The Clean and Green Club

When I’m interviewed, I find that most reporters and radio hosts have this idea that creating a socially response business is onerous. They think it adds costs, complexities and headaches—and many of them wonder why anyone would go through the “bother.”

Well, they got one part right. It does add a layer of complexity. But if you do it right, social entrepreneurship creates so many benefits! Consider a few of them:

Monday and Tuesday, March 28-29, I think I will be attending the Ethical Corporation conference in New York City, and moderating at least one session. Details not firmed up as of press time.

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

Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change by Adam Kahane (Berrett-Koehler, 2010)

During my early times of active organizing, I would have found this book incredible helpful. Much later, without knowing it, I used Kahane’s model in the most successful organizing I’ve ever been involved with: Save the Mountain, in my own town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US.

Kahane traces the evolution of his thinking through his direct involvement in all sorts of global struggles, from rebuilding South Africa after the end of apartheid to looking for peaceful solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to helping Guatemala and Colombia emerge from totalitarianism. Serious struggles, in other words. And he acknowledges that he did many things wrong before he discovered his key insight:

Power and love are the yin and yang of organizing. Neither one is        effective without its “opposite.” Either one by itself will        eventually evolve from a generative, positive focus at the start to        a degenerative, socially hostile outcome—but together, they help        us achieve great things.

You can look at this through an Eastern Taoist lens, as I did just now. But you can also frame it as a Germanic Hegelian or Marxian dialectic: power and love are the thesis and antithesis; their synthesis is positive social change. A third lens is one I learned studying comedy improv about ten years ago: replace either-or with both-and.

Whichever lens you look through, the combination of power and love is very effective. They balance each other, keep each other in check, and maintain a generative focus. And we need this kind of holistic approach to move forward.

Martin Luther King defined power as the ability to achieve a purpose (p. 12). Unchecked by love, power-to (positive, change-oriented) devolves into power-over (oppressive, protective of inequality). Paul Tillich notes (p. 46) that power-to destroys oppressive institutions, but power-over destroys people—sometimes in ways that are hard to see. Kahane says that his own wife, a South African and veteran of the struggle there, would rather deal with overt than covert racism (p. 48). But when love comes in to bring power into balance, you can achieve power-with, and real unity (p. 138). And that’s when things start to move forward.

Love can morph in similar ways. Validation of another can crumble into a stifling forced unity/false consensus (p. 49, p. 65, p. 92) or a state of mind that feels good but can’t change anything. But combining awareness of power relationships leads to a multipartisan (NOT bipartisan) approach (p. 118) that recognizes the need to collaborate with opponents—and you don’t have to like them in order to love them (p. 31).

Kahane suggests inquiring specifically about the power and love in any situation, and poses ten questions to determine who brings what into the mix (p. 73).

Although I took four pages of notes, I’m keeping this review short and deliberately omitting many of Kahane’s key points. Why? Because if you’re doing social change, or running a social change business, you will get far more out of Kahane’s ideas and experiences by spending a few hours with the book, and I want you to be able to apply the many powerful lessons I haven’t even touched upon.

But here’s a really good offer for you: I actually typed out my notes (something I almost never do) and if you read the book, I’ll share with you. Email me a receipt that shows you bought the book or a photo that shows you got it out of the library and I’ll send my notes so you get more value out of your reading.

About Shel & This Newsletter

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.

I am finishing this newsletter less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was named the victor in the US presidential race. As someone who has spent my whole life defending the oppressed, combatting racism, sexism, ableism and other ingrained prejudice, and working to preserve our planet. I was disheartened to see a repudiation of everything I stand for.

But the work goes on. It will be harder under a Trump administration than it has been under Obama. We can expect rollbacks of the hard-fought climate protection agreement forged in Paris last year, as one example. I have actually written to Trump and made a business case for continuing to honor Paris. I’ll be making that public shortly and will link to it here next month—or you can watch for it on my Facebook feed.

