Category Archive for Book Reviews

The Clean and Green Club, November 2018

7 Nov, 2018  No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, November 2018
This Month’s Tip: Framing, Part 1: Framing the Offer the RIGHT Way
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Recently at a conference, I got handed an advance copy of an anthology of marketing wisdom where I wrote a chapter.

When I opened the book and read the first essay, I saw an ungrammatical mess. And my first thought was that if people tried to read that article, they would abandon the book and never get to my “brilliant thoughts.” So I had a self-interested motive to address that problem.

I went up to the publisher and told him that I thought that essay needed an edit. He told me that it had been pulling teeth to get that article in the first place, and he thought the author would not respond well to the idea of an edit.

This was a fun challenge. How would you handle it? (Hit reply or post a comment and tell me, and then scroll down to see what I did).
This is what I did: While the conference was still going on, I went up to the author and said, “I have a gift for you. I’d like to do a no-cost edit of the first page of your essay.” And her eyes lit up. She treated it as a very welcome offering. Cool, huh?

Of course, I had another self-interested reason. Not only did I want the book to make a good impression so people would read my entry, but my hope was that once the two of them saw the editing sample, I would get hired to make the whole essay sing. When I told the publisher how I’d gotten her consent, he told me he’d send the Word file for the entire book, just in case other authors wanted to take advantage of my skills. But then he nixed the idea because he didn’t want to delay the book.

Still, even though it didn’t lead to a paid assignment, there were benefits to me. For instance, both the author and the publisher now know they can refer clients who need an editor or co-author who understands marketing. And that author also has access to me if she does more writing in the future.

Framing can take many forms. Since I haven’t discussed the concept in a while, next month I’ll look at the role of framing in copywriting. And then in part 3, the role of framing in marketing ideas (as opposed to marketing products and services).
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel
What a great interview with Mira Rubin on the Sustainability Now podcast! https://player.fm/series/sustainability-now-exploring-technologies-and-paradigms-to-shape-a-world-that-works/ep-009-guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world-with-shel-horowitzI found *14* highlights that you’ll see on the interviews page. Here are two teasers to get you to click through and read all 14:

  1. How being annoyed by environmentalists got me to start the movement that saved a mountain—and how saving that mountain led me to think so much bigger
  2. Five benefits in being a socially and environmentally active company (#3 is particularly exciting)—and three reasons why those companies have better employees

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.

Connect me with paid speaking or consulting in Italy in January and earn a generous commission. I will be flying into Rome January 4th, and available for a gig through the 17th. Rome to Sicily preferred, though I would consider a gig in the north as well.

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: Millionaire Success Habits
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Millionaire Success Habits: The Gateway to Wealth & Prosperity by Dean Graziosi
My goals have always included making the world better and having a rewarding life. Although acquiring big buckets of capital has never been a particular goal of mine, I have striven for financial comfort, freedom to travel and enjoy pleasures such as live performances and great restaurants. And because I enjoy learning from smart people and I find many of the self-made wealthy are very smart, I’ve read several books on the subject.

Dean Graziosi is one of those very smart people. Overcoming a childhood as a classroom underachiever with learning disabilities and poor social skills, Graziosi has succeeded in multiple industries, and has many great lessons to impart. His accessible, down-to-earth style, willingness to admit and learn from his mistakes, and especially his amazingly positive attitude make this worth a read.

I don’t often find a book about getting wealthy that not only discusses such concepts as attracting what you desire (a/k/a Law of Attraction) but also include a little mini-Marketing 101 course. This one does, and that makes a lot of sense to me, since 1) many entrepreneurs are motivated by the possibility of wealth, and 2) entrepreneurship is often a much better route to that wealth. Some of his marketing tips:

  • Transparency and trust, going in both directions, are essential to successful marketing—something I’ve been talking about since at least 2002, and built a movement around starting with my 2003 book Principled Profit, by the way (pp. 151-152).
  • People buy not when they understand, but when they feel understood (p. 145)—and when you sell them what they want, and not what you think they need (pp. 155-157).
  • Great marketing is often built around storytelling, as we’ve discussed here many times (pp. 157-162).
  • When you’ve closed the sale, stop talking—or you might talk yourself right out of the sale (p. 162).
  • Throw in unexpected bonuses (what New Orleaneans call “Lagniappe”) (p. 169).

Some of my many takeaways (or, in many cases, reminders), outside the marketing advice:

  • Keep asking why until you get to the real issue (pp. 34-41). Graziosi follows one of his mentors and goes seven levels. In my own life, I find it can be more or less than that.
  • Notice and list what you’ll no longer accept –and what you now demand (p. 67).
  • You have the power to largely disarm the negative impact of other people’s words (p. 72)—I’m in only partial agreement with this one; yes, when it’s a comment made to you. But how do you undo the negative impact of comments behind your back, that you’re not even aware of?
  • Frame things as positively as possible. For instance, transform overwhelm into “blessed with opportunity” (pp. 74-75). Look for ways to transform negative self-stories vby focusing on the good that came of those experiences. Graziosi found benefits in his dyslexia (p. 94); I have seen some positive outcomes in a bunch of difficult times from surviving childhood sexual assault to my parents’ divorce.
  • Think of the difficult times in your past as “research and development” necessary to create your amazing future (p. 95).
  • When something bad happens, find the best outcome; don’t seek revenge (pp. 197-108).
  • Come up with a series of motivational mantras or aphorisms to get you over the rough spots. One of his is “if I can get through this, I can get through anything”—but he has several that he uses for different situations (p. 121-122).
  • Having a “don’t-do list” may actually be more valuable than your to-do list (p. 128). Hire others to do the things on your don’t-do list that need to get done, but not by you, and save your own resources for the things you’re good at or the things it doesn’t make sense to delegate (p. 137).
  • Abundance mindsets open us up to solving problems that seem insurmountable when we view the world as scarce (pp. 154-155).
  • Happiness leads to success, not the other way around (p. 184).
  • Live life and run your business with passion (p. 163), but don’t be rigid about outcomes; be willing, even, to embrace failure (pp. 195-197).

And some places where I disagree. He sees wealth as a primary goal. I see wealth as one among many paths to abundance. I see money as only being useful for what it can buy; the stack of greenbacks in your drawer and the series of ones and zeros in your bank’s computer file aren’t useful by themselves. It’s only because we’ve agreed that you can trade them for services, possessions, and good works. But there are plenty of other ways to acquire goods and services or do good works.

I also disagree with the decision not to have an index. When will authors realize that their books become 10 times as valuable with an index that lets readers re-find key concepts and names in seconds?

The best part of the book is chapters 9, 10, and 11, leading off with 10 success habits, moving on to 17 “success hacks,” and concluding with a road map for getting started in the next iteration of your life. These 48 pages starting on page 184 are gold. If there were nothing else of value in the book (and as you can see, there’s quite a bit), it would still be worth reading just for these three chapters.
Accurate Writing & More
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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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, October 2018

15 Oct, 2018  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, October 2018
Friends Who Want to Help 

What a Magnificent Group of Smart Teachers—No Cost
Want to create positive change in your own life and in the world? Listen to the 9th Annual Global Oneness Day Online Summit on Wednesday, October 24th (with replays running the 24th through 26th). Zero cost but you need to register.
Theme: “Living Your Life for the Benefit of All.” A super-timely message people need to thrive in these challenging times.

You’ll hear from: Dr. Jean Houston, Bruce Lipton, Marianne Williamson, Gregg Braden, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Neale Donald Walsch, Marci Shimoff, Thomas Hubl, Steve McIntosh, Gangaji, Joan Borysenko, Matthew Fox, and many others. I’ve spoken there in the past.See the Speaker Schedule and Learn More About Global Oneness Day

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

See the Speaker Schedule and Learn More About Global Oneness Day

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

Three Freebie Calls with the Amazing Barbara Marx Hubbard
Also, one of my favorite teachers, Barbara Marx Hubbard, is doing three freebie calls:
This Month’s Tip: How to “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Mental Subversion by Fake News
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Last month, I shared a video of a dolphin rescuing a dog, asked whether you thought it was real or fake, and then told you my answer, with seven reasons why. If you missed it, please click on this paragraph to read it.

Why the Dolphin Video Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper

Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?

Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.

Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging. (You may want to visit the psychology category on my blog, where a version of this article first appeared, to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)

And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the Left and Right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.

My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:

Subject: Breaking: Trump ordered tanks in D.C.

From this subject line, you’d expect some horror story about peaceful protestors facing American military might. It could happen. It has happened in the past–for example, the 1970 Kent State massacre that left four Vietnam War protesters dead and nine more injured by Ohio National Guard soldiers’ bullets. (The shootings at Jackson State College in Mississippi 11 days later were committed by police, not soldiers.) And protestors in countries with totalitarian governments have often faced tanks; if you want to see courage, watch the video of a man stopping tanks with only a flag, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989–WOW!)

It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.

Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:

Shel —

Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.

This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.

But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.

Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.

More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego, and even he has since canceled the parade)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.

The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting it) in about ten seconds of searching.

And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.

As a country, we are better than this.

How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering

Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real. And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.

The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:

Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.

Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?

Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?

And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.

I could go on but you get the idea.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

This showed up just at press time and I haven’t had a chance to listen and write down the highlights–but I remember that this interview with Mira Rubin was excellent. I’ll run it again next month with the proper description: https://player.fm/series/sustainability-now-exploring-technologies-and-paradigms-to-shape-a-world-that-works/ep-009-guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world-with-shel-horowitz
 
Also quoted in this article on climate change in Playboy, of all places:
 
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: Our Search for Belonging
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Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect is Tearing Us Apart, by Howard J. Ross with Jonrobert Tartaglione

Ross sees the need to be part of community as essential; we are hard-wired to demand it, to form community in numerous ways. He sees two kinds of communities, though: inclusive and exclusionary. Exclusionary communities bond internally but create barriers outside their in-group: they see themselves as “us” against “them”—while inclusive communities build bridges (pp. 16-17).

While those divisions have always existed, Ross sees them escalating dangerously: “People are no longer merely disagreeing; instead they are disavowing each other’s right to an opinion” (p. xi). It’s much harder to forge coalitions across these divisions now, or even friendships. And we surround ourselves with bubbles of like-minded people, who reinforce our prejudices. And that kind of social isolation.

The barrier(s) could be cultural, racial, religious, class-based, gender, sexual orientation, etc.—but they also could be ideological. If we demonize the “enemy,” if we treat them as a batch of stereotypes and not as human beings with the best interests of the world in their hearts, we create that “us versus them.” But because we create it, we can undo it.

