Category Archive for Expert Interview

The Clean and Green Club, May 2018

9 May, 2018  No Comment

 

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, May 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 3: Why You Should Think of Mother Nature as Your Chief Engineer (an excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

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

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

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Love Let Go
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Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel’s done more than 30 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
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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.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles

7 Jun, 2017  2 Comments

Rather Read Than Listen? Here’s an Excellent Interview in Forbes

Kare Anderson interviewed me at length on Forbes.com. Learn…

  • How I got published repeatedly in a newspaper whose viewpoints were the opposite of mine—as a teenager
  • The deeper backstory of the amazing Save the Mountain campaign that rescued an endangered mountain the “experts” had given up on—and did it fast!
  • How big companies from GE to Unilever have turned sustainability consciousness and social entrepreneurship into profit centers
  • How to save 99% of the wasted water in this everyday household process
  • What designers can learn by studying the natural world—and how that creates hope for the planet

Listen to the Five Best Interviews I’ve Ever Done

1. This Interview Breaks New Ground on Reimagining the World

I’ve begun to focus some good thinking and research on how the pandemic creates opportunities to skip “going back to normal” and instead remake the world we really want to see. I’m even looking for a publisher for an article I’d like to write, called Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing.

As I began this research, podcast host Tony D’Urso invited me to return to his show–so I got my first chance to see how some of this sounds out loud. Keeping in mind that this is in the very early stages, and that we spent the first ten minutes sharing some background, I’d love to know your thoughts. You might even get a credit in my next book!

You can listen (and read the transcript) at https://tonydurso.com/crisis-opportunities-now-with-shel-horowitz/ –and Tony would be grateful if you gave a quick kudo at ratethispodcast.com/tony . And here’s my list of takeaways from the call:

Shel’s personal backstory as a writer, marketer, and activist (Timings: 00 through 8:20):

  • How activism got me into marketing AND journalism in my teens
  • My start in journalism: a right-wing high school alternative newspaper gave 15-year-old left-wing me a platform–and ran my articles with disclaimers!
  • My first paid writing assignments, at $3 per hour–and my unusual motivation to write those articles quickly
  • The humble beginnings of the business I’ve run for more than 39 years
  • Why forming a successful group to block a large mountainside housing development proposal opened the door to the work I’ve done for the last 20 years, integrating profitability with environmental and social good

Shel’s motivation for activism on multiple issues, especially clean energy (8:20 through 10:33, 15:06-17:35):

  • Why clean energy has a much brighter future than even 20 years ago
  • How the energy-hogging Empire State Building was converted into one of the greenest buildings around–and how those improvements generated 33% return on investment
  • The cow-poop-powered green heating system in my antique farmhouse (built in 1743)

How we pivoted in 2020, and how we can make those pivots bigger and more long lasting to create a better world (17:40-24:38):

  • The opportunity COVID created to remake the world differently–including the newly global reach of formerly local events
  • How I got connected to a 16-year-old green entrepreneur on the other side of the country, which would never have happened pre-pandemic
  • Chances to explore entirely new careers, because your old career may not exist anymore
  • How we’ve often faced huge social shifts (the 1918 pandemic, when no one had Zoom and few people had a phone in their house; transition from horse to engine power; the vast disruption of the Internet) and risen to the challenge

What it means to be environmentally and socially responsible AND profitable (29:23-39:54):

  • Successful examples from clothing company Patagonia to a company that builds a ladder out of poverty using inexpensive solar LED lanterns
  • Cost savings in going green, including a different approach to manufacturing (and the technology we already have that will eventually make that possible at scale)–and how that could revolutionize medicine and other areas
  • How even a pizza shop could make a meaningful difference–with a youth training program that offers four distinct types of benefits around job and entrepreneurial skills, healthy eating, life skills, and more profit to the shop owner
  • How a house in the Colorado snowbelt went net-zero-energy–in 1984–and paid for all the improvements out of energy savings
  • How mindset changes possibility, including a magnificent quote from Muhammad Ali (I built my TEDx talk around this quote)–and how to frame the narrative to find out what actually is possible
  • What I’ve learned by posting a daily public gratitude journal

“Opportunities, ideas, are under every rock and tree” (44:34-48:00):

