Five Weeks to Set Up a Profitable Green/Social Justice Business—Only Eight Spaces Available
If you’ve always wanted to run a business that makes the world better, this is your chance to get personal guidance from Shel Horowitz (me, your newsletter writer), an internationally recognized expert in environmentally and socially conscious business (bio below). In just five weeks.
Format:
Five 75-minute interactive and participatory online group sessions, plus a private 45-60-minute consultation with Shel: you get to choose either a single session or splitting it into two half-hour sessions at the time they’ll be most beneficial for you (I’d recommend scheduling at least one session after the final class, but that’s up to you). And a mutual-support private group on LinkedIn just for those who are currently enrolled in or have gone through this program.
Each group session will consist of
Attender check-ins on how they moved forward/what they’re pleased about/new challenges (for the first session, we’ll have introductions instead that follow a specific format to keep the discussion moving and focus on the important parts)
A learning unit presented by Shel
Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
Wrap-up and next steps
Members will have access to recordings and informal transcripts, to the best of our ability. You’ll probably find it helpful to replay the sessions or review the transcripts.
Topics:
Session 1: Identify your green and social equity opportunities.
Session 2: Rough out products or services that yourorganization (a business, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, educational or medical institution, government agency, etc.) can develop to address those opportunities.
Session 3: Use Shel and the group to evaluate your ideas and choose your first green and/or social equity offering.
Session 4: Understand the basics of marketing your first green/social equity product or service to three different populations—vastly increasing your potential market and giving you a significant competitive edge.
Session 5: Outline your personal path to move your idea from conception to completion: what steps you’ll take to make it real. Opportunities to continue receiving support.
One-to-one Consultation: 45-60 minutes total, in one or two sessions at the point in the five-session program that will provide YOU with the most value. Shel can help you see the unique strengths of your operation and guide you toward possible offerings, help you list and implement your next steps, steer you toward very helpful resources, and more.
Mondays, 3 pm ET/noon PT, May 20, 27, June 3, 10, 17.Click if you’re ready to sign up. Is This Program Right for You and Do You Qualify?
You will benefit from the program if you can say yes to at least three of these questions:
Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
Have you ever considered what kind of a difference your organization could make on the issues that matter to you most—if you focused some energy on those issues within a business framework?
Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
Are you eager to discover how your specific business can thrive by combining profitability with environmental and social good?
How to Apply:
With only eight spaces available and to make sure everyone has a fair chance at a slot, here’s the easy application process: You start by making sure you can answer yes to at least three of the questions above. Then fill out the simple questionnaire online. If your answers fit the program, Shel will schedule a quick 10- to 15-minute one-to-one call to explore a bit more. After the interview, you’ll be notified quickly whether you’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or asked to wait until you’re more ready.
Note from Shel, Your Presenter/Facilitator, on Enrollment, Pricingand Scheduling:
This first round is a pilot program, limited to eight people. A minimum of four is required to run the program. Future programs are likely to be more expensive and accommodate up to 12 people, so this is a time you can get more in-depth attention from me at a more affordable cost. I was advised by multiple experts that I should be charging $1500-$2000 for this program, but I want to keep it affordable—and I recognize that you’ll be road-testing it with me and helping me refine future versions. So, pricing for this first round will be just $675 in one payment or two payments of $375. The next iteration of this mastermind will likely be in the $995-$1195 range. This initial bargain price will not be repeated.
Mondays, 3 pm ET/noon PT, May 20, 27, June 3, 10, 17.Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.
Your Instructor/Facilitator, Shel Horowitz
With more than 20 years at the intersection of profitability and environmental/social good and more than 20 additional years in small business marketing and in activism, Shel’s “superpowers” include:
Finding your social change sweet spot: how you and yourorganization are uniquely positioned to create and market profitable products and services that address crises like hunger, poverty, racism/othering—even “unsolvable” ones like war and catastrophic climate change (the answers will be different for every business or nonprofit). Your offering will be based on your skills, interests, and capabilities.
Creating compelling ways to tell “the story behind the story” that generate interest, empathy, and engagement—in a press release, on a web page, in interviews and speeches, etc.
Writing informational and marketing materials that make a compelling case for you, your products and services, and your focus on higher good: reasons for your prospects to choose you!
Helping you write, publish, and market a book that establishes your expertise and credibility while helping to influence others toward a better world (Shel has published ten books under his own name and ghostwritten others, through big NYC publishers, small presses, his own publishing company, and a subsidy house, so he has expertise in whichever model will work best for you).
Suggesting win-win-win partnerships that broaden your market, add more capabilities to your offerings, and increase revenue opportunities. Shel can also write powerful introductory letters to your potential partners like the one that enabled one of his clients to do script consulting for Hollywood director Ed Zwick. Doing two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson was Shel’s best partnership in his own career.
Helping you secure knock-it-out-of-the-park endorsements and positioning those blurbs for visibility and sales. He wrote the letter that got one client a testimonial from basketball superstar Bob Cousy. Shel’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has 22 endorsements including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, green living and green business experts Alicia Bay Laurel, Jacquelyn Ottman, and Joel Makower, social media gurus Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Go-Giver Bob Burg, BNI founder Ivan Misner, and other prominent people.
I note in the opening paragraph of this month’s book review (Democracy Awakening by historian Heather Cox Richardson) that this is the third consecutive month I’ve reviewed a book that gives a window in changing the power dynamics in order to create lasting social change.
Shifting power dynamics is why we know this month’s author in the first place. Despite the rise of many authoritarian regimes around the globe, general social trends clearly show that power is being democratized in some very important ways. Electoral politics dynamics, shaping public opinion, fundraising, organizing movements, and of course, the buying process are really different than they were 30 years ago. Let’s look at just three of these.
Shaping Public Opinion
In this country’s early history, pamphleteers printed or went to a print shop to print their own works. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin became not just influencers, but folk heroes—and they did it without the help of a mainstream press. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, the mainstream media took hold. In the 1960s when I was growing up, the news, for the most part, was what Walter Cronkite or Huntley & Brinkley said it was on TV, or what the New York Times saw as part of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Our consciousness not only in news but in culture and life was shaped by just three major television networks, and the typical family might only consume one or two news sources.
National media still exist, of course. But with hundreds of thousands of media channels diluting the audience for any single one, there was no longer a national consensus about what was important and where to learn about it. At the same time, media broke out of geographic and time isolation. If a reader wants a European or Middle Eastern perspective, it’s easy enough to jump on the website for Der Spiegel or Al-Jazeera. And the days of needing to watch the news at a particular moment are long gone. We live in a world of unlimited reruns and pause buttons.
For the past several decades, opinion makers can once again, finally, develop an audience without the help of a mainstream media platform. While self-publishing never went away (think Walt Whitman or Anais Nin), it had existed on the margins. But by 2000, we suddenly saw a big shift: a return to the dynamics that had lifted Paine and Franklin in the 18th Century. Commentators like Greg Palast and Beverly Harris suddenly found a following.
24 years later, hundreds of self-made pundits have built significant followings, often leading to book contracts. But tens of thousands of others, using those same platforms, toil in obscurity.
Richardson is one of those newly strengthened voices. Her daily Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, has tens of thousands of readers. So do newsletters from Rubert Hubbell, Jessica Craven, and so many others.
This model has upended power relations between commentators and their public, at least from my perspective. I start my day reading Richardson and Hubbell along with business commentators Seth Godin and Bob Burg. And I read Craven’s Sunday good news roundup. While I frequently follow links to mainstream-media commentary such as Rachel Maddow and Seth Myers, I don’t seek them out, just follow links when their stuff someone or some algorithm sends me something that looks interesting. I do subscribe to various news bulletins from the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian, as well as several green business and climate publications. Sometimes I read the summaries and don’t click through; other times I might click three links in a single newsletter. But those self-published four are the first places I turn to when I log on each morning.