How we define our bonding communities shifts situationally. A conservative Muslim woman or a progressive gay Christian might bond with one set of people over politics, another through religion, and a third as part of the sisterhood of women (a majority group that still experiences discrimination) or within the gay community (a minority subculture)—and some of these communities would see membership in the others as anathema.

And sometimes, others put you in the category. When the news media identifies someone as a radical Islamic terrorist but doesn’t identify the Oklahoma City bombers or the man who shot up the concert in Las Vegas as Christian terrorists, that creates a false identification of Islam with terrorism, and that demonizes Muslims but not Christians (p. 19).

One key piece of identity politics is the difference in perception between members of the dominant and non-dominant groups: members of dominant groups typically don’t often think about the experience of those in non-dominant groups. Yet, a person of color or a woman or someone who identifies as another type of minority experiences daily reminders that society puts up physical, psychological, economic, and other barriers.

That difference in perception seems especially relevant during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination process, which was still going on as I wrote this earlier this month. Ross says we’re all heroes of our own stories (p. 55); certainly, both Kavanagh and Ford presented themselves that way.

I blogged about some of the parallels at: https://greenandprofitable.com/kavanaugh-and-the-culture-of-belonging/ Please read it. This review doesn’t duplicate that post. Here, I talk much more specifically about the book, which has relevance to so many situations in society, the workplace, the community.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the book, including a few specific ideas for defusing conflict and forming community across those “them” barriers. I will say, though, that I expected more of that. I didn’t really feel I’d been given a toolkit—but perhaps that’s because I’ve been doing bridge-building work for decades. As long ago as 1977, when I and 1413 other safe energy activists were incarcerated in New Hampshire’s National guard armories following a protest at the Seabrook nuclear plant construction site, I was one among many of the protestors who reached out to the young, conservative Guardsmen overseeing our captivity. I was only 20. Since then, I’ve met with and even stayed with Muslims (I’m Jewish), Evangelical Christians, conservatives (I identify as progressive), and others on the other sides of those us-them mental fences.

Ross presents 10 specific ideas to become more inclusive, pp. 53-58. While I wish he had included more, what he does include shows great wisdom. Examples:

  • Look for places you can partner with the other side: where does the right-wing goal of personal liberty [I’m not sure that’s as universal a concern as he says it is, but that’s a different discussion] intersect with the left-wing goal of justice [again, I see many on the right wanting justice; they just define it differently] (p. 53)?
  • Don’t confuse voting for a candidate with supporting all that candidate’s positions or actions (p. 55). If you’re talking to a Trump voter, you may feel that person is enabling racism, bullying, lying, etc. But you may discover that person is not acting out of racism, but perhaps economic issues or ending abortion. Similarly, if you’re talking to a Hillary Clinton voter, you may go deep enough to find that this voter didn’t support Clinton’s hawkishness or her tone-deaf and entitled campaign, but wanted to keep an openly racist and mean-spirited “loose cannon” away from the most powerful job in the world. It’s worth remembering that both candidates were caught up in multiple corruption scandals, and the media was not sensitive to the vast differences in degree of corruption. So a lot of people voted as they did to vote against what they saw as someone even worse, rather than voting for a future they really wanted.

Ross notes that having situational privilege, being part of the dominant culture and mindset in a particular interaction, doesn’t mean you don’t face challenges. But the nature of the challenge is different; you don’t have to prove that what you wear or where you travel or how you speak meets society’s standards; if you’re found wanting, it won’t reflect badly on your entire subgroup (p. 91). You may not even notice that members of different subgroups often don’t share that good fortune. And you’re very unlikely to feel negative physical effects from being marginalized, if you never experience being marginalized (p. 113).

But note the word “situational.” A gay white male will experience situational privilege when the focus is on race or gender, but will be the marginalized minority in other ways. And those who hold the power typically face far lesser consequences when they stereotype and marginalize (p. 152). Members of the dominant religion or ethnic group in one country may see other religions as not only not sacred, but even heretical (p. 130)—while in a different country, the positions might be reversed. At its extreme, the consequences of marginalization include death; I happen to be reading a poetry collection dedicated to a martyred white gay man, Matthew Shepherd (October Mourning, by Leslea Newman).

All of this affects how we communicate, and how we communicate also affects bias behavior. Language creates thinking and believing patterns (pp. 124, 126, 184). Inuit languages include dozens of words for snow, while corporate English has dozens to describe different strata in management. In Hebrew or Spanish or German, every noun has a gender. In English, that’s not true. How do we think differently as a result? How does social media, which can organize both positive and hateful movements, and which can amplify (go viral) and distort (fake news) messaging very quickly (pp. 164-165), shift the dynamics?

The good news: we can overcome the conditioning. Peru and Ecuador managed to settle a 175-year-old border conflict in just 77 days in the 1970s, by using a “process-oriented mentality” to really listen to each other (p. 173). The two presidents won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so, because they were able to treat the other’s point of view as just that, a point of view (p. 179).

Interestingly, this kind of inclusive thinking works better, even when it’s not easy. “Belonging has to include the uncomfortable” (p. 180). He lists eight factors in effective diversity training (pp. 196-197), notes that “breakdowns can be the source of breakthroughs” (p. 213), and stresses the importance of staying civil when you and the other person disagree (p. 214). At its best, as in Nelson Mandela’s leadership in post-Apartheid South Africa, idealism and practicality come together to create something amazing (p. 215).
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, August 2018

10 Aug, 2018  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, August 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Three Principles to Grow New Markets

Watch the 3-minute video at the top of Expand Furniture’s Smart Space-Saving Ideas page. Don’t multitask; you need to see people going through the few seconds of converting a piece of furniture from one use to another, or storing it in tiny spaces when it’s not needed.

I found three takeaways for you in this short video:
1) Many FunctionsThis entire product line is an excellent example of the principle of one part, many functions (which I discuss in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, BTW). If you want to create a green business, one of the planet-saving tricks is to build for multiple uses. It’s also an example of miniaturization; when not needed, these chairs, tables, sofas, and storage units take up almost no space.

Think of the all-in-one printer/scanner/fax as one example that’s gone mass-market. A smartphone is an even better example because it’s far more universal AND and embraces miniaturization.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, portable communication existed in concept and showed up in comics, science fiction, etc. (Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, Dick Tracy’s walkie-talkie). And so did the idea of all-powerful computers that contained the world’s knowledge.

But combining those two concepts into one device that fits in a pocket—WOW! I don’t think I came across anything that even hinted at this until the introduction of early PDAs like the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot in the 1990s, and I don’t think either of those had Internet access. Now, I even have a client about to introduce a line of portable multipurpose solar lamps about the size of a smartphone (and one model even has a phone charging port).

2) “Deep Kaizen”
Now, think about the video. Most of the furniture ideas are not really a new concept. William Murphy received his first patent for a “disappearing bed” in 1912 (and the concept predated him); modular sectional sofas and tables with self-contained expansion leaves have been on the market for decades.

The one really new product is that miraculous looking couch that seemed to pull out of a twisted piece of foam. It’s actually paper, and you can get a better look at it here and in this post’s photo.

Yet this gets only a few seconds in the video. The rest of it is simply doing more with ideas that have been around forever.

Some of the other designs could also be called “deep Kaizen.” Kaizen is the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. It got very popular in the US business world a few decades back. So yes, we’ve had Murphy beds forever—but have you ever seen a Murphy bunk bed before? An ottoman that holds a set of five padded folding chairs? A coffee table that can transform in under a minute into a full-size dining room table? And look at what I just did there. I used deep Kaizen to come up with the phrase, “deep Kaizen.” Okay, so I’m not the first to come up with that phrase—but I only found that out when I Googled it after I came up with it on my own.

3) Repurpose
And that Googling process—which I use whenever I’m helping a client name a business, product, service, book, or idea—brings up the third principle: repurposing. Just as I came up with a new way to use the phrase, ask yourself what do you already make or sell that could be used differently? I ask my consulting clients this question regularly, and it opens up many conversations about new markets and new ways of marketing to them. Expand has identified several target markets: condo dwellers and people living in Tiny Houses, among them. But some of the marketing photos and videos deploy the pieces in massive, spacious living rooms, too. The company understands that a photo like that changes the way people think about its products and make it attractive to a whole different sector.

How will you take these insights into your own business?
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.  
 
New on that page this month:
  • Alex Wise–Sea Change Radio
  • Carole Murphy–HeartStock Radio

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: The Age of the Platform
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The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon (Motion Publishing, 2011)
 
The Internet is constantly changing. And yet, this book that was written (and rushed into print) seven years ago is still remarkably current. Some of the specifics have changed, certainly. Twitter doubled the maximum size of a Tweet about a year ago. Facebook abandoned API support for posting by third-party applications just this month.

But most of the principles remain the same, and all companies in his “Gang of Four”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—not only remain robust but have continued to expand. And each also shows some significant problems.

Even in 2011, Simon saw Amazon as a company offering integrated shopping across many categories, far beyond books. Many people still thought of Amazon as a bookstore back then; now it’s a retail giant more akin to Sears; it even owns Whole Foods. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, personally owns the Washington Post. Yet anticompetitive practices and less-than-friendly labor policies continue to show up.

Several years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple continues to innovate—and develop non-price-sensitive markets—in computers, telephony, music, and other areas. It’s now the most highly valued company in the world. Yet that value could tumble at any time. Simon discusses why companies like Microsoft and MySpace have lost the competitive edge. Apple, especially on the hardware side, is a company I personally see as vulnerable.

Facebook has grown its user base enormously and competes with Google not only as an advertising venue but also in video (Facebook Live), images (Instagram), and chat. But as in 2011, it still faces privacy scandals, and now, content scandals like trollbots as well.

Google, in turn, has a social network (Google Plus) very similar to Facebook, although nowhere near as popular. And Google also has moved outside the computer world. While continuing to dominate search and (via Youtube) online video, it’s also gone into such wildly divergent technologies as driverless cars. You could argue that this is a logical extension of products like Google Maps and Google Earth. But it’s a pretty big leap from GPS to vehicle operation. The driverless vehicle project has had its share of pitfalls, too—including a fatality. It wouldn’t shock me if Google bought Tesla at some point; I see many parallels between these two companies.

In the 2011 book, Simon is enthusiastic about open APIs that allow outside developers to easily build new utility into the platforms. Since I was reading his book just as Facebook was restricting posting access from third-party apps such as HootSuite, I wrote to him and asked what he thought of the changes. He directed me to a blog post he wrote in 2012: https://www.philsimon.com/blog/platforms/the-gradually-closing-platform-strategy/

But enough about what’s changed since this book came out. Let’s discuss the content that remains relevant.

