The Clean and Green Club

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Last month, I spent a week in central Ecuador, and came back with lots of observations to share, in no particular order:

• The oil industry is a major player in Ecuador’s economy, and particularly noticeable way up in the mountains. However, most (but not all) of the installations we passed were surprisingly unobtrusive—actually less noticeable than in the American Southwest.
• Tourism is another major industry, but Ecuador’s tourist infrastructure is not nearly as developed as, say, Costa Rica’s. To me, it felt more authentic and not particularly difficult to navigate.
• Roses have also become a significant industry, exporting enormous quantities to the US and Europe—because in Ecuador, greenhouses can be built of cheap plastic tarps instead of expensive glass.
• It only costs 25 cents to ride public transit in Quito, and the bus goes pretty much everywhere (Ecuador uses US money); not surprisingly, public transit is heavily used.
• A few major transit lines in Quito are a cross between buses and trains. They run in their own roadbed, coupled together, with raised-platform stations with turnstiles—but on rubber tires, and probably a lot cheaper to build than rail.
• US fast-food chains are present but fairly minimal in Quito—and we didn’t see them at all in the dozens of smaller cities and remote villages we went through.
• Many of the various Quichua communities still retain strong cultural identity. Lots of people speak at least one Quichua dialect, many people wear traditional dress, and traditions such as making fermented drinks out of yucca, hunting with blow-gun and darts, or living in grass huts are still common. While not entirely self-contained, many of the rural Quichua villages are fairly self-sufficient—but some market towns attract people from many different communities. And the cultures are very different in the high Andes versus the low-lying rainforests. We heard they were different again in the coastal areas, but we didn’t visit those sections.
• Historic preservation is huge in Quito, with much of the Old Town dating from the 16th through 18th centuries, and those buildings still in active use (many belonging either to the government or to the church). Nearby, the national museum has incredible treasures from the precolonial period. However, urban sprawl is also huge, complete with traffic issues.
• Many villages have a specialty. We visited a textile town, a leather town, a rose-growing valley in the mountains, a town known for “vegetable ivory” (crafts made of from palm-hearts), etc.
• At least in the resort hotels our tour visited in out-of-the-way places, there’s surprisingly strong environmental awareness. Locally sourced food, organic gardens, and recycling programs were common, and some of the places we stayed in used very unobtrusive solar hot water—even though we were really in the middle of nowhere (in one place, accessible only by boat).

A lull in my speaking calendar at the moment (you can help with that and earn a very generous commission, by the way).

Malaprop’s Books, Asheville, NC, March 5 (I believe at 7). If the technology works out, I will be a remote panelist (the other panelists live in the store) at a program on Conscious Capitalism. Contact the store for details.

I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

My Name’s On the Cover of This One

This fall, I completely rewrote a book for my delightful client Ana Weber-Haber, one of the happiest and most optimistic people I’ve ever met. The book, The Money Flow, just published by Morgan James, extracts lessons for you from her own dramatic climb out of deep poverty, moving from Romania to Israel as a child to start over, and then again to the US. In both cases, she went from penniless immigrant to wildly successful, making tons of money for herself and her various employers along the way. Since English is Ana’s fourth language, I made it into a strong piece of writing as well as a bunch of great ideas and lessons—while keeping the exuberant personality that makes her work so much fun to read (and her such a joy to work with). And I’m on the cover as “with Shel Horowitz.” The book is available for the deep-discounted price of $11.41 (bn.com) or $11.53 (amazon) on February 26. Expect a special mailing from me around February 24, telling you more about the book and reminding you to buy it on her day.

You might remember the name Marilyn Jenett—I’ve mentioned her in these pages before. She’s the renowned prosperity teacher I’ve been studying with and in that time, I’ve manifested some amazing things—including the single most lucrative project I’ve ever worked on. Marilyn has agreed to share one of her powerful teaching calls with you that has been changing lives around the world. This is worth more attention than just a blurb in my newsletter—so keep your eyes open for all the details in a special e-mail around March 10.

Up close and personal with my celebrated co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay is offering his famous intimate 21-hour intensive at his lovely Florida home, March 18-20. Only 10 people will be allowed in. https://3bl.me/ysqdva . Jay describes it as “a three-day face-to-face training personally conducted by me in our home here on a lake just northeast of Orlando, Florida. It’s intense because it’s from noon till 7 pm three days in a row-21 hours with lots of hands-on, devoted to making you a true guerrilla marketer.” If you’re a student, you can get a discount!

Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones (Nation Books, 2012)

The 99% can embrace a deeper patriotism…in Dr. King’s words, “to make real the promises of democracy.” In essence, we are standing up for the supreme patriotic principle: “liberty and justice for all.”

And many of us take that “for all” part pretty seriously. We don’t mean “liberty and justice for all,” except for those lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those immigrants or those Muslims. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those women. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the Appalachians and rural poor. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the elderly or the disabled. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the afflicted, addicted, or convicted. When we say “liberty and justice for all,” we really mean it. That kind of principled stand is evidence of a deep patriotism.

Deep patriots don’t just sing the song, “America the Beautiful,” and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty—from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters, and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots…defend the principles upon which [the Statue of Liberty] was founded—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who year to breathe free.”

…Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to live in neighborhoods in which, when they smell smoke, they can’t find a firehouse for twenty miles—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to see their grandchildren going to schools with forty kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to have to wait seven minutes—or fifteen minutes—for someone to pick up the phone when they call 911…Deep patriots don’t just fight against our opponents. We fight for them, too. (pp. 228-230, emphasis in original)

Van Jones has been one of my heroes for about ten years now. He’s one of the very few able to bridge the gap between liberal white suburban environmentalists and inner-city low-income people of color, and he’s also an amazingly effective organizer who has started four effective and successful national progressive/environmental organizations: the Ella Baker Center, Color of Change, Green for All, and his current baby, Rebuild the Dream. He’s also an excellent speaker; I’ve heard him several times. And he’s one of the best among progressives at framing an issue—creating the memes, the rhetoric, and the sound bites that break through the clutter and get us to pay attention, which has not been a strength of progressives in this country for many years (despite the best efforts of George Lakoff, who is mentioned three times in the index).

And even a law degree from Yale couldn’t drum the people’s touch out of Jones. Here is a man who can talk to labor unionists, or even Tea Partiers, in language they can relate to. President Obama made a terrible mistake when he let the right-wing crackpots drive Jones out of his position as green jobs guy in the White House.

Jones’ earlier (bestselling) book, The Green Collar Economy, focused on the contribution green jobs can make to both our economy and our ecology (both words stemming from the same Greek root, by the way).

This newer book looks at that, but as part of a much larger picture. Jones analyzes four movements of the past five years—two from the center, one from the right, one from the left: the 2008 Obama campaign, the early years of the Obama administration, the Tea Party, and Occupy—and a fifth: the “99% 2.0” movement he’d like to help create. In each, he looks at who is cast as hero and villain, what the movement sees as a threat, and what kind of vision it can claim.

The 2.0 organizing will be based on a crowdsourced 10-point “Contract for the American Dream,” three core principles of the “next American economy,” and five constituencies that have been marginalized but (Jones believes) could be mobilized:

Contract for the American Dream:
1. Invest in America’s infrastructure (including broadband)
2. Create “21st Century” (green) jobs
3. Invest in public education
4. Provide Medicare for everyone
5. Pay living wages
6. Keep Social Security secure
7. Return to a fairer tax structure (higher taxes for the super-wealthy, ending offshore tax havens, etc.)
8. Stop the wars and invest the $3 billion per week we’re spending on them in the domestic economy
9. Tax stock trades to reduce speculation and bring banker bonuses back in balance
10. Strengthen democracy with clean, fair elections and a political structure that doesn’t keep lawmakers beholden to corporate lobbyists

Economic Principles:
1. Focus on local production instead of global consumption
2. Base the economy on thrift and conservation, instead of credit and waste
3. Achieve environmental restoration, not destruction (ending subsidies to fossil fuels and other “dirty economy” sectors, among other steps)

Five Constituencies to Organize:
1. Millennials
2. Veterans
3. Homeowners
4. Long-term Unemployed
5. Workers in the Public Sector

It’s great to find a book that not only has the analysis (including a lot of great statistics on the hugely positive impact of switching to a green economy, and some concrete steps to get there very affordably) but also articulates a positive progressive vision so clearly, and tells great stories along the way. Strongly recommended.

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Happy New Year! It’s an exciting time to be a green marketer. I hope you had a wonderful holiday.

Let’s Harness the Enormous Resources in Our Waste

In December, I wrote a blog post about harvesting trash heaps, and another one arguing that, number 1, the easiest way to true energy independence is to simply use less, and number 2, that using less is actually pretty easy.