  • If you generate ten ideas a day), find two each month to explore
  • Our power is in our resilience and our inventiveness
  • The benefits of the conscious choice I made to have a happy life

Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World–and what my legacy might be (48:00-54:00):

  • How marketers benefit by finding an elastic market (like books)
  • Why Guerrillas should be quick and nimble
  • Marketing that leads to action–and action that makes the world better
  • The secret of turning customers into ambassadors
  • Why customer evangelism is one of the most profitable things a marketer can invest in–and how surprisingly easy it is to develop and harness that loyalty (easier for businesses with a higher purpose, by the way)

Tony’s summary of the call takeaways (54:00-57:12):

  • The necessity of getting good and getting fast
  • The power of a higher purpose: “sow good seeds and do good deeds”
  • When you see problems–brainstorming how things can work better–grab hold of your vision
  • Find ways you can pivot
  • Find 10 new ideas each day

2. Kymm Nelsen, host of Conscious Leadership Weekly: In just 51 minutes, we managed to cover:

  • My activist childhood beginning at age 3, including a 48-year boycott
  • The key mindset shift that I harnessed to build the movement that saved a mountain
  • Why problems like hunger, poverty war, and catastrophic climate change are actually solvable—and how to effectively motivate people to solve them
  • Three ways business can profit by solving those problems
  • How to avoid getting a stake pounded through the heart of your business after a customer service screw-up
  • How empowering your employees lowers your HR costs
  • Why lying about one thing can destroy all the hard-won goodwill you’ve built up in your business
  • The exciting new exponential-growth paradigm of “biological marketing”—and the engineering miracle of “biomimicry”
  • How to convince business people who think going green or running a conscious, social-change-focused business is “too hard”
  • A key mistake the green movement committed in the 1970s and 80s
  • The two simple changes I made that cut my paper use ~80 percent
  • The way one social enterprise addresses urban poverty, creates personal empowerment, and eliminates staffing shortages all at once
  • Why Ben & Jerry’s was able to carve out 40 percent market share in a market with hundreds of competitors
  • The surprising answer: what company sells more organic food than Whole Foods—and how you can use their marketing strategy to sell green and social change products to people who don’t even care about the issues
  • The almost net-zero-energy house built in the cold Colorado Rockies back in 1983—that doesn’t need a furnace, stays warm enough to grow bananas, and has a $5 monthly electric bill
  • How thinking about light bulbs differently could save some businesses up to $4 million
  • Finding and harnessing new product opportunities that never existed before: from a Frisbee-sized hydroelectric generator to small-space indoor apartment gardens

3. 6 Star Business with Aveline Clarke in Australia: Why Social Change DOESN’T Have to be a Sacrifice

Normally, I prepare my own summaries of podcast interviews, but this was mostly prepared by the show host. I’ve shortened it somewhat, and added a few of my own highlights in italic.

…We explore how to market differently to the different types of “green” consumers, ranging from deep greens who prioritize sustainability to non-greens who may not be as conscious of their environmental impact. Shel highlights companies… [that have] made substantial strides…

[B]rands such as Patagonia and Ben and Jerry’s have found success in promoting their environmentally-friendly products by catering to the deep green market. Shel also sheds light on companies like Cadbury and Hershey that were originally founded as social impact companies but have lost their way…

We delve into the intersection of doing the right thing and being a successful business, and how Shel’s own business has evolved over the years.

Shel’s expertise extends beyond marketing, and he provides actionable advice for businesses looking to integrate sustainability into their operations. He highlights the importance of addressing sustainability and regenerativity issues, as consumers increasingly choose products that make a positive impact…

Shel offers a free resource called “10 success and profitability secrets for businesses looking to do social and environmental good” on his website, https://GoingBeyondSustainability.com . He also offers affordable consultation services tailored to each business’s unique needs.

In addition to his wealth of knowledge, Shel shares his personal practices for finding joy and gratitude in life, such as his 1530-day gratitude journal and his passion for writing.