Simon argues that these four giants—three of which were recent startups (mid-1990s to mid-2000s)—got their preeminence because they switched from one-trick ponies (Amazon=books, Apple=computer hardware, Facebook=seeing what friends were up to, Google=Internet search) to much broader capabilities integrated in a “platform”: an “ecosystem” of interrelated applications and capabilities that allows a user to perform many and diverse functions without leaving…that can add new capability simply by adding “planks” either developed internally or integrated from outside providers (pp. 22-23). Successful platforms keep raising the bar on technology, both to create more powerful user experiences and to scale up; they’re happy to build more capacity than they need now, so that it’s ready when they need it—and until then, they can use the excess to charge other companies for services (e.g., pp. 134-135).

Key to this model is the concept of “prosumer” (p. 6): a person who both produces and consumes. The Gang of Four have made us all into prosumers; each of us creates lots of content, and consumes even more. And every time we do something in either of those roles, at least one of these four companies is likely monetizing it somehow. Even if there’s no cost to the user (and that’s often the case), someone is collecting marketable data…selling ads…and integrating those two functions to serve ads directly related to that user’s activity patterns: searches, clicks, photo tags, downloads, video views, etc. (e.g., p. 122). For me, as a business writer and consultant, and for my wife, as a novelist, this often has humorous results; we’ll see ads for things we have no direct interest in. But for the average consumer, the computer can seem scarily prescient, serving ads for a new freezer after mentioning on social media that you had no room in your current one, for instance.

Another key is the network effect: the more people use certain technologies or platforms, the more useful they are to other users. If you had email in the early 1990s, you had a tiny circle of contacts—and you needed different email addresses to connect with people on different systems. And you did this from a desktop computer in a fixed location, over slow and balky dial-up phone lines. I got my first email address in 1987: a long string of numbers running over Compuserve. I gave up my account within a few months and didn’t try again until 1994. By that time, AOL made it easy to do email. And then the original Netscape browser made it just as easy to explore the nascent Internet. And then there was enough critical mass to pursue broadband, which in turn made it possible to do far more online.

One thing Simon doesn’t really discuss but fits in very well with his concept of platform is the interrelationship between number of users and ease of use. The whole idea of the platform is to make it easy and comfortable for users to stay within the system, as Google and Facebook do so well (e.g., pp. 113-117)—and as AOL tried to do but failed once Netscape opened up the rest of the online world (pp. 181-183). When the system is easy to use, more people use it. When a user base reaches critical mass, developers make it easier. Thus, with more users, developers figured out how to send email across different networks, and most people could get by with just one email address. And as email became the standard, and more people turned to the Internet for information, more websites sprang up, and ways to exchange information over the Net became more sophisticated. You could send documents! You could FTP videos and other large files! You could check your email from a remote location! And as first Apple and then Google built a user base for smartphones while the cloud allowed off-site data storage, suddenly you could do all this on a device that fit in your pocket, creating another revolutionary wave.

Much of this is because of something he does discuss, in some detail: successful platforms innovate constantly. Google even requires employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time on non-core projects (p. 120)—and that’s led to many new products. Simon shows 78 different Google application icons (p. 117), a number that’s probably much higher now.

Why are these platforms so successful? They make things easier for the user, who has to master far fewer interfaces. They encourage collaboration and build community. They put a lot of resources into both technology infrastructure and technology innovation. They’re willing to try things that fail in order to get to things that win big (p. 200)—and are preparing for Web 3.0, the “semantic web” (p. 239).
He also looks at why some other companies didn’t achieve this type of success, and what the risks are to these four giants as they become larger and more bureaucratic.

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’re likely to find this book useful in understanding how business in the first quarter of the 21st century is different than even the last quarter of the 20th.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, June 2018

12 Jun, 2018  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2018
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No-Cost Resources from Ryan Eliason’s Visionary Business School

It’s been at least 10 years since I first encountered Ryan Eliason. He has perhaps been the most successful person at combining entrepreneurial profitability with social change. He’s “walking the talk” that I’ve been advocating for years. It’s been a while, but I’ve mentioned him to you several times.

Ryan ALWAYS puts out a lot of value. Starting today and for the next couple of weeks, he is releasing a whole series of training pieces to make you a more skilled and successful social entrepreneur. Each piece is time-limited, so if you want the full collection of goodies starting with the manifesto and opening video, do yourself a favor and do it right away.

I know you’re an intelligent person who doesn’t need to be beaten over the head with offers of new content every day or two. Because this is only a monthly newsletter, I’m relying on YOU to take initiative and get the gifts. I will send one more note near the end of the cycle but not a constant stream. I benefit by knowing that YOU will benefit from the high-quality information and refreshing perspective he always provides. (And yes, if you sign up for the paid program, I earn a commission.) You will find him inspiring, I’m sure. I certainly do!

DOWNLOAD: The Revolutionary Entrepreneur Manifesto

You’ll learn a far more satisfying (even revolutionary) approach to business including:

  • The 4 essential foundations of all highly successful revolutionary entrepreneurs.
  • The unexpectedly simple way to build a lucrative career rooted in profound service.
  • Why you must avoid the deathtrap of isolated techniques!
  • The system used by over 6,200 of Ryan’s clients to collectively generate tens of millions of dollars while contributing to the greater good of the world.

Ryan spent the last 25 years coaching and training thousands of socially conscious entrepreneurs from 85 countries.

So if anyone’s qualified to teach you about this, it’s Ryan.

Go get a copy here to see for yourself 🙂

If you want to revolutionize your life, you definitely want give this a read today.

Enjoy!
Shel

P.S. When you download the manifesto you’ll also get instant access to Ryan’s video training on Revolutionary Success — How To Make A Lucrative Career Out of Profound Service. Be sure to check out minutes 5:18 to 19:02. Ryan’s personal story is captivating.
This Month’s Tip: Grow Your Business with the RIGHT Public Speaking
I was 12 or 13 when I gave my first speeches to 3 consecutive assemblies of several hundred junior high school students each (I ran for school office), and I’ve been speaking ever since. While most people have been programmed to be scared of addressing an audience, I really enjoy it. I love delivering an important message in an accessible format, even to people who might not read my books. And I love being able to grow my business just by opening my mouth.

  1. Practice to the point where you’d still be comfortable if you lost your slides (which happens sometimes—I’ve seen power failures bring down PowerPoint at least twice, including one of my own presentations).
  2. Keep text on slides pretty minimal, and NEVER stand there like an idiot reading them verbatim to the audience.
  3. At least some of your practice should be with a live audience, even if it’s five friends gathered over pizza. You need to know how people react to your material, and more importantly, how you react when people are in the room. Tweak what isn’t working and keep doing what is.
  4. Get to the room early, scope it out logistically, and MEET some of the early arrivals. Chat with them a bit, and if you’re feeling brave, feed off what they tell you: “Mary told me earlier that she struggles with ________ because __________. She’s not alone in that…”
  5. Control the introduction. Give the emcee something you’ve scripted out. Make the print really big, like 32 points. Keep it brief (1 to 2 minutes, maximum) but salient.
  6. If there’s a podium and the tech people allow it, stand to the side of it and not behind it. You can see your notes/computer screen but you don’t build a wall between yourself and the audience.
  7. Consider having your question period BEFORE your finale, so you don’t have the wind knocked out of your big finish and you leave them with the strongest reinforcement of your message.
  8. Unless there are legal compliance issues, don’t script out every word. Know the points you want to cover but use the natural language of the moment to cover them. But don’t ramble. I find PowerPoint helps me stay on track; I use it as my outline in the presentations where I use it (some of my talks, particularly on book marketing, don’t even use PowerPoint; I give the audience choices about what to cover, and I cover what they want to hear).
  9. Be your authentic self. Use approachable language. Smile. Make eye contact. Act like someone who not only has great information, but would be fun to go out to coffee with.
  10. Enjoy the perks but keep your ego in check. As a speaker, you can start a conversation with anyone in the room, so network away. You’re in demand as a meal partner, you get to go to the VIP events, you’re seen as important and having a message to share. As long as you are authentic and not arrogant, and not a prima donna, you have far more opportunities than most attenders to meet the key people (including other speakers), expand your network, offer informal advice, and build your client roster. You get more of these opportunities if you participate actively in the whole or most of the event. Fly-in/fly-out “helicopter” speakers get a lot less benefit.
  11. Remember that they are in the room because they want to hear what you have to say—and they want you to succeed. Be relaxed and have fun.

I won’t go into detail here about how to get speaking gigs, but I will give you two tips.

1) More than anything else, you need a “sizzle reel”: a quick video showing highlights of your talks. This is something that will evolve over time as you speak more often. My current (third) version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooSVbHQ5Ik&feature=youtu.be (and presented in context on my speaking page, https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/social-change-business-profitability-speaking-and-presentation/ ) The decision to stay authentic and somewhat homespun, rather than glitzy was deliberate. Authenticity is a key component of my brand, as is the message that ordinary people can change the world.

2) I also pay commissions to people who bring me paid speaking gigs. It helps to have other people bragging about how great you are.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

 
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live June 15, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT (the previous interview didn’t record due to technical failure). Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.
I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them.
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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: Purpose
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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

This book surprised me. I’m a big believer in purpose as a tool of business success, but Mourkogiannis defines purpose rather more broadly than I do. He identifies four distinct categories of business purpose, based loosely on the work of four major schools of philosophy:
  • Choice (Existentialist: including themes such as choice, innovation, freedom, authenticity, and commitment)
  • Virtue (Aristotelian: including themes like excellence, quality, courage, and character)
  • Compassion (Humean, as in David Hume: focused on themes of compassion, altruism, well-being and happiness of others, and promoting the general good)
  • Power (Nietzschian: devoted to the individual’s triumph over others and not typically concerned about the impact on those less fortunate—think Ayn Rand, and descriptors like heroism, self-mastery, strength)

In his framework, I’m clearly a Humean first (with elements of the others, especially choice and virtue). When I think of business purpose, I think about how business can profitably identify, create, and market profitable offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. I don’t put Nietzschian values like maximizing personal wealth in the category of business purpose. If that were someone’s only business purpose, they might as well just learn how to be a successful casino gambler.