I decided that these two posts were really different slices of the same circle: the idea that we have the resources we need, but we don’t tend to look for them in the right places. As the powers-that-be look at disastrous technologies such as fracking, nuclear power, and polluting/greenhouse gas-emitting coal, we, the people who will be affected by these bad decisions, need to stand up and be counted. Thus, my newsletter this month is modified from those two earlier pieces.

Achieving Sustainability Means Changing Our Thinking About Machines—And Landfills

Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?

This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.

Davis argues compellingly that a lot of our difficulties with reducing waste, reducing raw materials, and reducing carbon impact stem from the way we’ve historically designed our machinery. Too often, we’ve assumed (falsely) that raw materials will be not only abundant, but very pure. These 19th and 20th-century machines need a constant stream of very pure raw materials, and that is unsustainable. In fact, Davis cites a contract between a town and a trash-to-energy incinerator that inflicts monetary penalties on the town if it fails to supply enough trash. Can you say “goodbye, recycling!”?

He proposes that as a society, we change our thinking about this: that instead of designing machines that require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, we design to use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:

• To a large degree, we’ve already extracted the easy stuff. Mining and drilling will continue to produce lower-grade, lesser concentrations that need more work and energy, increase carbon footprint, and produce more waste in order to get usable raw materials—getting more and more expensive in both dollar and environmental measurements. Look at the horrible process of extracting oil from tar sands, if you want an example.
• Designing machines that can run on waste streams turns landfills into abundant sources of raw materials. When we start mining landfills, we have lots to feed the machine—as long as the machine can run on a mixed and inconsistent stream of materials. If we can mix together several kinds of plastics even as the specific mix constantly shifts, our landfills become resources, right along with our recycle bins. Our trash problem goes down; the environmental consequences of mining are also much-reduced.
• A logical corollary: instead of designing a machine to make one output from one consistent input, we can design machines that create multiple kinds of materials depending on what sources are being harvested at the moment.

In short, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.

InterfaceFLOR is now able to use 97 percent of the messy mix of materials in old vinyl carpet tiles to make new flooring tiles, and the remaining three percent goes into other products. I think that’s pretty cool

And this kind of holistic thinking is how we, as a society, change our demons into delights.

“Solar Isn’t Practical”? HAH!

Recently, I got into a heated discussion with a very conservative neighbor about the potential for clean energy in this country. He doesn’t think it’s practical to power the whole country through solar, wind, small hydro, etc.

I do—but only if we first reduce our energy loads, and I argued that we can easily cut energy use in half or more with today’s technology.

So I appreciated the timing of these two articles on Triple Pundit that crossed my desk the next day.

First, deep conservation can save us 50 percent on existing buildings, 90% if incorporated into the design of new buildings. I know of a solar house built in 1983, long before solar and conservation technology evolved to today’s sophistication, that was pretty darn close to net-zero energy. I also know that several very civilized European countries including England and Denmark use less than half the per-capita energy as the United States. If we’d mandated this in the early 1980s, we wouldn’t be facing the climate crisis we have today. And second, the price of solar continues to fall.

Once we cut our energy use in half (and really, we can do much more than that)—the remaining load really can be satisfied by the clean, renewable technologies. Consider just two among dozens of facts I could list:

1. According to the San Antonio, Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, every 40 minutes, enough solar energy falls on the earth to power the entire world for a year. And that’s without even factoring in wind, hydro, geothermal, magnetic, tidal, and all the rest.

2. Electric cars can actually supply power to the grid—this is already technologically possible.

I live in a house built in 1743, which we solarized. As far as I know, it’s the oldest solar house in the United States. It has both solar hot water and a small PV system—and we hope to tie in to the cow poop-powered methane generator that our farmer neighbors are building for their farm that was established in 1806. My neighbors across the street from the farm put geothermal in their 1747 home and use it for heating, cooling, and hot water.
 

My solarized 1743 Saltbox farmhouse. The three panels at the top are for hot water; the four at the bottom produce 1KW of electricity.

We do this, and we don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii or Louisiana; we live in Massachusetts, a much cloudier and colder place than many other parts of the US, and the world. Similarly, cloudy, cold Germany is a world leader in solar. If we can do it—so can you.

