Isn’t it strange how long it can take to see the obvious thing sitting right in front of you?
I spent decades chasing horizons – spotting some enormous problem, like humanity literally choking on its own trash, and watching mind’s explode into a sprawling vision of how to fix it. That’s just how the team was built. Show me a mess big enough and we will hand you back a moonshot.
For a long time, when someone showed up with a pair of scissors to trim that vision down, I flinched. I called it negative. A wet blanket on the fire. It took me far too long to understand something a child could have told me: the person trimming the dream isn’t trying to kill it. They’re trying to keep it from collapsing under its own weight.
I only really understood this looking back at Code Blue Recycling.
We didn’t build that company on enthusiasm alone, though I would have told you at the time that we did. We had a scrappy, weekly rhythm – a room where a few very different people forced raw ideas into something that actually worked. I didn’t see the shape of what was happening back then. I just thought we were lucky. Now I think we were something more specific than lucky.
There was Paul Wolff. When I’d walk in with some crazy, boundary-pushing idea, Paul had this quiet gift of looking past the noise and finding the one piece worth keeping. I remember the day he said it, almost casually: let’s build a kiosk, something that can sit right in front of the store, read the UPC code, and hand back a coupon or a reward right there on the spot for every single-use bottle – plastic or glass – someone drops in it. That one sentence became the Dream Machine, the program PepsiCo later put its name behind, funding business school scholarships for veterans. Just magic. I didn’t see it as a gift back then. I saw it as resistance. It took me years to realize that without Paul’s structure, my abundance would have simply floated off into the air, never touching the ground.
There was Jeff Smith, who understood something I didn’t: that you can build the smartest system in the world, and if a person doesn’t feel something real when they touch it, the whole thing quietly dies. I still remember the day it clicked. Out of the clear blue, Jeff said: let’s use the Entertainment coupon book – the one with every pizza place and mini golf spot in the country – and match the rewards to your zip code. Recycle a bottle, and out of nowhere you’re holding a coupon for the pizza place three blocks from your house. Ohhh myyy. That was magic. Jeff had found a way to make an ordinary act, like recycling a bottle, feel like it belonged to the person doing it, in their own neighborhood. I didn’t know at the time that this was its own kind of genius. I thought it was just Jeff being Jeff.
And none of it happens without room to try. I remember Carl Rush walking into our meeting at the Waste Management office in Houston one day and asking, almost out of nowhere: what if you guys called this “Greenopolis” – greening the metropolis? From that moment on, that’s what we were. And something shifted. We went from being a scrappy outside idea to something Waste Management’s own people trusted and used, innovation woven right into community waste contracts across the country. Carl didn’t just give us headspace inside a massive organization that didn’t always love new ideas. He handed us the keys to actually succeed inside it. I didn’t appreciate then how rare that generosity is. Big institutions protect themselves. Carl chose, instead, to open the door.
Here’s the part that amazes me now, all these years later: an abundance optimist, a practical reductionist, a humanist, and a patient institutional partner – stitched together, almost by accident – and the whole thing worked. Not because any one of us was extraordinary. Because none of us were the same.
If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be this: don’t build alone, and don’t build only with people who think the way you do. Find your Paul. Find your Jeff. Find your Carl. Then get out of the way long enough to let them do what you can’t.
It took me far too long to see this clearly. I’m just grateful it wasn’t too late to say thank you.
