The Clean and Green Club

Good For Business: The Rise of the Conscious Corporation, by Andrew Benett, Cavas Gobhai, Ann O’Reilly, and Greg Welch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

If you ever doubted that corporate social and environmental responsibility play a role in business success, consider some of these stats:

• In a survey of consumers across the U.S., France, and U.K., 74 percent of consumers believe businesses bear as much responsibility as governments for driving positive social change
• 76 percent  take responsibility for avoiding products from unethical companies, and 63 percent have made purchase decisions based on company conduct
• An astonishing 85 percent believe that companies need to stand for more than just profitability

All of these are taken from the appendix of Good For Business: The Rise of the Conscious Corporation, which ends with 11 pages of juicy stats. And there are plenty of important stats in the main text, too: such as:

• The market for organic foods in the U.S. grew by nearly an order of magnitude in just eleven years, mushrooming from $3.6 billion in 1997 to $33 billion in 2008
• Just the compact fluorescent light bulbs sold at Walmart kept 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere—the same result as removing 700,000 cars from use
• Reputation accounts for 75 percent of the difference between book value and market capitalization; in other words, good behavior translates into real dollars when a company is sold
• On the aggregate, companies listed on the 100 Best Places to Work returned 14 percent a year on investment, compared with just 6 percent for the overall corporate economy
• Tesco, the U.K. supermarket giant, built a store in 2008 that uses just 30% of the energy of a store built just two years earlier

Plenty more to this book than statistics, of course. Much of the text draws from four cornerstone concepts—corporations need to:

1. Be about more than profit.

2. Treat both employees and customers well

3. Champion sustainability

4. Respect the power of consumers

Case-study companies, including well-known examples like Marks & Spencer, Ben & Jerry’s, Nike, GE, Whole Foods—and many less-frequently cited examples, including not only companies but also nonprofits—are examined in light of these four criteria, with many specifics.

There is a long digression on mission statements, which the authors reinvent as a living, changing document they call a USOD (Useful Statement Of Direction). Were it up to me, I’d have edited that part down. But this one small negative is more than compensated by pearls of wisdom such as the way a Conscious Corporation turns transparency into advantage, even as old-style companies see it as a recipe for paranoia. (p. 186)

Growing America: The Story of a Grassroots Activist, A Call for Renewed Civic Action, by David A. Kidd, “The Tree Man”

If you think one person can’t make a difference in the world read this book. David A. Kidd is personally responsible for reforesting his Ohio county; he organized a massive community effort that planted three million trees over a ten-year period, involving thousands of people in the process.

Kidd is an unlikely activist: a very ordinary guy with mainstream tastes and interests who served in Vietnam and had a spiritual transformation there. Kidd’s decision to renounce violence in all forms and devote his life to a higher purpose began there with a conversion to vegetarianism. Over his next several decades, he first brought an Eastern spiritual movement to his Ohio community. Later, he started the county-wide tree movement, then was hired to oversee Ohio’s state reforestation program. Eventually, he moved to animal rights activism, putting his own body on the line to stop a particularly brutal hunting event, several years in a row.

Because he doesn’t come out of an activist background, Kidd’s organizing methods are creative and unorthodox; he gets the tree project moving through schools, churches, and especially Rotary clubs, and understands intuitively how to get buy-in from all the key players so the projects are adopted and followed through, and how to successfully motivate both aid and volunteer helpers. His formal study of organizing came later, after he was already up and running with the tree project.

Essentially, he has created a blueprint for organizing around any issue where there’s pretty much a community-wide consensus supporting the project goals.

It would never have occurred to me to do a community organizing project through Rotary, so perhaps my biggest takeaway is to think about different audiences and how to reach them. Environmental work crosses many demographics, as I learned with my own most successful organizing project, Save The Mountain–the only time I’ve ever been involved in a movement with a near-complete community consensus.

This is a timely book for me to read, as I contemplate creating the<a href=”https://earthconsciousmarketers.com/”>International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers</a>. an international trade association for Green marketers

Available directly from the publisher, Lantern Books, at <a href=”https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302″>https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302</a>. Not showing up on Amazon (and his davidakidd.org website seems to be gone), but well worth tracking down.

Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying) by David Bach with Hillary Rosner

Okay so there are a gazillion books, e-books, and pamphlets with tips on going Green, including my own Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle—so why buy this one?

A few things make this one stand out. First of all, it’s written by a retirement-planning guru: David Bach, author of such books as Start Late, Finish Rich and The Automatic Millionaire (with help from Hillary Rosner, who worked on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). It’s very refreshing to have a celebrity personal finance author take on the topic of personal environmental responsibility.