Multiply me by tens of thousands of others, and you can see that both Left and Right are building audiences through individual newsletters, a few subscribers at a time. Add in social media chatter, which tends to aggregate like-minded audiences, and we see that the established media has much less influence than it used to. As a society, we now crowdsource our wisdom and to some extent our conclusions.
And this is one of the reasons why things seem so much more polarized. We’re not getting the middle voices so much, and the ends of the spectrum get far more traction than they used to.
Fundraising
You’d never know it looking at the number of fundraising letters coming into my postal mailbox every week, but fundraising has also seen sweeping change. Any of us can now set up a campaign on one of many platforms. While Kickstarter is the most famous, hundreds of alternatives exist (many with much more fundraiser-friendly models). To name just a few (listed for informational purposes; these are not endorsements and you should do your own due diligence): GiveButter, Chuffed, and Zeffy serve nonprofits, Barnraiser and Harvest Returns help farm and food businesses, Mighty Cause and SeedInvest fund activists, Patreon assists musicians, and GoFundMe and IndieGoGo can fund pretty much any venture. These and many other crowdfunding platforms have allowed inventors, creatives, charities, and for-profit businesses to capitalize without relying on vulture capital, banks, or predatory lending.
[This article continues next month, examining one more category and discussing what this means for marketers, business owners, activists, and creatives.]
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Overcoming the challenges in creating a successful business.
The art of merging world-saving with business growth.
How ethical, green businesses aren’t just good for the planet—they’re great for business success.
Four diverse markets for green products, from the eco-enthusiasts to the skeptics, and how tailoring your pitch can win them over.
Global conflicts, and how resource competition fuels them.
Easy-to-implement socially conscious business practices.
How activism can boost your business and fill your soul.
And much, much more
A much shorter 21-minute interview with Mari-Lyn Harris of Heart at Work on her Creating an Impact podcast, which also aired on her Summit for Changemakers.
Mari-Lyn has had me on her podcasts and telesummits many times and we always have a great conversation. Despite the short length, we managed to cover:
Motivating from excitement about new possibilities instead of despair and gloom
Creating initiatives that have multiple benefits (and often, few or no disadvantages)
How green initiatives offer ROIs that outperform almost any other option
Why we need to go beyond sustainability(keeping things from getting worse) to regenerativity (making things better)
Why the so-called Green Revolution that started in the 1940s was really a failure
How funding small, well-chosen initiatives with tiny donations can create deep and lasting change–and how I personally used this method to start libraries in two developing countries
How I can help businesses and organizations find enormous value in the social change and environmental work they do
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America By: Heather Cox Richardson (Viking, 2023)
Why am I devoting a third consecutive book review to a book on power dynamics? Some of it is coincidence—but the play of power dynamics in the 2024 US presidential election probably helped bring Democracy Awakening, David and Goliath and Reclaiming Democracy to the top of my reading pile. Next month’s book review will be entirely different: a handbook on reversing the carbon problem.
As a historian, Richardson has a very different approach than Gladwell the visionary or Daley-Harris the activist. She puts this moment with a would-be dictator facing 91 criminal charges into a historical context that starts before the Revolutionary War, continues through the major threat to US democracy before, during, and after the Civil War (a struggle between slavers/segregationists and those who saw their mission as expanding the reach of liberty), and moves into the 20thth and 21stst centuries with the slow-building right-wing attempt to return to the “glory days” when white males controlled those they saw as inferior—culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
We know that Trump in some ways is different. Never before has a president been so willing to lie (the Washington Post documented 30,573 lies during his term.) Never in my lifetime has a US president been so openly corrupt or so blatant in using his office to grow his personal wealth and business revenues—or so openly racist, misogynistic, ableist, and cruel; so demanding of personal loyalty while giving none in return; so enamored of some of the worst dictators in the world; so inept at policy; and so emotionally insecure that he needs to brag that anything good was because of him (while being conspicuously absent when it’s time to admit he was wrong).
But Richardson shows that Trump, while extreme, is a logical consequence of decades of policy.
We will never know if Trump would have happened (or been so successful) without the earlier almost continuous attempts at subverting democracy, from Jefferson—yes, the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence—pushing winner-take-all presidential state-by-state voting in a blatant attempt to win the presidency under the new rules (p. 185) and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act betrayal that could have turned the entire US into slaveholder territory (p. 197) to Richard Nixon squelching negotiations with Vietnam until he was firmly in the White House so Johnson could not claim a victory. That playbook was used again in 1980 by Ronald Reagan to block a hostage-release deal with Iran until Jimmy Carter had left the White House (p. 49), and Trump used a variant in first demanding action on immigration in order to get funding for foreign crises, then torpedoing that action as soon as it became apparent that it might actually pass.
This sorry history has many roots. The KKK chose white robes so they would appear to be ghosts and spook Blacks into intimidation (p. 27). A pro-slave senator physically attacked Senator Charles Sumner in 1856 (p. 197). Hitler slurred the groups he tried to destroy, such as Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as “Indians” (p. 167).
Richardson also examines the little tug-of-wars in values in both current US political parties. But one thing she doesn’t do satisfactorily is to explain how the Republican Party of liberation that managed to win the presidency in just its second attempt (and that under Lincoln made huge strides toward a more equal society) became the party of racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism while the Democrats, who embodied blatant racism through the 19thth century, somehow became the part of working people regardless of color, gender, sexual orientation, or physical abilities. To me, that’s a rather shocking omission.
Despite this flaw, it’s a well-written book that fills in a lot of details about the past 200+ years and girds us well to protect our democracy again going into November.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
I tried to watch an SNL skit sent to me by a marketing colleague. First, a hoodie ad at 2:49–so I went and did something else. I have plenty of sweaters and almost never buy from online ads. Then they hit me with a 49-minute ad for some nutritional thing. No way to fast-forward to the end, so I exited immediately. And I never got to see the skit.
Good morning, YouTube. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that pissing off your customers is not a smart business strategy?
Never mind the mismatch of message and market (I don’t purchase nutritional supplements other than vitamins)—you don’t hit ANYONE with a 49-minute infomercial when they want to watch a three-minute video. The only thing YouTube accomplished with this was that henceforth, if people ask what video platform I recommend for their content, the answer will be Vimeo. And if I were running that nutritional company, I’d be hiring a different Chief Marketing Officer. It’s totally desirable to offer a 49-minute infomercial to those who are seeking detailed information—though it would be much better to offer a dozen 3-minute videos covering specific aspects plus an overview. But it’s totally counterproductive to jam it into the eyes and ears of people who weren’t even looking for that type of product. This unfortunate company actually paid YouTube to piss me off. Ugh!
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by: Rob Hopkins (Chelsea Green, 2019)
When I did my TEDx talk several years ago, I called it “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare!” So I was primed to love a book that looks at possibility as both an open door—and a door opener. And indeed, I loved it!
Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Towns movement and of Transition Town Totnes (the community in the UK that created the concept), envisions a world where it’s always OK to ask questions, to try out new ideas, and to think holistically at local, regional, national, and global levels. He envisions societies that embrace—and democratize—the arts, follow patient-centered/student-centered health and educational models (including Reggio Emilia, p. 93, which was the educational model used by the elementary school my own kids attended), use biomimicry to harness nature’s wisdom develop over eons, and more.
While many of his examples are drawn from either the Transition Town movement or living experiments around the UK, he goes well beyond these sources, drawing on currents as diverse as comedy improv, art therapy, temporary takeovers of town squares and other public spaces—all leavened with a lot of play and humor—in locations as widespread as: Bolivia; rural Iceland; Jackson, Mississippi; Mexico including both extremely rural Chiapas and extremely urban Mexico City; Bologna, Italy; both modern and ancient China, to name a few. His thinking is influenced by practical visionaries from speculative fiction authors Moshin Hamid of Pakistan and Ursula LeGuin of the US to today’s Extinction Rebellion global youth movement.
Some of it we’ve heard before, like making sure to get away from our screens and devices and out into nature, get off social media and into real-world human-to-human connections. And some might be new, like the idea that “boredom is your imagination calling you” (p. 79).
