Category Archive for Clean and Green Marketing Newsletter

The Green and Clean Club, March 2018

12 Mar, 2018  No Comment

 

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

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

 
I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet. 
 
Amory Lovins…lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (-18°C) on winter nights. Yet, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter)— and it stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Lovins built his luxurious 4000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run… 
 
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of US power needs, Lovins claims that a well-designed office building can save 80–90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.
 
With conventional building logic, you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins notes that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater… “Big savings can cost less than small savings, because you also save their capital cost…” Look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions. This mirrors nature, where many components have multiple functions. A mouth processes food, water, and air, communicates, and kisses. A hand can pull, push, hold, lift, manipulate, write, type, draw, paint, sculpt, fasten, unfasten, dress, undress, check the weather, provide sensory feedback, point, speak sign language…
 
Lovins consulted on a 1656-square-foot tract house with neither heat nor air conditioning in Davis, California, where temperatures can reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Replicated on a mass scale, construction cost would be $1800 cheaper than a comparable conventional house, and maintenance costs would drop $1600 per year. While it’s easier to achieve these dramatic savings in new construction, even on a retrofit, the savings can self-fund these improvements. 
 
Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute was also one of several companies involved in the massive “deep energy retrofit” of the Empire State Building, discussed in Chapter 9 [saving $4.4 million per year]… 
 
Just by switching a factory from long, narrow, pipes with turns to short, wide, straight ones, Lovins was able to cut energy costs for that process by 92 percent—and slash maintenance costs and operating noise, too.
 
Lovins has also looked long and hard at transportation. He and his associates have developed amazing car designs, under the service mark Hypercar…SM 
 
Lovins’s team designed an SUV that not only can hold a whole family (or two people and their kayaks), but weighs 52 percent less than a Lexus SUV, can go 55 miles per hour on the energy the Lexus uses just for air conditioning, achieves the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon (except that it runs on hydrogen fuel cells—330 miles on 7.5 pounds of hydrogen), offers greater safety than a heavy steel SUV (even if it hits one), is undamaged by a 6-mph collision, emits only water, and is so well made that its designers expect to offer a 200,000 mile warranty. 
 
When parked, the Hypercar vehicle “could be designed to become a power plant on wheels”; plug it into the electrical grid and watch your meter spin backwards, eliminating any need for nuclear or coal plants… 
 
Lovins has developed a few key principles over the years: 
  • Design whole systems for multiple benefits, rather than components for single benefits
  • Redesign production to close all the loops in a system and eliminate both waste and toxicity
  • Reward service providers and customers who do more and better, with less, for longer
  • Reinvest the resulting profits in scarce natural and human capital regenerativity model can have a huge impact not only in developed countries, but in areas of deep poverty, too.
Lovins described an effort by the Zero Emissions Research Initiative to grow houses out of bamboo, in a developing country with an acute housing shortage. The houses cost only about $1700 each, can be located where they’re most needed, and can finance themselves by selling excess bamboo to carbon brokers for energy or other uses. And of course, if the bamboo is cut back (rather than cut down) to build the houses, the plant can regenerate and maintain an ongoing income stream.
 
Curitiba, Brazil…reinvented mass transit, with a bus system that moves people as efficiently as a subway, but at a fraction of the cost. The fully integrated approach to changing from a dying to a thriving city is told in Lovins’ book, Natural Capitalism—and can be read online at https://www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter14.pdf . 
 
Using nature as a model and mentor, Lovins encourages companies to rethink their waste streams, too. In many cases, the waste of one system can become a nutrient for another process… 
 
One of the great things about the Lovins approach is that it relies on the private sector to do well by doing good. Companies that adapt to the systemic approach will be highly profitable key players in the new economy. “Early adopters will enjoy a huge competitive advantage,” Lovins says. 
 
Lovins has been looking at these issues for more than 40 years. The full profile expands on many of the points here, and is one of many reasons you should go get your own copy of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

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

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

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

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

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Flash Foresight
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Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible: Seven Radical Principles That Will Transform Your Business by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Green and Clean Club, February 2018

11 Feb, 2018  No Comment

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/
Friends Who Want to Help

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

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Don’t Sell Me,
Tell Me
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Don’t Sell Me, Tell Me by Greg Koorhan (Crossbow Studio, 2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, January 2018

5 Jan, 2018  No Comment

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this play out in your life and your business?
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Another great interview! The Spotlight with Tony DUrso

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

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/
Friends Who Want to Help

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

You’ll want to take action now

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

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
A Recommended Film—Prosperity
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“Prosperity” by Dr. Pedram Shojai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, December 2017

8 Dec, 2017  No Comment

 

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

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

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

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/
The Perfect Gift for the Socially/Environmentally Aware Business Person in Your Life (maybe that’s you)

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll share with you every other month through June want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ll want to take action now.

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

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—Blue Collar Proud
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Blue Collar Proud: 10 Principles for Building a Kickass Business You Love by Taylor K. Hill and Carter Harkins

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, November 2017

10 Nov, 2017  No Comment

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

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

I take that seriously. So…if you know anyone with that kind of star power—or if you know someone who does—can you help me by getting the song in front of him or her? Listen to it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWQHdHTLRI (and #westernma folks, you’ll recognize downtown Northampton).
Like Twitter Pinterest GooglePlus LinkedIn Forward
Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?
Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Shel Horowitz is inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame by Judith Eiseman near his home on Barstow’s Longview Farm in Hadley, MA, December 2013
This Month’s Tip: How to Get the Most Marketing Oomph out of Receiving an Award
Last month, I told you how to select the right awards to enter—the ones where your chances are higher than average.

Let’s say you were successful, and you got that certificate or trophy. This is major “social proof” for you—third-party validation. Milk it for everything you can:
  • Send a press release announcing the award—but don’t just say you won an award. Use this as a chance to get your core message in front of the media. (See the example just below this article that I wote for a client) 
  • Put it prominently on your website
  • Add it to your email signature
  • Mention it several times on social media—not too often, and using an excited/humble rather than entitled tone, e.g., a Tweet like “Deeply thrilled to be named “Most Environmental Business in Pisqua. Thank you so much, @PisquaChamber” [this is a fake Twitter address] (I’d say no more than once every 20 posts or every three days, whichever is less)
  • Display conspicuously in retail locations and tradeshow displays
  • Mention it in radio, TV, and podcast interviews
  • Blog about it, including some of the backstory—make it interesting
  • Use that blog article again in your internal and external newsletters, reports to stakeholders (stockholders, employees, investors, vendors, government officials, etc.)
  • Feature the award in an e-blast
  • If the award is relevant, put it in your CSR or Sustainability Report, as well as in your public Annual Report
  • List it on business cards, brochures, sell sheets, and other printed materials
  • If your company has a Wikipedia page, make sure it’s included
  • Work the award into any review sites that cover you, such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Amazon, etc.
  • To quote the king of Siam, “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera”
For Release: On Receipt
Contact: Sheila Ruth: [phone number], info at imaginatorpress.com 
 
Why Does This Unknown Author Keep Winning All These Awards?
BALTIMORE, MD: Coming out of nowhere last year as a debut author with an unknown press, Nick Ruth has now won an astounding eight honors for his first two books in the Remin Chronicles series, The Dark Dreamweaver and The Breezes of Inspire. 
 
