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Last month, I spent a week in central Ecuador, and came back with lots of observations to share, in no particular order:

• The oil industry is a major player in Ecuador’s economy, and particularly noticeable way up in the mountains. However, most (but not all) of the installations we passed were surprisingly unobtrusive—actually less noticeable than in the American Southwest.
• Tourism is another major industry, but Ecuador’s tourist infrastructure is not nearly as developed as, say, Costa Rica’s. To me, it felt more authentic and not particularly difficult to navigate.
• Roses have also become a significant industry, exporting enormous quantities to the US and Europe—because in Ecuador, greenhouses can be built of cheap plastic tarps instead of expensive glass.
• It only costs 25 cents to ride public transit in Quito, and the bus goes pretty much everywhere (Ecuador uses US money); not surprisingly, public transit is heavily used.
• A few major transit lines in Quito are a cross between buses and trains. They run in their own roadbed, coupled together, with raised-platform stations with turnstiles—but on rubber tires, and probably a lot cheaper to build than rail.
• US fast-food chains are present but fairly minimal in Quito—and we didn’t see them at all in the dozens of smaller cities and remote villages we went through.
• Many of the various Quichua communities still retain strong cultural identity. Lots of people speak at least one Quichua dialect, many people wear traditional dress, and traditions such as making fermented drinks out of yucca, hunting with blow-gun and darts, or living in grass huts are still common. While not entirely self-contained, many of the rural Quichua villages are fairly self-sufficient—but some market towns attract people from many different communities. And the cultures are very different in the high Andes versus the low-lying rainforests. We heard they were different again in the coastal areas, but we didn’t visit those sections.
• Historic preservation is huge in Quito, with much of the Old Town dating from the 16th through 18th centuries, and those buildings still in active use (many belonging either to the government or to the church). Nearby, the national museum has incredible treasures from the precolonial period. However, urban sprawl is also huge, complete with traffic issues.
• Many villages have a specialty. We visited a textile town, a leather town, a rose-growing valley in the mountains, a town known for “vegetable ivory” (crafts made of from palm-hearts), etc.
• At least in the resort hotels our tour visited in out-of-the-way places, there’s surprisingly strong environmental awareness. Locally sourced food, organic gardens, and recycling programs were common, and some of the places we stayed in used very unobtrusive solar hot water—even though we were really in the middle of nowhere (in one place, accessible only by boat).

A lull in my speaking calendar at the moment (you can help with that and earn a very generous commission, by the way).

Malaprop’s Books, Asheville, NC, March 5 (I believe at 7). If the technology works out, I will be a remote panelist (the other panelists live in the store) at a program on Conscious Capitalism. Contact the store for details.

I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

My Name’s On the Cover of This One

This fall, I completely rewrote a book for my delightful client Ana Weber-Haber, one of the happiest and most optimistic people I’ve ever met. The book, The Money Flow, just published by Morgan James, extracts lessons for you from her own dramatic climb out of deep poverty, moving from Romania to Israel as a child to start over, and then again to the US. In both cases, she went from penniless immigrant to wildly successful, making tons of money for herself and her various employers along the way. Since English is Ana’s fourth language, I made it into a strong piece of writing as well as a bunch of great ideas and lessons—while keeping the exuberant personality that makes her work so much fun to read (and her such a joy to work with). And I’m on the cover as “with Shel Horowitz.” The book is available for the deep-discounted price of $11.41 (bn.com) or $11.53 (amazon) on February 26. Expect a special mailing from me around February 24, telling you more about the book and reminding you to buy it on her day.

You might remember the name Marilyn Jenett—I’ve mentioned her in these pages before. She’s the renowned prosperity teacher I’ve been studying with and in that time, I’ve manifested some amazing things—including the single most lucrative project I’ve ever worked on. Marilyn has agreed to share one of her powerful teaching calls with you that has been changing lives around the world. This is worth more attention than just a blurb in my newsletter—so keep your eyes open for all the details in a special e-mail around March 10.

Up close and personal with my celebrated co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay is offering his famous intimate 21-hour intensive at his lovely Florida home, March 18-20. Only 10 people will be allowed in. https://3bl.me/ysqdva . Jay describes it as “a three-day face-to-face training personally conducted by me in our home here on a lake just northeast of Orlando, Florida. It’s intense because it’s from noon till 7 pm three days in a row-21 hours with lots of hands-on, devoted to making you a true guerrilla marketer.” If you’re a student, you can get a discount!

Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones (Nation Books, 2012)

The 99% can embrace a deeper patriotism…in Dr. King’s words, “to make real the promises of democracy.” In essence, we are standing up for the supreme patriotic principle: “liberty and justice for all.”