But I will be attending Wendy Lipton-Dibner’s Move People to Action! A four-day training for speakers who want to spread their message and monetize their work, January 24-27, in Stamford, CT. More info: Wendy AT movepeopletoaction.com

And I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World, Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser, and Bob Abramms (ODT, Inc., 2006)

When you represent a sphere (such as the Earth) in just two dimensions, something has to give. If you draw the shapes accurately using the very common Mercator projection, the sizes are deeply distorted. If you get the continents’ relative sizes right, as in the Peters or Hobo-Dyer projections, the shapes are all messed up. Buckminster Fuller, who I think of as a Da Vinci for the 20th century, managed to keep both sizes and shapes accurate, but threw geography out the window; in his beautiful and very unusual projection, Australia and Antarctica are on opposite ends of a series of polygons centered on the North Pole, and most of the world’s land masses form a long necklace: Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, South America.

Also, in a sphere, there’s no real up or down in directions—only in topography. Just because most maps we’re familiar with have north at the top, or have our own continent at the center, does not mean these are the only world views we can structure.

So what does this have to do with green marketing? Just this: when we look at the world differently, different thoughts have an easier time entering our brains. The familiar Mercator projection was very useful for sailors seeking the shortest passage across the Atlantic in the 16th century—but a Mercator map with Europe or North America at the center and north at the top also conveys a psychological message that can foster the kind of colonialism and imperialism so rampant in the 18th and 19th centuries: when the whole huge continent of Africa seems to be smaller than Greenland, is it easier to justify racism and exploitation? When Asia is split down the middle on North America-focused maps, doesn’t it lose political significance? How does your perspective shift when you look at a south-on-top map with Africa at the center? What can you learn by studying Charles Menard’s map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian, correlating troop losses and temperatures, and only incidentally including a few geographic references? https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters. That web link is to the original French; in the book, it’s been translated. In short, once we can create a visual representation of something, that view of the world becomes more possible.

In fact, the book actually includes a graphic from my most successful green marketing campaign: a fight to save our local mountain range when it was threatened by a large housing development. We prepared a picture of the range as it stands today, and a projection of what it would look like with the roads and houses blighting the landscape, reprinted on page 100.

Our view of the world can change quite a bit if we look at a map with an unusual orientation. One of the maps (page 77) turns a portion of the sphere on an angle, with northwest at the top, to compactly show a pattern of slave trading routes between Africa and the Americas in centuries past—a view that would have been much more difficult to convey along a more conventional axis. Another south-facing map (page 47) shows a sweeping view from Hudson Bay to Mexico, with an emphasis on southern Canada while Mexico fades into a small strip of land between oceans. What kind of perspective do you get when Ontario is the center of your rectangular world? Or when Ontario’s largest city, Toronto, is at the center of a round map showing Hong Kong, Delhi, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires as tantalizingly close (p. 28)? Or when looking at a 2000-year-old city map of Rome (p. 44), pointing southeast? How do we absorb information differently when maps are transformed into modern infographics, allowing us to visualize—among many examples—how American political parties fall along urban/rural lines (p. 86) or how different parts of the world affect global climate change (p. 83).

One point the authors make over and over: there is not a “right” or “wrong” way to view the world, or any subset of it. Maps should be judged as to whether or not they achieve their purpose, and the purposes of different maps are different.

This book, with dozens of cool examples and well-written narrative, should open your mind to all sorts of creative brainstorms. I found it a really good book to keep in my bathroom, looking over just a couple of pages at a time, so that my brain could absorb these new ways of looking at a problem. I think I got a lot more out of it, savoring a bit at a time over several months. The good index helps, too, because it’s easy to find information again later.

Given its not-so-recent copyright date and badly designed front cover, you probably won’t find it at your local bookstore. But it’s easy enough to order directly from the publisher, at https://odtmaps.com/

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Last month, I discussed using surveys to better understand your customers and prospects—and asked you to fill out a brief 8-question survey regarding what you like and don’t like about this newsletter. After all, I’ve been publishing at least one monthly newsletter (up to four) all the way back to 1997, and I need to check in every now and then to make sure it’s still relevant. I confess, I know a whole lot about marketing copywriting and marketing strategy, but have no particular training in market research. So I’m flying by the seat of my pants to begin with, in both designing the survey and evaluating the results.

So take my results with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, here’s some of the data, and the conclusions I take away.