The latest honor: both titles have just won the Parent to Parent Adding Wisdom Award. In the fiercely competitive world of children’s products, Ruth, a government employee and homeschooling dad, is particularly proud that three different parenting organizations have recognized the books’ quality and appeal. 
 
The Dark Dreamweaver: 
  • One of only two chapter books to win the coveted Mom’s Choice Award in fall 2005
  • Chosen by iParenting Media as one of the “Greatest Products of 2005”
  • A Finalist for the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award.
  •  Named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Children’s Pick
  • Parent to Parent Adding Wisdom Award
The Breezes of Inspire: 
  • Named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Children’s Pick
  • Parent to Parent Adding Wisdom Award
  • ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Finalist (winner to be announced in May)
The Remin Chronicles is a fantasy-adventure series in the tradition of the Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia. The books are imaginative stories of magic, friendship, and adventure—with a bit of environmental science blended in. In The Dark Dreamweaver, ISBN 0974560316, David, a boy from our own world, visits Remin, the world of dreams…does battle with the evil sorcerer Thane…and is aided by an imprisoned wizard battling the dream thief and living repeatedly through the lifecycle of a monarch butterfly. David and several cousins return to Remin in The Breezes of Inspire, ISBN 0974560332, but quickly get transported to the equally threatened world of Inspire. Both were published in hardback by Imaginator Press and are available at or through Greenleaf Book Group, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. 
 
Journalists: Ruth and his illustrator Sue Concannon are available for interviews and the books are available for review. 
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

I recorded a brand new keynote, “Terrific Trends for Enlightened Capitalists,” for the Enlightened Capitalist Virtual Summit November 28-30, and it came out great. I’ll be on the line for live Q&A following the broadcast on November 30. Listen to all the sessions; they promise to be excellent. I’m especially looking forward to hearing Jeff Golfman, Donna Lendzyk, and Ravinol Chambers. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/EnlightenedCapitalist/
Friends Who Want to Help

Want to build a successful content brand? My friend Marc Guberti released his latest book Content Marketing Secrets which is available at a steep discount for a limited time. The book will teach you how to create, promote, and optimize your content for growth and revenue.
 
Looking for a Job? I’ve Just Added a Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—We Rise
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We Rise: The Earth Guardians’ Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Martinez has been an activist for 11 years—and he’s not even old enough to vote. Only 17, he became aware of the earth’s current distress at age six and has been organizing ever since. Not just organizing. Performing original rap music and traditional dance, speaking at major conferences and even becoming only the second non-diplomat, non-politician to address the UN General Assembly, being featured in a film on youth activism, receiving an award from President Obama, standing up as one of 21 youth activists who are suing the US government to enforce climate change, and now, releasing his first book (with a major publisher, too—health and organic gardening leader Rodale). He was at the 20th Anniversary Rio Conference, organized a youth presence at COP21 (where the Paris Climate Accord was hammered out), and performed for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.

I was a child activist too, starting—not counting an action against smoking I took in my own home at age 3—at age 12 when I went to my first demonstration, opposing the Vietnam war. And I, too, have been an activist ever since. Now, as I turn 61 next month, I’m seen as an elder—but I’ve got a few decades before I catch up with some of my activist friends in their 90s and 100s, such as Arky Markham.

But I was 16 before I turned vegetarian, 17 when I started speaking on the issues of our time, 20 before I participated in an action that definitely made a difference in the world (the Seabrook occupation of 1977), and 23 when my first book (on why nuclear power is a terrible idea) was published. So I’m in awe of this kid. We can think of him as a Malala Yousafzai for the United States. By the time he’s my age, he could have credits like toppling the whole fossil-fuel power structure or maybe managing a successful campaign to create a world unity government. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know he’s destined for greatness.

Martinez comes naturally to a holistic, intersectional approach that sees the relationships among multiple issues. Whether it’s getting big money out of politics, raising climate awareness among youth, or supporting the intersectionality of opposing different “isms,” he’s on the job. Raised in Boulder, Colorado by indigenous activists (his parents founded Earth Guardians, where he works as Youth Director), Martinez is strongly rooted in his own Mexica/Aztec tradition and very knowledgeable about the traditions of many other indigenous cultures, around North America and the rest of the world. This culture, where every living thing is sacred, informs his activism and his lifelong vegetarianism. It also provides a solid frame of earth guardianship and water protection from which he reaches out on a host of other issues.

That ability to see others’ oppression no matter what shape it has taken leads to deep wisdom: “Rather than pointing fingers, let’s work with people to help make better food choices” like eating less meat rather than instantly going cold turkey to vegetarianism (p. 135, pun intentional). That philosophy extends beyond food, to other areas where we can build connection, change our habits, and come together stronger.

And shifting our internal compasses to accept victory is part of that. He quotes activist Mika Maiava of Samoa: “You need to win from within, so that even if people look at you like you’re losing, you’re not losing because you’ve already won in your heart.” (p. 71)

At the same time, in a world where 200 species go extinct every day (p. 85), he demands immediate progress on climate change. And he’s doing what he can to create an empowered intergenerational movement to get us off fossil fuels into renewables, to create a humane and nutritious and just food system, and to secure the rights of every ethnic and cultural group on the planet. He’s doing his part to build a coherent, focused movement that can actually generate this needed shift, using every nonviolent tactic from lobbying through nonviolent direct action. Direct activism, he reminds us, “doesn’t wait for permission from leaders to act.” (p. 102)

He’s also very media-savvy. He understands the power of Standing Rock pipeline opponents self-identifying not as protestors but as water protectors—“defined by what we love and seek to defend” (p. 180). And writing in the earliest days of the Trump administration, he recognizes how the 2016 US election changed things for climate activists.

The book is well-researched, with plenty of facts and figures to back up his assertions. Even I didn’t know that not only does the fossil fuel industry receive $548 billion a year in direct subsidies, but also leaves us holding the bag for $5.3 trillion in externalized costs, for example (p. 144). On the positive side, he cites a study of college and university campuses investing in “green revolving funds” to finance the campuses’ own energy improvements; they show an astonishing 32 percent return (p. 219). The advance copy I have was in need of another round of proofreading, but hopefully that was fixed in the final printing.

Martinez is also using the book to spread messages from many leaders in the fight for global and local climate justice; the book includes his interviews with such luminaries as India’s environmental economist Vandana Shiva, Paul Watson of the environmentalist direct action group Sea Shepherds, climate activism pioneer Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org), actor/activist Mark Ruffalo, Bernie Sanders’ campaign liaison to Millennials, Moumita Ahmed, and several others including his own grandfather.