Second, the book is crammed with hundreds of websites and resources (including Read the rest of this entry »

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson (Hyperion, 2009)
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

The influential author of The Long Tail has once again broken new ground. He argues persuasively that the price of anything that can be digitized, and the price of even many things that are based in physical space inexorably gravitates toward zero–and then, even though it might be counterintuitive, demonstrates a seemingly infinite number of ways to monetize your free offerings.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dealing with the Tough Stuff: Practical Wisdom for Running a Values-Driven Business, by Margot Fraser and Lisa Lorimer (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009)

Every business faces challenge like revenue crunches, supplier issues, personnel problems, and of coure, stress. For socially conscious businesses, the challenges re multiplied by the need to address these problems in ways consistent with the company’s social and environmental commitment, even if that’s not the easiest path.

In this latest entry in B-K’s excellent Social Ventue Network series, Fraser and Lorimer, past CEOs of Birkenstock USA and Vermont Bread Company, resectively (with substantial help from Carol Berry of Putney Pasta, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt, Joe O’Connell of Creative Machines, Marie Wilson of the Ms. Foundation and White House Project, and Tom Raffio of Northeast Delta Dental) show solutions that worked, and solutions that failed.

The book will be very useful to companies with at least a few employees and revenues in the seven to nine figures, and particularly those facing rapid changes in their market or corporate identity (from products going out of fashion to challenges in getting financing without onerous strings attached, to dealing with rapid growth). One section that will apply just as clearly to much smaller and perhaps larger companies is the last chapter, on how to exit from the business while still maintaining not only the viability of the company but also its core values. Even social entrepreneurship pioneer Ben & Jerry’s got burned on that one.

Learning from Ben & Jerry’s mistakes, Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg describes how he held out for the right buyer, one who would take the ownership burden while leaving him with decision-making power. It was a long search, but he did find his buyer. Birkenstock’s Fraser was not as fortunate; transfer of ownership to her employees was a disaster, and the company had to be regrouped and sold off to its German parent, even as the German company was gong through management transition of its own.

Some advice comes though consistently in chapter after chapter:

• Understand the numbers and what they mean
• Use a board of outside advisors (including ten great tips on how to set up and work with your board)
• Heart, head, and gut all play important roles—but you also need a reality check
• Don’t undersell yourself, don’t overcommit yourself, and yet don’t be afraid to take on big challenges
• Avoid getting trapped by your own “socially responsible mindset arrogance” (as Lorimer puts it)—but don’t let the nay-sayers stop you from bringing those values into every aspect of your business; as Fraser says, you don’t have to give your vision away to make quotas
• Hire people who know more than you—but don’t let them push you into decisions you’ll regret

While the book spends a fair bit of time on the grim realities, it also offers hope that companies who maintain their high standards of ethics and social/environmental responsibilities are often well-placed to survive the challenges of the corporate world and the marketplace, and come out stronger as a result.

Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Of the dozen or so books I’ve read on Internet-based communities (and their application for marketing), Trust Agents stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Normally when I review a book, I take a page of notes, maybe two. In the smallest handwriting I can still read, I had more than half a page by the time I got to the end of Chapter 1! By the time I was done, I had four full pages.

A generation younger than me and a generation older than those who grew up with computers from the womb on, Brogan and Smith bring insights from Read the rest of this entry »

Another Recommended Book: Appreciation Marketing: How to Achieve Greatness Through Gratitude, By Tommy Wyatt and Curtis Lewsey (BFG Group Publishing, Westport, CT)

As Wyatt and Lewsey point out, your customer can leave you for ever in just two clicks: the first to Google or another search tool, and from there to a competitor. This is one among many reasons why I’m a big believer in marketing by building real relationships (something I spend quite a bit of time on in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First).

And one of the best ways to build relationships is to say thank you. A lot. To say thank you without any obvious self-interest motive on your part, such as enclosing your business card and asking for a referral along with the thank-you. It shows up your thanks as insincere. In Wyatt and Lewsey’s vivid metaphor, it’s “chocolate frosted dog crap.”

The authors spend a fair amount of time describing that kind of person, and several others you want to avoid turning into. Fortunately, they also provide plenty of examples of sincere thanks expressed well. Start your thanking program by appreciating the blessings in your own life, and with that grounding, thank others every chance you get. This is their strategy to achieve “TOMATO: Top of Mind Awareness…Through Others.” Once you have that, your marketing will almost take care of itself.

The Pursuit of Something Better: How an Underdog Company Defied the Odds, Won Customers’ Hearts, and Grew its Employees Into Better People, by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger (Esler Kruger Associates, 2008)

Can a mediocre company (whose main USP is dominance of markets too small for others to bother with) transform into something truly great? If U.S. Cellular’s experience is any indication, the answer is a very strong yes. It isn’t easy, quick, or cheap–in fact, as of the book’s publication late last year, it had been an ongoing 8-year process–but under the right leadership, in this case, the remarkable CEO Jack Rooney, a squirmy little company with little concern for either its associates, its customers, or its business practices can actually reinvent itself as a highly ethical, customer-focused company that not only makes its employees really proud to work there, but actually begins to make a positive impact in the family and community lives of those employees. It’s not surprising that it now has twice as many associates and three times as many customers (meaning not only is the company growing rapidly, but productivity has also grown; each associate handles more customers)

This is an insider’s story; Esler and Kruger are the culture consultants that Rooney brought in at the start of his tenure, and they’ve played an ongoing role in shaping the transformation. Yet they don’t gloss over the rough stuff, and there’s plenty of it along the way.

