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About Shel

How can you profit by putting the VALUE in your VALUES? Shel Horowitz shows how to MONETIZE your organization’s commitment to fixing problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. Shel consults individually and in groups, gives presentations, and writes books and articles including Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin and others).

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The Clean and Green Club, October 2018

15 Oct, 2018 No Comment belonging book recommendation book review fake news Friends Who Want to Help Global Oneness Day Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World Hear & Meet Shel

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, October 2018

Friends Who Want to Help

What a Magnificent Group of Smart Teachers—No Cost
Want to create positive change in your own life and in the world? Listen to the 9th Annual Global Oneness Day Online Summit on Wednesday, October 24th (with replays running the 24th through 26th). Zero cost but you need to register.

Theme: “Living Your Life for the Benefit of All.” A super-timely message people need to thrive in these challenging times.

You’ll hear from: Dr. Jean Houston, Bruce Lipton, Marianne Williamson, Gregg Braden, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Neale Donald Walsch, Marci Shimoff, Thomas Hubl, Steve McIntosh, Gangaji, Joan Borysenko, Matthew Fox, and many others. I’ve spoken there in the past.See the Speaker Schedule and Learn More About Global Oneness Day

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

Three Freebie Calls with the Amazing Barbara Marx Hubbard
Also, one of my favorite teachers, Barbara Marx Hubbard, is doing three freebie calls:

Webinar #1 – Saturday, October 27th, 12 – 1:30 pm ET/9-10:30 am PT – Becoming New: The Secret to Reinventing & Rediscovering Yourself Every Day of Your Life
Webinar #2 – Tuesday, October 30th, 2:30-4 pm ET/5:30 pm – 7:00 pm PT – Living in Omni-Love: Accessing Your Universal Self & Falling in Love with the World
Webinar #3 – Friday, November 2nd, 10-11:30 am ET/1 pm – 2:30 pm PT – Activating Synergy: Using Co-Creation to Accelerate Evolution in Yourself & Others

This Month’s Tip: How to “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Mental Subversion by Fake News

Last month, I shared a video of a dolphin rescuing a dog, asked whether you thought it was real or fake, and then told you my answer, with seven reasons why. If you missed it, please click on this paragraph to read it.

Why the Dolphin Video Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper

Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?

Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.

Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging. (You may want to visit the psychology category on my blog, where a version of this article first appeared, to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)

And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the Left and Right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.

My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:

Subject: Breaking: Trump ordered tanks in D.C.

From this subject line, you’d expect some horror story about peaceful protestors facing American military might. It could happen. It has happened in the past–for example, the 1970 Kent State massacre that left four Vietnam War protesters dead and nine more injured by Ohio National Guard soldiers’ bullets. (The shootings at Jackson State College in Mississippi 11 days later were committed by police, not soldiers.) And protestors in countries with totalitarian governments have often faced tanks; if you want to see courage, watch the video of a man stopping tanks with only a flag, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989–WOW!)

It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.

Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:

Shel —

Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.

This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.

But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.

Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.

More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego, and even he has since canceled the parade)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.

The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting it) in about ten seconds of searching.

And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.

As a country, we are better than this.

How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering

Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real. And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.

The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:

Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.

Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?

Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?

And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.

I could go on but you get the idea.

New on the Blog

Hear & Meet Shel

This showed up just at press time and I haven’t had a chance to listen and write down the highlights–but I remember that this interview with Mira Rubin was excellent. I’ll run it again next month with the proper description: https://player.fm/series/sustainability-now-exploring-technologies-and-paradigms-to-shape-a-world-that-works/ep-009-guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world-with-shel-horowitz

Also quoted in this article on climate change in Playboy, of all places:

https://www.playboy.com/read/what-cli-fi-gets-right-about-our-environmental-doomsday-1

I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them. In the meantime, you can browse the list of the more-than-30 podcasts I’ve done; they range from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

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.

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/

Another Recommended Book: Our Search for Belonging

Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect is Tearing Us Apart, by Howard J. Ross with Jonrobert Tartaglione

Ross sees the need to be part of community as essential; we are hard-wired to demand it, to form community in numerous ways. He sees two kinds of communities, though: inclusive and exclusionary. Exclusionary communities bond internally but create barriers outside their in-group: they see themselves as “us” against “them”—while inclusive communities build bridges (pp. 16-17).