Here’s some highlights of our conversation…

    • The power of individual consumers, social change movements, and ordinary people to effect change
    • Changing the world is not a sacrifice if done with joy and gratitude
    • Going beyond traditional limits of excellence to a spiritual 110 percent
  • Cross-pollinating: finding solutions for one industry by looking at other industries—or at nature
    • Thinking of communities as organisms within a bioregion
    • Seeing businesses as allies in positive change who can benefit by addressing the world’s big problems
    • Giving advice to clients on marketing green and social change products and services
  • Kaizen (small improvements) versus Great Leaps

and much more…

Here are the links to listen to the episode:

Audio only with transcript: https://podcast.6star.business/1743080/13106695-profitable-sustainability-balancing-business-success-and-positive-impact-with-shell-horowitz/

Or video without transcript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mibStVs0MiY

4. The Spotlight with Tony Durso (2017)

  • 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
  • Brief history of the Guerrilla Marketing movement and how it works for social change
  • How an attitude of invincibility led to actual victory in a major grassroots campaign
  • My process for staying ahead of trends—and what I see as the next big trend after green
  • How going green got GE a 1250% ROI, saved NYC $6.5 billion, and created a $15 billion/year revenue stream for Walmart
  • How to sell green or socially conscious products and services to three different types of consumer markets—and a specific example of how this plays out
  • What my mother-in-law told me that revealed one of those markets
  • Why market share doesn’t matter for many businesses—and how that understanding led to profitable cooperation with other businesses from solopreneurs to Fortune 50 companies including Apple, IBM, and FedEx
  • Why you should see green as a built-in, not an add-on, and how that will increase profit
  • How changing out lightbulbs could save some businesses $4 million per year—and how you can get my $9.95 ebook on saving energy AND money as well as some other gifts including a 15-minute consult from me, at no charge
  • How to frame massive problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change as solvable—and how those solutions can create abundance for all by addressing multiple problems at once
  • The secret that let ordinary people like a seamstress, an electrician, and a housewife launch movements that changed the world—and how all of us can step from our ordinariness to create great impact

5. Covering some different ground was this interview with Jack Humphrey (and occasional help from Gina Gaudio-Graves) on Leverage Masters:

  • Why I am not daunted but INSPIRED by the “tough” challenges of getting business to meaningfully turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance
  • The surprising turnaround that graced the lives of people like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates (I could have named Warren Buffett as well)—and what that meant to the world
  • How to create a “possibility mindset”—in Jack’s words, changing “the insurmountable skyscraper” into something doable; thousands of companies have begun doing this
  • The power of being shocked into action
  • The surprise you can find on a rooftop eight floors above a South Bronx street—and how that affects not only the future of food but skill building and job creation for inner-city youth
  • The flip side of ASAP—you need both sides
  • How Ben & Jerry’s went viral long before social media, and won the ice cream wars
  • How to sell green products to a Hummer-driving climate denier
  • Why green is a lever to create deeper social change

More Interviews

Ian Peterman interviewed Shel on his Conscious Design podcast. Shel is not a designer, but had a lot to say on how design can be a tool of environmental and social justice.

I’ve gotten quite a bit of media coverage recently, though only the first two links are about green and social justice business practices. But hey, I’m eclectic ;-).

Share2Seed quotes me in a long piece about how Elon Musk has made it more OK to be a successful eco-entrepreneur https://medium.com/@Share2Seed/how-to-be-an-ecopreneur-and-get-paid-well-like-elon-musk-463a0e3eaed7

  • They seem like an interesting support venture for eco-businesses; after you read the article you might want to visit their home page.

Included in this roundup story about making seasonal businesses more sustainable. https://www.incfile.com/blog/how-to-make-seasonal-business-sustainable

Profiled in this article about how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

I presented a brief gallery talk on the stunning posthumous show of my stepfather, Michihiro Yoshida, a painter whose bright colors and surrealistic images earned him the title, “The Mythic Modernist.” His site is http://artbyyoshi.com, and the slide talk is at https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/3qKcWmG8nEb8FMYIHTpf8AVYILof-xfJtxP5MfxKEQegkkhcTlZwHCDbyGKxBuhH.-9D0QrXxeZDB4lZi Passcode: BtAUz?Y3 (the presentation starts at 2 minutes, eight seconds into the video).