Of course, I understand that business has to make a profit. I teach that it is possible, and in some ways easier, to profit by running a socially and environmentally conscious business that is actively working for a better world. But I see purpose-driven businesses as looking well beyond their income statements—looking first and foremost at their impact. And thus I found some of his key examples puzzling because he seems to be conflating purpose with an industry-agnostic, impact-agnostic desire for excellence. Thus, he sees banker Siegmund Warburg as having a purpose, but the purpose he describes is simply to be the best at banking. Writing, most likely, in 2004 or 2005 for his 2006 copyright, he sees Warren Buffet’s purpose simply as to be the best investor—note that this was before Buffett pledged almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation, in the summer of 2006.
Despite my disagreement with his model, I found much wisdom and took four pages of notes. To name a few:
  • I like the construct of building purpose around one or more of his four bases: New, Excellent, Helpful, and/or Effective—and the six traits of purpose that immediately follow that idea (p. 16).
  • I love the idea of putting executives, including CEOs, in the front-line trenches of a business (p. 84), so they can gain both direct feedback and deep intuitive understanding about what motivates—or fails to motivate—employees, customers, and other stakeholders.
  • I think the idea of communities of expertise that integrate business folks and academics is terrific (pp. 144-145).
  • I totally agree that it’s cheaper (and more profitable) to create a genuine purpose than to try to fake one (p. 148).
  • I’m fascinated by the concept that a purpose can only continue to motivate if it is not achieved, and thus a true purpose is never fully achieved (p. 172).
  • And I’m thrilled to see acknowledgment that quarterly profits are often the wrong metric; that we need a much longer-term focus, which purpose can steer us toward (p. 189).

And those are just a few of my takeaways.

One gripe I do have is the way Mourkogiannis ignores historically marginalized constituencies. This was a book published only 12 years ago, but reading with a gender or race lens, you’d think it was from the 1950s. All five of his key exemplars are white males, and only Buffett is still alive. I don’t remember the words “she” or “her” appearing in the book. The vast majority of the extensive list of sources are written by people with male names. I do remember a passing reference to Katherine Graham of the Washington Post but don’t recall any other women even being mentioned, at least not by the time I started consciously looking for them, struck by their absence. It is unconscionable to do a book on corporate leadership that not only can’t find other examples but still pretends anyone worth even a mention is white and male.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done more than 30 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, May 2018

9 May, 2018  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, May 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 3: Why You Should Think of Mother Nature as Your Chief Engineer (an excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World)

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.

Think about this: Whatever engineering challenge we face, nature has probably already solved it.

Imagine the fortunes awaiting companies that can roll out a construction material as strong and lightweight as spider silk…a desalination process as cheap and effective as the one that mangrove roots use…a water collection method as powerful as the one used by the Namib desert beetle. John Kremer talked about “biological marketing”—so why not biological engineering, also known as biomimicry? It’s just as miraculous—and just like biological marketing, the results can be outsized. Nature has figured out Zero Waste, and figured out how to do pretty much anything that humans feel a need to do: housing, transportation, flood resistance…

These technologies have been around for thousands, maybe millions, of years, and they outperform what we humans have come up with.

Meet Janine Benyus, TED speaker and author of several books on biomimicry. When she walks you through Lavasa, India, where native vegetation has not grown for 400 years, and tells you that the area gets 27 feet of rainfall during the three-month monsoon season and basically nothing the rest of the year, you know that maintaining a thriving city here will be challenging.

Yet, immediately abutting this city, she finds proof that nature knows quite well how to handle this environment: a hilly wilderness area that, despite the alternating torrents and droughts, experiences zero erosion. As she walks us through this wilderness, she shows us adaptations like an anthill built with curves and swales, so that it doesn’t get washed away in the flood. She walks us through a sacred grove there, cool and delightful even in the dry season, and lets us understand that our cities could be just as pleasurable to live in.

She shows us a 1500-year-old live oak tree in Louisiana that has designed itself to withstand hurricanes, and points out that only four of New Orleans’s hundreds of live oaks were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

And whether it’s in India, Louisiana, China, or New York City, she captures metrics like carbon sequestration, energy and water use from those neighboring wilderness areas—things no one has bothered to measure in the past—and then cheerfully announces, “Because this is happening in the wild land next door, no one can say it’s impossible. A city that does this, that’s generous in its ecosystem services, is going to be great to live in.” She describes ecosystems in terms like “generous” and “competent,” and reminds us that the human species, at 200,000 years old, is still a baby, and we can learn much from our “elders” in the plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacterial realms.

Her approach combines human-built infrastructure and nature-built ecostructure together to provide “ecological services” that contribute to meeting per-acre and per-block metrics, carried in part by the buildings and in part by the landscapes.

Species adapt and evolve over time, growing more able to influence their environment while being influenced by it in turn—and most of these adaptations are positive both for the organism and the ecosystem. Maladaptations create room for better-adapted species to move in. Species that fail to provide these ecological services are maladapting, and will be replaced by those that do contribute, she says. She remains optimistic that humans will learn to positively adapt, and be welcomed by other species.

A lot of her work is based on the idea that because each place is unique, the technologies we use should be matched to each place, as they are in nature. In nature, organisms ensure the survival of the species by protecting the survival of their habitat; they can’t directly take care of offspring many generations in the future, but they can protect the place where those future generations will live.

How can biomimicry change our patterns of design and construction? Thousands of ways. Here are just a few projects Benyus and other biomimicry researchers are working on:

  • Concrete that sequesters CO2 rather than emits more of it (Bank of America did a building this way, and the exhaust air was three times as clean as the intake air)
  • Altered wind patterns through urban rooftops, modeled after the reverse-hydraulics of an Indian forest
  • Artificial leaves that—just as real leaves do—convert sunlight to energy far more efficiently, and using far less expensive inputs, than today’s solar panels
  • A robot hand with more agility and dexterity, because it was inspired by cockroaches’ spring-like feet
  • Desalination systems that not only create drinking water from the sea at a fraction of the energy requirement, but can green the desert at the same time.
  • GeckSkin, an ultra-powerful adhesive developed at the University of Massachusetts after studying the way gecko lizards climb walls
  • The Biomimetic Office Building, whose designers encourage starting not with reality, but with the ideal, and then seeing how close they can come to it. They “found inspiration from spookfish, stone plants and brittlestars for daylighting; bird skulls, cuttlebone, sea urchins and giant amazon water lilies for structure; termites, penguin feathers and polar bear fur for environmental control; and mimosa leaves, beetle wings and hornbeam leaves for solar shading.” [End of excerpt]
If you want to know more about this amazing work, the full citations for most of the examples are in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Put into practice on a wide scale, biomimicry could revolutionize not just the business world, but the way we build structures, grow food, collect energy, move from place to place, and more. Imagine a world in harmony with itself!
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Last fall, I recorded a brand new keynote, “Terrific Trends for Enlightened Capitalists,” for the Enlightened Capitalist Virtual Summit, and it came out great. The online event was rescheduled to May 16-18–yep, that means it starts TOMORROW. Sorry, I didn’t have the dates yet as of last month. Listen to all 20 sessions; they promise to be excellent. I’m especially looking forward to hearing Jeff Golfman, Donna Lendzyk, and Ravinol. I’m one of just two of those speakers giving a keynote; my session kicks off the final day. This is one series you’re really going to want to dip into: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/EnlightenedCapitalist/
 
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live June 15, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT (the previous interview didn’t record due to technical failure). Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.
I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them.
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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/

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.
Another Recommended Book: Love Let Go
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Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

DGB took a very clinical, engineer-like approach to deciding which charities to support and what activities to do—even what career to choose—for maximum impact but neglected many of the human factors. While I was still reading it, I went to an author talk by Amalya (“Ami”) Campbell and I thought her book Love Let Go would be the perfect antidote to my frustration.

Love Let Go, unlike DGB, is a very free-spirited approach to giving (DGB’s author would think it’s too free-spirited). It chronicles a church that had invested just USD $1000 into a mixed-income community affordable housing project in its Chicago neighborhood, back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, when that housing project was sold off, the church found itself with a $1.6 million windfall.

After long deliberation, the church leaders decided to tithe. They’d give 10 percent to their congregants, with only five words of direction: “Do good in the world.” This is introduced on page 8. Most of the rest of the book follows one of three strands:

  • What the parishioners did with their individual checks (with a side story of how the media treated this story and what happened as a result)
  • How the church—which had been struggling to get enough money for its own infrastructure— wrestled with what they’d do with the remaining $1.4 million (revealed, after teasing us all the way through, on pp. 183-184)
  • Sharing the research and various philosophies on generosity that they sifted through during their long and very deliberative process

The impact from this one church and its congregants was quite impressive, but it’s only the beginning. Enabling a generosity mindset could be huge; in his Foreword, Richard Stearns of World Vision says that if every Christian gave an extra 60 cents per day (which works out to $219 per year), we could eliminate poverty in a single generation (p. xi). And yes, this is an overtly Christian book, probably the first I’ve ever reviewed. I don’t happen to be Christian, but I see no reason why this process couldn’t be replicated in non-Christian houses of worship and in non-religious organizations.

Generosity, say the authors, is our neglected superpower (pp. 3-4); using it involves the simple five-step process outlined on page 4. And we help ourselves when we get generous, opening ourselves up to all sorts of little miracles—and generosity begets more generosity (p. 95). People who give are as happy as those who double their income (p. 7). Even the bottom-income congregants, people whom no one would have criticized for using the $500 for themselves (including homeless Stephen Martin, pp. 106-107 and debt-ridden Kristen Metz, pp. 108-110, among others), found deep meaning in their giving. Of course, even a homeless man in the US is far wealthier than many people around the world; in 2015, a net worth of just $3210 was enough to put someone in the top 50 percent worldwide (p. 188).

All of this is based in something I’ve been teaching for years: an attitude of abundance. When you know the world will provide, it gives you the freedom to experiment. And while not every congregant’s $500 experiment was successful, most of them were—and several inspired even larger acts of generosity. The ones that failed were sometimes recast, for instance bringing in an established social service agency better suited to the mission (pp. 150-152). Another failure (according to the way most of us measure things) involved donating to the medical expenses of someone in need, who died nonetheless—but even this experience, which removed the money from circulation, offered many blessings.

Generosity has a twin, according to the authors: gratitude (pp. 153-166). Like generosity, gratitude improves with practice. When theologian Mary Daly says “you learn courage by couraging,” this church creates a corollary: we learn thankfulness by thanking (p. 161). And sometimes the most charitable thing you can do is to receive charity with grace, creating the freedom for others to feel the abundance of giving (p. 105, for instance). For the authors, this abundance mentality is embodied in the opening chapters of Genesis (pp. 43-44) and in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish (pp. 143-144), as long as we don’t let fear get in the way—something even the usually abundant-thinking Abraham was not immune from (pp. 51-52).