It gives me lots of hope to find a book this comprehensive and also (in places) really fun to read, written by a teenager. People like Martinez are our future, our bright hope. His book is well worth your time.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 25 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, October 2017

10 Oct, 2017  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, October 2017
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Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?
Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/
This Month’s Tip: How I Started Winning Awards—And How You Might, Too

Seven of my ten books, including two of my five self-published titles, have won at least one award and/or been translated and republished in foreign markets. My second award-winner was the self-published Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First, which I brought out back in 2003; it won the Apex Award for best book in the PR industry. Since so many of my readers are not part of large organizations, and since awards provide lots of credibility to independents who win them, it might be helpful to go over some tips on how to win awards. Next month, we’ll look at how to make the most of your award victories.

I am a big believer in third-party credibility. Awards are part of that package along with endorsements (Principled Profit was endorsed by Jack Canfield and more than 80 others), foreign rights sales (India and Mexico for this title, Italy and Turkey for the subsequent Wiley revision/expansion), press coverage (in addition to a Publishers Weekly review, this book was mentioned in dozens of articles), special sales (1000 copies sold to Southwest Airlines, making the book profitable the day it printed), etc. It shows that other people think you do a good job. In the ever-more-crowded publishing universe where there might be thousands of titles in your niche, this is critical.

Sales of this title were not stellar. But I think the overall package of credibility was a key factor in selling the rights to Wiley—which published an expanded and updated edition in 2010 as Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—and again a few years later to Morgan James (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, 2016). Because of these rights sales, I had to take the original self-published edition out of print, but that was fine.

Determining which awards to enter involves several factors: Whether it’s a fit, how many other entrants will be competing, overall quality of the product, the cost of entry… I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first award-winner, published by Chelsea Green, had a very elegant design. That inspired me to hire a design team for Principled Profit after doing my own interiors on two previous self-published books. And that, I believe, is part of why my books started winning awards. I’ve always done very well-written, useful books, but my first two self-published books had poor design standards with covers done by people with no book experience and interiors I designed myself.

Does it matter that most people haven’t heard of the awards I’ve won? I don’t think so. There is a huge difference in top-tier vs. second-tier awards, e.g., Newberry, Caldicott, National Book Award, Booker Prize that absolutely everyone has heard of vs. Ben Franklin, Foreword BOTY (Book Of The Year), or Ippy, which are extremely respected in the indie publishing word but not beyond it. In terms of market effect, I don’t see much difference between the second tier and the third tier, where they are not widely known even in the industry. A skilled marketer can take good advantage of all of them. My Apex was a third-tier award, and I have fourth-tier awards on at least three other titles. Even those are just as good in getting prospective buyers to take another look, and that’s really why I do them.

My advice to you: Enter awards where your chances of winning are higher. If you’re producing a quality product, there may be opportunities in the industry vertical as well as the horizontal category (books in my case, perhaps green manufacturing or music or customer service or tasty food in yours). Apex Awards are given in many categories within the PR industry. I suspect that very few books were entered in the Best PR Book category that I won, so my chances were much better. If I found a book award in the green or social entrepreneurship space (as opposed to a green or social entrepreneurship category in a book contest), I’d enter my current Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World in a heartbeat.
New on the Blog
Friends Who Want to Help

No cost to listen to this year’s Global Oneness Day, October 24. The awesome speaker lineup includes Marianne Williamson, Jean Houston, Michael Lerner, Panache Desai, Matthew Fox, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Michael Beckwith, Marci Shimoff, and many others. Another superb event from Humanity’s Team.
 
Green and Profitable and Humanity’s Team invites to join evolutionary storyteller and visionary Barbara Marx Hubbard as she shares a compelling new video series: “What’s New in You?” Barbara will give voice to our collective and unprecedented “crisis of birth” into a new humanity.
 
Barbara will help you to understand why the crisis we are facing today is part of the birthing pains of Homo Universalis the opportunity and ability we have to transform as a species! https://vgi65.isrefer.com/go/bmhvs/shorowitz/
 
Looking for a Job? I’ve Just Added a Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—Our Earth, Our Species, Our Selves
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Our Earth, Our Species, Our Selves: How to Thrive While Creating a Sustainable World by Ellen Moyer

Rarely have I come across a book that so closely mirrors my own thinking. But our lenses are different. In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World—and in three earlier related books—I look at the power of business to heal the world. Moyer looks at how consumer-citizens can do the same thing.

Also, I made a deliberate choice not to dwell on the gruesomeness of our situation and the urgency to change; I figure that information is widely available. Moyer spends several chapters on what’s wrong before moving to how we fix things.

If you’re in business, I recommend that you read both. They complement each other nicely.

On to the specifics: Before delving into the problems, she gives us a vaccine of optimism in the introduction—starting right on page 1 with a magnificent, empowering quote from Buckminster Fuller: “The best way to predict the future is to design it” and pointing out, correctly, that “changing course is not only doable but it is not so difficult as we may think—and it can be fulfilling.” (p. 3)

Fuller is only one of dozens of my favorite luminaries she quotes or cites. Her list includes environmentalists like Wangari Maathai, Wendell Berry, and Jane Goodall…human potential geniuses including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston…activists from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Mandela and Robert Reich…prosperity folks such as Marci Shimoff, Jack Canfield, and Napoleon Hill…deep thinkers like Einstein, Pope Francis, and Bruce Lipton—to name a few.

This list shows the breadth of her holistic approach. It’s not either/or but all, and. Instead of focusing on one necessary evolution at the expense of all the others, simultaneously pursuing world change and a healthy environment, exploring the 90 percent of our brains most of us don’t use, achieving financial comfort, expanding our compassion, and all the rest of it. Yes, we can have all this and more, and it’s actually easier to get there holistically.

Refreshingly, she doesn’t see a grumpy, hoarding billionaire as financially healthy (p. 105). Having money without happiness does not make you a success in her eyes (or mine).

That insight is part of a nice section on happiness. Quoting Gandhi: happiness is when our thoughts, speech, and actions align (p.99). Fun is transient; happiness is ongoing; both are important (p. 106). Quoting Shimoff: happiness is more likely to bring success than financial success is to bring happiness (p. 109).

She makes some connections that I didn’t know. I had no idea that we squander half our water to cool electric power plants (p. 30)—we wouldn’t need to do that if we’d switched to renewable energy—or the horrifying statistic that 1.8 million children per year die a thoroughly avoidable death from lack of water or lack of unpolluted water (p. 31). We waste water in many other ways, too, including far too great a share of irrigation water (p. 73). I’ve been saying for years that there’s no shortage of water or energy—but we deploy them poorly. So poorly that she sees climate change as a massive civil rights violation against the poor (p. 118).

I also didn’t know that the $5.3 trillion in global fossil fuel subsidies accounts for a full 6.5 percent of global GDP—more than we spend on health care! Eliminating those subsidies would reduce CO2 by 17 percent and eliminate 50 percent of pollution deaths—while hastening the transition to clean, renewable energy, which is already cost-competitive if you take away the fossil and nuclear subsidies.

And she points out that the lone wolf doesn’t usually create the sweeping change we need. Cooperation with each other and with other species, not ruthless social Darwinism, makes us fittest (pp. 43-46).