A lot of it is telling the stories of people who dared to think and feel differently—and then build new and different kinds of experiences, institutions, and even entire communities out of those new thoughts and feelings—from the movement to declare all of London the UK’s first city-wide national park (pp. 62-64, 126-128) to a school system that supplies its cafeterias with student-grown organic food (p. 155) to asking the kinds of questions that create longing and wonder (p. 126).
Hopkins himself asks great questions, including how would we need to evolve democracy to replace “the imagination-devouring dragon of endless growth and economic development…with something more humane, more interesting, and better suited to meet the needs of the people and the planet?” (p. 142, and his answer posits the creation of a national Ministry of Imagination that would be involved in all aspects of governance).
Each chapter title is actually another sweeping question:
What if we took play seriously?
What if we considered imagination vital to our health?
What if we followed nature’s lead
What if we fought back to reclaim our attention?
What if school nurtured young imagination?
What if we became better storytellers
What if we started asking better questions?
What if your leaders prioritised [he’s British] the cultivation of imagination
What if all this came to pass?
For Hopkins, imagination in all its forms, and the art across many disciplines that it generates, is essential—and he says it’s long past time for the educational system to acknowledge its importance. After noting that creative pursuits generate more jobs than aerospace, automotive, fossil fuels and life sciences together, he continues:
Being involved in art at school can increase cognitive abilities by 17 percent and improve attainment across all subjects. Students from low-income families are three times more likely to get a degree and twice as likely to vote if they do art in school. They are also more employable. (p. 88)
Ask yourself—and your government—the sorts of questions Hopkins does. And read this book. It could change your life.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
One cool way to get the juices flowing AND have quite a bit of fun is to make stuff up and then write promotional material for it. The first time I remember doing this was in 1978 or 1979, when I worked as a manuscript reader for a New York City literary agency. A particularly bad manuscript led to this poem (copyright 1979 by Shel Horowitz, all rights reserved):
Advertisement (Melodramamine)
And now, from the makers of Dramamine, for motion sickness…
an exciting new product,
Melodramamine, for EMOTION sickness.
Yes, this special formula will overcome that nasty, nauseous feeling
from indulgence in overwritten books.
Let Melodramamine return YOU to the world of literary enjoyment.
Use only as directed.
My 2000 book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World had a few examples, too. One was a series of six radio commercials for a fictitious Armenian grocery: five illustrating how the same business could target different market segments on different shows—and one demonstrating how they could get too clever and forget that the purpose of an ad is to get people to buy (that one involved singing apricots and the arrest of their importer). While Grassroots Marketing is officially out of print, I still have copies for sale, with the price reduced all the way from the original $22.95 down to just $10 before shipping for the paperback, $10 and no shipping cost for the PDF ebook. (And while you’re on my shopping cart, why not pick up a copy of my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World? It’s all about building environmental and social good into profitable products, services, and mindsets. You’ll save on shipping costs by getting both at the same time.)
And sometimes, I make up products without writing copy for them. Anyone who wants to start a Chicagoland heavy metal festival called Illinoise or a nonsmoking vegan casino in (guess what city) called Las Vegans—you have my blessing. My daughter enjoys this kind of game too. Years ago, she came up with L’Auberge d’Aubergine, which translates as The Eggplant Inn. So, besides a few laughs, what do you get from doing this sort of exercise?
Most of all, you get a creativity jumpstart. It gets your brain thinking in different ways. You think about what’s missing in the marketplace and what niche you night fill (not with your imaginary product but with a real product that you imagine and then create)—and you think about what makes a good name for a product, service, company, or even an idea, which is a very good skill to have. I actually have a section of Grassroots Marketing covering eight factors to consider in choosing a name. And for those doing social change and planetary healing, it’s a way of expanding what’s possible. Conceiving of something can be a first step to achieving it. For every invention that happened through serendipity, a lot more showed up by doing the work.
Of course, if you’re in the market for a new business name and would rather not do it yourself, drop me a line. While I’m not a professional naming consultant (and I don’t charge like one either), I have named a fair number of things over the years.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions
The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions by Urvashi Bhatnagar and Paul Anastas (Chelsea Green, 2022)
Yes, another book brimming with examples of companies that re-imagined and then reinvented, piloting initiatives that if widely copied would go a long way toward greening the planet. I’ve reviewed plenty of those, and this will not be the last one, I’m sure. A few things make this one different:
Anastas’ expertise in green chemistry
A data-driven, quantifiable scorecard that companies can use or adopt to drive innovation, working on the principle that before you improve something, you have to measure it
Emphasis on large corporations
A proposed shift in the sustainability conversations at those corporations—from risk management to strategic opportunity (first introduced on page 14 and a theme throughout the book): “We can achieve superior performance, convenience, efficiency, and profitability not in spite of a focus on sustainability but because of it” (p. 28)
In my consulting, I personally don’t generally begin with the data, preferring to start with the vision and then figure out how the engineers can get us there—but I don’t think either approach precludes the other. And while I run a one-person business and don’t ever expect to be an employee of a huge corporation, I still found significant utility in this book. The writing is clear, and the data-driven outcomes are impressive. Small businesses and solopreneurs have to think differently about implementation, but can still draw many useful lessons.
Bhatnagar and Anastas design their whole-lifecycle scorecard around four principles: waste prevention, maximizing efficiency and performance, supply chain renewability, and safe degradation at the end of a product’s lifecycle—and measure three categories of impact: environmental, employee, and community (p. 16). One key takeaway is to design safety and end-of-life considerations in from the beginning—preferably by turning waste into monetizable inputs for other products (pp. 48-50, 81-83).
As a marketer, I find it odd that their scorecard aims for the lowest possible score: a zero in each metric. I would have designed it to give points for good initiatives so that a higher score provides companies with a clear and obvious marketing benefit. But even though it gives the book its name, the instrument is only a small portion of the content.
Much of the rest is examples of companies jumpstarting eco-friendly and socially just innovation. To list a few among many: design electronic chips WITHOUT generating 600 times the product weight in waste (p. 63); sequester not just whatever carbon you create but some of the backlog (p. 65); lower not just carbon footprint but water footprint (pp. 73-74); eliminate toxic chemical flame retardants by switching to non-flammable materials (p. 80); extract and recycle the water in human waste while turning urine into electricity (pp. 116, 118); replace forever chemicals including poisonous plasticizers such as phthalates with safe, degradable alternatives (p. 133) and chemical insecticides with yeast-grown non-toxic ones (p. 144); change pharmaceutical packaging so extra doses can be used instead of thrown away (p. 136); eliminate hunger by approaching food waste differently (pp. 147-149); extract and reuse materials like nickel and cobalt from used batteries (pp. 151-152); fund more expensive green and social justice initiatives through the savings in health care costs (p. 174)…
A few organizations get extended case studies, some including their full scorecards:
Electronics giant Philips (pp. 106-112; 191-197) already generates 70 percent of revenue from green products and services and is aiming for 100 percent.
Hospital system Gunderson Health (pp. 159-161) parlayed a $2MM investment into annual savings of $1.2MM—that’s an astounding 60 percent annual ROI— including slashing the cost of managing pharmaceutical waste from $151,000 to less than $10,000 per year.
Janitorial products company Coastwide Laboratories (pp. 161-170; 177-185) re-engineered its product line to combine functions in fewer products, marketed its private-label solutions to some of the largest manufacturers in the country, and brought distribution in-house, allowing them to market honestly as the lowest cost solution even while increasing the product price (because the customer only needed one product to replace two or more).
P2Science, maker of eco-friendly silicones for cosmetics and hair products, boosted yield to 95 percent while simplifying the production process.
The book is also full of sets of principles and steps that would be useful to companies of any size. And it has a terrific index, which I wish more publishers would model.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
In her book, Orwell’s Roses (see book review, below), essayist Rebecca Solnit writes,
Past and present support for authoritarians and denial of their crimes among those who are supposed to be the left has long made me wonder what, if anything, the term left means, since at other times it means those who support the human rights, freedoms, and egalitarianism that are antithetical to this
Perhaps I have an answer for her: Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian are often thought of as linear: as a journey of static points along a continuum. Some people even see this “linear” journey as age-related: that most people grow more conservative and more comfortable with repression as they get older.