And many of us take that “for all” part pretty seriously. We don’t mean “liberty and justice for all,” except for those lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those immigrants or those Muslims. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those women. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the Appalachians and rural poor. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the elderly or the disabled. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the afflicted, addicted, or convicted. When we say “liberty and justice for all,” we really mean it. That kind of principled stand is evidence of a deep patriotism.

Deep patriots don’t just sing the song, “America the Beautiful,” and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty—from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters, and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots…defend the principles upon which [the Statue of Liberty] was founded—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who year to breathe free.”

…Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to live in neighborhoods in which, when they smell smoke, they can’t find a firehouse for twenty miles—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to see their grandchildren going to schools with forty kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to have to wait seven minutes—or fifteen minutes—for someone to pick up the phone when they call 911…Deep patriots don’t just fight against our opponents. We fight for them, too. (pp. 228-230, emphasis in original)

Van Jones has been one of my heroes for about ten years now. He’s one of the very few able to bridge the gap between liberal white suburban environmentalists and inner-city low-income people of color, and he’s also an amazingly effective organizer who has started four effective and successful national progressive/environmental organizations: the Ella Baker Center, Color of Change, Green for All, and his current baby, Rebuild the Dream. He’s also an excellent speaker; I’ve heard him several times. And he’s one of the best among progressives at framing an issue—creating the memes, the rhetoric, and the sound bites that break through the clutter and get us to pay attention, which has not been a strength of progressives in this country for many years (despite the best efforts of George Lakoff, who is mentioned three times in the index).

And even a law degree from Yale couldn’t drum the people’s touch out of Jones. Here is a man who can talk to labor unionists, or even Tea Partiers, in language they can relate to. President Obama made a terrible mistake when he let the right-wing crackpots drive Jones out of his position as green jobs guy in the White House.

Jones’ earlier (bestselling) book, The Green Collar Economy, focused on the contribution green jobs can make to both our economy and our ecology (both words stemming from the same Greek root, by the way).

This newer book looks at that, but as part of a much larger picture. Jones analyzes four movements of the past five years—two from the center, one from the right, one from the left: the 2008 Obama campaign, the early years of the Obama administration, the Tea Party, and Occupy—and a fifth: the “99% 2.0” movement he’d like to help create. In each, he looks at who is cast as hero and villain, what the movement sees as a threat, and what kind of vision it can claim.

The 2.0 organizing will be based on a crowdsourced 10-point “Contract for the American Dream,” three core principles of the “next American economy,” and five constituencies that have been marginalized but (Jones believes) could be mobilized:

Contract for the American Dream:
1. Invest in America’s infrastructure (including broadband)
2. Create “21st Century” (green) jobs
3. Invest in public education
4. Provide Medicare for everyone
5. Pay living wages
6. Keep Social Security secure
7. Return to a fairer tax structure (higher taxes for the super-wealthy, ending offshore tax havens, etc.)
8. Stop the wars and invest the $3 billion per week we’re spending on them in the domestic economy
9. Tax stock trades to reduce speculation and bring banker bonuses back in balance
10. Strengthen democracy with clean, fair elections and a political structure that doesn’t keep lawmakers beholden to corporate lobbyists

Economic Principles:
1. Focus on local production instead of global consumption
2. Base the economy on thrift and conservation, instead of credit and waste
3. Achieve environmental restoration, not destruction (ending subsidies to fossil fuels and other “dirty economy” sectors, among other steps)

Five Constituencies to Organize:
1. Millennials
2. Veterans
3. Homeowners
4. Long-term Unemployed
5. Workers in the Public Sector

It’s great to find a book that not only has the analysis (including a lot of great statistics on the hugely positive impact of switching to a green economy, and some concrete steps to get there very affordably) but also articulates a positive progressive vision so clearly, and tells great stories along the way. Strongly recommended.

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Last month, I discussed using surveys to better understand your customers and prospects—and asked you to fill out a brief 8-question survey regarding what you like and don’t like about this newsletter. After all, I’ve been publishing at least one monthly newsletter (up to four) all the way back to 1997, and I need to check in every now and then to make sure it’s still relevant. I confess, I know a whole lot about marketing copywriting and marketing strategy, but have no particular training in market research. So I’m flying by the seat of my pants to begin with, in both designing the survey and evaluating the results.

So take my results with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, here’s some of the data, and the conclusions I take away.

First of all, I either did not create enough incentive to read the November newsletter in the first place, or to do the survey, or both. I only got a 9.44 open rate on the original newsletter with the subject line, “Are You Asking the Right Questions?” When that original newsletter had produced only 11 responses, I sent out another one, with a subject line tied directly to the benefit you could get: “Reader Survey—Get a Chance for a 15-Minute Consult with Shel”, which got a 9.16 percent open rate (and was mailed later in the month, when you typically don’t hear from me).

