mails nearly 1 million catalogs each day, it was a major policy change. Todd Paglia, ForestEthics’ executive director, attributes these breakthroughs to an approach that is decidedly rare in his field. "We don’t treat company representatives like they’re evil," he says. "Even while we’re campaigning against companies in really aggressive ways, we spend a tremendous amount of time investing in relationships with the people who are hopefully going to be our contacts for years afterward in order to implement the changes we create together." ForestEthics was not always so enlightened. But in recent years it has put considerable effort into transforming its institutional culture. Most of its staff members have taken a three-day course at the Rockwood Leadership Program in nearby Berkeley to develop their management skills and establish a common language among coworkers. The course includes practical exercises in team building and assessment as well as deeper forays into organizational visioning, inner alignment, self-care, and contemplative discipline. Significantly, ForestEthics continues to build on this work by regularly bringing in mentors like Robert Gass and William Ury to help its staff expand their capacity to innovate, communicate, and lead. With the vision and tools its staff has cultivated, ForestEthics has developed a remarkable knack for turning its purported corporate adversaries into allies. In its recent campaign to change the paper procurement policy at Limited Brands, ForestEthics publicly took an adversarial pose. It ran a provocative series of newspaper ads – titled "Victoria’s Dirty Secret" – that resembled Victoria’s Secret’s own marketing materials. But there were some noticeable differences; the models accessorized their lingerie with chainsaws, and the adjacent text called attention to where the company got its paper.Behind the scenes, Paglia and his colleagues were busy building relationships with people inside the company."Years ago people told us it wouldn’t work, that you either work with companies or you work against them, and I always thought that was a false choice. "he says, "If you do it right they can respect you and have a little bit of fear, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t need to be buddies, but you do need to have respect. That’s more important, and that’s the way we’ve tried to orient our communications with the companies behind the scenes." ForestEthics reached a deal in December 2006, with Limited Brands agreeing to dramatically alter its paper sourcing policies. But the company has gone even further by seeking advice from ForestEthics, lobbying the Canadian government to tighten regulation of the paper industry, and urging other catalog companies to follow its lead. None of that would have happened, Paglia says, if he and his colleagues had taken a more hostile approach. "We don’t feel like we’re beating people," he says. "We feel like we’re waking them up."