Maverick that I am, I see the world differently. My theory is much more circular. Think of two circles, intersecting at two 90-degree angles at opposite ends of each circle (180 degrees apart)—kind of like this drawing of a hydrogen atom, but with only two circles. One circle embodies points on the left-right spectrum, the other marks degrees of loving freedom or loving repression.
What are those points of intersection? Left and right come together at both libertarian and totalitarian ends. Similarly, along the freedom arc, they meet at both left and right. I see very little difference between Fascist thugs of the Right and Stalinist thugs of the Left; they are both into suppressing dissent and inflicting an all-powerful state. And this, I believe, is how the socialist George Orwell—who fought in the militia against the Franco version of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War until he realized that totalitarians of the Left were equally dangerous—came to write two of the most powerful anti-Communist books ever written.
Finding and Harnessing That Common Ground
On the freedom side of the spectrum, it’s no coincidence that Right- and Left-libertarians have both used the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag from the revolution that created the United States of America. Both value personal freedom enormously, but not necessarily the same aspects of freedom. For someone on the progressive side, it might be the freedom to wear clothing more typical of a different gender, while a conservative might be more interested in reducing regulation of small business. And people on both sides might advocate for various positions on issues ranging from homeschooling to firearms to organic foods to unrestricted speech.
Still, Tea-Party libertarians (the real ones, who actually believe in individual freedom even for those who don’t look like them or share their backgrounds) and civil liberties progressives have more in common with each other than either do with the Fascists and Stalinists.
What this means is that politics can indeed create strange bedfellows. You may find opportunities to coalition with people whom you disagree with on many fundamental issues—but where you agree, you can work together, powerfully and effectively.
Want real-life examples? How about these two:
In 1999, I founded a movement called Save the Mountain, to stop a proposed luxury home development that would have ruined the four-state view at the top of the much-loved state park immediately abutting the site. In the press release announcing the group’s formation, I wrote (as close as I can remember it), “Mr. ___________ [developer’s name] has vastly underestimated the love that people of Hampshire County have for this mountain.”
And it was true! By using messaging that crossed all demographic and psychographic divisions, attracting not just environmental activists but farmers, store owners, academics, local politicians, and more, we created a near-consensus movement that could routinely bring 400 people out to public hearings in a town of 5000—and we achieved near-total victory in just over a year. Even though I expected to win all along, even I’d thought it would take us five years.
Since 1994, environmentalists and Tea Partiers in the Green Scissors movement have worked in coalition to expose and oppose wasteful government spending on things that aren’t good for the environment. They recognize they’re stronger together than separately.
Aging Doesn’t Mean Ossifying
As for people getting more conservative with age, I disagree with that too. From my initial flowering into activism at age 12, I was constantly influenced by my elders—sometimes people who were 60 or more years older than me. I’ve been to two birthday parties four years apart for women who were still passionate activists on their 100th birthdays (the link goes to my blog entry for the earlier one, in 2015). I remember after my arrest during the Seabrook Occupation of 1977 that the largest and most vocal faction inside our armory was the “gray hair caucus,” numbering at least 100 out of the 700 or so gathered inside.
And at 66, I’m still an activist, working on progressive causes such as immigration justice and protection of diversity—but also on showing the business world that addressing the environment and our toughest social issues can be profitable. There have been victories and defeats along the way—but if I make it to 100 like my two friends, I expect I’ll still be doing my part to improve the world.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Solnit, a well-known voice in progressive politics, shows us a very different side of Eric Blair, the complex bundle of contradictions better known as George Orwell. The world knows him as a dystopian author of Animal Farm and 1984: two scathing novels attacking Stalinist Totalitarian Communism. Academics also know his work chronicling the lives of coal miners in his native UK, the impact of imperialism in Burma (where, as a young man, he was a police officer), and fighters in the Spanish Civil War (where he was a soldier fighting against Franco’s fascists). Solnit knows him as an avid gardener with a special passion for roses—who sought refuge from polluted London first in the small cottage where he gardened in 1936, and near the end of his life on a farm on a remote Scottish island where the last eight miles of the journey could only be done on foot; a fighter for the principle of clear language and opponent of government or corporate euphemisms; and above all, an optimist who maintained hope all the way through his life.
Why am I reviewing this book HERE, in my newsletter? What relevance does this fascinating portrait of a many-faceted man have for my audience of business leaders involved in social and environmental good, with an interest in marketing?
First, because Orwell was incredibly aware of the interplay of humans with the natural world. Second, because he was involved in social causes throughout his adulthood, even putting his own life at risk several times. Third, because he himself was a solopreneur, running a little shop in the cottage with his wife. Fourth, because Orwell, himself an outcast as a working-class student at elite Eton and then as an Eton-educated person seen as trying to be better than his peers (p. 22), understood that history is shaped by people on the margins. Fifth and perhaps most germane, because this book has a lot of relevance in its discussions of messaging, building positive AND negative movements, and influencing culture.
Solnit starts (p. 8) by noting that planting can be a semi-permanent legacy; trees we plant might outlive us by generations, sometimes centuries. A tree in my front yard was planted in 1916, when my oldest grandparent was 11; I’ve eaten carob from the 2000+-year-old tree that sustained Shimon Bar-Yochai when he hid from the Romans in a cave in northern Israel for thirteen years when people who had known Christ were still alive. Orwell suggested planting an acorn for “every time you commit an antisocial act (p. 10).”
Solnit has a gift for lyrical writing. She refers to the Carboniferous Era as “a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago” (p. 60). Here’s another of many beautiful passages:
Much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passages of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm… (p. 189).
Solnit celebrates Orwell’s joy in the natural beauty and simple pleasures around him, decrying the puritan, humorless aspects of the Left (e.g., pp. 91-92). Having been criticized for making space for pleasure travel, daily time in nature, and eating delicious food instead of being an activist every waking minute, I appreciate this celebration, and the third-party validation she offers through people like Emma Goldman. In my 20s, I proudly wore a t-shirt with a picture of Emma and a distilled version of her response to an activist who criticized her for dancing, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I still agree, even though the shirt wore out long ago. Solnit gives the complete and accurate quote, in context (p. 114).
So much more to say, but this is already long. Quick highlights:
Class perspectives on how we experience nature (p. 163) and beauty—and their interaction with justice/injustice, including visiting a sweatshop “rose factory” in Colombia (pp. 189-219)
How authoritarians exploit lies and gaslighting (pp. 222-224)—and the dangers of letting them create and control history (pp. 222-228 and in numerous references to 1984 protagonist Winston Smith’s career expunging inconvenient history from the written record)
Orwell’s surprising critique of Gandhi as dogmatic and questioning his tactics (pp. 263-264)
Right at the end, a key insight: Orwell wasn’t a prophet of doom but a merchant of hope (pp. 259-264). Orwell issued warnings, not prophecies. Warnings give people the option to change, and avoid calamity. In his own words, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe [in 1984] necessarily will arrive, but…something resembling it could arrive” (p. 262), “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection” (p. 263), and “Our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have” (p. 264).
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
It happened again. Someone emailed to sell me something. Nothing wrong with that. But if you’re sending a pitch letter, demonstrate your competence—NOT your incompetence.
My correspondent was selling press release writing and distribution. I’ve written hundreds of press releases for my clients, my own business, and community groups—but don’t do the distribution part. So, bingo–this email got opened…Ugh!Take a look at the first two paragraphs. What issues do you notice? (Scroll down to see the ones I spotted.)
For Press Release needs and more, we provide your business with comprehensive solutions. We have worked with hundreds of businesses around the world. We have worked with companies of all shapes and sizes, addressing such needs as Targeted Media Distribution, Web Distribution, and even PR writing services.