My tips on traveling like a local lead off this article on traveling internationally for newbies: https://arreh.com/planning-a-trip-heres-what-you-need-to-know-10-pieces-of-advice-for-new-travelers/

My interview, How to Write a Book for Social Change, is live on Dan Janal’s Write Your Book in a Flash podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPUoVPp2yP4 . I had a short-term physical issue that day, which explains some of the weird pauses—but the information is really good, and because it’s focused on authors building movements, it’s significantly different material from many of my other interviews.

  • How books have ALREADY changed the world (with examples)
  • How to research to support the point of view you want people to adopt
  • How to leverage your book to widen the audience for your point of view
  • How self-publishing can give you leverage to get a traditional publisher
  • How to use YOUR book to create a movement

It’s worth noting that a lot of my social change consulting practice is book shepherding and book marketing for authors with socially conscious books. In other words, if you’re looking to get a change-the-world book done, published, and/or marketed, please get in touch: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/

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Profiled in this article about (of all things) how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

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Nice new print interview with Shel on Billion Success: https://billionsuccess.com/shel-horowitz/

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For his Western Mass Business Show, radio host Ira Bryck asked Shel to put together a panel. Shel reached into the activism world to pull in State Senator Jo Comerford (who was elected after a decades-long career at MoveOn and elsewhere) and to the green business world for Raj Pabari, a 16-year-old entrepreneur who has started multiple companies and has 16 employees.

Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdego4U3jSM&feature=youtu.be

  • Guests: Shel Horowitz, Going Beyond Sustainability, expert on/consultant to social entrepreneurship businesses and author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
  • Jo Comerford, Massachusetts State Senator and 30-year professional activist
  • Raj Pabari, 16-year-old CEO of Off Grid Technologies (a social enterprise and green business making device charges that can take many power sources)

Takeaways:

  • There is significant synergy among progressive business, activists, nonprofits, and government–different ways to get to similar results–and each of these sectors can learn lessons from the others
  • People will flock to a business associated with a social cause and conducting itself ethically and sustainability
  • But even bottom-line-driven companies can save and make a lot of money by doing the right thing–including the surprising identity of the company that doubled the organic foods market by selling to mainstream consumers
  • How Shel began to merge profitable business and social change
  • How Jo anticipated some of the worst aspects of the 2017-2021 federal government, and where she found hope–and what it’s like to speak on behalf of 160,000 constituents
  • How Raj is finding success as a social enterprise that goes well beyond the basics, and how he appeals to impact investors who cout environmental and social goals
  • How to talk to–and be heard by–“the other side”–in politics and in business
  • How Shel makes the self-interest argument to skeptical business owners and managers
  • How government can open doors to social and economic transformation

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Here’s my talk last month at the Kindness Matters Summit. The audio came out a bit rough, with some words getting chopped (and more ums/uhs/pauses than usual–I wasn’t feeling all that great)–but it’s worth the effort, because this is a really good introduction to social entrepreneurship through the lens of kindness and an emphasis on ordinary people succeeding despite the challenges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHXiTtJ5wiA&feature=youtu.be

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Quoted at some length in Playboy, of all places, on individual actions we can all take to avert climate catastrophe.

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Wide-ranging written interview on Fem Founder (I was very pleased that they would interview a man) about being a tiny startup, morphing my business multiple times, marketing challenges, the current work on strategic integration of profitability and social change–and even some insight into my lifestyle and my volunteer social justice/immigration justice/environmental activism outside of work. https://www.femfounder.co/femfounderstories/shel-horowitz-interview . If you prefer to read it on Medium, it’s also at https://medium.com/fem-founder/do-the-homework-to-make-sure-you-can-find-a-market-if-you-follow-your-heart-with-shel-horowitz-f27efb35ac82 . Note that at this time, I am not pursuing the activist clearing house idea that the interview refers to. I have something more exciting that I’ll reveal to you down the road.

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The 22-minute Climate Change with Scott Amyx interview I taped several weeks ago is now live: https://scottamyx.com/2020/08/31/interview-with-shel-horowitz-green-transformative-expert/ We discussed some very different ideas about marketing, the importance of environmental and social commitment to profitability, and more.