Speaking of wolves: I love her description of the many positive ripples resulting from wolves’ reintroduction into Yellowstone (pp. 62-63). So in pursuing any big goal, we need to factor in all the costs and all the benefits.

That means rethinking absolutely everything—and setting big goals that let us get out of either-or thinking and into all-and. We can switch to fully organic and leverage that to eliminate food scarcity; the UN says this would double our produce supply (p. 150). We can fund the space program and fund human and environmental needs, but not if we box ourselves in with small thinking and limiting stories (p. 141).

Combining “high-tech and high nature” (p. 148), Here’s her four-part formula for creating this kind of systemic change:

  1. Exercise the Precautionary Principle to avoid unintended consequences
  2. Work upstream to eliminate problems in the first place
  3. Change from centralized to distributed systems (solar is a great example)
  4. Use a holistic approach

A lot of this is about mindset. One great example: shift our thinking from “environmental protection” to “rights of ecosystems” (p. 177). But even as we build a new castle in our corner of the sandbox, we can’t ignore the soldiers at the moat. Reich notes that if we give up on politics because it’s too corrupt, we collapse the buffers protecting the planet and most of its people from corporate and government rapists who would plunder without limit (p. 185). But citizens, leading through creative nonviolence, can create leadership where governments eventually have to follow—and according to Paul Hawken, the environmental movement is the largest people’s movement in history (p. 191). When just 15 percent of us (p. 199) combine our vision of possibility (pp. 195-196) and our outrage at the status quo, (p. 198), change happens.

And then maybe the whole world will start to look like the remarkable success story of Bhutan (pp. 200-201). Years ago, Bhutan looked beyond Gross National Product to Gross National Happiness—and manifested massive improvements in sectors including democracy, health, environment, carbon, and energy.

This is only a tiny taste of the wisdom in Moyer’s book. Read it, buy it for friends, apply it to the business world by also reading Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, and put the lessons of both books into action.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 24 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

Follow on Twitter

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Join Shel’s Circle on Google+
 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, September 2017

5 Sep, 2017  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, September 2017
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Before We Get to This Month’s Tip: A Few Quick Things

Did Your Organization Spend a Bunch of Time and Money Creating a Sustainability or CSR Report to Let it Gather Dust on a Shelf?
Here’s an easy, quick, and affordable way to repurpose that content and get more mileage out of the resources you put into preparing that expensive report, without any staff time on your end. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use right away: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/  
Looking for a Job? I’ve Just Added a Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.comJust Because it Would Be Cool
I need 101 more followers on Twitter to reach 10,000. Will you be one of them? Once you’ve done so, Tweet “Subscriber” to @shelhorowitz and I will follow you back.

Hear and Meet Shel
I’ll be attending Linda Hollander’s Sponsor Secrets seminar October 3-5 in Los Angeles. I did a course with Linda and she definitely knows her stuff. If you’d like to learn all about how to get companies to give you money for their own promotional purposes, visit https://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?Clk=5591242

 
Want to learn how to accomplish all of your goals and become a high achiever? My friend Marc Guberti is hosting the Productivity Virtual Summit from September 18th to the 25th. I am one of over 50 speakers at the upcoming summit and would love for you to join us. 
Hurricanes, Flooding, and Climate Change, Oh My

 

My heart goes out to all those impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the flooding in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia (not much in the US news but also very severe), or the out-of-control fires in the American West (a friend in Oregon told me, “the whole state is on fire. I can’t go out of my house because of the smoke.”

Every bit of research (read more)
This Month’s Tip: 4 Questions to Create Eco-Friendly Transformation, Part 3
And now, the final two questions:

3. How can I maximize impact and minimize waste?

You may have heard the term, “circular economy.” Or you might remember it from my reviews of books like Cradle To Cradle. It’s the idea that you find a use for the things you used to consider waste. So each former waste stream becomes an ingredient in another process, making something else. This could be very simple (like food waste becoming garden compost), or it could be quite complex.My favorite example is one of the complex ones: The Intervale, in the Burlington, Vermont, area of the Northeastern United States. The site includes a brewery, whose spent grain is used to grow mushrooms. The mushrooms in turn donate material to raise tilapia for restaurants. And the fish waste provides nutrients for a crop of hydroponic greens, which in turn feed the grains and hops the brewery uses to make its beer.This kind of thinking can go far beyond minimizing waste, though. We can take it a few steps further and design to make a difference in the biggest problems we face as a society. Imagine creating profitable products and services that actually turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.Want an example? At least three companies have developed solar-powered LED lanterns that typically replace flammable, toxic, carbon-hostile kerosene. The LED lamps provide a better light that needs no fuel, does not produce toxic fumes, has no risk of setting the house on fire, reduces pollution, and leaves considerably more money in the hands of the family using the lantern—addressing health, safety, carbon footprint, and poverty all at once.

4. Am I counting all the costs?

When a new technology is introduced, people often object because they see increased costs. But a closer look often reveals that they’re comparing apples and eggplants.

An example would be the nuclear power industry. Nuclear is hailed by people who don’t know better as a miracle technology that doesn’t have a significant carbon footprint and is so economical. But they’re wildly wrong. Actually, nuclear is a multiheaded hydra of a disaster.

As it happens, my first book was on why nuclear is not a viable technology, and I updated that book following the 2011 accident at Fukushima. So this is something I know quite a bit about.

Both the economics and the supposed carbon benefits of nuclear are very dubious. Because its apologists only count the costs of actually operating the nuclear power plant, the numbers appear on first glance to work. But to be fair, we have to add in all the other parts of the fuel cycle: mining the uranium, milling it, processing it into fissionable form, encasing the fuel mixture into metal-clad fuel rods, transporting it hither and yon for each of these steps, encasing those fuel rods in a massive, carbon-hostile structure of concrete and steel, storing and/or reprocessing the spent fuel rods, keeping them isolated from the environment and secure from terrorists for an unfathomable 220,000 years, friction losses in power transmission, etc. Once we do that, the economics, the carbon costs, and a bunch of other factors are a lot shakier.

Then add in the costs of a catastrophic failure every ten years or so—a very conservative estimate considering that we have experienced over 100 potentially devastating nuclear accidents in the seventy-odd years of this experiment, including two (Chernobyl and Fukushima) that made wide swaths of land unlivable for decades. More than 30 years after Chernobyl, the 1000-square-mile (2600-square-km) dead zone is still not even open to the public.

Of course, renewable energy has hidden costs too, and we need to look at those as well. Once we do, we may find that centralized wind or solar farms don’t make as much sense as distributing small solar and wind (and other renewable energy), constructing them at or near the point of use and moving away from the central power grid model.

Let’s look at counting all the costs in a different context: industrial pollution. Through the first couple of centuries of the Industrial Revolution, companies poisoned tens of thousands of toxic sites by using public air, land, or water as their private dumping ground, externalizing all those costs to the taxpayers and abutters—or so they thought. However, it’s become common practice to hold companies financially responsible for decades-old toxic dumping, even if that dumping had been legal at the time. And the cost is far higher now than it would have been to just clean it up properly in the first place.