In other words, will help you shape your Press Release with the best possible scope, style, and language. We then take things to the next stage by utilizing our powerhouse network of media sources.
Here’s my list:
The biggest red flag is in the first line of the second paragraph. That “will” should either be “we will” or “we’ll”—something 30 seconds with a grammar checker would have flagged. Who’s going to trust this organization to write a press release?
The writing is unnecessarily stiff (contractions would help). Having developed “story-behind-the-story” press releases that people say feel like reading a good novel, why switch to one that sounds like a job application cover letter from the 1970s?
It’s a perfect example of “we, we, we all the way home” copywriting. In ten lines, three “we” statements plus one missing one (see #1 above). Scroll down to see one of many ways to do it differently.
It suffers from excessive, inappropriate capitalization.
It makes me feel like the person in the picture ?
Why NOT to “we, we, we all the way home”
Copy should not be about you, your company, your brand. It should be about how you help your prospects and customers (or clients, patients, students, direct reports, etc.) remove a problem, fix a pain point, accomplish a goal, or experience something wonderful. In this example, why should a prospect care that this agency has “worked with companies of all shapes and sizes”?
If this were my copywriting assignment, it might have looked something like this:
Have you been featured in any major media lately? Would you like be?
Media attention helps you not only get noticed in a crowded world, it builds credibility, loyalty, and a desire to be part of the “in crowd” by working with you. But too often, entrepreneurs like you fail to get that media attention—maybe their competitors got it instead.
Why? Because they don’t know how to write a press release that gets noticed and picked up.
Maybe you’ve experienced this. Have you spent hours writing a press release, sent it off with great expectations—and pffft, it died a quiet death in the trash folders of all the reporters’ email programs? Maybe you hate to write and passed the task off to an untrained secretary or intern with no marketing expertise.
And then, did you decide that PR doesn’t work? But that’s like missing your first shot at a basket when nobody’s ever showed you how to shoot one, and then deciding you’re no good at basketball.
Here’s some good news: you can have all the benefit of press coverage without having to write anything, and without dragging in people who don’t have the skills to make it work. What would it be like—how would it improve your business—to work with an experienced copywriting and distribution team that’s gotten coverage for [name two famous clients] and many others in publications and TV networks like [name three well-known media outlets where your work got your clients coverage]?
See the difference?
Oh, and by the way, this was a quick spontaneous riff. It took 20 or 30 minutes to write replacement copy to replace the real and awkward note. No research, no interviews. Just one draft.
For an actual client, of course, a lot more energy would go into it. If you think you could benefit from a press release or other marketing copy from a copywriter who understands you-focused, benefit-oriented marketing—and especially if you have a story to tell about sustainability, regenerativity, or social equity in your business—there’s room in my schedule for a couple of more clients. Learn more at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/marketing-consulting-copywriting/ (green/social equity organizations).
PS: Because most of us have been taught to write that way, the first draft of this article contained 15 instances of the first-person singular (the capitalized letter that sits alphabetically between H and J. All but one were edited out in this draft—proving that it may not come naturally even to someone who knows to look for it, but it certainly can be done.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Harper Perennial Paperback, 2009)
I’d been hearing amazing things about Freakonomics, which won several awards and garnered fabulous reviews in the mainstream press, since it was published in 2005. The book’s premise is simple: we should dig deeper and find the true, non-obvious causes of various phenomena backing our hypotheses with data—recognizing the differences among cause-and-effect, coincidence or the same factor impacting more than one variable . And they look at some fascinating questions—like why many crack dealers live with their parents because they can’t afford to move out (pp. 100-104) or how real estate agents actually have more incentive to sell quickly and cheaply than to get the best price for their clients (pp. 68-73).
That’s a totally valid perspective. But it isn’t enough, and this book disappointed me. I didn’t feel it came close to living up to the hype. And the bait-and-switch techniques they occasionally use were very irritating to me. For example, after going on at some length about how nature is more important than nurture, examining adopted kids from low-performing birth families raised by high-performing parents, they undermine the entire argument by showing that while those kids perform poorly at the beginning of their school careers (p. 173, with a related argument on p. 211), they more than make it up over the entire course of their education (pp. 178-179). Admittedly, this “we didn’t mean it” narrative may have been more annoying right now because I was reading this book as the story broke that newly elected Congressman George Santos had lied about almost anything that mattered in his entire history. And it felt like I’d been “Santosed.”
Perhaps the most controversial conclusion they draw is that the reduction in crime in the 1990s had far less to do with changes in policing policy and strategy than with the far smaller number of unwanted babies born into unloving homes following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion throughout the US. I think there is a good chance that they are right. If the 2022 holding in Dobbs that effectively reversed Roe continues to allow states to undo that right, and if the data 20 years from now shows a dramatic increase in crime, we will have pretty good evidence that they were correct.
Page numbers are from the 2009 Harper Perennial paperback edition.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
A spork seems like a great invention—until you actually try to eat soup or spear a vegetable. Then, you discover it’s a compromise. It can do some of what a spoon does, and some of what a fork does, but for the most part, does neither very well.
The early 3-in-1 printers were like that, too. Dot-matrix (low-quality) printing, horrendous fax and scanning software, and expensive general awkwardness. They didn’t catch on until they got a lot better. Now, with high-resolution laser printing and quality scanning, good reliability, intuitive software, and smaller footprints both in price and square footage than having three separate devices (well, okay, two—I don’t know a lot of people who still use fax), they make a heck of a lot of sense. My first one, a gift from the manufacturer, retailed for $1200. It had a good laser printer but the scanning software was so awkward I had to relearn it each time I used it. My current one was only about $150, does two-sided printing, and takes up much less space. Once I figured out how to batch scans, my only complaint is the lack of autofeed for scanning. Fortunately, I don’t scan very much.
At this point, even if you only needed scanning or fax capabilities once in a while, why wouldn’t you buy a 3-in-1?
So—What’s the Lesson Here?
This: Usability, quality, and simplicity are as important as convenience. Convenience is only appreciated if you’re not compromising usability, quality, and simplicity. My current printer passes the test—not with flying colors, but adequately for my purposes. The spork, despite its brilliant simplicity, fails—and so did the $1200 printer I no longer have. So, if you’re designing a convenient solution, make sure you don’t leave essential performance tools on the cutting room floor.
In the green world, that might mean making appliances or even floor tiles modular and easy to disassemble, so if one part fails it can be replaced easily and inexpensively. It’s why single-stream recycling (sorted later, not by the user) is so popular. It means that if you offer compostable coffee cups, you should make sure the tops are compostable as well—AND you should have a collection point for used ones at your retail location and other convenient spots.
PS: Even sporks have their uses. I discovered recently that the spork is awesome for scraping out a can of wet cat food. But I don’t think I’d buy one just for that purpose.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage by Daniel Burrus (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2017)
A few years ago, I reviewed Burrus’s earlier book, Flash Foresight. This book revisits that territory and expands from it. While aimed at large corporations, much of his advice holds for small businesses, including solopreneurs like me—even if we don’t have the kinds of financial and logistical resources big companies can throw at a problem. Note: I am using his preferred capitalization.
His main theses?
If we divide our forecasting into inevitable Hard Trends (e.g., Baby Boomers are aging out of the workforce and into eldercare services) and malleable Soft Trends (Boomers take their hard-won knowledge with them as they exit), we will know how to both anticipate and be ready for the inevitable changes and consider whether we want to impact the soft ones—such as creating a way to capture that soon-to-be-lost experience-based knowledge through the exit process.
Checking whether we are using Hard (data-based) or Soft (gut-based) Assumptions can help avoid disaster. Trends based on Hard Assumptions are much more likely to come true.
Many of the disruptions are caused by three technology trends: faster processing speed, higher bandwidth, and better/more storage. Others are caused by the changing relationships these tech trends enable.
Even though phones, tablets, and personal computers might face hardware limitations, these three trends allow us to push more tasks out to the cloud—which has, for practical purposes, no such limitations.