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Insight-packed five-minute interview by Mitchell Levy https://www.thoughtleaderlife.com/thoughtleaderlife/thought-leader-life-455-guest-shel-horowitz/

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Back in March 2020, I responded to a reporter query on corporate social responsibility (one of my fortes). I received a note from the reporter that the story was published late last month, and I was very pleased with the way it came out. I talk about one of my favorite examples, a company that addresses poverty, the environment, and quality of life all at once, through solar LED lights. And I enjoyed reading the examples other experts provided, too: https://blog.submittable.com/csr-examples/

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Also quoted in some depth on whether socially conscious advertising is a good thing. Not surprisingly I argue that it is, and back up my claim with facts: https://www.verywellmind.com/does-socially-conscious-advertising-work-4847116

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Mirko Galassi interviews Shel on the Italian channel Webenjoy.net:

  • My new, unusual and very green heating system (in a house built in 1743, BTW)
  • How to market green products to nongreen audiences, and how service businesses can focus on the green market
  • Why it makes sense to get your current clients onto your marketing team
  • My observations on Italy’s steps toward a greener society (I happened to be there just a few weeks before this interview)
  • What to compete on instead of price
  • Two surprising suggestions on dealing with aggressive competitors
  • How Walmart doubled the US market for organic foods
  • My green design challenge to Apple

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Willie Crawford interviewed me last summer and I missed the message where he told me the interview was posted. This is what I’m posting on my interview page about it (yeah, I recognize that posting in the third person is odd on Facebook, but that’s why):

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/williecrawford/2018/08/17/profiting-from-taking-care-of-yourself-and-making-a-real-difference-in-the-world-1

My segment starts at 31:11, and we covered a LOT of ground:

  • How an “impossible” movement not only won, but changed the culture of Shel’s town
  • How that success inspired Shel to go much bigger–eventually developing strategies to tackle problems as big as hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change
  • Why Shel says sustainability is not enough–and what we need instead
  • What Shel thinks the best AND worst outcomes of doing this work will be, and how those possibilities affect his legacy
  • The bigger impact of Ben & Jerry’s long-time push for socially responsible business–and a hat-tip to a social responsibility business pioneer of nearly 200 years ago (still in business today)
  • The reasons why a “pure capitalism, non-tree-hugger” retail giant has become a leader in green business
  • How even a pizza shop owner could pilot a “social responsibility octopus” [I don’t use that term in the interview, just came up with it now] with gains in skill-building among unemployed youth, job creation, organic food marketing, and more–at close to zero cost and with plenty of opportunity to monetize
  • How ordinary people like a seamstress or an shipyard electrician can change the world (with famous examples)
  • Where to find an inexpensive road map for achieving social change through profitable business
  • A successful model for marketing socially responsible products to people at the very bottom of the ladder, where they can afford to buy, and the company can be economically successful
  • The surprising positive society-wide outcomes of a simple plumbing fix
  • Where we can turn to to solve climate problems when the government is hostile
  • The low-hanging fruit that can cut energy use in the US 50 to 75 percent within just a couple of years

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I’m the final of 22 positive-thinking experts featured here: https://upjourney.com/how-to-get-rid-of-negative-thoughts

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Mira Rubin interview with Shel Horowitz on the Sustainability Now podcast

The power of one person making a difference—and the corollary power of thinking big: three examples everyone has heard of but maybe haven’t thought about what that really means

  • How being annoyed by environmentalists got me to start the movement that saved a mountain—and how saving that mountain led me to think so much bigger
  • Five benefits in being a socially and environmentally active company (#3 is particularly exciting)—and three reasons why those companies have better employees
  • How one of the most profit-driven retailers in the world created a $15 billion/year mainstream market for organic food
  • Why the “bottom of the pyramid” represents a vast economic opportunity—and how to approach it the right way
  • How a super-successful company succeeds by hiring ex-addicts, ex-mental patients, and other “unemployables”
  • My superpower, according to Mira—and tips to make it work in your own business
  • Why you NEVER want to “we, we, we all the way home”
  • What money really is—and how to gain its advantages even if you don’t have a lot of it
  • The secret to turning your customers into active ambassadors for your company
  • Why values matter when you want to establish value
  • The difference between prosperity and abundance—and how gratitude fits in
  • How I switched from heating with oil to heating with cow poop and food waste
  • Why I continue to be optimistic about reversing climate change, despite the gloomy predictions