I have no way of knowing how many of the same people and how many unique subscribers opened each version—but I do know that the second one, even with a slightly lower open rate, generated more responses to the survey.

An open rate approaching 10 percent is actually not bad as such things go these days; we are all buried under e-mail and the days of 40% open are long gone. However, my newsletters in September and July, with “sexier” subject lines, got much better open rates: 13.81 percent opened “Since When Are Libraries Known for Brilliant Marketing?” (July) and 12.16 percent opened “The Marketing Impact of Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech (September). So one lesson for me is to be sure I have subject lines that hook my readers. Thus, instead of calling this issue “Making Sense of the Results?” I went with an ambiguous yet accurate title that I hope will generate curiosity—and a higher open rate.

If there was zero overlap between those who opened the original and the reminder, about three percent of the people who saw one of those messages took five minutes to do the survey. However, I am guessing there was substantial overlap. I know I have a core group of fans, and a portion would have opened both. If 2/3 of the people opening the second one had seen it before, my success rate was actually below two percent of the unique readers—and 0.5 percent of the total subscriber base. I think I should be able to do better than that. So either my incentives were not good enough to get people over to the survey, or the chance to influence the content of this newsletter did not resonate, or the design of the survey discouraged participation, or…who knows? So another lesson is the reminder that market research is far from an exact science (I’d say even for those who have been trained in it. Judging by seeing many badly designed surveys and strange results reports over the years).

So the survey may have failed on a quantitative level, with too few participants to be meaningful. However, on a qualitative level, the results were very telling. I clearly pulled deeply from that loyal fan base:

• About 40 percent have been reading my newsletter between four and fifteen years
• An astonishing 66 percent prefer the long-form articles and book reviews over the shorter option
• 54 percent have passed my newsletter around to others
• 31 percent have changed your own marketing based on what you’ve read in my newsletter
• Smaller but substantial percentages have bought books/information products I’ve either written or recommended (again, I don’t know if there’s overlap)

So, for now, I will honor those who put so much trust in me and continue to publish the newsletter—even though the ratio of time I put in versus monetization is not satisfactory, and even though most of you aren’t even opening my mail. There are, after all, some definite benefits to me that go beyond revenue—ranging from the ability to do joint ventures because I have a subscriber base to keeping current in my field reading at least one business book each month, in order to review it for you. Still, I’d love to find the secret of getting you, my subscribers, to hire me for speaking, consulting and/or copywriting, or at least to buy my books (which have far more information than the newsletters, of course).

Congratulations to the Winners:

The three 15-minute consultations go to Peter Lukacsi of Hungary, zoldmarketing.hu, MJ Ray of the UK, software.coop, and Eckhart Beatty of the US (https://www.indowwindows.com/).

The two ebooks go to Gautam Chaudhury of India and Robert Stosser of Germany.

Kind of cool to have five countries and three continents represented, don’t you think?

Happy with Your Current Webhost?

In the summer, I switched to a new hosting service after several of my sites had gone haywire and the previous host couldn’t fix the problem. And I have to tell you—I have been thoroughly delighted. Hostgator not only has the most responsive and well-trained tech support of pretty much any company I’ve ever dealt with, and nice features such as the ability to check all my numerous domain-based email addresses from a single page—but it also has prices that compare favorably with any of the several hosting companies I’ve used (starting at $3.96 a month)…45-day money-back guarantee…tools and templates to create a site…and on and on it goes.

https://shelhorowitz.com/go/HostGator/ (affiliate link).

Enjoy your winter holidays and we’ll see you in January. And remember—I offer commissions if you locate me a full-fee speaking gig or a new consulting/copywriting client.

Global Sense by Judah Freed (Hoku House, 2012)

Noting the turning of both the 5000-year Mayan calendar and the 365-day modern calendar used in much of the world, I’m going to take a three-month break from the nitty-gritty in-the-trenches marketing and ethics books I usually review in this space.

We start, this month, with a very personal book on social transformation, combining big-picture thinking around a prescription to save the world with the author’s own deeply personal journey. Next month, a fascinating look at how visual maps of the world influence our thinking, and then in February, community organizer and former White House staffer Van Jones’ book on green activism in urban low-income communities. I’m a huge fan of Jones, have heard him speak several times, and think he’s one of the best marketing strategists in the green world. So I’m very much looking forward to reading his book.

Meanwhile, let’s get started with Judah Freed’s Global Sense.