First of all, I either did not create enough incentive to read the November newsletter in the first place, or to do the survey, or both. I only got a 9.44 open rate on the original newsletter with the subject line, “Are You Asking the Right Questions?” When that original newsletter had produced only 11 responses, I sent out another one, with a subject line tied directly to the benefit you could get: “Reader Survey—Get a Chance for a 15-Minute Consult with Shel”, which got a 9.16 percent open rate (and was mailed later in the month, when you typically don’t hear from me).

I have no way of knowing how many of the same people and how many unique subscribers opened each version—but I do know that the second one, even with a slightly lower open rate, generated more responses to the survey.

An open rate approaching 10 percent is actually not bad as such things go these days; we are all buried under e-mail and the days of 40% open are long gone. However, my newsletters in September and July, with “sexier” subject lines, got much better open rates: 13.81 percent opened “Since When Are Libraries Known for Brilliant Marketing?” (July) and 12.16 percent opened “The Marketing Impact of Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech (September). So one lesson for me is to be sure I have subject lines that hook my readers. Thus, instead of calling this issue “Making Sense of the Results?” I went with an ambiguous yet accurate title that I hope will generate curiosity—and a higher open rate.

If there was zero overlap between those who opened the original and the reminder, about three percent of the people who saw one of those messages took five minutes to do the survey. However, I am guessing there was substantial overlap. I know I have a core group of fans, and a portion would have opened both. If 2/3 of the people opening the second one had seen it before, my success rate was actually below two percent of the unique readers—and 0.5 percent of the total subscriber base. I think I should be able to do better than that. So either my incentives were not good enough to get people over to the survey, or the chance to influence the content of this newsletter did not resonate, or the design of the survey discouraged participation, or…who knows? So another lesson is the reminder that market research is far from an exact science (I’d say even for those who have been trained in it. Judging by seeing many badly designed surveys and strange results reports over the years).

So the survey may have failed on a quantitative level, with too few participants to be meaningful. However, on a qualitative level, the results were very telling. I clearly pulled deeply from that loyal fan base:

• About 40 percent have been reading my newsletter between four and fifteen years
• An astonishing 66 percent prefer the long-form articles and book reviews over the shorter option
• 54 percent have passed my newsletter around to others
• 31 percent have changed your own marketing based on what you’ve read in my newsletter
• Smaller but substantial percentages have bought books/information products I’ve either written or recommended (again, I don’t know if there’s overlap)

So, for now, I will honor those who put so much trust in me and continue to publish the newsletter—even though the ratio of time I put in versus monetization is not satisfactory, and even though most of you aren’t even opening my mail. There are, after all, some definite benefits to me that go beyond revenue—ranging from the ability to do joint ventures because I have a subscriber base to keeping current in my field reading at least one business book each month, in order to review it for you. Still, I’d love to find the secret of getting you, my subscribers, to hire me for speaking, consulting and/or copywriting, or at least to buy my books (which have far more information than the newsletters, of course).

Congratulations to the Winners:

The three 15-minute consultations go to Peter Lukacsi of Hungary, zoldmarketing.hu, MJ Ray of the UK, software.coop, and Eckhart Beatty of the US (https://www.indowwindows.com/).

The two ebooks go to Gautam Chaudhury of India and Robert Stosser of Germany.

Kind of cool to have five countries and three continents represented, don’t you think?

Happy with Your Current Webhost?

In the summer, I switched to a new hosting service after several of my sites had gone haywire and the previous host couldn’t fix the problem. And I have to tell you—I have been thoroughly delighted. Hostgator not only has the most responsive and well-trained tech support of pretty much any company I’ve ever dealt with, and nice features such as the ability to check all my numerous domain-based email addresses from a single page—but it also has prices that compare favorably with any of the several hosting companies I’ve used (starting at $3.96 a month)…45-day money-back guarantee…tools and templates to create a site…and on and on it goes.

https://shelhorowitz.com/go/HostGator/ (affiliate link).

Enjoy your winter holidays and we’ll see you in January. And remember—I offer commissions if you locate me a full-fee speaking gig or a new consulting/copywriting client.

Global Sense by Judah Freed (Hoku House, 2012)

Noting the turning of both the 5000-year Mayan calendar and the 365-day modern calendar used in much of the world, I’m going to take a three-month break from the nitty-gritty in-the-trenches marketing and ethics books I usually review in this space.