One of my very few regrets in my life is not fighting harder against the 2000 election results (which, to me and many others, were deeply tainted). I will not make that mistake again. If you visit my Facebook profile and scroll back to November 9, you’ll see resources of organizations you can support. And you’ll see a press release called “How Can Social Entrepreneurs Still Thrive in a Trump America?”, also posted at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/how-can-social-entrepreneurs-still-thrive-in-a-trump-america/

Conventional marketing wisdom tells you to keep purging your list, purging your list, purging your list. If they haven’t bought from you after so many months, out they go! Some businesses will even purge the ones who do buy, but haven’t bought “enough.” They chop out the clients who provide the bottom 10 or 20 percent of revenue each year, and concentrate on the bigger fish.

Here’s some UNconventional marketing wisdom: that’s a load of crap.

Consider this:

• Some people take years to decide on a purchase
• Purchases, especially of expensive products or services in the B2B (business-to-business) world, might require a very long sales cycle while you build trust
• It’s not uncommon to move a sale through the “funnel” model, starting with a no-cost or very inexpensive information product, and moving through a series of products of increasing depth—building trust and a reputation as the expert—before finally landing the big sale.

Tonight, I was inspired to write this column because I listened to a webinar, and at the end of that webinar, I pulled out my credit card and bought an info product for $995. Maybe the most interesting thing about the purchase is where it came in my cycle of trust with the presenter and the organizer. I met the organizer in 1997 or 1998 and have consumed a lot of his no-cost offerings; I met the presenter online a couple of years later. I’d purchased very low-cost products from the organizer a few times (such as a one-day conference in the $59 range); I’d never bought anything from the presenter before this call, although I had listened to several of her previous webinars and actually had a no-cost consultation from her.

It’s very rare that I buy something priced higher than $100 or so through a webinar. But in this case,

1. Buying this product will probably save me at least 20 hours of time—and (because it includes sample contracts and other documents) several hundred dollars in lawyer-review fees.
2. The two principals had proven their value to me over time, by consistently providing great information.
3. The presenter’s offer happened to coincide exactly with a new direction in my business.
4. A risk-free 100% satisfaction promise made it a no-brainer. If it wasn’t what I expected, I could send it back.

The confluence of those four factors made it worth my while to drop a whole grand on this. Those conditions moved me from lookie-loo to buyer of a relatively expensive product. Those conditions hadn’t existed before.

As a service provider, I’ve also experienced this from the other side.

• This summer, I had a $39,500 client and a $6,000 client. Both of those originally came to me several years ago, with a tiny little project that earned me a few hundred dollars. And both of them have dribbled a steady stream of small projects my way. The $6K client had done some larger projects with me, including one at $20K. If I remember correctly, the $40K client had not spent more than about $1,500 with me at once.
• Two other clients I worked with this summer have consistently spent a few hundred dollars at a time, a few times a year, for several years.
• My final big client this summer was a referral—from a client I worked with nine years ago!
• I literally had a client contact me who had saved and filed an article in the Wall Street Journal about six years earlier that mentioned me.
• Most of my largest projects in the 35 years I’ve run my business have grown out of previously completing a series of very small orders—pretty much everything except book contracts from publishers, and a few of my book-project-management gigs.

How much work would I have given up if I had purged these folks from my list because they hadn’t bought yet, or hadn’t bought enough yet?

How many people are you sending away just before they were finally ready to buy, or buy bigger?

Thursday, December 1, 5 pm ET/2 pm PT, guest on Willie Crawford and Haddy Folivi’s entrepreneurial radio show.

Monday, December 5 is the likely release date for a really interesting and unusual interview with Jena Rodriguez on the Branding with Jena/Brave Entrepreneur podcast. This is the first time I think I’ve been asked about how I’ve been brave in my social change work (and I riffed about some of the people who are much braver than I am). We had a lot of fun, too.

Monday and Tuesday, March 28-29, I think I will be attending the Ethical Corporation conference in New York City, and moderating at least one session. Details not firmed up as of press time.

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

Tools for Grassroots Activists: Best Practices for Success in the Environmental Movement, Edited by Nora Gallagher and Lisa Myers

After two months in a row of reviewing corporate apologists, it’s refreshing to stumble on a grassroots handbook for action—published by a very different kind of corporation: Patagonia.