Your business can avoid this huge and expensive headache by doing it right the first time. And as we see in question 3 above, the best way is to find a use for the stuff being dumped. Reuse or resell it instead of throwing it away-but-not-really-away.
New on the Blog
Friends Who Want to Help

No cost to listen to this year’s Global Oneness Day, October 24. The awesome speaker lineup includes Marianne Williamson, Jean Houston, Michael Lerner, Panache Desai, Matthew Fox, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Michael Beckwith, Marci Shimoff, and many others. Another superb event from Humanity’s Team.

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—The Code of the Extraordinary Mind
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The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life & Succeed On Your Own Terms by Vishen Lakhiani (Rodale, 2016)

Brules. Godicle. Blissipline. These are just three of the words you’ll add to your vocabulary reading this powerful book—because Vishen Lakhiani, founder of the wildly successful personal growth site Mindvalley.com, loves to make up new words to describe his concepts.

Although I read several self-help books a year, I rarely review them here. And not since The Success Principles by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer, which I reviewed some time around 2006, have I been so enthusiastic about one. But Code, true to its promise, is an extraordinary book.

Starting with his note in the introduction that he’s a sponge for and codifier of learning (p. xvi), I knew I would like this book, and probably would like Lakhiani if we ever get to meet in person. I’m wired that way too; I often say I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything.

In encouraging all his readers to become extraordinary, Lakhiani starts from the premise that all of us can make that journey. The “code of the human world…is just as hackable” as a computer program.

This is directly in line with what I teach: that the world is changed by ordinary people stepping into greatness when the door swings open. Rosa Parks was a seamstress; Lech Walesa was an electrician in a shipyard.

Lakhiani is a proponent of changing yourself first, and from there, changing the world. But I think sometimes those growths can be in parallel. For me, I found the purpose of changing the world long before I gained the life skills to make it happen—but making the commitment to the world gradually helped me find the road toward my own highest self (and I’m still on the path to get there—I see much more potential in my future and—at age 60—I’m far from done).

Lakhiani offers ten new laws to improve our physical and mental health, our relationships, financial security, and our ability to impact the world. Each law gets a chapter. He also includes many nuggets of wisdom from some of the most successful people in our time, from Richard Branson and Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama and meditation teacher Emily Fletcher.

Perhaps more importantly, starting in Chapter 1, “Change the Culturescape,” he gives you reasons to question and discard the old rules, imposed by others who don’t understand your loves or your purpose—even if these rules have been handed down through your culture for centuries What other people think you should do for a living, who they think you should marry, what they think you should eat is not your concern—all of those are matters for you to decide. You’ll need strength if the whole culture lines up against you, but you can still be true to your inner self.

But the power to choose what to believe or not to believe is a powerful gift to yourself (p. 88). And that’s one tool in understanding that your “software,” your “systems for living.” They are not static. Just like a computer, they can be upgraded. Lakhiani says he tries to upgrade at least one of his systems for living every week (p. 95). Just as we’ve learned to clean out our bodies, we can also consciously deactivate our anxieties, stress, fear, and other negative emotions that hold us back (p. 106), and emerge into disciplined bliss: “Blissipline.”

By Chapter 3, he’s talking about our ability to engineer our own consciousness, finishing the chapter on pages 63-64 with a checklist of 12 areas of life you can self-rate.

This just one of many self-help exercises scattered throughout the book. Others I particularly like are the question from parenting expert Shelly Lefkoe, “What beliefs is my child going to take away from this encounter?” (p. 77) and the “I love you” mirror exercise (pp. 181-182).

But all this is prologue. It’s necessary to go through it, so you’re ready for the really life-changing parts of the book. Parts Three and Four (chapters 6-10) need all the pre-work of the first five chapters, just as most of us first learn to crawl, then walk, before we try to do a four-minute mile.

By this time, you’re ready to really learn the tools to create the reality you want in your own life, and in the world. You’ll become an extraordinary person when you see happiness less as a goal than as an empowerment tool (p. 124); you begin to think in the future, and not in a past that holds you back, and when you stop overestimating your short-term possibilities while underestimating the long-term ones (p. 125).

To realize those possibilities, say goodbye to traditional “goal-setting.” Instead, learn to sift END goals—which you’ll actively pursue—from MEANS goals—which would lock you in to the existing limited reality (pp. 151-157).

And we haven’t even touched on some of the really life-changing pieces near the end, like the concept of “beautiful destruction (p. 192) and the Godicle Theory (pp. 196-198).

Read this book. Set some time aside to do the exercises and to drink in some of the many extra resources for readers online. And then go out there and do the amazing thing you are here to do.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 24 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, August 2017

9 Aug, 2017  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, August 2017
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Before We Get to This Month’s Tip: A Few Quick Things

Did Your Organization Spend a Bunch of Time and Money Creating a Sustainability or CSR Report to Let it Gather Dust on a Shelf?

Here’s an easy, quick, and affordable way to repurpose that content and get more mileage out of the resources you put into preparing that expensive report, without any staff time on your end. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use right away: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Do You Have a Room in or Near NYC that Can Hold at Least 20 People?

I’m looking to barter for one-day use of a room suitable for a workshop, ideally Tuesday November 21. If you have an organizational affiliation, so much the better.

Are You a Videographer Near NYC? 

I’m also seeking to barter with someone who can record the above event, if it comes together.

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

Just Because it Would Be Cool
I need 205 more followers on Twitter to reach 10,000. Will you be one of them? Once you’ve done so, Tweet “Subscriber” to @shelhorowitz and I will follow you back.

Hear and Meet Shel
I’ll be attending Linda Hollander’s Sponsor Secrets seminar October 3-5 in Los Angeles. I did a course with Linda and she definitely knows her stuff. If you’d like to learn all about how to get companies to give you money for their own promotional purposes, visit https://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?Clk=5591242
This Month’s Tip: 4 Questions to Create Eco-Friendly Transformation, Part 2

Last month, we looked in-depth at one key question: what’s the best way to achieve the result?

Now, we’ll tackle the second question: What can I learn from other industries—or from nature?

What can I learn from other industries—or from nature?

Consider how much innovation has been the result of cross-pollination (these examples are all taken from my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World):

  • Drive-through service didn’t start at restaurants; banks had them first (in 1930), and car washes were next
  • Shopping carts (the folding kind you take with you when you go shopping) were invented when an inventor studied folding chairs
  • Sticky notes were a repackaging of a failed adhesive; it wasn’t strong enough for a permanent hold, but a bright person created a need for temporary adhesives
  • Velcro was used in the space program years before it was redeployed to households and businesses—where it became, among many other uses, an empowerment device for people with fine-motor disabilities and kids who haven’t learned to tie shoes
  • A medical practice couldn’t eliminate the long wait to see a doctor, but got rid of patient frustration by providing not just a pager but a coffee shop gift card.