Disruptive approaches can be created and harnessed by “Opportunity Managers” who can spot the possibilities and ride the exponential curves. And if you don’t disrupt, someone else will (p.129).
Be a contrarian. Innovate instead of competing. Choose to be extraordinary every day and ask the questions an extraordinary person would ask (p. 157). Skip the obvious problems and anticipate/plan for the deeper ones so you can turn them into opportunities—especially when you see the low-hanging fruit others aren’t noticing. Zag when others zig.
I would add one more to his three megatrends: exponentially better ease of use. That, in turn, democratizes the technology. Ease of use takes something out of the realm of engineers in lab coats and puts it into the pockets of ordinary people, even kids. Compare a DOS interface from the 1990s (or worse, a punch card-driven mainframe of the 1970s) with the few simple, well-labeled icons on a smart phone—WOW! My first experience going online was CompuServe, in 1987. Not only did we have to use command-line prompts, we had to deal with 10-digit all-numeral user names—so we never knew who was writing to us. And my creakingly slow 300-bps modem connection was very balky, so I was constantly getting thrown off. After a couple of months, I gave up. Now, nine-year-olds and ninety-nine-year-olds can get online with a few clicks.
And this means that any of us—a preschooler, a solopreneur, someone just learning a written language—can become a disrupter and harness the early-mover advantage. Even as a home-office solopreneur, I disrupted the local portion of an industry all by myself, back in 1984, after buying my first computer (an original 128K Mac). At that time, my business focused on typing term papers with some resume writing—using an involved process of interviewing the client, writing and editing a draft, having the client approve the wording, and then typing a final, formatted copy. Suddenly, I could do the whole thing in one shift. I put a little half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages reading “Affordable Professional Resumes While You Wait.” Clients loved the speed, quality, and low price. Within about a year, it was the biggest part of my business—for a decade. And after that success, each time I switched my focus again, I looked for an approach that was at least a bit disruptive and different from what everyone else was doing: from popularizing “story-behind-the-story” press releases in the 1990s to staking my position around the idea that business can profit from building deep environmental and social responsibility into core products and services, which has been my core mission for almost a decade now.
Be sure to read Appendix A, a list of 25 principles in the book, and Appendix B, an expanded glossary that serves like an alphabetically organized Cliff Notes; they come after the acknowledgements and author bio, but before the thorough index. These two together will deeply reinforce the learning. Appendix C is about his video program.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Be sure to read the blog post, This Could Change Everything–it’s crucial to understanding a big shift that’s upon us. The link is below the main article and seasonal message.
Marketing Lessons from a Fruit Tree and a Spider Web? Yup.
Last month, we talked about operational reasons why one size DOESN’T fit all. This month, we continue that conversation, but look directly at why it doesn’t work in marketing either—looking to nature for examples.
I’ve been really interested in biomimicry for many years, and have written and spoken about how it can improve our engineering and design. My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, even has sections about biomimicry visionaries like Janine Benyus, Amory Lovins, and John Todd. It also has a section on John Kremer’s concept of biological marketing, where he talks about a single ear of corn generating thousands of ears.
But it was only just last month, on a beautiful day where I spent half an hour telling a prospect why I was uniquely qualified to write him a marketing plan for a venture that actually is unique (synthesizing ideas from at least three different industries) and then another hour planting garlic, that I really GOT how biomimicry applies to marketing.
Let’s ask some questions of our friends in nature.
Reporter: “Fruit tree, what’s your marketing plan?”
Fruit tree: “You’re going to think this is really funny, because it’s not a human thing—my marketing plan is to be eaten.”
Reporter: “Wow, that sounds crazy. How does that even work?”
Fruit tree: “Birds and animals nibble my fruit, then they move someplace else, poop out my powerful seeds—and my little babies, little clones of me, grow in all sorts of places I can’t reach (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m rooted deep into the ground. Not only is this how I reproduce, it’s the only way I can travel—and I love to travel).”
Reporter: “How about you, Spider—what’s your marketing plan?”
Spider: “Remember that famous book, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches by Joe Karbo? He was so lazy he took his idea from me. I’ve been doing lazy spider marketing for 250 million years [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_spiders], and Joe-com-lately didn’t show up until 40 years ago. All that talk about passive income, that’s my jam since before there were any humans. OK, I do work hard spinning a fancy web—but hey, the artistry feeds my soul and the craftsmanship feeds my body. Because once it’s done and my web looks gorgeous, all I have to do is lay back, quiet down, and wait for some company to drop by—and get stuck until I can have a nice snack. It’s eco-friendly, too, by the way. Zero carbon footprint—and without me and my sisters and daughters, this world would be overrun with pesky bugs.”
So what are the lessons here? I’ll offer two of them. If you come up with others, I just might mention you and your idea.
1. Just as the fruit tree’s marketing plan wouldn’t work for the spider and vice versa, a marketing plan for a B2B (business-to-business) green engineering firm would be useless to a B2C (business-to-consumer) weatherization company, even though are both are sub-slices of the green building scene. Your marketing plan has to make sense for your products and services, your market niches and their demographics/psychographics, and yes, your mission, values, and impact on the wider world.
2. Both the tree and the spider offered benefits. The tree’s ultimate client is its own progeny, but to achieve that ultimate goal, it offers food to hungry animals in search of sweetness—just as so many industries (social media networks, Internet search tools, and traditional media, to name three) entice users with services—but their real clients are buying eyeballs, or data. And the spider, perhaps aware of her own arrogant reply, points out the bug protection benefit to us, which helps to neutralize a predator (humans kill a lot of spiders).
If you need help thinking through the best ways to apply this in your particular organization, I’ll happily give you a 15-minute phone or Zoom consultation. Request a time at https://calendly.com/meet-shel/15min (Note: Calendly sometimes offers times it shouldn’t, and I sometimes miss the notifications—so after you get instantly “confirmed” from the Calendly robot, you’ll also get a manual confirmation or request to shift from me.)
Blessings of the Season
If you celebrate a special holiday at this season, such as Christmas, Chanukah (I do that one), Kwanzaa, or Solstice, may you enjoy many blessings and joys in your celebration. If you celebrate a holiday at a different time, such as Ramadan or Diwali, may the blessings I’m sending now ripen and blossom at the time they apply. Here in the U.S., we also celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year; many parts of Asia mark that time a month or two later. Jewish culture celebrates several New Years, the earliest of which is Tu B’Shvat, the New Year for the Trees (this year, it’s the evening of February 5th and all day February 6th. And the one you’ve probably heard of, Rosh HaShanah, is always in the fall, usually in September.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Changeby Tom C.W. Lin (Berrett-Koehler, 2022).
Lin urges coalitions between activists and capitalists. Since I’ve written four books on activist business success (most recently, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World), I’m very familiar (and agree) with that case.
Lin covers some ground that I don’t. I appreciate his analysis of both sides’ strengths. He cites corporate skills in communications, operations, and accountability (p. 104)—and I’d elaborate to specify analytical/data capture/measurement skills (accountability), exponentially larger resources (operations), and global presence. But I see activists as the better communicators; their passion, tenacity, and creative tactics capture public attention, at no cost, that corporations often have to purchase.
And I appreciate his call for both groups to enlist governments—with far larger resources than activists and corporations combined—as partners (pp. 151-152), and how much power those combinations can bring to bear. He starts off with the four—four!—teenage Parkland shooting survivors who not only organized a massive Washington million-person demonstration (plus satellite demonstrations around the world) in just six weeks but also actually got gun safety legislation passed into law in notoriously gun-friendly Florida (pp. 1-4). Later (pp. 109-113), he discusses JP Morgan Chase’s $200 million economic and skills investment—in close collaboration with local government, business, and activist organizations—to rebuild Detroit’s shattered economy. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon freely acknowledges its self-interest. This effort turned it into “the home bank,” with 65 percent market share (p. 112). The company plans to replicate the effort elsewhere.