Alex Wise– Sea Change Radio

  • How we can motivate people with something better than guilt and shame
  • The secret weapon the general public has to create BIG change in the business world
  • The long history of social change movements just in the past 60 years, and some of the miracles they’ve accomplished
  • How Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia used social and environmental concern to beat the odds
  • The shocking demographic that potentially could become the biggest consumer of green products and services
  • How to tell real green commitments from greenwashing

Carole Murphy—HeartStock Radio

  • How my childhood (and my mother) shaped the work I do now, and how I got past my urban roots
  • The intertwined shifts in society that give me hope even in troubled times
  • How activism led directly to my marketing career, starting at age 15—and the marketing lessons I learned at that early age, including targeting a message to the market
  • Who’s the leader in selling green products? The answer might shock you
  • How each of us, as consumers, can make a difference one interaction at a time

Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy

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

Profitability Revolution with Ruth King

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

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

Hear Shel on Game Changers with Lisa Faulkner, https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/5334235

  • The Biblical command that inspires Shel to be an agent of change
  • How to make huge goals manageable and solvable
  • How changing a community’s mindset led to a solution path for solving humanity’s biggest problems
  • How hiring “unemployables” created multiple benefits for the company and the community
  • How America’s most famous skyscraper got a 33% return on its clean energy investment

Stephanie Chandler interviewed me on Writing to Create Social Change:

  • Three books (among hundreds) from three centuries that changed the world
  • How I started writing for social change—as a 15-year-old high school student
  • How my passion for the environment—and a bizarre coincidence—led me to become a published author at age 23
  • Why I STOPPED freelancing for magazines and newspapers
  • How I get top-tier endorsers and co-authors for my books
  • What happened when a subsidy publisher DEMANDED to publish my book
  • How social change got me a gig as a TEDx speaker

The debut of my brand new talk, How Social Entrepreneurs Can Thrive in a Trumpian World, was a webinar put on by Green America (my fourth for them). Catch the replay at https://youtu.be/GderLF6vn0s

Karina Crooks interviews me on the Business Code Podcast: :

  • What mangrove trees can teach engineers
  • Why “coopetition” works
  • What will social entrepreneurship look like 20 years from now
  • How a seamstress and an electrician separately changed the world, three decades apart
  • How to create a successful mass movement

Brief but powerful interview on JenningsWire—a great lesson in how to make the most of less than nine minutes.

Ajay Prasad and I chat on Founder’s Corner. He mentors me about pricing, ROI, and other MBA-type business concerns, while I educate him on green business and the green/social entrepreneurship market—including three different types of customers for green products and services and the surprising answers to questions like 1) what’s the largest segment of customers for green products? And 2) what company sells more organic products than Whole Foods?

Positive Phil Podcast. We start with a detailed example of the types of products that can create social betterment (reducing poverty, creating jobs), environmental/health/safety improvement (eliminating toxic fumes and a major fire hazard), and make a nice profit all at once. Then several examples of how we can improve our engineering and design by studying nature. We discuss the word “Transformpreneur” (which I use to describe myself)…how solar can be workable for renters and for people who live in cloudy areas…how to replace boring press releases with fascinating ones…a company that has thrived by employing “unemployables”—and what I love about the work I do and the life I lead.

Brand with Jenna—Brave Entrepreneur Podcast: (Episode 90):

  • How you can create a *profitable* business that can change the world
  • The teamwork involved in building a successful movement
  • Learning to think long-term—even through a 10-year campaign

Profits and Prana with Ysmay Walsh:

  • Ordinary people joining with others to change the world
  • How we saved our local mountain
  • Why Ben & Jerry’s is so successful (hint: it has a lot to do with their corporate social conscience)
  • Exploring the idea of an international force of yoga teacher serving as conflict mediators

Smart Hustle Podcast with Ramon Ray:

  • Why every business can benefit by introducing and marketing products and services that address threats like hunger, poverty, war and climate change
  • Why social entrepreneurship goes deeper than philanthropy
  • How even solopreneurs can make a difference

Reaching the Finish Line—Kallen Diggs

Unlike most interviews I do, this one focused on book publishing and not on the core message that business can profit by solving our biggest problems.