Now, turn your attention to our best engineer: nature. Other human beings have used “biomimicry” to create engineering breakthroughs such as these:

  • Concrete that sequesters CO2 rather than emits more of it (Bank of America did a building this way, and the exhaust air was three times as clean as the intake air)
  • Altered wind patterns through urban rooftops, modeled after the reverse- hydraulics of an Indian forest
  • Artificial leaves that—just as real leaves do—convert sunlight to energy far more efficiently, and using far less expensive inputs, than today’s solar panels
  • A robot hand with more agility and dexterity, because it was inspired by cockroaches’ spring-like feet
  • Desalination systems that not only create drinking water from the sea at a fraction of the energy requirement, but can green the desert at the same time.
  • GeckSkinTM, an ultra-powerful adhesive developed at the University of Massachusetts after studying the way gecko lizards climb walls
  • The Biomimetic Office Building, whose designers encourage starting not with reality, but with the ideal, and then seeing how close they can come to it. They “found inspiration from spookfish, stone plants and brittlestars for daylighting; bird skulls, cuttlebone, sea urchins and giant amazon water lilies for structure; termites, penguin feathers and polar bear fur for environmental control; and mimosa leaves, beetle wings and hornbeam leaves for solar shading.”

Stay tuned next month for Part 3, addressing the final two questions:
How can I maximize impact and minimize friction/waste?
Am I counting ALL the Costs?

 
New on the Blog
 
Friends Who Want to Help

Are you anywhere near Santa Cruz? New Age/current events humorist Swami Bhaerman https://www.facebook.com/events/147971745782567/ I organized a gig for him here in Western Massachusetts a few years ago and he was hilarious.

No cost to listen to this year’s Global Oneness Day, October 24. The awesome speaker lineup includes Marianne Williamson, Jean Houston, Michael Lerner, Panache Desai, Matthew Fox, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Michael Beckwith, Marci Shimoff, and many others. Another superb event from Humanity’s Team.

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—The Storyteller’s Secret
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The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don’t by Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s, 2016)

I picked this book up expecting it to be a book about using storytelling to achieve a business purpose. It is that, but it’s so much more. It’s really a book on how to change the world through the power of telling the right story to the right people.

Sure, many of the sources are business leaders: Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Steve Jobs of Apple, Richard Branson of Virgin, John Mackey of Whole Foods, Paul Polman of Unilever, Elon Musk of Tesla, Kate Cole of Cinnabon, Sheryl Sandberg who taught us to “Lean In” (and yes, among those profiled who were known first as business leaders, white males dominate, as they do in the subset I listed here—I see this as a weakness in an otherwise strong book).

But many others we know first outside the business world and this list is far more diverse: activists like Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks; entertainers including Oprah Winfrey, Sting, Bruce Springsteen; and public figures who used their platform to create sweeping change: Pope Francis, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy. And numerous ordinary people who made a difference.

One of my favorite stories is about Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise. After an encounter with a boy in India who desperately wanted a pencil. He started a charity with just $25, and that charity has gone on to build and fund schools that have served 30,000 impoverished children.

Gallo’s format is to open each chapter with a story, often rooted in the protagonist’s difficult early years—and he suggests we open all our talks with a story. He has consciously chosen to present much of the material either through the seven-part Pixar formula for successful storytelling:

  1. Once there was a ______
  2. Every day he ______ (I think he could have said “he or she”)
  3. Until one day ______
  4. Because of that______
  5. Because of that ______(emphasis added)
  6. Until finally ______
  7. Ever since then ______

Or the three-part formula used by J.K. Rowling and others: Trigger/Transformation/Lesson

These are two of many storytelling tools Gallo shares with us to help us amplify our own message by telling it more effectively. Some are common knowledge if you read many books on speaking, such as the vastly stronger appeal of emotional connection over a recital of facts. But some were new to me, such as the biological research that shows why this is so, and the conclusion that if your story is going to succeed, 65 percent or more of the content needs to hit the emotions. He looks at why such devices as analogy and repetition have so much resonance for us (because they turn the content into something more emotive), why so many stories follow “the rule of threes,” and how to develop a “success-destiny mindset.” (Note that the previous sentence is an example of the rule of threes.)

Successful stories involve the protagonist overcoming obstacles, and often require a villain. Every hero needs a “worthy adversary.”

And all these techniques have a goal of moving the listener or reader—he uses the word “transporting.” When you transport your audience, you have the chance to change their point of view.

I’m going to play with that insight myself. Not all of my talks have villains right now, and I am going to experiment with whether adding them makes the speech demonstrably stronger. This might be a challenge in my “Making Green Sexy” speech, where the closest thing to a villain is the abstract notion that green products and services have to be boring. While it’s not a human villain, “Impossible is a Dare” does have two opponents: apathy and disempowerment—but even that may not be clear-cut and personal enough. Reading this book caused me to put up a new speech topic that starts with a very clear villain: the stranger who grabbed me on the street and raped me when I was 11. And that is right there in the talk title: “From Child-Rape Survivor to Champion of Social Change: A Personal Journey.” We’ll see what kind of interest it attracts (and meanwhile, I welcome your feedback on this idea).

Sometimes, great storytellers harness behavior that diverges sharply from the proper and expected. Great storytellers harness our discomfort and break us out of our patterns—like the time Bill Gates, discussing malaria deaths, unleashed actual mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, let me share a few insights (there are far more than I can include here):

  • In cultures with a rich storytelling tradition, the approach is multimodal: including gesture, tone, etc.
  • Learn passion from Steve Jobs’ question, “what makes your heart sing?”
  • Adversity and failure become empowering when we learn from them
  • Storytelling creates a bond that Gallo calls “neural coupling” between teller and listener
  • Stories take complex subjects and convey them in manageable chunks—especially when told in accessible language
  • Stories of hardship and failure say “I’m just like you”; they see themselves as able to do what you’ve done—but never let yourself be defined by those failures
  • Often, the business storytelling successes—and the business successes they lead to—are also driven by a need to change the world: “We’re not retailers with a mission, we’re missionaries who retail,” as John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, put it—or, in the words of Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, “we exist to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel”
  • Visuals do enormous work in helping us retain a message, boosting recall from 10 percent all the way up to 65—but never get so dependent on your slides that you can’t deliver without them

Gallo ends the book with an awesome quote from Walt Disney: Storytellers “instill hope again, and again, and again.”
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 24 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 
 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, July 2017

12 Jul, 2017  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, July 2017
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This Month’s Tip: 4 Questions to Create Eco-Friendly Transformation, Part 1
Stumbling across this article on bicycle-powered-everythings (bicimaquinas) in Guatemala—grain mills, water pumps, nut-shellers, blenders, and more—I’m reminded once again of key questions to ask if you want to spark innovation while keeping an eco-friendly focus on using fewer resources.

1. How Can I Best Accomplish the End Result?

Too often, we focus on the tool: asking questions like “how do I get a new tractor?” But what is a tool? It’s a means of accomplishing a task! So the real focus should be on the task: “How can I get this done?” Asking “how can I get harvestable plants” might lead to plowing with draft animals—or to no-till farming techniques.

Green entrepreneurs (or frugal ones) refine that question. It morphs into “How can I accomplish this with the fewest resources?” Money and time are resources. So are raw materials, energy, water, plant seeds, animals, and so forth.