This is a book I wish I’d had access to in some of the organizing campaigns I’ve been involved with for the past 40 years. It’s full of diverse advice from activists in the trenches. Some of these are people we’ve heard of: Bill McKibben, author of several climate change classics and founder of 350.org…Jane Goodall, researcher and activist for chimpanzees…toxics activist Lois Gibbs (who took on Hooker Chemical over the contamination of Niagara Falls’ Love Canal neighborhood)…and of course, Patagonia’s amazing founder Yvon Chouinard, among others.

But most of them are known not so much by their names, but their deeds. They leave a trail of success. They have organized or actively participated in movements that saved threatened land. They have expertise in areas such as grassroots organizing, media relations, fundraising, lobbying…

Many of them have great advice about how to work with people who don’t share your values or lifestyles—engaging ranchers, ethnic or cultural communities, retailers, or commercial fishing operators in the areas where your purposes overlap, or winning over influential conservative politicians.

Reflecting on my own experience as the founding organizer of a group that successfully defeated a large development project on our local mountain in 1999-2000 and my participation in a few other successful movements, I found most of the advice was spot on.  Specifically: 

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About Shel & This Newsletter

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.

I’m writing to you on the evening of October 4—just after the end of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish new year. Starting the previous month and going for several weeks until Simchat Torah a few weeks later (October 25, this year), Jews take time for reflection and renewal—peaking at Yom Kippur, which will have been a few days before you receive this. We spend a lot of time in synagogue or find other ways to get right with God and our fellow humans, apologize if necessary, reflect on the things we want to do better, and emanate positive energy about our directions in the year to come. We’ve been doing this a very long time; this year is 5777. We had more than a 1,000-year head start on the Chinese, who are in year 4013.

I personally don’t go to synagogue much. I did the Tashlich ritual twice of casting bread into moving water (traditionally, to represent the sins you want to get rid of—as I do it, the aspirations of what I’d like to do better): once with my kids, who came in for the holidays, and again with friends from our local Jewish community. I do plan to attend Kol Neidre services the evening before Yom Kippur (all Jewish days start the night before) and possibly some part of Yom Kippur itself.

And with all this reflection, I’m going to veer off my usual subjects of green and ethical business success, marketing, and book publishing—and talk a bit about WHY we work.

We work to live; we don’t live to work. Work provides the income that enable us to feed, house, and clothe our selves and our loved ones—and to experience some joys of a fulfilled life that are easier with money. We also work to create a better world, and for the satisfaction of doing something well. And of course, we each have other reasons.

I’ve talked a lot over the years about working—about my joy in using my writing, speaking, and consulting skills to make the world better. Today, I’m going to talk about the choices I’ve made to build in time NOT working—to keep my life in balance and build in time for things that matter.

Let’s start with exercise. My goal is to get 2 hours of it every day, with at least 1/3 outdoors. On non-travel days, I don’t go to bed until I’ve had at least one hour. And I track it—very simply. I write the number of minutes for the day on a paper calendar that I also use to track what books I’ve read, how many learning audios I’ve listened to, and of course, my appointments and to-do list. I find that tracking, even this informally, inspires me to do more. September, for instance, was a particularly good month. I got 3722 total minutes of exercise, or average of 124 minutes per day—above my goal despite two travel days. Three days I only managed between 94-110 minutes, and the 94 was one of my two travel days that month. The other 27 days, I got between 120 and 151 minutes each day.

Reading and learning are other things I make time for. In September, I read seven books (six of them at my exercise bike) and listened to 24 learning audios—more than usual, thanks to a really good telesummit.

Travel, arts, and time with friends and colleagues are also important to me. I got to New York once in September to attend a conference at the UN—and to visit my daughter and her husband. I had scheduled two trips to Boston, one to see my son perform a solo concert and once to meet a client. Both trips were to include visiting my son. But my wife got sick, so we watched his concert on a livestream, from home. Then my client canceled her trip east.

Even skipping my son’s performance, I made it to seven live cultural events last month: four concerts, one play, and two agricultural festivals. And yes, I watched the first presidential debate. I also attended two professional networking functions and scheduled two one-on-one meetings with new colleagues. Add to this an hour or two a day of online networking.

I travel quite a bit. While September had only the one overnight, in the past twelve months I’ve had three major trips of five to 20 days: to Texas, China, and eastern Canada—and at least a dozen shorter ones, to Boston, NYC, Vermont, and Rhode Island. In the next few weeks, I’m visiting family in Denver (and meeting a new business contact) and attending a conference in Atlanta. We’re going to Thailand in January.