  • What I did wrong on my first self-published marketing book (and how I can save you from doing the same)
  • Why I don’t worry about low-volume book sales—and what I focus on instead
  • How to keep a book going long beyond its expected shelf life
  • How an ugly, unknown newsletter I almost didn’t respond to sold 90 books for me

Five-minute interview on Jennings Wire: “How Ordinary People Can Do The Extraordinary” How ordinary people start and lead movements—and how Shel saved a mountain in his own town.

Mike Schwager: 
How I got started in social/environmental change at age 3 and returned to it (for life) at age 12. Dialog with Jack Nadel, 92-year-old entrepreneur with a green product line. The easiest ways a business can go green—and the real 7-figure savings that are possible when counting all the costs. Why market share doesn’t matter, and how to partner with competitors

Western Massachusetts Business Show with Ira Bryck,  Profiles of several companies that were founded to good in the world. Green companies as price leaders. How to get a copy of my $9.95 ebook, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle at no cost.

Bill Newman—WHMP:  (segment starts at 28:28): A quick, intense 11-minute trip through the highlights of my work

Ask those Branding Guys:  (segment starts at 9:23)

Barry Moltz:  (segment starts at 15:12)

Todd Schinck, Intrepid Now, with a nice emphasis on the power of ordinary people to change the world  (segment starts at 2:28)

JV Crum, Conscious Millionaire, second interview: We cover my first activist moment at age 3, how I helped save a mountain, the next big environmental issue, and how a simple vow in my 20s changed my life  (segment starts at 3:25)

Jill Buck, Go Green Radio:  The difference between socially responsible and socially transformative businesses, impact of a social agenda on employees, urban farming, new energy technologies…and a cool case study of how a dog groomer could green up. (segment starts at 0:52)

Kristie Notto, Be Legendary: The perfect example of a business that addresses social issues, the hidden revenue model I showed a social entrepreneur, how a famous gourmet food company went head-to-head with a much larger competitor, what we can learn about engineering from nature, and why wars are solvable

Leon Jay, SocialpreneurTV  (you’ll get to see what I look like when I’m overdue for a haircut/beard trim—a rare glimpse at Shaggy Shel)

Two-part interview on Steve Sapowksy’s excellent EcoWarrior Radio podcast:  (Listen to Part 1 before Part 2, of course)

The first of two excellent shows on Conscious Millionaire 

 

Marcia Yudkin, Expert Interview

5 Jul, 2010  No Comment

Marcia Yudkin, 20+-year marketing veteran and widely published author who proves you can be an introvert, be extremely ethical, and still be a major marketing guru.

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Jeff Brown, RideBuzz.org: Expert Audio Interview, June 2010

7 Jun, 2010  No Comment

Jeff Brown, founder of RideBuzz.org: a web-based organization to promote and facilitate ridesharing/carpooling, thus reducing carbon footprint and use of fossil fuels, easing traffic congestion, and saving its users money. Jeff talks about how and why he started this organization in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, how it’s benefiting its users, and how others might replicate this idea elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

May Expert Interview: Alicia Polak, CEO of Khaya Cookies

18 May, 2010  No Comment

Alicia Polak, CEO of Khaya Cookies in South Africa. Former Wall Streeter who gave it up to provide jobs making organic cookies in the townships. Focus on economic development and job creation for women in marginalized communities, how a global company looks at sustainability/how to be Green when you’re in an import business, keeping costs down with partnerships, and organic health benefits.

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April Expert Call: Mark Joyner on Social Change

15 Apr, 2010  No Comment

Mark Joyner is well-known as an Internet marketing pioneer and multiple best-selling author of such books as The Great Formula (which includes an essay by me), Simpleology, and Integration Marketing. What’s less known is his strong commitment to making the world better. In this exclusive interview, Shel got him to open up and discuss that hidden but very important side of his marketing career.

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Expert Interview: Hazel Henderson

23 Mar, 2010  No Comment

This month’s Expert Interview is with Hazel Henderson, an economist and citizen activist who has taken an active role in creating a Greener, more ethical business community. Her books range from the landmark Creating Alternative Futures in the 1970s through the more recent (and wonderful) Ethical Markets, which I reviewed about a year ago. You won’t want to miss this (originally recorded for my Principled Profit radio show). Read the rest of this entry »