He documents many other corporations benefitting through social and environmental advocacy and argues that companies should choose their activism targets according to their strengths: logistics for a delivery service like UPS, housing for AirBNB, financial activism for banks… (p. 153). And he notes that social and environmental action can attract more impact investors and more capital (p. 115).
Also, recency creates relevancy. Lin documents many events and trends that hadn’t happened yet when I wrote my books. He covers the revulsion of CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg against the previous administration’s policies of deliberate cruelty, open racism, othering of numerous groups from Muslims (pp. 72-74) to women to people with disabilities to protestors exercising their rights to dissent to immigrants—even to the point of caging children (pp. 76-79). He also chronicles business response to the nationwide elevation of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (pp. 86-89), the gender gap and #MeToo movement (pp. 92-96), and the attack on democracy itself that culminated in the violent riot of January 6, 2021 (pp. 79-81).
Refreshingly, he warns against over-reliance on corporate saviors (pp. 117-131). Corporate elites (especially those not yet changed by diversity efforts) may slant their causes toward the most mediagenic or the ones with the largest financial stake (p. 127) rather than the most important, may attempt to deflect attention from bad actions in other areas, may water down legislation, etc. And causes without profit potential still need attention—thus, he sees a major role for government.
He encourages companies to see their purpose-driven mission not as PR but as a key element in the company’s core identity (something I’ve advocated for years). And he applauds the many ways activist corporate execs are making changes from the inside.
But he lacks deeper analysis of business’s ability to benefit by addressing really big problems in a systemic way. Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a lot more depth there. In short, the books complement each other, and you’ll benefit by reading both.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
If You Appreciate this Newsletter and its Mission, Maybe You’ll Be the One I Hire to Keep it Going
My long-time assistant is moving on to other ventures. I’m looking for someone to take over two tasks from her: 1) Formatting the email (using Get Response) and web (using WordPress) versions of the newsletter each month, and 2) Sending a pre-written birthday message to Facebook friends as their birthdays come up (typically somewhere between 5-15 per day). Interested? Please write to me (shel AT greenandprofitable dot com) with the subject line “Newsletter Formatter” with a bit about your background.
DUMP this Useless Business “Truism” Already—Because It Isn’t True
One-size-fits-all is a myth! Want proof?
A colleague in New York City is trying to drum up support for a citywide education campaign to encourage recycling in New York’s thousands of large apartment buildings. I read her material and thought it’s going to take more than education—because multifamily apartment buildings present challenges that just aren’t relevant in a single-family house, or even a triple-decker with a yard or a driveway. Example: many inner-city apartments (not just in NYC but around the world) are really, really tiny. I’ve seen some that only had one sink in the kitchen and none in the bathroom. Other bathrooms have a triangle-shaped mini-sink that fits into a corner, allowing the bathroom itself to be only a couple of feet wide. I had a friend who used a Murphy bed that folded up vertically into the wall of her one-room apartment, so she could have living space during the day. When space is so scarce, who’s going to devote a big percentage to separate bins for recycling glass, metal, plastic, and paper, plus compost and trash? The suburban solution assumes a garage or at least a large closet and just won’t work in a studio or efficiency apartment with living space of only 200 to 500 feet. Even if you have a bigger place, the average apartment size in NYC is only 702 square feet—with an average monthly rent of (are you sitting down) $4265. If you’ve ever wondered why the tables are so close together in NYC restaurants, that’s why. Every square inch has to count.
Selling to a poverty market. Even the very poor in the US, Europe, or the big economies in Asia would be considered extremely wealthy in much of the developing world. In four countries in Africa, the average gross income is under $1000 US. Since the wealthy are always a little sliver of the population, most residents are surviving on far less than that. So if you’re selling into that kind of economy, you need to re-engineer everything. You’ll be asking how to produce products for 1/10 the cost you’d face in the developed world, how to deal with poor or nonexistent transportation, storage, and dealership network, how to handle government corruption and high security threats, how to get people to pay such a big chunk of their income for your stuff (Among many possible models: no-interest time payments; money recouped from savings; rent-to-own; advertiser or grant support), and how to best support your people on the ground—all without compromising the product or service’s key functionality.
Yes, it can be done—but not with the same models as you’d use in a country where people are far more economically secure. I’ve written a few times about one company that has risen to the challenge: d.light sells solar LED lamps to replace toxic, flammable, and expensive kerosene or go into situations that hadn’t had any artificial light before. That first link has a quick summary of six benefits this product offers to its customers (and some other examples of solving multiple problems with one initiative). The other link is the excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World that describes d.light’s business model and accomplishments in more detail.
Next month, we’ll continue looking at one-size-fits-all is nonsense—but from a marketing lens.
Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost
I’ve been telling you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.
A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.
You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).
Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Answers Are There: Building Peace from the Inside Outby Libby HoffmanThis is a remarkable, super-optimistic book that I wouldn’t even have looked it based on the title, but a colleague I have great respect for not only recommended it but sent me a pre-release copy (publishing date was October 25). It’s all about forming real community in strife-torn lands, in ways that respect and honor and take direction from the indigenous perspective while helping establish resilience in very different ways than the typical First World development agencies try to work. It’s a deeply personal account that’s also elegantly written and remarkable easy to read. I often found myself gliding through 20 or 30 pages at a sitting—not typical of the books I review—even while pausing to take lots of notes.
Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.
Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.
Some of the key principles and insights:
Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments
Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”
I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.
Latest in the “Archives of Ridiculously Bad Marketing”: I received this email with a From name that matched the name at the bottom of the letter, but the address looked spammy and from a different person–and the subject line was someone else’s name. Oh, and there was no signature or even URL—just the person’s probably-fictitious name. Here’s the content, exactly as I received it. I found at least 8 grammar and usage errors in the four-line first paragraph. How many did you spot?
This Morning I was on your website and I can see a few issues affecting your website Ranking I would like to send you a no-cost proposal on your website that will give some vital insight as to why you aren’t on page 1 yet and to show you some bigger issues. This is totally no-cost you’ll not be charged for any of this
Does this sound good?
Regards,
[Name]
Normally, I wouldn’t even respond—but somehow, I felt that maybe this person was teachable. And I know how hard it can be when it feels like your communications fall into the abyss. So I wrote back:
If I could give you some unasked-for advice: sending an ungrammatical mess with three different identities isn’t a really effective marketing strategy.
Why am I sharing this? Because I see a lot of people making mistakes like this—and I believe one of the best ways to do better is to dissect the failures.
It’s not just the bad grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. What other problems do you see in this 70-word message?
Here are a few that I notice:
The writer failed to be specific. The letter is generic and could be applied to any business owner in any industry.
There’s no attempt to engage with me as an individual business owner, e.g., “I love your focus on business succeeding by solving the world’s biggest problems”—or even “On your About page, I noticed that your use of the phrase, ‘extravagant cookie monsters’ could be costing you search engine rankings because [insert brief explanation].” If I had seen some indication that my correspondent had actually gone to my web page and spotted a problem, I would have been willing to gamble the time to read the report. (And just in case you go looking, that was a made-up example. I’m pretty sure that the archive of this newsletter will be the first time “extravagant cookie monsters” has appeared on any of my sites 😉 .)
While it has a call to action, it has no third-party validation (like testimonials or reviews). It has no URL for me to check it out on my own (and a generic Gmail address that doesn’t give me the website). And it has no credibility.
There’s also no differentiation. What makes this service different than the dozen other SEO services that pitched me this month? The only differentiation is the sense that this is a low-skill individual that I cannot trust to do a good job.
So there’s a quick four-point list of how to turn a pathetic email into a useful one. Go out there and make it happen! And if you want expert help with your copy, visit my contact form (on my main site, Going Beyond Sustainability), and let’s talk.
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Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost
A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.
You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).
Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
If you find yourself bollixed up when someone asks why social responsibility is important in your business, share this 20-minute slide presentation. The UK-native speaker has a charming accent and his slides are clear and easy to understand. He covers the basics (including the Milton Friedman-inspired arguments against it, which he knocks down reasonably well though not in great detail) and at least mentions the idea that CSR can be a profit strategy, citing experts like then-Unilever CEO Paul Polman and the very positive experience of major UK retailer Marks & Spencer.