Typically, I get about 6 hours of sleep most nights—getting up between 5:40 and 6:30 a.m. and heading to sleep between 11:30 and midnight. Most days, I squeeze in one or two very short naps (30 seconds to ten minutes). Cooking is fun for me, and I usually cook at least three dinners per week for my wife and myself (and, frequently, guests), as does she.

And of course, I spend several hours most weekdays either on direct client projects, admin, and/or on steering my business toward where I’d like it to be (following a shift in emphasis three years ago). But I don’t let the work subsume my reasons for living my life.

How about you? What do you do to regenerate yourself? What are your priorities outside of your work? How much time do you allocate per week to making yourself a better or more complete person? Use the comment field at the bottom to tell us. Maybe it will even lead to connecting with other readers.

Next month, I promise, we’ll be back to a direct focus on business. Next month’s lead article is called Marketing to “Dead” Prospects.

I’m taping postcast interviews with both Ajay Prasad on Founder’s Corner and Jena Rodriguez on the Brave Entrepreneur podcasts. See next issue for playback links.

Tues. 11/8, 6 pm ET: First meeting of Western Massachusetts Global Marketers. This is a new group of entrepreneurs who market nationally or internationally and are based in Western Massachusetts. By invitation only. If you think you should be invited, give me a call at 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m. US Eastern) and tell me about yourself.

Tues. 11/8: If you’re a US citizen, please VOTE! If you want your vote to support the Paris accord and other action on catastrophic climate change—which for me is a very key issue—consider the Democratic Party position of strong support for reducing carbon output and gradually (too gradually) moving toward a clean, renewable economy vs. the Republican position of denial, hostility, and reversal of the small steps we’ve taken. And consider that even if the climate skeptics are right (and I see plenty of evidence in storms like Katrina, Rita, Irene, Sandy, and Matthew that they are very wrong)—we still get to lower our energy bills, increase our comfort, reduce dependence on foreign powers, and clean up our lungs. Reversing and retrogressing back to fossil and nuclear is stepping away from the future we all want.

Wed. 11/9 (telesummit starts 11/1—don’t wait for my call, this is great stuff): Nicole Holland interviews me on her Building Business Rockstars telesummit. Proud to say I’m in awesome company of rockstars including Marisa Murgatroyd, Dorie Clark, Lou Bortone, and several other very cool people. You’ll want to listen to the whole series. No charge to sign up: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/rockstars/ Plus, you get to see the incredible job Nicole did putting together the visually stunning, highly informative workbook (really a combination brochure and learning tool. Even if you hate listening to teleseminars, you should visit that URL and pick up your copy. A lot of learning there both in the content and in the presentation. The calls run November 1-10.

Wed. 11/16: If you are in Atlanta and want to get together in the late afternoon or evening, I will have some free time. Call me (phone number above) no later than November 10.

Thu.-Sat. 11/17-19: I’ll be attending Suzanne Evans’ and Larry Winget’s Build Your Speaking Biz event in Atlanta—and I have ONE ticket to give away. Visit https://buildyourspeakingbizbootcamp.com/ — and let me know right away if you want to go. First person to respond gets the link for a comp.

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

The Surprising Solution: Creating Possibility in a Swift and Severe World by Bruce Piasecki (Sourcebooks, 2009)

About Shel & This Newsletter

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.

As a Vendor, Be Agile and Adaptable

The caterer we chose was remarkably flexible, and that’s why this organization—a high-end restaurant in the area—got hired. My daughter is vegetarian, gluten-free, and rice-free. Her first criterion was that she could eat all the food. As a trained chef and food blogger (see her yummy recipes at https://TheSmilingOnion.com), her second was that all the food conformed to her own tastes.The restaurant chef was willing to

• Do a tasting of the exact proposed menu in the restaurant, and even surprised us with an elegant custom-printed menu just for the four of us who attended
  
• Modify her recipes based on Alana’s suggestions following the tasting
  
• Negotiate the scope of services
  

And that’s why they got a $12,000 gig. Another caterer disqualified herself by being rigid; she was not willing to adjust her recipes or her policies to meet our needs.