We start, this month, with a very personal book on social transformation, combining big-picture thinking around a prescription to save the world with the author’s own deeply personal journey. Next month, a fascinating look at how visual maps of the world influence our thinking, and then in February, community organizer and former White House staffer Van Jones’ book on green activism in urban low-income communities. I’m a huge fan of Jones, have heard him speak several times, and think he’s one of the best marketing strategists in the green world. So I’m very much looking forward to reading his book.

Meanwhile, let’s get started with Judah Freed’s Global Sense.

In only 256 pages, Freed has managed something quite remarkable: a sweeping, ambitious, and holistic approach to replacing what’s wrong with the world with what’s right. Most authors would have demanded 800 or 1000 pages to attempt even a quarter of what Freed sets out to do. Despite the large scope and the small canvas, Freed does surprisingly well at tacking these very big questions. I think the reason he succeeds is because he frames each of these big-picture issues in the context of his life, his personal story. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative, and then expands out to examine the larger world.

Freed has had a very wide range of experiences: successful entrepreneur, failed entrepreneur, spiritual seeker, respected journalist, teacher, abuse survivor, self-healer, scholar of spiritual enlightenment and social change, event planner, community organizer, cult follower, and homeless person (among many others). Paying deliberate homage to 18th-century pamphleteer Thomas Paine (Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, etc.), he’s been able to channel this breadth into a great deal of insight into human relationships, power structures, personal growth, and social change. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s gotten such a diverse range of endorsements: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Pete Seeger, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, and even Joanne Greenberg (author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden). Democracy writer and radio host Thom Hartmann is also on the list—which makes a lot of sense given Hartmann’s own status as a modern-day Paine.

I’ve read hundreds of books that cover some aspect of what Global Sense covers; I can’t remember another one that covers all the aspects Freed touches on. Charles Hayes’ Beyond the American Dream looks similarly at materialism and the need for liberal thought. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia look at the green/local economy. Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles combine the spiritual underpinning with business and life success tools. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and others make the feminist case. Gene Sharp, George Lakey, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. make the case for nonviolent social change, and John Stuart Mill and other Libertarian thinkers showed us that self-rule is better than heavy-handed government. But this is the first book I can remember that synthesizes so many worlds into a coherent whole.

Some of the many insights I took away:

• Society develops from our wants and needs–but government develops from our failures; we should strive toward “enlightened self-rule,” both as individuals and as a culture
• Darwin’s “fittest” survived not because they dominated, but because they were the best at adapting to change
• Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations and creator of the “invisible hand” theory often used to justify capitalism, opposed monopoly capitalism and favored government regulation
• As Ben Franklin pointed out more than 200 years ago, it is not wise to sacrifice liberty for security—but this persists because each successive generation believes itself incapable of self-rule
• We give governments and institutions permission to govern us, and we can withdraw that permission at any time (as we’ve seen in the past year in both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement)
• Quiet social change too often fails; Gandhi and King were not quiet—yet, in order to get from the current mess to a better place, positive vision and personal transformation are key ingredients, even more than the critique of what needs to change: “our redemption redeems the world” (p. 87)
• Justice is satisfying when it focuses on restitution rather than revenge
• Finding solutions means dwelling on—and expanding—the possible, not putting up barriers of supposed impossibility (I have experienced this in my own social change work, and it’s very powerful)—and sometimes there are multiple right answers
• With every purchase, we vote for the kind of world we want—so let’s “vote” wisely
• When building movements or personal relationships, look first at the easy points of agreement, then build out
• We can’t control others—but we CAN control our emotional responses to their behavior
• When we create high expectations, people/organizations/governments are more likely to live up to them

Chapter 19 is the best mini-crash course on organizing I’ve seen in a long time; that could be spun out into an an entire book.

Be warned: this book is a lot more “wu-wu” than the books I typically review here. There’s a strong spiritual component, and a lot on listening to your inner voice/the divine through many techniques, some of which may be unfamiliar to you. If this is new territory, I’d say it’s worth the struggle–but you may want to go and read a few of the numerous books he recommends, and then revisit Global Sense once you have that broader perspective. There’s some attention to cutting edge psychology, neuroscience and particle physics (I did say it was a holistic book). And there’s a heavy dose of political correctness, including a tendency to see most of the world’s problems as symptoms of “alpha male rule” and “authority addiction. Having lived in some superfeminist communities, I speak from experience when I say that alpha female rule can be just as oppressive. And despite his fondness for enlightened self-rule, Freed supports world government. I’m more of a bioregionalist; I think solutions will be found in networks of small communities cooperating with each other, and see many places where a central world government could go awry.