And here, abundance is coupled with awe (pp. 132-134). That’s something most of us rarely experience, but the process of giving away money to individuals who in turn gave it to others, as well as the much longer process of deliberating over the remaining money, created numerous moments of awe.

The book ends with a chapter-by-chapter reading guide that opens discussion of larger issues and how this kind of giving program can make a difference. The very last page (p. 195) notes that individuals, not foundations or corporations, make an astounding 81 percent of charitable contributions. Then it asks three questions, and I particularly love this one: “What causes you to be optimistic about the ability of one individual to make a difference in the world? How can you increase your exposure to these sources of optimism?
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done more than 30 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, April 2018

6 Apr, 2018  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, April 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $797 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: The Perils of Victory

What happens next if you win your biggest battle?

Whether you’re in business, running a nonprofit, or spearheading a community campaign, you need to know the answer to that question.

I speak from personal experience. In 1999, I started Save the Mountain, a citizen campaign that I expected to win—and I thought it would take about five years. But it was so successful that we won near-total victory in just 13 months (just over one year—a fifth of the time I thought it would take). We had near-total agreement in our town of 5000 that a mountain abutting a famous mountaintop state park was no place for the massive real estate development that a local builder announced—but what we needed to change was the very strong idea that people in town were powerless to stop the project. Once that changed, after just four months, our victory was in motion. After that, it was just a mater of lining up all the pieces in the right way.This was a very exciting campaign. We had dozens of people actively working to save this mountain, bringing expertise in science, water resources, lobbying, fundraising, and other areas. I brought my own expertise in marketing and community organizing and helped to secure about 90 stories in local print, radio, and TV, social media as it existed in the pre-Facebook era of 2000, and even a story in the Boston Globe, the paper of record in the large city 100 miles away.

We were consistently able to bring out more than 400 people to public hearings, pass several pieces of legislation to regulate mountaintop development in town—and most important, change the consensus from “this project is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “which of the numerous arrows in our quiver will put the final nail in the coffin of this unwanted project?”

But the biggest mistake we made was not having a Plan B for what would happen to Save the Mountain once we achieved our big victory. We were organizationally unprepared to win. And thus, all the momentum that we could have harnessed in a future campaign dissipated rapidly.

This organization could have morphed into a permanent force for environmental improvement in our local area. Yes, most of our thousands of supporters joined specifically to accomplish the immediate goal—but many of them would have been happy to keep improving our area’s beautiful environment. Once we won, though, we had nothing for them to do, no other project to harness that incredible energy. The organization crumbled.

So we saved the mountain—but we let the organization wither and die, when it could have gone on to many other victories.

It’s worth pointing out that other organizations have evolved far from their original purpose. Tesla has moved from focusing on transportation to putting big tentacles into solar power production and storage, and even space travel. MoveOn.org, the massive petition site, started as an organizing effort to get Republicans to stop wasting tax dollars trying to impeach President Bill Clinton. Save the Mountain could have at least taken a role in trail maintenance and park cleanup, once we added the threatened acreage to the adjoining state park. At best, it could have taken a leadership role in redefining appropriate land use in our county. But we had no organizational way to take those steps.

In my consulting, my organizing, and in running my own business, I will not make that mistake again. I urge you to think about how—in your own business, in the community projects or nonprofit causes you’re involved with, even in your family—to think about how your next victory will create the energy and direction you need to achieve the victory after that. Do that thinking now, before you need it.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring one more guest who owns a business in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy.

  • Why I got into marketing (through activism)
  • How activism led me into writing books
  • When I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up (not so long ago)
  • How you can design to solve multiple problems at once (for instance, poverty, environment, and safety)—and to build in circular (no-waste) resource use
  • The difference between old-style social responsibility and thinking really big
  • The biggest challenge I have found in this new work
  • The most exciting parts for me personally of the new social change work
  • The difference between marketing and advertising
  • How to write sexy, attention-getting press releases (and other marketing materials) that DON’T fit the 5W formula
  • Where to look to surmount almost any engineering challenge—the surprising key
  • 2 key questions to green your business and profitably address social issues
  • How the Empire State Building changed its thinking about energy to save $4.4 million per year

Profitability Revolution with Ruth King

  • How even a very small business can get involved in healing the biggest problems of our time
  • The key questions to ask in developing a profitable approach to social change within business
  • An unrehearsed brainstorm about how a consultant can make an impact in developing countries and find people to pay for it
  • The key to solving war
  • Positive versus negative motivation
  • How the most famous skyscraper in the world got a 33 percent return when it went deep green

Watch for This One! I’ve got a taping date but not an air date for:
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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/

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.
Another Recommended Book: Doing Good Better
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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (Gotham/Penguin Random House, 2015)

I don’t usually recommend books that annoy me as much as this one did, but I do recommend it. MacAskill raises crucial questions for anyone in the nonprofit or social responsibility spaces: how are our time and money best spent to make the world better? I agree that we have to be willing to dive deep enough to discover that sometimes, things that seem terrific at the macro level crumble in our hands when we look closely.

Yes, we want our resources to make the maximum impact—to hold our social impact projects and charity partners responsible for their actions AND their outcomes. And seeking fact-based answers about which of our actions do the most objective good is well-worth the effort. He’s an advocate of a scheme called QALY, which imposes a quantitative framework on decisions by looking at the outcomes. In theory, QALY should tell us whether it’s better to increase lifespan or increase quality of life, whether we best serve a greater number in less depth or a lesser number in greater depth, and how to measure costs and benefits of any initiative. And MacAskill remembers to factor in a lot of subtleties, such as how much improvement would occur without your help.

As an example, if a student is deciding whether to go into medical school, MacAskill suggests looking at how much impact this particular person would have as a doctor, versus someone else who would fill the medical school slot; there are always more people wanting to study medicine than available slots, so a doctor will be created regardless. That involves a whole host of questions: would the doctor be working in a developed country where services provided would not have great impact on the larger social picture but the potential for charity donation is enormous, or a developing country facing a massive health crisis, where that doctor could save many lives? Would another doctor have a social conscience? But despite MacAskill’s best efforts, a lot of it would be guess work.

Sometimes the answers may be extremely counter-intuitive; he cites cases where the most effective thing certain individuals can do is to go into a high-paying profession and live simply enough to donate large portions of that pay to well-vetted causes.

But I have a problem with his Bean-Counters Uber Alles approach. He tends to ignore a lot of the human factors, and I think that’s the kind of attitude that got us into trouble with our planet in the first place. It was actually a big relief to read that he became a vegetarian out of concern for animal rights, because it showed a caring persona that’s largely absent from the text. Yet he scorns the little actions we can all take to live more in our values, which I strongly feel make a big cumulative difference. In fact, I’ve written an ebook, 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, offering 111 simple and no-cost/low-cost steps we can take as individuals. If everyone did even 50, I think it would make a tremendous difference.

Doesn’t something go missing when we worry so much about the numbers and so little about the human factors? Is working at a job you hate for 20 years so you can donate more money and then be financially secure enough to take an executive position with a charity really better than working at lower pay in a meaningful career right off the bat? Are there tradeoffs in the massive improvement you can make in one person’s life through some kind of direct intervention versus the benefit of eradicating some scourge that affects many more lives? And how do you predict which of the people you help might go on to find the cure for cancer? It makes a lot of sense to reduce malaria deaths at a cost per life saved of $40,000, while the US spends millions per life saved on highway safety—and this aligns with his theory that we do the most good when we focus on the more neglected areas. But then again, I am alive today because improvements in vehicle safety allowed me to walk away from a 60-mph crash. So, in some ways, the whole set of questions and assumptions is absurd.

MacAskill gets even more absurd, with obnoxious positioning like a chapter called “The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods” (he says they provide better jobs than the indigenous industries. I say that’s not good enough).

But in other areas, he’s spot on. As big a supporter of peace as I am, it’s hard to argue with his math that eradicating smallpox has saved more lives over the past 40 years than creating world peace would have over the same time frame. And it’s certainly important to choose to give to charities at the top of the curve, who consistently achieve far more with less and significantly outperform average charities. He names several of his favorites.

And one area where I’m in total agreement is how much impact one person can have, especially when joining with others, and especially in poor countries, where a dollar goes so much farther. Most human advances—in medicine, technology, agriculture, even human behavior—were because one person had an idea and nurtured it.

Bottom line: if you come in to the book as an engaged and questioning reader, willing to mentally dialogue with him about what makes sense and what doesn’t, you’ll find tremendous value. If you either accept it all at face value or throw the whole thing out, I’d say you’re making a mistake.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 29 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, March 2018

12 Mar, 2018  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, March 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $497 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 2: Amory Lovins—Reinventing Human Enterprise for Sustainability

(a shortened excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World) 

 
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. 
 
Amory Lovins…lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (-18°C) on winter nights. Yet, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter)— and it stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Lovins built his luxurious 4000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run… 
 
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of US power needs, Lovins claims that a well-designed office building can save 80–90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.
 
With conventional building logic, you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins notes that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater… “Big savings can cost less than small savings, because you also save their capital cost…” Look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions. This mirrors nature, where many components have multiple functions. A mouth processes food, water, and air, communicates, and kisses. A hand can pull, push, hold, lift, manipulate, write, type, draw, paint, sculpt, fasten, unfasten, dress, undress, check the weather, provide sensory feedback, point, speak sign language…
 
Lovins consulted on a 1656-square-foot tract house with neither heat nor air conditioning in Davis, California, where temperatures can reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Replicated on a mass scale, construction cost would be $1800 cheaper than a comparable conventional house, and maintenance costs would drop $1600 per year. While it’s easier to achieve these dramatic savings in new construction, even on a retrofit, the savings can self-fund these improvements. 
 
Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute was also one of several companies involved in the massive “deep energy retrofit” of the Empire State Building, discussed in Chapter 9 [saving $4.4 million per year]… 
 
Just by switching a factory from long, narrow, pipes with turns to short, wide, straight ones, Lovins was able to cut energy costs for that process by 92 percent—and slash maintenance costs and operating noise, too.
 