But they and Rooney–and thus, U.S. Cellular–drew lines in the sand, fired people who didn’t share the dream, and made it work. In the early years of this decade, U.S. Cellular was widely expected to be swallowed up. Instead, they’ve shored up existing markets, built new ones, won numerous awards both for their customer focus/workplace culture and the reliability of their technology, and are well-prepared to hold their own even in the current recession.

A couple of core principles dominate:

• How comes before what, and nothing is morally neutral: if you get the numbers you want through the wrong methods, it doesn’t count; go back to the drawing board
• Truth is less stressful than deception

A key insight: marketing is important too. In many companies, the grim reality doesn’t match the sunny marketing/advertising/public relations picture, and that’s a problem. At U.S. Cellular, the problem was in the other direction: the company refused to take credit early for what it was accomplishing (Rooney felt they weren’t ready yet), and so the sunny and glorious reality was vastly better than the public picture; the company could have grown faster, perhaps, if their marketing had lived up to their culture. (This is exactly why I show, in my award-winning sixth book Principled Profit, that the ethical and social commitments must be accompanied by effective marketing that harnesses and highlights these achievements.)

A bonus: this is one of the better-written business books I’ve read recently, as you can see from this passage below, at the very conclusion of the book.

Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greedy, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door He has proven beyond question, once and for all…that a values-based model works, that it can raise both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived. He has shown that there is indeed a better way.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Another Recommended Book: ONO: Options Not Obligations: Enrich Your Personal Life by Rethinking Your Financial Life by Marc Warnke (Morgan James, 2009)

In his first book, Warnke lays out a compelling case for succeeding, staying within your means, and being a “family first entrepreneur” who understands that quality time with kids and high ethical standards are more important than the million-dollar deal. However, he’s had a few of those deals as well.

Warnke encourages business people to think strategically, using what he calls the “Scrabble model.” Just as an experienced Scrabble player knows how to place tiles for maximum points, so the savvy business person looks at any possibility in terms of how well it fits in with the entrepreneur’s strategy: how much time it needs, how big the potential reward might be, how much energy it will take, and at what level of risk.

On ethics, he encourages readers to make sure that “all of your actions fall within the parameters of the highest moral and ethical standards. When profitability gets in the way of ethics, it is only a matter of time before a business blows up and goes under. If you keep your moral and ethical standards high, you’ll attract a long list of people waiting to do business with you because they know they can count on your integrity. That simple fact is worth a fortune.”

Warnke had to come to this realization the hard way, though. He’s not ashamed to admit that in his early years, he tried to put himself first at the expense of others, and also struggled with alcoholism. But when he changed his ways, he changed them permanently, and bettered himself in the process. These days, he understands that a give/give relationship works best, and that we should all “be the customer you want to have.”

CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World by Tom Watson (John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

Are there lessons from the nonprofit and social change worlds for business? Watson’s new book proves that the lessons not only are there for the taking, but that they’re numerous–particularly in the way they use new technologies to build communities poised for action.

Business is ultimately about influencing others: persuading them to take actions such as buying or endorsing a product. And business can take many lessons from the explosive growth of social change and nonprofit groups in the online world, some of which started with just a single person expressing outrage, and moved on from there to build forces that could actually change things.

Organizations that started as small local networks have broadened to create national or been international constituencies involving tens of thousands of people–and more importantly, using those constituencies to accomplish the change they want.

From this book, you can take away such important marketing lessons as:

• Creating and leveraging “social proof”
• Building much stronger and more powerful alliances than the organization could do on its own
• Harnessing the “long tail” to attract profitable niche audiences that less nimble entities ignore
• Extending not only the reach but the feeling of ownership and participation among small donors who are able to see the results of their donations, sometimes in real time–cost-effectively providing resources that used to be available only to major givers
• Tapping into the consciousness of younger buyers–Generation Y, or Millennials–who are notoriously resistant to “traditional” marketing
• Extracting the core understanding of the blend of organizing and marketing that characterized both the Obama campaign on the left, and the Ron Paul campaign on the right
• Working profitably to market through new technologies, from Facebook and Twitter to cell-phone messaging, and taking advantage of the interactive, participatory aspects of these tools to build two-way participation–and thus, lasting community

In short, if you read this book through a marketing lens, you will find a whole lot of value, and you’ll be well-placed to get a jump on oghers in your industry by adapting these strategies–just as the fast-food industry borrowed the drive-up window from banks.