The book is also marred by a few structural flaws. It needed a good proofread, an index, and a centralized list of all the wonderful resources scattered throughout the book (fortunately, the last of those is posted on Freed’s website, GlobalSense.com).

Still, on the whole, it accomplishes quite a bit of its ambitious agenda, provides lots of food for thought AND action, and may be just the thing you need to get started in the second 5000-year epoch of the Mayan calendar/the Age of Aquarius/what Barbara Marx Hubbard calls the time of humanity’s rebirth.

Full disclosure: Freed is a friend and colleague.

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Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company

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).”

That can take the form of numbers  — so for a newsletter, how many/what percentage opened the newsletter, spent at least so many seconds,clicked a link, or forwarded it. This is objective, fact-based information: *quantitative feedback*  — and it’s quite useful.

But it’s not enough. You also need *qualitative feedback*: information that looks at how people interact with your products or services. Qualitative feedback looks at much more subjective factors: people’s likes and dislikes, their willingness to take action, and so forth.numbers

Right now, I have a need to examine this newsletter’s usefulness to you and to me, and to think about whether I want to switch to a different delivery mechanism or shut it down.

So I’ve put together a very simple eight-question survey, using Survey Monkey.com — where surveys up to ten questions cost nothing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DNR9Z6W

And I decided to make the survey itself the subject of my column. Notice how some of the questions determine what you find useful — and others probe the benefit to me, such as whether you’ve ever bought a book or attended a call I told you about. Notice that the questions are a mix of multiple-choice with any number of answers, multiple choice with only one answer allowed, and open-ended.

And notice that most questions allow a comment. That’s because I want it to feel personal. In the question about article length, this lead article and the book review demonstrate the new, shorter articles I’m thinking of switching to. They’re about 1/3 the length of my typical articles.

Notice also that I’m using incentives: I will give away three 15-minute marketing or publishing consultations to people who give me the best reasons, and I’ll also give away two of my marketing e-books to random participants. (You’re eligible if you haven’t won something from me in the past year, and if at least 20 people complete the survey). What can you learn from this process and incorporate into your own marketing?

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

REMEMBER: If you get me a paid speaking gig, you earn a commission. 25% on my standard rate of $5000.

experience and insight on the transformational power of words. With one word each day of the year, you can change your world. So, every day of every year, you can tune into a word that will infuse your life with new creative energy. Goodies include what looks like a really fun one-month membership in her Take 5 and Cook Club, a copy of my own Painless Green e-book with 111 tips on saving water and energy, and more.

Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise

“The next time someone asks whether your mission is more important than your margin, tell her…that you started your business because you had a yearning to change the way the world operates…that the most effective institution impacting the world today is business, and that you are going to use that power for good… Tell him that you run a social enterprise–where mission and margin are *not* an either-or.” (pp. 37-38)

An interesting collaboration between a former addict who came to socially responsible business for all the wrong reasons and an ordained minster who took the helm of a large, socially conscious bakery–with stories from many other social enterprises, too.

Social enterprises, say Lynch and Walls, see their role as adding value to the entire community, not just to stockholders. Their mission and business operations are completely intertwined. And they succeed when they incorporate both business and humanistic principles into all phases: creating a climate where blame is supplanted by responsibility to improve…where there’s no room for mediocrity but plenty of room for anyone, from line employee to CEO, to admit mistakes and extract the lessons from them…and where good planning creates sustained growth in both the social mission and the financial metrics.

The authors talk a lot about the need to scale up. In their view, successful social enterprises must become big players. Thus, Walls’ Greyston Bakery, founded to create jobs for disadvantaged workers and selling to customers like Ben & Jerry’s, has staked out a position as the only “nationally branded premium brownie” (p. 151). Here, I disagree. I think there’s plenty of room for small, local companies to have big impact; a great example would be organic fair-trade coffee roaster Dean’s Beans, in Orange, Massachusetts, which has pushed the entire coffee industry toward sustainability. And I am working, through my books, my syndicated Green And Profitable column, and my speaking, to have big impact while staying small.

However, beyond that small disagreement, I find much good advice for CEOs and managers looking to start, grow, and successfully run companies whose social mission is just as integral as their bottom line.