Lovins has also looked long and hard at transportation. He and his associates have developed amazing car designs, under the service mark Hypercar…SM 
 
Lovins’s team designed an SUV that not only can hold a whole family (or two people and their kayaks), but weighs 52 percent less than a Lexus SUV, can go 55 miles per hour on the energy the Lexus uses just for air conditioning, achieves the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon (except that it runs on hydrogen fuel cells—330 miles on 7.5 pounds of hydrogen), offers greater safety than a heavy steel SUV (even if it hits one), is undamaged by a 6-mph collision, emits only water, and is so well made that its designers expect to offer a 200,000 mile warranty. 
 
When parked, the Hypercar vehicle “could be designed to become a power plant on wheels”; plug it into the electrical grid and watch your meter spin backwards, eliminating any need for nuclear or coal plants… 
 
Lovins has developed a few key principles over the years: 
  • Design whole systems for multiple benefits, rather than components for single benefits
  • Redesign production to close all the loops in a system and eliminate both waste and toxicity
  • Reward service providers and customers who do more and better, with less, for longer
  • Reinvest the resulting profits in scarce natural and human capital regenerativity model can have a huge impact not only in developed countries, but in areas of deep poverty, too.
Lovins described an effort by the Zero Emissions Research Initiative to grow houses out of bamboo, in a developing country with an acute housing shortage. The houses cost only about $1700 each, can be located where they’re most needed, and can finance themselves by selling excess bamboo to carbon brokers for energy or other uses. And of course, if the bamboo is cut back (rather than cut down) to build the houses, the plant can regenerate and maintain an ongoing income stream.
 
Curitiba, Brazil…reinvented mass transit, with a bus system that moves people as efficiently as a subway, but at a fraction of the cost. The fully integrated approach to changing from a dying to a thriving city is told in Lovins’ book, Natural Capitalism—and can be read online at https://www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter14.pdf . 
 
Using nature as a model and mentor, Lovins encourages companies to rethink their waste streams, too. In many cases, the waste of one system can become a nutrient for another process… 
 
One of the great things about the Lovins approach is that it relies on the private sector to do well by doing good. Companies that adapt to the systemic approach will be highly profitable key players in the new economy. “Early adopters will enjoy a huge competitive advantage,” Lovins says. 
 
Lovins has been looking at these issues for more than 40 years. The full profile expands on many of the points here, and is one of many reasons you should go get your own copy of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring two guests who own businesses in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy.

  • Why I got into marketing (through activism)
  • How activism led me into writing books
  • When I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up (not so long ago)
  • How you can design to solve multiple problems at once (for instance, poverty, environment, and safety)—and to build in circular (no-waste) resource use
  • The difference between old-style social responsibility and thinking really big
  • The biggest challenge I have found in this new work
  • The most exciting parts for me personally of the new social change work
  • The difference between marketing and advertising
  • How to write sexy, attention-getting press releases (and other marketing materials) that DON’T fit the 5W formula
  • Where to look to surmount almost any engineering challenge—the surprising key
  • 2 key questions to green your business and profitably address social issues
  • How the Empire State Building changed its thinking about energy to save $4.4 million per year
Watch for These! I’ve got taping dates but not air dates for:
Profitability Revolution with Ruth King
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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/

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.
Another Recommended Book: Flash Foresight
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Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible: Seven Radical Principles That Will Transform Your Business by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann

As you might guess, my work requires big departures from traditional business thinking. Helping business identify and market profitable ways to turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance requires overcoming a whole lot of skepticism and rigid thinking.

Read Burrus and you’ll be well on your way to making those big shifts. How much farther along might have the business world be by now if I’d plucked it off my shelf in 2014, when I started thinking big enough to imagine actually creating that kind of shift?

The seven key principles, each of which gets a chapter, are:
  1. Start with certainty
  2. Anticipate
  3. Transform
  4. Skip your biggest problem
  5. Go opposite (I might consider that a corollary to #4)
  6. Redefine and redirect
  7. Direct your future

Even without reading it, I’d come to embrace some of these, as well as the lens of abundance that he brings to all of it—through studying systems thinkers like Amory Lovins (see this month’s main article), Janine Benyus (she’ll be profiled in May) and John Todd (July). But I didn’t have the framework to see how all the pieces relate to each other. Now I’ve taken tons of notes and I see the whole picture a lot more clearly.

Perhaps Burrus’s biggest insight is that we have to look at two very different patterns of change: the inevitable (and highly predictable), and the uncertain. Calling these hard and soft trends, he looks at key drivers of change, such as technology and demographic patterns, and extends the lines from the present to the future.

It astounds him that more people don’t do this, because the hard trends at least are in plain sight. Watching the baby boom—a hard trend— begin in the 1940s, why didn’t municipal planners and educators understand that they’d better start building new schools before those vast numbers of new students started banging on the door? And watching that same bulge work its way through its lifespan, why are we not planning effectively for the coming wave of elders and the services they’ll (we’ll) need? They’ll be quite different from those serving prior generations, from boomer video games reliving the generation’s great moments to “unretirement homes” that facilitate volunteerism while providing services (pp. 29-32).

Planning for hard trends is about anticipating and capitalizing on them. We know that Boomers will move their demographic bubble up the age ladder. We know that technology makes many things smaller and more powerful. But planning for soft trends is thinking about how to change behavior—how to affect the outcome. We can anticipate that Boomers will want active lifestyle choices in retirement. We can be ready for Millennials who demand greener business practices. We can create educational models that feel relevant even to ghetto kids who don’t expect to see their 20s (pp. 223-224).

And business success is easy if you consider both types of trends when planning new products, services, and corporate capabilities. You can predict the future if you leave out the uncertain parts, he jokes—and he backs up this joke with a multi-page chart outlining some of his successful predictions from 1983 through 2008 (pp. 24-26; the book was published in 2011, so he probably wrote it in 2009). We need anticipation; agility is no longer enough. (p. 42) And you can leapfrog the stuck places by measuring tomorrow’s benchmarks (p. 46) instead of adopting today’s best practices (which will be obsolete soon enough).

Sometimes it takes a bit of mental jiu-jitsu: instead of trying to beat your competitor at its greatest strength, find a different frame, where your strengths and their weaknesses position you for success (p.188). Often, this means turning a commodity item that people typically only purchase based on price into a unique experience. And Burrus says anything can be decommoditized (pp. 192-193), citing examples like underwear (Victoria’s Secret), coffee (Starbucks), and even junk removal (800-GOTJUNK).

Much of the book walks us through examples of how various industries could anticipate the need for change, but usually don’t. He spends five pages showing how the US auto industry could take what they know for certain about the future (e.g., fossil fuels will be less and less important, shipping cost will drive more manufacturing close to the end user, and cars will need to fit the narrow streets of places like India’s cities) and reshape itself to effectively compete—and dominate (pp.32-37). This means thinking globally. Much of the world’s new and powerful thinking will come from developing nations, as adequate food, energy, and water begin to free people in those culture from focusing only on basic survival (p. 139). And much will come from thinking differently about resources—something I’ve advocated for years. For example, the Internet and the sharing economy allowed pharma giant Eli Lilly to crowdsource the wisdom of scientists, paying only for results (p. 113)—while other companies harness children’s creativity or rent computer power at night from schools that only needed it in the daytime.

And Burrus walks his talk. As an epilogue (pp. 250-263), he describes his own experience starting a software company using the Flash Foresight principles. Determining that smartphone apps met all the demographic criteria but the existing revenue models were not profitable, Burrus set up a company to not just write some apps but reinvent how creators can monetize their work—and created an app suite in real estate that could be repurposed in many other industries, using the same software engine. Using a virtual workplace model, generating revenues by selling recurring subscription charges to vendors who wanted to be in front of his customers, and garnering a tone of Tier-1 media coverage and blogger attention, Burrus’s Visionary Apps succeeded quickly and with hardly any head-banging.

Go read this book and think about how your company can leapfrog its stumbling places and not just catch the next wave but maybe even create it.

Note: Burrus has a new book out: The Anticipatory Organization. Visit that link to get a copy at no charge.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 28 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, February 2018

11 Feb, 2018  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, February 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $497 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: How a Toddler Took Action to Save the World

The 19-year-old who interviewed me for a telesummit on productivity recently asked me some questions I don’t usually get asked. Perhaps my answers about how I got started on this path and how the profit motive can be harnessed to create social good will inspire you (while demonstrating one of the principles in my second response). His questions in italic, my answers in ordinary type.

1. When did you first realize you could positively change the world?
My earliest activist memory was at about three years old. My parents were having a party, their friends were all hanging out and smoking, and I was reacting negatively to the smoke. So I crawled around under the coffee table and started breaking cigarettes in half.

Then I took a break from activism for nine years. At about age 12, I had two radicalizing experiences and I’ve been an activist ever since. First, I bought an adult ticket but was made to sit in the children’s section of a local movie theater. This is the first time I can remember experiencing discrimination against me personally. I was so annoyed that I vowed never to return to that theater. I’ve kept that vow for 48 years so far. And second, a few months later, I went to my first rally about Vietnam in October, 1969. A speaker said the war was undeclared. That destroyed all my faith in the checks and balances we heard about in social studies class. I started questioning everything.

2. What are some great hacks for boosting your productivity?

  • Hootsuite and Buffer, to better manage my social media
  • Reading while indoor-biking
  • Repurposing replies in discussion groups, columns, etc.
  • HARO and Speakermatch: tools that connect me with people who want media sources and speakers.

3. How do we align our professional goals with positive change in the world?
I’ve chosen to motivate business to create positive change through enlightened self-interest. Guilt and shame don’t work. But the profit motive does.

4. How do we determine which problems in the world we should begin changing?
We have many choices. Ask yourself what sings to you—or what so deeply disturbs you that you can’t leave it alone. I’ve chosen hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change: four that I feel are big and scary enough that many people are shut down about getting them done, but manageable enough to actually lend themselves to creative solutions in bite-sized chunks. I just have to show that we’re not helpless; we all have the power to help create solutions.

5. How do we get others to actively support our cause?
The first thing is convincing them that change is possible. I look at the movement I started that saved our local mountain. All the “experts” told us it was impossible. I set out to prove them wrong. I thought it would take five years, but we got it done in 13 months flat—involving thousands of people along the way.

6. How do we begin to realize we can change the world?
Look at what ordinary people have done throughout history. Rosa Parks was a seamstress; Lech Walesa (founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement and later Poland’s president) was an electrician in a shipyard. Save the Mountain engaged farmers, storekeepers, school children—people from every walk of life.