In only 256 pages, Freed has managed something quite remarkable: a sweeping, ambitious, and holistic approach to replacing what’s wrong with the world with what’s right. Most authors would have demanded 800 or 1000 pages to attempt even a quarter of what Freed sets out to do. Despite the large scope and the small canvas, Freed does surprisingly well at tacking these very big questions. I think the reason he succeeds is because he frames each of these big-picture issues in the context of his life, his personal story. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative, and then expands out to examine the larger world.

Freed has had a very wide range of experiences: successful entrepreneur, failed entrepreneur, spiritual seeker, respected journalist, teacher, abuse survivor, self-healer, scholar of spiritual enlightenment and social change, event planner, community organizer, cult follower, and homeless person (among many others). Paying deliberate homage to 18th-century pamphleteer Thomas Paine (Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, etc.), he’s been able to channel this breadth into a great deal of insight into human relationships, power structures, personal growth, and social change. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s gotten such a diverse range of endorsements: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Pete Seeger, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, and even Joanne Greenberg (author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden). Democracy writer and radio host Thom Hartmann is also on the list—which makes a lot of sense given Hartmann’s own status as a modern-day Paine.

I’ve read hundreds of books that cover some aspect of what Global Sense covers; I can’t remember another one that covers all the aspects Freed touches on. Charles Hayes’ Beyond the American Dream looks similarly at materialism and the need for liberal thought. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia look at the green/local economy. Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles combine the spiritual underpinning with business and life success tools. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and others make the feminist case. Gene Sharp, George Lakey, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. make the case for nonviolent social change, and John Stuart Mill and other Libertarian thinkers showed us that self-rule is better than heavy-handed government. But this is the first book I can remember that synthesizes so many worlds into a coherent whole.

Some of the many insights I took away:

• Society develops from our wants and needs–but government develops from our failures; we should strive toward “enlightened self-rule,” both as individuals and as a culture
• Darwin’s “fittest” survived not because they dominated, but because they were the best at adapting to change
• Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations and creator of the “invisible hand” theory often used to justify capitalism, opposed monopoly capitalism and favored government regulation
• As Ben Franklin pointed out more than 200 years ago, it is not wise to sacrifice liberty for security—but this persists because each successive generation believes itself incapable of self-rule
• We give governments and institutions permission to govern us, and we can withdraw that permission at any time (as we’ve seen in the past year in both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement)
• Quiet social change too often fails; Gandhi and King were not quiet—yet, in order to get from the current mess to a better place, positive vision and personal transformation are key ingredients, even more than the critique of what needs to change: “our redemption redeems the world” (p. 87)
• Justice is satisfying when it focuses on restitution rather than revenge
• Finding solutions means dwelling on—and expanding—the possible, not putting up barriers of supposed impossibility (I have experienced this in my own social change work, and it’s very powerful)—and sometimes there are multiple right answers
• With every purchase, we vote for the kind of world we want—so let’s “vote” wisely
• When building movements or personal relationships, look first at the easy points of agreement, then build out
• We can’t control others—but we CAN control our emotional responses to their behavior
• When we create high expectations, people/organizations/governments are more likely to live up to them

Chapter 19 is the best mini-crash course on organizing I’ve seen in a long time; that could be spun out into an an entire book.

Be warned: this book is a lot more “wu-wu” than the books I typically review here. There’s a strong spiritual component, and a lot on listening to your inner voice/the divine through many techniques, some of which may be unfamiliar to you. If this is new territory, I’d say it’s worth the struggle–but you may want to go and read a few of the numerous books he recommends, and then revisit Global Sense once you have that broader perspective. There’s some attention to cutting edge psychology, neuroscience and particle physics (I did say it was a holistic book). And there’s a heavy dose of political correctness, including a tendency to see most of the world’s problems as symptoms of “alpha male rule” and “authority addiction. Having lived in some superfeminist communities, I speak from experience when I say that alpha female rule can be just as oppressive. And despite his fondness for enlightened self-rule, Freed supports world government. I’m more of a bioregionalist; I think solutions will be found in networks of small communities cooperating with each other, and see many places where a central world government could go awry.

The book is also marred by a few structural flaws. It needed a good proofread, an index, and a centralized list of all the wonderful resources scattered throughout the book (fortunately, the last of those is posted on Freed’s website, GlobalSense.com).

Still, on the whole, it accomplishes quite a bit of its ambitious agenda, provides lots of food for thought AND action, and may be just the thing you need to get started in the second 5000-year epoch of the Mayan calendar/the Age of Aquarius/what Barbara Marx Hubbard calls the time of humanity’s rebirth.

Full disclosure: Freed is a friend and colleague.