Be Accessible and Communicative—Build Client Confidence in You

Two other caterers lost out because one of them never returned multiple phone calls, and the other (the least expensive) would take weeks to answer email and his answers lacked understanding of our needs. Even though he would have saved us thousands of dollars, we weren’t convinced of his ability to serve us.

There were communication issues on our end, too. For example, Bobby and Alana ordered compostable plates, cutlery, and napkins—but no one thought to communicate with the catering staff about how waste would be handled. So compostable dishes, food waste, and general trash all got lumped together and hauled off to the dump. Ooops!

As a Client, Find Out What Can Be Negotiated

The restaurant’s catering staff originally returned an estimate of $22,000. We cut that almost in half by negotiating down from what they originally planned to include; we rented our own chairs, tables, tablecloths, and tents, brought in our own liquor (which we paid their certified bartender to serve) and ice, and supplied high-end compostable plates and cutlery. Even adding back in the $3,000 we spent to obtain these items elsewhere, we saved $9,000—and they still got $12,000 (by far the largest expense).

As a Marketer, Be Creative but Stay on Message

Alana and Bobby wanted a wedding that represented who they are, individually and as a couple. They themed the entire event as a Broadway musical, complete with a Playbill and brief clips from several musicals. They wrote their own vows, scripted and rehearsed a ballroom dance, chose an officiant who would honor their cultural and personal traditions.

The finished wedding canopy

Build in Interactivity and Social Media

The wedding couple provided numerous ways for attendees to get involved, starting some months ahead by asking people to decorate a square for the wedding canopy they would be standing under (a traditional Jewish custom). They also built in several events around the wedding itself, ranging from a pizza/taco party the night before to a hike or drive up our local mountain, with its 4-state view at the top, the day after. They created a fun website just for the wedding, providing not just logistical information but two fanciful stories of their coming together. They encouraged attendees to take pictures and post them on a specific page of a photo website. And of course, there were numerous posts and new friend connections on Facebook (the right social media network for this type of event). A table was set up with Polaroid cameras and a hand-made guest book.

Honor Diversity

This wedding brought together a conservative Anglo-Mexican Christian family from Texas and a liberal Jewish family originally from NYC but living in rural New England for 35 years. Friends and family came from a dozen states. Ages ranged from preteen to people in their 80s. This diversity was reflected in the wedding ceremony, the menu, and the music (the band learned two klezmer and one mariachi songs for the occasion). Diversity was also honored in Dina’s and my decision to personally cook for the six of my relatives attending who kept Kosher—after discovering that the caterer’s option was frozen dinners that she described as similar to airplane food. We cooked four courses and supplemented that with some properly certified houmous (you may know it by its usual English spelling of “hummus”—my spelling is closer to the way it’s pronounced in its original Arab culture), cheese, and crackers. The effort we made to make sure that everyone felt welcome regardless of religion, politics, or culture was clearly appreciated by all who attended.

Honor Your Commitments—and Go the Extra Mile

The liquor store we chose had already promised to take back unopened bottles. When our ice vendor fell through a week before the wedding, we called the liquor store. The owner cheerfully agreed to sell us ice, and deliver both the ice and the booze the day of the wedding, for a very reasonable price. There was no problem returning the extras and she even waited to be paid until after the event, rather than collecting our money and refunding an unknown chunk of it. That liquor store now has our party business (and our recommendations) pretty much forever.

By contrast, the shuttle van service we hired did not honor its commitment. Both the runs back from the venue to the hotel drop-off points were made substantially earlier than the agreed time, and with no warning from the driver. As a result, three people had to stay at the site overnight instead of in their hotel rooms, and we negotiated the service to half of the agreed price, because we felt only half the service (transportation TO the wedding) had been properly provided. That company will never get a call from us again.

One final lesson: Use your powers of observation and treat everything as a learning experience. If I can get three months worth of marketing advice for you out of just one event, you can find lessons all around you.

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

Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society by John Browne (with Robin Nuttall and Tommy Stadlen) (Public Affairs Books, 2015)

Yes, I’m recommending this book by the former CEO of BP—but there’s much in here I disagree with, and I want to get that out of the way first.