7. How can businesses generate a profit by positively changing the world?
By finding niches to fill. By creating and marketing products and services that address these issues in some meaningful way. And hundreds of companies are doing this. Two examples among many: 1] Solar-powered LED lights that replace toxic, flammable, expensive kerosene. 2] A gourmet brownie baker that hires and trains people considered unemployable.

8. Why do you love positively changing the world?
It’s in my blood. I’ve been in the activist world since age 12. My mom was an activist before me. If a black family was told an apartment was already rented, Mom would go and try to rent it. What’s really exciting is in the last few years, finding ways to integrate the concept of regeneration—making things better—into businesses that are already primed the think about sustainability. That’s why I set up a website at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

9. What are you doing to soar higher?
I’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to connect business success with solving these big social problems. I’ve written the book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’ve done the TEDx. I’ve attended and spoken at some pretty cool conferences. Now I want to find a critical mass of clients who will hire me either to create this kind of transformation in their own company or to enable their small business clients or nonprofit partners by sponsoring my work.

10. How do we stay motivated during the most challenging times along the journey?
Understand that it can be a long journey. The first protest against slavery in what is now the US was from a small group of Quakers in 1688. It took until the 1750s to convince fellow Quakers to oppose slavery, and more than 100 years after that before the US abolished slavery. The pace of change has picked up. It was less than a decade from the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott to the passage of major federal civil rights legislation. The movement for same-sex marriage rights started only in the late 1980s as a fringe movement, but by 2004 it was legal in Massachusetts, and by 2015, it was legal in all 50 states. So we have to remember how much progress we’ve made, celebrate our victories, and strategize on how to expand them and create the society we really want.

11. Please let me know what offer you would like for me to share with my attendees. This can’t be a paid product but it can be a landing page with an autoresponder leading to a paid product.
Social change business readiness assessment: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/your-self-assessment-how-ready-are-you-to-achieve-deep-social-change-in-your-business

Sampler from Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ (click on the sampler link)
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Ask Me Anything (#AMA) is a new (at least to me) model for conversations with experts, basically a live chat. I’m doing one on social entrepreneurship. I’ll be answering live Tuesday, February 27, 10 a.m. ET, 7 a.m. PT, 3 p.m. UK, 4 p.m. CET—but you can get a jump on things. Go any time and post your questions. I am visiting every few days and answering the latest batches, though you won’t see my answers until the air date. 

Stephanie Chandler of the Nonfiction Authors Association interviews me on Copywriting for Authors: How to Write an Author Bio, Book Jacket Copy, and Press Releases That Get Results Wednesday, March 7, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. (follow the link and scroll down to “How to Participate,” then click “Join Here” to get a no-cost member profile and the dial-in instructions. If you’re a paid (Authority) member of NAA, you can also listen any time over the following 90 days.Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring two guests who own businesses in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.

Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.

Watch for These! I’ve got taping dates but not air dates for:
MaturePreneur with Dina Todd-Hardy
Revenue Chat with Tony D’Urso (who did a fantastic interview with me several months ago for his other show, Spotlight—scroll down to his name to see what we covered—and to listen)
Profitability Revolution with Ruth King
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity

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/
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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.
Another Recommended Book: Don’t Sell Me,
Tell Me
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Don’t Sell Me, Tell Me by Greg Koorhan (Crossbow Studio, 2017)

Like December’s review choice, Blue Collar Proud, this is a bit of a sleeper in a small package. It’s another book that pays careful attention to ethics before getting into the more obvious topic (storytelling as marketing)—and I see that as a positive. For Koorhan, in order to succeed with story-based marketing, you have to build a company worth telling stories about. Since I’ve been writing about ethics, green principles, and social change as business success principles since at least 2002, I happily agree.

But many companies get this all wrong. The trouble usually starts, he says, not when someone makes a mistake, but when the company tries to cover up that mistake (p. 15). Honesty is a great differentiator—but some business leaders can’t be honest because they’re not aware of what’s really going on in their company: “you cannot share the truth if you’re not aware of it” (p. 18). Thus, be prepared to do deep self-examination—to admit your vulnerabilities (p. 20).

With that all understood, NOW we can look at the storytelling piece. According to Koorhan’s research, telling stories is 22 times more effective than trying to convince with only facts

Koorhan sees infallibility as just not that interesting—so the stories can’t be about showing your perfection. Better: show the struggle—how you (or your client) got from a bad place to a better one, for instance. After all, filmmakers telling the stories of “broken heroes” are the most effective storytellers ever (pp. 29-30).

When you stay true to your mission, your stories create high trust for your brand (p. 38). As I’ve said for decades, your brand is not the visuals and slogans, but the “the sum of all experiences the customer has with you” (p. 41). In other words, your reputation is at stake every time anyone in your company interacts with a customer.

Koorhan makes lots of lists in the middle of the book and then elaborates on them. Here’s a list of some of his lists, each presented with explanation, and context:

  • Seven ways to brand your strongest benefits (pp. 43-47)
  • Six types of stories (pp. 47-51)
  • Four more elements of a good story (pp. 72-74)
  • Six steps to identify your brand message (pp. 79-82)
  • Twelve archetypes to factor into your psychographics (pp. 82-92)

The last third of the book continues the tutorial on how to create successful stories, with an emphasis on the aspect of connection. Some of his tips:

  • When considering which pieces to add and which to leave out, ask yourself if including this bit serves the story (p. 102)
  • Remember that authentic and humble will always be more meaningful than jargon and spin (p. 103)
  • Make both the video and text about them, not you (p. 115); a great way to do that is to dig for how a client felt before working you, and how that same client feels afterward (p. 100)
  • When networking in person, just listen first. If it’s appropriate, tell your no-pitch, relevant story. Then, and only if asked, do you go into your very brief pitch (pp. 118-119)
  • If doing anything in installments, use TV-style teasers to build interest for the next episode (p. 124)
  • When you tell your story the right way, the right people will respond (p. 134)

One little gripe: poor design. We’ve all heard, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s very true of this book. The information inside is good, but the cover would have looked dated and amateurish in 1990, and the interior layout, while better than the cover, is mediocre—easy to read, but again, not professional. I was actually quite surprised to see a self-publishing coach listed in the acknowledgments, because if this had come through my shop, I would not have let it go to press without hiring someone to improve the design. (Yes, I still help people get their books published, even after adding the business-social change work). So forgive it the design flaws and go read it for the content.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 28 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, January 2018

5 Jan, 2018  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, January 2018
A very happy 2018 to you! In honor of the New Year, this month’s column looks at the kinds of personal goals that often find their way into New Year’s resolutions. Next month will look at an organizational strategy—another thing often evaluated at this time of year. And this month’s review is a movie, not a book—one that will help you start the year on a really positive note. And with that, “on with the show, good health to you”—and a copy of my Painless Green ebook to the first person who identifies the 1960s band and the song that quote is from (please keep the default subject line so I can sort the responses easily).
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This Month’s Tip: Bad Case of “Rusty Object Syndrome”?

In the worlds of marketing and entrepreneurship, we often hear the phrase, “Shiny Object Syndrome”: the temptation to get distracted by the next shiny new marketing technique.

I’ve just invented a term for its “evil twin”: “Rusty Object Syndrome”: getting distracted by all the little tweaks you can do to clean up the work you’ve already done, instead of doing the new work that should be higher priority.

I’m as guilty as anyone else. One day recently I had work orders from both a first-time and a long-time client, and an inquiry from a likely prospect. As I was about to send my standard response to the prospect, I noticed that one of the landing pages had an obsolete bio and the letter itself had a link to a shopping cart I no longer use. It took only five minutes to fix the cart link in my template immediately, but then I had to tell myself, STOP. Fixing the bio can wait. Getting started on the two actual bird-in-hand client projects should come first. I jotted a few notes on what I needed to fix on which pages, and turned toward something more productive, knowing that when I did turn to the bio, it would likely lead to a cascade of other things that needed tweaking or updating.

But sometimes I get sucked into that trap. Hours go by, and I’ve fixed 10 things that were in need of repair on my websites and email templates, but didn’t get any of my real work done.

Sure, those things are important. Accurate, up-to-date, easy-to-use websites are part of the clean and efficient image we want to present to the world. But that sort of thing can wait a few hours, because it doesn’t require enormous brain power. In the morning, when my brain is fresh, I should be doing the creative profitability and marketing work that my clients happily pay for.

How does this play out in your life and your business?
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Hear & Meet Shel

Another great interview! The Spotlight with Tony DUrso

  • Two key events at ages 3 and 12 that spurred me to a life of activism—and how activism turned me into a lifelong marketer and writer at age 15
  • Learning to build a platform to reach people who don’t agree with you—as a teenager
  • How I approached Guerrilla Marketing founder Jay Levinson to do our first book together—showing him the win-win possibilities—how I landed the contract with Wiley to publish it, and the easy things I did to get on Jay’s good side for the rest of his life
Visit this link to read the full description.

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/
Friends Who Want to Help

A note from my business coach, who has helped me enormously as I’ve shifted the direction of my own business: You can begin the New Year with new ideas, clear goals and a plan. Offering a Complimentary Holiday Coaching Session to assist you to begin the New Year in a way which helps you achieve your goals successfully. Call Oshana Himot, MBA, at 602-463-6797 or email oshanaben@yahoo.com.
 
Getting your book into the hands of those who love it forever can be daunting.
Authors: Consider adding this to your New Year’s Resolutions. See what my longtime friend and colleague, Paulette Ensign, created. She simplifies the process, based on her successful approach of less bringing more of what we want.

You’ll want to take action now

 
Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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.
A Recommended Film—Prosperity
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“Prosperity” by Dr. Pedram Shojai

Instead of a book this month, a brand new movie.

From the title, you might expect this would be a film about the “Prosperity Consciousness” trend embodied most famously in the movie, “The Secret” and Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. You would be wrong.

And to me, that’s a good thing; bear with me while I rant for one paragraph. Even if their teachers have a broader perspective (and many do, including people I consider colleagues, like Jack Canfield and Marilyn Jenett)—far too many people see the Prosperity Consciousness world in a shallow, one-dimensional way—all about personal wealth and with only the lightest lip service paid to being of service, to improving the world. Also, too many people measure prosperity only by their bank account. For more than 20 years, I’ve been talking about other, nonmonetary, ways to create abundance. My ebook, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook, came out all the way back in 1995.

