Review
“Living Above the Store breaks the mold on business writing. This is a tale of three generations of the Melaver family, the purported end of the world, and the true nature of enterprise. It is a book about the greening of business to be sure, but it is literature first, brilliant disquisitions and narratives that place commerce within the broader context of history, culture, and the cherished human values that bind us together. Martin Melaver has enlarged the vocabulary of co…
Buy Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change, and Restores Land and Community–How One Family Business Transformed Itself … Using Sustainable Management Practices at Amazon
While Living Above the Store pertains most particularly to builders and real-estate development businesses, it contains valuable strategies and lessons for creating a values-oriented business. If you are interested in creating a “flater” management structure in which all of your employees define and implement a vision for your business, Melaver describes a variety of techniques for doing so. I found the discussion of the “5 Whys” particularly intriguing as a method of getting to the root cause of a problem that usually forces oneself to admit one’s own initial mistake or careless error. This book offers an alternative to the usual “maximize shareholder value” goal of contemporary capitalism, suggesting that other values such as environmental quality and employee meaning and satisfaction can be added to create a better, more meaningful business that can not only remain profitable but grow in a more orderly, natural pace. It should be added to your shelf of classic revisionist business books along with Ray Anderson, Paul Hawken, and E.F. Schumacher.
Many writers have written about how businesses can do well by doing good. In this addition to the literature, Mr. Melaver gives us his own take on the connection between doing good and doing well.
Early in his tenure as the new CEO of a 70 year old family-owned business, Mr. Melaver was confronted with this question: Does it matter what our business does (especially if we’re only doing what others in the industry are or have been doing), as long as we’re giving back to the community? Mr. Melaver’s answer to this question is yes, and he tells us the whys and hows in this book.
According to Mr. Melaver, doing good and doing well are inseparable concepts; a business that takes into heart the principles described in this book will do well without having to sacrifice its core values.
Mr. Melaver’s world view is an integrative view: Every person is the sum of many diverse parts — land (place a person lives in), community, etc. — and each of those individual parts is recursively the sum of many other diverse interconnected parts; the challenge for each of us is to reflect on our values and how we want to conduct ourselves so that we can grow to our highest potential at a thoughtful pace, while simultaneously giving others the same opportunities to reach their own potentials without disturbing the natural order of the integrated whole. This challenge requires, among other things, a willingness to change the way we view ourselves, competitors, knowledge sharing, partnering, etc. and is a daunting one.
The principles described in this book are supposed to help us rise to this challenge; but principles, like good high-level plans, still require the translation of abstract, general matters to concrete, more specific actionable items, and this is where, I think, the book falls a little bit short. While writing beautifully and passionately, Mr. Melaver sometimes tends to keep the level of discourse abstract for far longer than necessary, offering drawn-out nuanced discussions of ideas and concepts from many different angles and perspectives that sometimes borders on belaboring a point. The few times that Mr. Melaver was able to work in real-life examples of the described principles in action (e.g., the risks his family took when they stood firm on their desegregation stance, the effort to understand a stressed out employee who left the company, the admission of error when someone failed to follow one or more of the principles advocated in this book and lessons learned, etc) were some of the best moments I’ve had with the book because they were moments of insights for me as well, and I wish Mr. Melaver had been able to work in a few more examples, because principles, like good plans, are only as good as how well they’re executed.
LIVING ABOVE THE STORE: BUILDING A BUSINESS THAT CREATES VALUE, INSPIRES CHANGE, AND RESTORES LAND AND COMMUNITY is a ‘must’ for any business library and many a general lending collection. It shows how to create a sustainable business, using a 70-year-old, third generation family business as its model for example. From incorporating ideals of contributing to the community in a business plan that works to handling workers differently for highest achievement and understanding limits to growth, LIVING ABOVE THE STORE is a top pick.