The people at Maya Pedal, the organization profiled in the bicimaquina article, understood this. They looked around and realized there were a lot of junk bikes out there that could still do plenty of useful work, just not as transportation. They’ve come up with 19 different models so far.

Bicycle technology is cheap, accessible, understandable, and versatile. In fact, my latest book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World mentions a number of creative bike technology uses, even including a bike-powered trash hauling company. I also know of a fitness center that harnesses the energy of their bike-pumping clients to light the room.

This blender is one of 19 different types of bicimaquinas—bike-powered equipment—developed by Maya Pedal in San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala

We can ask this question in many situations—and it creates abundance. Asking “how can I power my electronic devices easily and cheaply without negative environmental consequences” might lead to developing something like the amazing Blue Freedom frisbee-sized hydroelectric plant (no dam required).

Back in 1985, when laser printers were retailing for $7000 and I had only a dot matrix, I asked myself how I could offer laser quality to my clients without spending that kind of money. That led me first to rent time on a nearby laser printer for a dollar a page, and later—when I spotted a remaindered model for $2500—to organize a co-op of four local business owners who chipped in $700 each to buy the printer and a sturdy stand for that very heavy machine. Since I organized the co-op, the printer lived in my office.

Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, asked himself how to build a really energy-efficient house that could fund the energy improvements out of capital savings. All the way back in 1983, he built a near-net-zero-energy luxury home that didn’t need a furnace or an air conditioner (in the snowbelt outside Aspen, Colorado, where the biggest industry is skiing). I have a detailed study of Lovins’ work in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, by the way—including the energy retrofit of the Empire State Building that saves $4.4 million per year in that building’s energy bills.

We have to learn to be clear about what our end goal really is. Booking a hotel is not an end goal. Phrasing the question as “where will I stay when I travel?” opens up options like homestay organizations. Even money is not an end goal. Money has near-zero intrinsic value: the paper and ink used to create it. Money’s value is in the ability to exchange for goods and services. Whole economies have been built on other types of exchange, such as barter and even gifting.

(continued next month)
New on the Blog
What I Told Seth [Godin] About Seeing the Journey’s End
Hear and Meet Shel
Another fantastic interview, this time on Leverage Masters with Jack Humphrey and Gina Gaudio-Graves. On my interviews page, I’ve identified nine different attention points in this interview, including a surprising parallel between Bill Gates and the most successful industrialists of more than 100 years earlier.

Also, I’ve put a link to the in-depth written interview with me on Forbes.com.

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/

Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—Building the New American Economy
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Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable, by Jeffrey D. Sachs

At this year’s Book Expo (the largest US trade event in the book publishing world), Building the New American Economy was one of only two books I saw that reflected the results of the 2016 US election. I sought out Sachs’s signing and picked up a copy. Published in February (by Columbia, where Sachs teaches), this book specifically sets out to influence policy in the new administration.

Based heavily in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals adopted by all 193 member countries including the US, it lays out a sustainable blueprint for the promised infrastructure rebuild and warns of the dangers of focusing on the dead end of fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the new president has chosen a path in opposition to all the environmental and much of the human rights progress of the last several decades. He has embraced a mean-spirited and miserly ethic and shows no sign of caring about the rights of poor people at all, let alone protecting them in environmentally sustainable ways. And his stated infrastructure plans revolve around environmentally destructive and economically unsound support of heavily polluting industries such as non-renewable energy.

Is Sachs is spitting into the wind, at least as far as getting the government to listen to him? Am I with my own Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World? No—because these and similar books have many purposes besides directly influencing government. In the activist community, there’s an old and very relevant saying: “If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.” If this book helps the people to lead and the government to eventually follow, it’s doing good work.

Sachs lays out a very solid framework for understanding some of the issues, and as an Ivy League economist, backs up everything with solid numbers and sharp analysis. It’s a shortish book—just 121 pages in the main text—and much easier to read than much of what comes out of academia. Spend a few hours with it.

The last several chapters focus on ambitious solutions. A few of the goals he promotes:

  • Harnessing the high-level brain power of America’s universities, think tanks, businesses—and yes, governments—to create solutions for seemingly intractable problems. He notes that government has contributed to many technical breakthroughs, from the polio vaccine to the Internet, and that these created multiple new industries that create enormous economic growth and far outstrip occasional failures such as Solyndra)(p. 91).
  • Long-term thinking that goes well beyond the classic first 100 days of a new administration (pp. 102-104).
  • A six-step process to restore trust in the US political process (pp. 109-111)—including a wonderfully ambitious program to reduce income inequality while funding services that people actually want.
  • “Making America great again” through great goals. Just as JFK set goals to reach the moon, end racial inequality, and sign a nuclear test ban agreement with the USSR, we need to end our slide to the bottom in such areas as cutting the poverty rate from 17 to 8.5 percent (Denmark’s is 6 percent)…slashing obesity from 36 percent of the population down to 10 percent (Japan’s is 3 percent), and reducing the rate of incarceration from 716 per 100,000 to 100 (Scandinavia ranges from 65 to 75 per 100,000). “None of the goals outlined is utopian or out of reach.” (pp. 113-119). Alongside these mega-goals, he suggests we upgrade our broadband, rail transit, genome research, and several other areas where the lack of government spending has caused us to fall out of leadership—and behind many other countries (pp. 13-16).
He has some excellent ideas on where to find the funding and how to fix our debt crisis, too.

But Sachs does endorse one set of recommendations that I strongly disagree with: he’s a fan of advanced-design nuclear power. I am an ardent opponent of nuclear. I’ve written an entire book on why nuclear power is a dreadful technology that should be abandoned (as several countries have done or are in the process of doing).

My reasons:

  1. It’s not nearly as carbon-friendly as some environmentalists claim
  2. It’s an economic disaster
  3. The consequences of an accident, or even of improper waste storage (over the 220,000 years it has to be totally isolated from the environment) are horrific; the area around Chernobyl is still not habitable after 31 years, and may not be for centuries
  4. We don’t need it—we have plenty of safer, cleaner options
If you’d like to know more, I’m happy to send you the update to my nuke book that I wrote for a Japanese publisher, post-Fukushima. It’s only 14 pages and it goes through a number of arguments. No opt-in required and you have my permission to share the document as long as you don’t change anything. To get your copy, please visit https://greenandprofitable.com/download-the-post-fukushima-expose-of-nuclear-power/ and click on the link.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 24 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Connect with Shel


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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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

The Clean and Green Club, June 2017

8 Jun, 2017  No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2017
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This Month’s Tip: Marketing Your Ideas Is 24/7
A famous copywriter known for his grumpy persona posted on Facebook his unhappiness with people who post pictures of their meals. He got an earful from foodies, of course.