For a much deeper exploration of CSR generally and its potential role as a bottom-line success driver, I recommend my own 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. You can sample some really nice excerpts at no cost at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/freebies/
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.
A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.
You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).
Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.
A Peace Prize for Pill Pockets? A Lesson in Ultimate Benefits
If you have a cat or dog, you may have experienced medicating your companion with the help of a nifty thing called a Pill Pocket. It’s a little animal treat shaped kind of like a Hershey’s Kiss. The canine model is about the same size, while the feline version is much smaller. You press the pill into the pocket in the middle and then wrap the corners around it so the medicine is completely enveloped in the treat. And the animal is usually happy to gobble it down.
If you’ve ever tried to medicate some dogs or (especially) cats the old-fashioned way, you know it can be an act of war. I speak from experience that holding a cat’s mouth open and then jamming it closed before the pill can be spat out, while massaging the throat to force a swallow and trying not to get ripped to pieces by the furious cat is not fun for you or the cat.
Pill Pockets uses the slogan, “turn pill time into treat time.” It’s a good statement, focusing on shifting an unpleasant experience into a more enjoyable one for all concerned. But what would happen if their marketing went deeper? What would happen if the explored the ultimate benefits?
I learned the concept of ultimate benefits (and many other basic marketing strategies that I’ve used ever since) reading the books of Jeffrey Lant and interviewing him for one of my own early marketing books. I have my issues with Jeffrey (particularly in his approach to marketing online, which I totally disagree with), but I learned more from reading Cash Copy than any other marketing book. The idea is you keep drilling down until you find the reason for the reason. So if you go to the hardware store to purchase a hammer, your ultimate goal wouldn’t be to own a hammer or even to put nails into the wall—because the goal of hammering the nail would be to put up shelves or hang pictures or build something, and the goal of hanging pictures is to live surrounded by beauty—and the goal of living surrounded by beauty might be to have a more serene and creative life, and the goal of that might be to invent something world-changing that in turn would have a purpose like enabling people to climb out of poverty. You just keep drilling down to the core benefits (yes, I know, hammers aren’t good at drilling ?).
So—the obvious benefit of a Pill Pocket is to get your animal properly medicated. But going deeper, we find much more “ultimate” benefits:
Your pet gets the proper dose of medication without hiding or spitting out big pieces of it
YOU don’t get clawed or bitten, leading to both a better mood and more productive time afterward
Your PET avoids a traumatic incident—or, more likely, a series of traumatic incidents until the medicine is used up or no longer needed—and thus is able to trust you more and be more loving with you
If you have kids or housemates, you get to model creativity and nonviolent solutions to problems—which could make a huge impact on an observer who goes on to devote their life to peace, clean energy, or other forms of betterment (in keeping with a core principle of mine that we don’t always know the full impact of our actions at the time)
Here’s the “ultimate” question: What ultimate benefits can you discover in your own products and services, and how can you leverage that to get into new markets?
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Ian Peterman interviewed Shel on his Conscious Design podcast. Shel is not a designer, but had a lot to say on how design can be a tool of environmental and social justice.
If you want a book that builds character—and especially if there’s a person in your life who could use some firm guidance—Sonnenberg may offer just what you need. Directed both at business and personal life, his book probes to the heart of what it means to be a person with strong ethics and solid character: someone who others can count on, and who can look in the mirror and feel good. It’s full of lessons, many in easy-to-digest list format, such as:
30 ways to live the Golden Rule (pp. 7-9)
4 reasons why earning your accolades is better than receiving them without doing the work (p. 28)
25 ways to demonstrate a strong work ethic (pp. 35-37)
13 ways to turn mistakes into learning opportunities (pp. 60-61)
9 reasons why selfish people are losers (pp. 87-88)
15 positive business choices (pp. 116-117)
15 negative choices that could ruin your business (pp. 119-121)
10 times you want to walk away from a sale (pp. 123-125)
11 ways to make yourself proud (pp. 154-155)
13 workplace policies that work better than rigid rules (pp. 162-163)
14 examples of leading by example (pp. 181-183)
25 things not to stress about and 15 negative attitudes to dump (pp. 219-225)
20 things to either fix now or regret not fixing them when it’s too late (237-239)
16 ways to give more effectively (pp. 241-242)
As well as affirmations and principles within the text including:
“Self-discipline is not a punishment; it’s a gift.” (p. 21)
“Winning doesn’t have to be at someone’s expense…focus on how much you can accomplish together.” (p. 63)
“Someone’s good fortune is not your misfortune.” (p. 82)
“What’s the cost to your well-being of harboring anger and resentment?” (p. 92)
“If you think that doing the right thing most of the time makes you reliable, you’re kidding yourself.” (p. 109)
[On people who always need to be right] “You never know if your ideas are sound until they are challenged.” (p. 147)
“Watch your children grow, and they will teach you what you’ve taught them.” (p. 175)
[Quoting actor/author Sean Patrick Flanery] “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” (p. 187)
“Doing your best isn’t an activity; it’s a mindset.” (p. 197)
“Impossible means that you just didn’t do it yet.” (p. 203)
“A wedding reveals promises made while a funeral recounts promises kept.” (p. 205, emphasis in original)
“Forget your to-do list and create a to-be list.” (p. 215)
“If work isn’t fun, you’re playing on the wrong team.” (p. 225)
The final list, on pages 245-247, is “30 questions only YOU can answer.” While he presents them as binary choices, I found many of them were really “both-and.” For example, #21, “Identify as a member of a group or view yourself as a unique individual?” I’d even say that my uniqueness could be the sum of my descriptors (writer, social justice/environmental activist, business owner, consultant, husband/father, visionary, music lover, voracious reader, photographer, vegetarian foodie, etc.), memberships (Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, National Writers Union, a grassroots political action network in my town, several Internet forums, and dozens of groups I support financially), and various intangibles and personal experiences.
While I agree with about 95 percent of the content, there are places where Sonnenberg and I disagree. One is his oft-repeated urging to always finish what you start. I once wrote a piece called “Failure is ALWAYS an Option.” For me, knowing when to walk away is a key life skill. It should not be done casually and it should acknowledge the consequences. A lot of people would look at where I’ve put much of my energy for the past 20 years, see big change-the-world ambitions but less-than-stellar results, and tell me I’m a fool to keep going. But showing the business world that social change and planetary healing can be profitable is still the passion that gets me up in the morning, and I’ve had enough results that I see the worth of continuing. But when something just isn’t working—or simply no longer inspires me—I walk away, without guilt. To me, failure is an essential part of evolution—and my business, my life, and my thinking continue to evolve.
My other two quibbles:
The blanket statement that breaking the law is always wrong (p. 159). I almost agree: breaking the law for personal financial gain or to do violence to others is always wrong. But as a nonviolent activist, I’m well aware of the 3000-year-old tradition of resisting unjust laws. The Bible is full of examples of courageous people who broke unjust laws; my favorite is of Shifra and Pu’ah, midwives to the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. Ordered by Pharaoh to kill the newborn Hebrew males, they responded with the lame (but effective) excuse that the Hebrew women gave birth too fast. In our own recent past, we saw vast nonviolent resistance to unjust laws in such diverse situations as Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories around Europe; the US Civil Rights, draft resistance, and peace movements; Tiananmen Square; South Africa’s rebellion against apartheid; Arab Spring, Greta Thunberg’s school strike (among thousands of examples)
His long rant opposing affirmative action could have argued (but didn’t) that while you should hire someone who is qualified, if you have a choice to hire another person from the majority culture or someone from a historically disenfranchised and abused culture, this can be a chance to partially right a grievous wrong.
But these are minor points in a book filled with wisdom. So much so that if I had a time machine, I would bring a copy to the teenage version of a certain disgraced recent US president who was so out of alignment with the principles of this book that he was willing to subvert democracy rather than admit defeat.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.