This movie is about real prosperity: the kind where businesses and communities come together to enlist conscious capitalism to solve the world’s problems in ways that generate profit. It’s a visual representation of the principles I discuss in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

The founder of Well.org and author of The Urban Monk: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Hacks to Stop Time and Find Success, Happiness, and Peace (which has been on my read-it-one-day list for a while now) spent months talking to experts in conscious capitalism, from Whole Foods founder and Conscious Capitalism co-author John Mackey and Seventh Generation founding CEO and author of The Responsibility Revolution (which I reviewed several years ago) to Naomi Whittel of Reserveage™, a fair-trade entrepreneur and reforester who sells high-quality Panamanian organic cacao and coconut into the nutritionals and beauty markets, and Tom Szaky, founder of TerraCycle, the company long known for finding creative ways to recycle all kinds of trash (even cigarette butts).

Many of the people the interviews and stories he tells are familiar to me, but on screen, they come alive in a way you just can’t do in print. And for those who are new to this work, it’s a fabulous introduction.

The film makes a strong case for conscious capitalism: using business as a tool to both heal the world and make a very nice financial return. It takes us behind the scenes into the offices, the manufacturing plants, and the source communities in the developing world, where these businesses have direct impact on the local populace.

But this is no mere documentary. To me, by far the most exciting part was near the end, when Shojai, Whittel, Szaky, and the Guna elders in an island community in Panama join together with Procter & Gamble to harvest the solid waste washing up on the beautiful beaches in Guna territory—to sell them to P&G as raw material for shampoo bottles. This social entrepreneurship project, benefitting the locals, the environment, and the North American investors, was hatched directly out of the making of this movie. In other words, the film doesn’t merely document the emerging new business reality; it directly helps to bring it about.

Even though I was trained as a traditional journalist who takes the facts and writes them up. I’ve been a longtime fan of the power of advocacy journalism—of using the power of story to shed light on those who make the world better and offer alternatives to doing business with those who make it worse—and of participatory journalism—documenting an event where you are there as a participant. My very first published articles, as a 15-year-old high school student covering peace demonstrations in 1972, were participatory. This film is a fine example of going beyond even participatory journalism to what we might call activist journalism—not just participating, but organizing something new, and documenting it. Because the recycling/resale project actually arose from the filmmaking, this opens up an entirely new way of thinking about the intersection of journalism and social change. Let’s model it!

The film is available here. As of this writing, you’ll find a player right at the top of the page, but that looks like it might be temporary. If it’s no longer at the top, just scroll down to “Our Movies.”
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 29 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, December 2017

8 Dec, 2017  No Comment

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, December 2017
Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine, and You

In October, I attended a concert by The Nields, who always put on a great show (they are local to me and I’ve heard them many times). Near the end of the show, they sang “Tyrants Always Fall,” a song that so blew me away that I went up to Nerissa Nields (the song’s author) after the show and told her it needed to get in front of someone who could bring it to audiences numbering into the seven or eight digits. Someone like the people I named in the headline. She answered that finding such a person “is your job.”

I take that seriously. So…if you know anyone with that kind of star power—or if you know someone who does—can you help me by getting the song in front of him or her? Listen to it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWQHdHTLRI (and #westernma folks, you’ll recognize downtown Northampton).

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/
The Perfect Gift for the Socially/Environmentally Aware Business Person in Your Life (maybe that’s you)

The old ways of doing business—polluting without a care, externalizing the social costs of your company onto taxpayers or workers or neighbors, not worrying about how much energy or other resources you waste—don‘t work anymore. Did you really want to sink all your spare time and money into combatting lawsuits or bad press? I didn’t think so.

The good news: better ways are available AND profitable. The award-winning book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, which I co-authored with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson (known as the “Father of Guerrilla Marketing”), is the road map to profit without compromising principles—for you, or for anyone you know who runs a business or nonprofit.

Special Holiday Offer: Order at https://shelhorowitz.com/product/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ by Wednesday, December 20 (just five days from now) and we’ll pick up the cost of Priority Mail shipping within the US, plus I will personally autograph it to your loved one(s) and get it into the mail within one business day. How cool is that? Use the code, HolidayShipping

Written in the clear, accessible style you’ve come to love as a newsletter subscriber, it’s endorsed by Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, visionary blogger Seth Godin, Jacquelyn Ottman of GreenMarketing.com, Joel Makower (founder of GreenBiz.com), social media rock stars Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Alicia Bay Laurel (author of the 1970s classic Living on the Earth), and many others. It also has four guest essays, by Cynthia Kersey (Unstoppable/Unstoppable Women), Frances Moore Lappé (about a dozen books on food and democracy including Diet for a Small Planet), Yanik Silver (Evolved Enterprise) and Ken McArthur (The Impact Factor). And it was even named a Top Content Marketing Book of the Year!
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 1: Biological Marketing

Practical Visionaries, Part 1: Biological Marketing (an excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World)

I’ll share with you every other month through June 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.

John Kremer, author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books and one of the foremost authorities on book marketing in the US, says marketing is making friends and creating a “word-of-mouth army” that will sing your praises.

Kremer suggests turning your customer into a participant, letting that customer become emotionally attached. So, for example, let your customers vote among different packaging alternatives or product names. Or package the same information in a free report with several different titles. A clear reader preference helps you pick the right name.

He’s developed a new paradigm called biological marketing, and with his permission, we’ll share it with you:

Farmers have incredible ROI [return on investment]. They plant one seed of corn and get back 900. Nature does not follow physics. Instead of an equal and opposite reaction, there’s an incredible multifold giving back. It follows biological laws, and when you give and share, it comes back to you in abundance. Physics says that the ultimate end of the universe is entropy. Biology says the opposite, that everything multiplies and becomes incredibly rich and diverse. That’s the law of life. Physics is the law of non-life. And it’s the laws of life that determine marketing.

When you understand that, you know it’s OK to give. The authors [or business owners] who are generous with their time get it back, they build legions of fans. That kind of relationship makes marketing fun and successful. You cannot replace it with mechanical rules, but once you learn it and take it to heart, that becomes the basis for success in anything you do. If you treat people right, it comes back over and over again. If you build a network of relationships, it’s only three degrees of separation [versus the classic six to reach anyone in the world]. Another part of the law of nature is that you have to break out of your shell, just as birds and reptiles do. You can do it one person to one person. [End of excerpt]

I absolutely love this concept of nonlinear, exponential success based on biological principles. How can you apply this in your own business?
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Interview with Brian Basilico on the Building Authentic Connections Online Networking podcast. Interestingly enough, Brian did not have the link to my media center ahead of time, so this was a freewheeling, off-the-cuff interview with neither of us knowing ahead where the conversation would flow. We managed to cover quite a bit of ground:
https://www.baconpodcast.com/episode-315-guerrilla-marketing-heal-world-shel-horowitz/

  • My journey from file clerk and park ranger to running a business that changes the world
  • The life-changing shock at age 12 that committed me to activism
  • A definition of cause marketing—and why it isn’t enough
  • Three ordinary people—a seamstress, a shipyard electrician, and a writer: two of them changed the world and the third is working on it
  • The big problems with the terms “global warming” and “sustainability”
  • How to find out if YOU’RE ready to start a profitable social entrepreneurship product
Interview on Blue Collar Proud with Taylor Hill and Carter Harkins (segment starts at 24:23)
  • How small-scale businesses in the trades can lower costs and boost revenues doing things to help the world
  • What if the climate change deniers are right—and what if they’re not?
  • The impact of going green on healthcare
  • Why making big, sweeping improvements in sustainability can be much more cost-effective than tiny changes
  • How switching to greener lighting can save certain types of businesses millions of dollars 
  • Does green make a real difference in customer loyalty?
  • The shocking fact that could end hunger in the US
Friends Who Want to Help

A note from my business coach, who has helped me enormously as I’ve shifted the direction of my own business: December is one of the best times to plan for 2018. You can begin the New Year with new ideas, clear goals and a plan. Offering a Complimentary Holiday Coaching Session to assist you to begin the New Year in a way which helps you achieve your goals successfully. Call Oshana Himot, MBA, at 602-463-6797 or email oshanaben@yahoo.com.

Getting your book into the hands of those who love it forever can be daunting.
Before shifting into holiday mode, see what my longtime friend and colleague, Paulette Ensign, created. She simplifies the process, based on her successful approach of less bringing more of what we want.
https://www.kickstartcart.com/app/?af=889945&u=www.tipsbooklets.com/tipsoffer.html

You’ll want to take action now.

Looking for a Job? I’ve Just Added a Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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.
Another Recommended Book—Blue Collar Proud
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Blue Collar Proud: 10 Principles for Building a Kickass Business You Love by Taylor K. Hill and Carter Harkins

I didn’t plan to review this book when I picked it up. Frankly, I grabbed it because the authors do a podcast and I wanted to be interviewed. I was expecting a book about how great it is to run a blue collar business and isn’t it a shame that those types of businesses “don’t get no respect.”

And yes, there’s some of that, especially at the beginning. But this book is actually a stealth-weapon to shape those types of firms toward much more holistic business practices: creating a culture of pride, integrity, workmanship, and “operational excellence” (which gets all of Chapter 9)—by establishing a workplace that values its employees (even more than it values its customers) and treats them as partners in helping customers. The authors even point out that “the customer is always right” can translate, dangerously, into throwing employees under the bus (p. 66).

The book emphasizes many points that I’ve been teaching in my speaking and writing for years:

  • Establish and stick to your core values; this frees up the business owner because the ship will run itself much more smoothly and you’re not always putting out fires (pp. 38-39)
  • Find ways to increase customers’ perception of your value (pp. 71-72)—upsell not to meet sales goals or push a product but because your next offer anticipates and meets your customers’ needs (pp. 93-94)
  • Treat every interaction point, every part of the customer’s experience, as part of your marketing, and every employee as a member of your marketing team (pp. 92-93)—thus, superior service is your best marketing method—and failure to provide good service will get you trashed on the Internet anyway, so you may as well do it right (p. 91)
  • Environmental awareness can become a selling point that not only distinguishes you from all the commoditizers but adds tolerance for more profitable pricing (of course, I go way beyond this in my own latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World—which talks about building a business with profitable approaches to solving things like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change)
  • Say no to the wrong customers—it’s better not to take them on than to wreck your business accommodating people who don’t share your values and won’t treat you fairly (p. 70)
The final chapter, “Will You Commit to Change,” offers this wonderful statement: “Things happen to victims, but leaders happen to things. Leaders embrace change because they see that it brings opportunity…Those who play the victim, on the other hand, spend their time fighting that reality right into stagnancy and irrelevance. The choice is yours. It takes just as much time and effort to build a business you can be proud of as I does to build one you aren’t proud of.” (pp. 96-97)
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 27 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

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).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.
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