But I responded as a marketer. I want people to experience more delicious meals made with local organic ingredients, and by the way, without meat. I’ve been vegetarian for 43 years and see vegetarianism—particularly when based in local, organic foods—as one of the easiest ways to slash your carbon footprint. I don’t preach about it, but I remind myself constantly of Buckminster Fuller’s quote, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This was my comment on his Facebook post:

Here’s why I do it. A lot of my work as a marketer is to foster ideas that make the world better—like the idea that eating locally grown organic foods can be appetizing. I carry these ideas beyond my paid work and see a well-photographed plate with a tasty-sounding description as a part of my activism that uses my marketing skills. I’m selling the sizzle, so to speak. And interestingly enough, many of my food posts get high engagement. It’s not uncommon to get 20 or 30 likes and several comments from people far away wishing they could come share my food. It’s also a vicarious pleasure for many people, just like sharing travel pictures. And finally, since the caricature of social media is the boring “what I had for breakfast” tweet, I want to prove that it’s possible to talk about what you’re eating in an attractive, even seductive manner. But I find Facebook a much better platform that Twitter. Need more room than 140.

Why did I post this, really? Because I am always looking for ways to put my ideas in front of new audiences. On some level, I’m a marketer every waking moment. And I hope you are too.

Marketing can be fun. And we can all learn from each other.

Here are a few examples of my foodie Facebook posts. Let me “focus group” you: do you find these capture your interest? Do they make you want to explore new foods? Am I succeeding as a spokesperson for this idea? Please share on the Comments page and we can all learn from this.

I’ll start with one that contained eight pictures (including the three just below). Obviously, some of the text refers to pics of the garden harvest that I’m not including here.
 

Who could believe that all these frost-sensitive veggies (1st pic) were still in my garden on October 24? Even a tiny (but absolutely delicious) zucchini. It’s supposed to go down to 34°F tonight, so I harvested everything fragile. In the harvest pic, you can see some of the beans have speckled pods. Those pods were too tough to eat, but the beans inside were great (2nd pic). 3rd pic is probably the last near-100% from-our-garden dish of the year (except I cheated with a bit of organic local shallot grown three miles up the road). Beans in pods, beans removed from the tough pods, tomatoes harvested green last week and now finally ripe, and that itsy-bitsy green non-polka-dot zucchini (I’m dating myself, I know—who gets the reference?) Served it with (local organic) sweet potato and organic (nonlocal) lentil tacos and a green salad, shown here when it was all still from Next Barn or our garden. Later, I added olives and hazelnuts. And while I was waiting for Dina to come home, I sliced up and began drying our remaining supply of home-grown jalapeños, most of which actually got to ripen and turn red on the vine. The ones I picked today were green. #locavore
 

Another great #locavore dinner: frozen corn and zucchini with dried tomatoes, local cheddar cheese, and salsa; sweet potato, tot soi, shallots, garlic, and ginger in peanut sauce; spinach-arugula-carrot salad with goat gouda, local brie, sunflower seeds, local home-roasted squash seeds flavored with cayenne and salt, and local apple. All the veggies and fruits other than what was in the salsa were local and organic. The zucchini, tomatoes, butternut squash were from our own garden. Two of the three cheeses were local. The peanut butter was locally ground but not locally grown. I don’t think anyone does peanuts around here. But there is a farm that does local organic ginger, and we buy it exclusively.
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Hear and Meet Shel
Proud to be a speaker at Marc Guberti’s Content Marketing Success Summit, June 6-17. Other speakers include Ray Edwards, Ana Hoffman, and Jay Papasan. Take a look at the whole program at https://shelhorowitz.com/go/ContentMarketingSuccessSummit/ — or jump directly to the All-Access Pass s you can listen anytime from now to forever: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/ContentMarketingAllAccessPass/

The Web Bender, Jack Humphrey, and JV Queen Gina Gaudio-Graves
interview me on Leverage Masters Radio Tuesday, June 27, noon ET/ 9 a.m. PT. Listen by calling 646-478-0823, or listen live online at https://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/jvqueen , or later on replay at https://TheLeveragists.com

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book—Practical Bliss
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Practical Bliss: The Busy Person’s Guide to Happiness by Lisa Broesch-Weeks (InBliss, 2016)

Several times a year, an interviewer asks me, “what was the best decision you ever made?” I always answer, “the decision in my 20s to have a happy life.” That decision influenced everything else from that day forward. I believe it has been the key to my productivity, and the change I’ve made in the world.

Yes, it was a conscious decision. And yes, you can choose that path as well.

My client Lisa Broesch-Weeks can help you get there. She sent me a copy of her book, and as soon as I saw the title, I knew I’d like it. As a busy person, I love the idea of happiness for busy people, and I love the idea that bliss can be practical. She uses “bliss” and “happiness” pretty much interchangeably, seeing bliss as simply a more complete version of happiness (p. 96). I see more of a difference: bliss is more of a temporary high, while happiness, to me, is an ongoing state—but for this review, I’ll accept her near-merging of the terms.

Happy people. Lisa says, have figured out how to advance their purpose—which will be a verb, not a noun (pp. 44-48) and will be widely different for different people—with every part of their lives. And their purpose is not tied to serving one particular individual (p. 58).

They don’t beat themselves up striving for perfection; they’ve replaced stress-inducing words like “search” with power words like “explore” and “uncover” (p. 57). At work, they’re more productive and more engaged. Gallup put the cost of “employee disengagement” at $300 billion per year (p. 18), so there are dollar figures on that engagement. And at home, they enjoy better relationships, better health, and better brain function (pp. 21-24).

A lot of keeping happy is basic self-care: not letting yourself get overstressed…learning to say no to tasks that don’t advance your purpose or to people who deplete your energy…taking time for vacations, exercise, and other self-care (pp. 27-28) …and making space for your passions and pleasures. She reminds us that machines don’t run without time for recharging and maintenance, and neither do people (p. 26).

More stuff doesn’t create more bliss. And neither does running on the “hedonic hamster wheel” (p. 78—what an amazing metaphor!). And certainly you don’t get there by neglecting your passions in favor of something that feels “more important” but usually isn’t (p. 96). She points out that no one else is going to relieve you of your “optional obligations and stressors” and offers strategies to get rid of them in ways that don’t alienate others (p. 104).

Not all stress is avoidable, of course, and she provides help with managing the mandatory stress. As an example, she suggests worrying less about the need to appear constantly busy and more about how to add value (p. 111)—and shows some ways to shift focus from what’s wrong to what’s right, phrasing our goals and accomplishments in ways that the brain can hear and absorb, and act upon (pp. 119-126). Once concept I especially loved was the idea of gratitude for the wonderful future you expect, and not just for a present that may or may not seem fulfilling. She notes that this transformation helped her “put myself in situations where I would make it easier for success to find me” (p. 134). Time in gratitude, she says, is not an expense but an investment.

As the book wraps up, she advises on how to thrive despite happiness “haters” and how to forgive them (pp. 154-156). Though some of her advice may seem obvious, it can be hard to see from the outside, and always worth reminding ourselves: “I have what might be startling news. Living in bliss is a journey, much more than a destination…you may not know when you’ve arrived (p. 141, emphasis in original).

Note: Although I have done some consulting for Lisa, this review is not part of that arrangement and I am not being compensated for it.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 22 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

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