The Clean and Green Club, July 2018

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, July 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 4: John Todd, “Gossamer Engineer”
I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context, since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

In downtown Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, you’ll find a very unusual industrial park: a place where brewery wastes turn into a growing environment for mushrooms—and in the process create an enjoyable biopark, a green and vibrant ecosystem in the middle of the business district, where downtown workers can enjoy a unique natural setting.

Welcome to the Intervale, 700 acres of sustainable enterprises and ecofriendly public spaces.

This project is one of many lasting gifts to the earth—and to the business world—from John Todd. Todd defines ecological design as “the intelligence of nature applied to human needs”: a new partnership between the ecological needs of the planet and the physical and commercial needs of human beings that can “reduce negative human impact by 90 percent.”

Todd described a project on Cape Cod to save a pond that was receiving 30 million gallons of toxic landfill waste a year. His staff remineralized the pond by adding a rock floor and brought the dead bottom water up to get light with floating windmills. They installed restorers: solar and wind-powered biosystems that process the contaminated water through a series of cells, each with different ecologies—integrated networks of microorganisms, higher plants, snails, and fish. Each of these mini-ecosystems removes specific toxins from the water. Designed to work as a system, the restorers—nine cells in this case—digested 25 inches of sediment within two years—and the water is clean enough to drink now. “This pond was constipated; we uncorked it,” says Todd.

In Maryland, Todd worked on a project to clean up waste from a large chicken-processing plant. The highly concentrated waste was being dumped into a lagoon that flowed directly into Chesapeake Bay. “We planted restorers with 28,000 different species of higher plants and animals. It grew very quickly. Each was designed to break down or sequester different compounds. We reduced the electrical power to convert the waste by 80 percent and cut capital costs in half.” This kind of system is “very effective in agriculture, because it’s cost-effective enough for farm use.”

One of the underlying principles in this work is sharing resources among different pieces of the system and changing the paradigm about what’s left over. Instead of disposing of a waste stream, Todd encourages people to think about how to use that material as an input. The goal is zero emissions: no waste generation at all. If wastes are considered as inputs, they can lead to new commercial enterprises—for instance, a mushroom farm. All of a sudden, the cost of waste disposal turns into capital for a new revenue stream.

This is how the natural world works, at least when undisturbed by human pollution. When these systems are integrated together, they not only eliminate waste, but also provide shared synergy, reduce costs, spread technical and legal expertise, and create both economic and environmental improvements—as occurred at the Intervale, where biowastes feed a commercial fish farm that also cleans the water, and the waste heat from a wood-fired power plant is recaptured to heat the complex. “I begin to see a model for college and urban food production. We can begin to think of strengthening our own food security in these troubled times. We’re creating a new culture based on earth stewardship.”

These concepts can also work easily in developing countries. Todd designed a water treatment sustainability project for a refugee camp, using a long transparent pipe to expand and contract gases. The range of temperatures and conditions is so great that it kills viruses.

Todd notes, “The biotech industry looks for magic bullets—single solutions to complex problems. Nature is a symphony”; it doesn’t work that way.

For more information about this award-winning, life-changing book (Shel’s favorite by far among the 10 he’s written) and to get your very own copy—visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ Find out why over 20 world-class entrepreneurs and green business experts including futurist/blogger Seth Godin, Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, pioneering green business author Jacquelyn Ottman, GreenBiz.com Executive Director Joel Makower, and many others. If you buy a paper copy directly from Shel, he will happily personally inscribe and autograph it for you or the person of your choice.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them. In the meantime, you can browse the list of the more-than-30 podcasts I’ve done; they range from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.   

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Another Recommended Book: Customer Experiences with Soul
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Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design, by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson (Holonomics Publishing, 2017)

Let’s get something out of the way right at the start: despite the subtitle, this isn’t a book about product design; it’s about designing magnificent customer experiences based in core values. I’ve covered several books on that theme over the years, and I consider it part of the core knowledge base for all social entrepreneurs and marketers.

And yes, customer experience is absolutely part of marketing. Maybe the most important part. The authors point this out consistently, starting right on page 4: “’customer experience’ refers…to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors…and every person who comes into contact with the business.” The Robinsons set a goal of congruence: what a business says, means, and does should all align (p. 6). And on page 11, they set out five hard-nosed MBA-type statistics demonstrating why businesses should embrace this thinking.

They definitely see the social entrepreneurship side of their work. Within the main chapters, subsections bear titles like Peace, Truth (a subhead in two adjacent chapters), Love, Righteousness, Non-violence, Beauty, Goodness, and Justice. The book is a roadmap to design a business that embodies those types of values—and spins that out to create stakeholder (especially customer and employee) experiences that also embody those values.

The early part of the book is somewhat theoretical, and parts of it can be a bit of a slog. But when they’re talking about real businesses, sharing case studies, it’s a great read.

For an American like me, the perspective and language of two Brazilians who trained in England is very different, and quite refreshing. Several examples forced me to confront my own regional biases, and to see what works well in a very different culture like Sao Paolo.

It’s also very refreshing to see their emphasis on authenticity, integrity, ethical behavior—principles I’ve been publicly advocating since 2002, and where I sometimes feel like a lonely voice in a business and political culture that emphasizes short-term profit at the expense of these deeper virtues. I love this image: “We can’t use soul like chili sauce” (p. 70). It’s not a condiment to spice up a dead company; it has to be a core value. This attitude is key to understanding the book, and themes like that are repeated often.

Of course, service itself has to matter. Even little things can count a lot. “Sometimes we can find a phenomenon, such as the coffee in a hotel, which contains the whole essence of the brand, the company, the values, the experience” (pp. 64-65). And the book makes the business case many times. One of my favorites was the story of a happy customer’s Facebook post that brought a 900% increase in revenue to a Sao Paolo cell phone repair kiosk (p. 155).

But a better experience doesn’t mean taking all the challenges away, making things too easy. That can actually be counterproductive, if the challenge reminds your prospect of what they like about the struggle. Think about artisanal wares made in small batches, by hand, versus their mass-produced equivalents. A handwriting font simply doesn’t replicate the experience of receiving a card done in real (hand-done) calligraphy (pp. 68-69). Similarly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot replicate the customer service experience of dealing with a skilled human being who is actually interacting with you (p. 185).

Several case studies shed light on applying this good thinking in a real-world business. The book ends with a fabulous case study of a love-based set of restaurants (not a chain, as each venue has its own identity and niche (pp. 198-211); the authors see their interview with founder Walter Mancini as encompassing all the principles they discuss. But I found another case study even more compelling: a Sao Paolo medical center called Hospital Sírio Libanes (Syrian-Lebanese Hospital, pp. 167-178). Their remarkable CEO, Dr. Chapchap, has made a career of making the hospital experience far more enjoyable than the typical. He also has a collaborative attitude that I find really refreshing: Believing that “it is not morally defensible to have a competitive advantage in healthcare” (p. 168), he not only creates a culture that continually improves best practices, but freely shares them with other medical organizations.

On page 186, the Robinsons give a quick summary of their favorite takeaways from several of the businesses they’ve profiled, and then on page 187, a comprehensive chart of their holonomic model, in three concentric almost-circles. Each circle has a small gap, to emphasize that the circles are interrelated.

There’s much more. Go out and read it and take the time you need to get through.

Accurate Writing & More
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
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1 Comment so far »

  1. Guest Article: Shel Horowitz reviews Customer Experiences with Soul | Transition Consciousness said,

    Wrote on July 22, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

    […] and I were honoured to see Shel’s thoughtful review which he published this month in The Clean and Green Club newsletter and which he has given us permission to republish on Transition […]

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