Browne has a big set of blinders. He shows an awful lot of reluctance to question technology, even going so far as to embrace highly dangerous technologies like fracking, pesticide-saturated GMO crops, and nuclear power. And while I agree with him that business can be a major part of the solution to our toughest problems—like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change—I’m less convinced than he is that business opposition to regulation is necessarily coming from a principled place.

Browne was no longer the CEO during BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, having left three years before. He watched from afar as his corporate child withered under the helm of Tony Hayward, who had told an audience at Stanford a year before the spill, “We had too many people that were working to save the world”—and notoriously pleaded, “I want my life back,” during the Deepwater crisis.

However, Browne was in charge during the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 people and an Alaska oil spill the following year (p. 121). To his credit, he understands that these incidents damaged BP’s stature and credibility, so when the rig exploded in the Gulf, the reservoir of goodwill had been sorely depleted.

So there’s a lot to set aside, and you’ll want to take this one with at least a spoonful of salt. Still, it provides a remarkable look into what it means to be a “forward-thinking” CEO of one of the largest fossil energy companies in the world—and the book contains good doses of both insight and wisdom, even if you have to filter out a good deal. He also interviewed many other big-company CEOs including Hank Paulson (later US Treasury Secretary) and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Indra Nooyi of Pepsico (among many others).

He points out that seeing business as the villain is nothing new; it dates back at least to the Han Dynasty in China, a century before Christ was born (p. 3). Browne includes a great deal of (very disturbing) detail on the racist, brutal, all-powerful imperialism of the British East India Company—the first modern corporation (pp. 49-57)—and of Cecil Rhodes’ equally barbaric activities in Africa (pp. 36-38).

And using business to achieve social good is nothing new either. Chocolate barons George and Richard Cadbury (UK) and Milton Hershey (US) set up humane conditions right from the get-go and saw their companies as benevolent intervenors, providing excellent working and living conditions (pp. 21-28). Henry Heinz was a strong advocate of food labeling laws, knowing that his preservative-free catsup using quality tomatoes would do better than his sodium benzoate-containing catsups of his competitors (pp. 42-43). Even many of the worst of the Robber Barons—like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick—men with blood on their hands and horrible working conditions for their employees—tried to rehabilitate their reputations through massive philanthropy (pp. 17-21).

What about our current century? Browne says the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) department is an outmoded concept; siloing social responsibility doesn’t create effective change. Enron, he points out (p. 139) had a great CSR-focused mission statement. Real change has to percolate throughout the organization: in the C-suite, in operations, in marketing…not just in its own department.

And when we have this integration, he sees incredible rates of progress. He says US industry can easily reduce carbon emissions 3 percent per year, meet the 2°C limit on climate warming just by going after “cost-negative” (in other words, profitable) low-hanging fruit, and save $190 billion a year in the process (p. 88). A great example is the way Paul Polman turned Unilever around when he became CEO, with his Sustainable Living Plan:

To double the size of the business while helping 1 billion people to improve their health and well-being, halving the environmental footprint, and enhancing suppliers’ lives. Each of these three goals is directly related to Unilever’s core business activities… By using its Lifebuoy brand to improve hygiene habits, the company sells more soap and helps to cut in half the number of people who die from diseases such as diarrhoea. By investing to reduce carbon emissions and water usage, it lowers costs and minimizes its exposure to water scarcity, an issue that poses a serious risk to consumer-goods firms… (p. 158)

We already know Browne is an unabashed booster of technology. Technology contributes heavily to Browne’s view of the three most important trends that are changing the business world: artificial intelligence, a shift of the economic center of gravity from the US and Europe to Asia, and the growth of the global consumer (pp. 213-246). While I don’t share Browne’s unmitigated embrace of technology, I agree that when used properly, technology empowers people, moves them out of poverty, and cleans the environment all at once. As one example, he cites the very positive impact of mobile phone access on the fishing communities of Kerala, India (pp. 108-109). I also agree with his strong emphasis on open communication, collaborative culture, and including all stakeholders—and, of course, that business will not only be instrumental in solving these enormous challenges, but does and will benefit enormously by doing so.

Business actively contributed to many of these problems in the first place—of the top six social problems, he sees four—smoking, obesity, alcoholism, and climate change—as created by business (pp. 243-244). I’d say that another of the six, war/terrorism/violence, is largely a corporate creation as well. This is a moral justification for business working to fix them; there’s also the practical reason that fixing them can help the bottom line.

Finally, he concludes the book with a call for justice, based in corporate self-interest:

Mistreating any constituent of society eventually leads to collapse, while successful connection is rewarded with lasting commercial success…Future global development will be constrained just as badly if business is hamstrung by the hate it generates so self-destructively…I am optimistic that companies will be an enormous force for good in the future…The connected firms of the future will push the boundaries of human possibilities in their quest to contribute. They will not fracture their bonds with society (pp. 247-248).

About Shel & This Newsletter

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.

Early Arrivals Trying to Keep Warm

Last month, I shared some of the logistical things we did right. But there were other things we could have been a lot more prepared for.

Work with Experienced Venues
Some of the problems we had were because this was only the third wedding they’d ever done. The first was the site owner’s own large wedding, but that had been more than 20 years earlier; she didn’t remember how she’d handled the specifics. And the second was a much smaller event for her housemate. So we were the first large-scale outside wedding they’d done in 20+ years. Several issues arose because nobody knew to raise them ahead of time.

Plan for the Unexpected
June in our part of New England is usually quite warm and buggy. We’d rented cooling fans and brought in several gallons of drinking water as well as bug protection—but the day of the wedding it was in the low 50s and windy. We didn’t need fans and the water, and we didn’t need to worry about bugs—but women guests in thin summer dresses with bare shoulders were shivering during the ceremony. My wife had called me from the site some hours earlier to tell me to bring every sweater we owned, and we passed them out during the reception—but we didn’t have them available at the ceremony, where they would have been eagerly used. The grandparents in their 80s spent a lot of the reception in the main house, which (unlike the rented reception tent) was heated. The rest of us finally got warm when the dancing started. The cold also cooled the food very quickly once it was off the serving table and onto a plate. And I realized during the reception that if it had rained, our contingencies were not adequate. The one tent we’d rented for the reception would not have been practical for the ceremony. Luckily, it was a gorgeous sunny day and that wasn’t an issue.

Revisit the Venue in the Right Season—Notice the Weak Points—Know What Questions to Ask
We encountered several very stressful surprises in the weeks leading up to the wedding. The worst of these was the site owner telling us that she didn’t think the house electricity would be enough for our needs. We brought in an electrician she had worked with before, and he gave us a $1500 estimate to put in temporary circuits for the reception area and take them out again afterward. Yikes! Luckily, we consulted with two other electricians and asked them about alternatives. Someone suggested we simply bring in generators, and that’s what we did—renting them for $300 including delivery and takeaway.

Making a site visit to meet the electrician just three weeks before the ceremony, we discovered a serious problem with black flies—something that we hadn’t thought about when we’d tromped through the snow in 20°F temperatures on our first visit. This time, the site owner met us wearing a face net! Fortunately, there was time to purchase 100 citronella bracelets and some citronella candles and incense sticks—which, as it turned out, we didn’t need because the same high winds that chilled the guests (and the food) kept the bugs away.

On that same visit, the owner raised her concern about overwhelming her septic system. We agreed to bring in a portapotty, but the wedding program didn’t mention it, I never knew where it was, and I don’t think it was used much except by the campers. Had we known ahead about needing extra electrical and toilet capacity, we would have negotiated on the price of the venue.

If I were doing an event like this in the future, I’d get everything spelled out in writing about what the venue was providing and what was expected of us.

Have a Point Person Onsite and Unload Systematically, in the Presence of the Point Person
Hire one person who knows where everything is and needs to be, has a checklist of what’s needed by whom, and coordinates what has to happen when. Introduce this person to all outside contractors and to everyone bringing in supplies. We didn’t do this, and a lot of things slipped through. Multiple drivers brought up loads of stuff and unloaded them wherever. People didn’t know that items they were waiting for had arrived, or where they were, or whom to ask. One consequence was that the bar never received the cranberry juice it needed to mix certain drinks, and another was the shuttle driver not communicating that he was taking a few people back to town—which resulted in others being stranded at the site. It would have also been helpful to the site owner to have one person she could talk to as issues arose.

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll move from logistics to marketing.

Sunday, August 28, 9-10 a.m. ET/6-7 a.m. PT: Eric Moncrief interviews Shel on The Talk with Green Guy Show, WGST 640AM/iHeart Radio, Atlanta, online at https://www.iheart.com/live/Talk-Radio-640-WGST-6066/

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

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus

Since I’ve watched videos of several of Benyus’s wonderful talks (including at least one TED), I thought I knew what to expect: a look at how nature can teach us the solutions to all sorts of human engineering problems, because nature has solved them eons ago. And nature has consistently done this with just sunlight and materials on hand, no special chemistry, pressure, or external energy source other than renewable clean ones, and no waste that isn’t used by some other organism for another process. Consider, for instance, spider webs: made from water and dead flies, using six different types of silk, a web is five times as strong as steel, and has five times the impact resistance of bullet-proof Kevlar, while stretching 30% farther than nylon. A web made by a human-size spider would be able to catch a moving jet plane, she says (pp. 129-130, 1998 paperback edition).

Published in 1997 and thus older than the talks, the book certainly contains some of this. Perhaps the most dramatic example is in solar power itself. Benyus points out that all green leafy plants and many bacteria are more efficient solar collectors than anything we humans have come up with. “Though [photosynthesizing organisms] use only about 2 percent of the sunlight that reaches the Earth, they make the most of it, achieving an astounding 95 percent quantum efficiency” (p. 260). So far, the best we humans have done is 46%, in an experimental array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency). Typical commercial panels are in the 12-17% range (https://sroeco.com/solar/most-efficient-solar-panels/), so only about a fifth as good as a plant, even while requiring very complex, energy- and resource-intensive manufacturing.

But I wasn’t expecting the deep dive into chemistry, biology, and what she calls “industrial ecology,” and the wide net of applications for harnessing our growing knowledge. For instance, when we get past the limits of silicon-based computing to biological (p. 223) and molecular (p. 234) computing models, “a DNA computer could perform more operations in a few days than all the calculations ever made by all the computers ever built—and with a billion-fold increase in energy efficiency, and similar reduction in physical size.

Ecology, she says, is basically a form of accounting: making sure all the inputs and outputs zero out (p. 50). And that includes costing out not just any individual process but the entire lifecycle (p. 243). Benyus challenges us to incorporate these ten lessons (pp. 254-277) into all our human endeavors, and offers many examples of each:

• Use waste as a resource
• Diversify and cooperate to fully use the habitat
• Gather and use energy efficiently
• Optimize rather than maximize
• Use materials sparingly [and let them serve multiple purposes]
• Don’t foul their nests
• Don’t draw down resources
• Remain in balance with the biosphere
• Run on information
• Shop locally [meaning use local resources and inputs, a non-commercial version of shopping]

Number 2 in the above list is part of the reason why she calls monocropping (as most humans grow plants) a suicidal disaster. But she calls us to get past this unsustainable model, noting, for ex ample, that “diversity is also the cheapest and best form of pest control” (p. 26) and that we have life-friendly alternatives to “heat, beat, and treat,” even for making complex materials—as nature does with mussels, rhinos, and more (p. 97).

She also lists “four steps to a biomimetic future” (pp. 287-295); I might call them four stages:

• Quieting: Immerse ourselves in nature
• Listening: Interview the flora and fauna of our own planet
• Echoing: Encourage biologists and engineers to collaborate, using nature as model and measure (this includes asking questions like “Does it run on sunlight? Does it use only the energy it needs? Does it fit form to function? Does it recycle everything? Does it reward cooperation? Does it bank on diversity? Does it use local expertise? Does it curb excess from within? Does it tap the power of limits? Is it beautiful?
• Stewarding: reserve life’s diversity and genius

One key takeaway embodied in her second list, and especially stages 3 and 4, is that solutions are situational. The way nature solves the same problem in a tropical rainforest, a midwestern prairie, and an arid desert will be unique to those environments. They can scale within their own ecosystem, but they may not travel well.

This book is quite complex but despite the advanced science, pretty readable. And a great expander of the sense of what actually is possible by emulating nature in every facet of human activity.

About Shel & This Newsletter

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.