While those divisions have always existed, Ross sees them escalating dangerously: “People are no longer merely disagreeing; instead they are disavowing each other’s right to an opinion” (p. xi). It’s much harder to forge coalitions across these divisions now, or even friendships. And we surround ourselves with bubbles of like-minded people, who reinforce our prejudices. And that kind of social isolation.

The barrier(s) could be cultural, racial, religious, class-based, gender, sexual orientation, etc.—but they also could be ideological. If we demonize the “enemy,” if we treat them as a batch of stereotypes and not as human beings with the best interests of the world in their hearts, we create that “us versus them.” But because we create it, we can undo it.

How we define our bonding communities shifts situationally. A conservative Muslim woman or a progressive gay Christian might bond with one set of people over politics, another through religion, and a third as part of the sisterhood of women (a majority group that still experiences discrimination) or within the gay community (a minority subculture)—and some of these communities would see membership in the others as anathema.

And sometimes, others put you in the category. When the news media identifies someone as a radical Islamic terrorist but doesn’t identify the Oklahoma City bombers or the man who shot up the concert in Las Vegas as Christian terrorists, that creates a false identification of Islam with terrorism, and that demonizes Muslims but not Christians (p. 19).

One key piece of identity politics is the difference in perception between members of the dominant and non-dominant groups: members of dominant groups typically don’t often think about the experience of those in non-dominant groups. Yet, a person of color or a woman or someone who identifies as another type of minority experiences daily reminders that society puts up physical, psychological, economic, and other barriers.

That difference in perception seems especially relevant during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination process, which was still going on as I wrote this earlier this month. Ross says we’re all heroes of our own stories (p. 55); certainly, both Kavanagh and Ford presented themselves that way.

I blogged about some of the parallels at: https://greenandprofitable.com/kavanaugh-and-the-culture-of-belonging/ Please read it. This review doesn’t duplicate that post. Here, I talk much more specifically about the book, which has relevance to so many situations in society, the workplace, the community.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the book, including a few specific ideas for defusing conflict and forming community across those “them” barriers. I will say, though, that I expected more of that. I didn’t really feel I’d been given a toolkit—but perhaps that’s because I’ve been doing bridge-building work for decades. As long ago as 1977, when I and 1413 other safe energy activists were incarcerated in New Hampshire’s National guard armories following a protest at the Seabrook nuclear plant construction site, I was one among many of the protestors who reached out to the young, conservative Guardsmen overseeing our captivity. I was only 20. Since then, I’ve met with and even stayed with Muslims (I’m Jewish), Evangelical Christians, conservatives (I identify as progressive), and others on the other sides of those us-them mental fences.

Ross presents 10 specific ideas to become more inclusive, pp. 53-58. While I wish he had included more, what he does include shows great wisdom. Examples:

Look for places you can partner with the other side: where does the right-wing goal of personal liberty [I’m not sure that’s as universal a concern as he says it is, but that’s a different discussion] intersect with the left-wing goal of justice [again, I see many on the right wanting justice; they just define it differently] (p. 53)?
Don’t confuse voting for a candidate with supporting all that candidate’s positions or actions (p. 55). If you’re talking to a Trump voter, you may feel that person is enabling racism, bullying, lying, etc. But you may discover that person is not acting out of racism, but perhaps economic issues or ending abortion. Similarly, if you’re talking to a Hillary Clinton voter, you may go deep enough to find that this voter didn’t support Clinton’s hawkishness or her tone-deaf and entitled campaign, but wanted to keep an openly racist and mean-spirited “loose cannon” away from the most powerful job in the world. It’s worth remembering that both candidates were caught up in multiple corruption scandals, and the media was not sensitive to the vast differences in degree of corruption. So a lot of people voted as they did to vote against what they saw as someone even worse, rather than voting for a future they really wanted.

Ross notes that having situational privilege, being part of the dominant culture and mindset in a particular interaction, doesn’t mean you don’t face challenges. But the nature of the challenge is different; you don’t have to prove that what you wear or where you travel or how you speak meets society’s standards; if you’re found wanting, it won’t reflect badly on your entire subgroup (p. 91). You may not even notice that members of different subgroups often don’t share that good fortune. And you’re very unlikely to feel negative physical effects from being marginalized, if you never experience being marginalized (p. 113).

But note the word “situational.” A gay white male will experience situational privilege when the focus is on race or gender, but will be the marginalized minority in other ways. And those who hold the power typically face far lesser consequences when they stereotype and marginalize (p. 152). Members of the dominant religion or ethnic group in one country may see other religions as not only not sacred, but even heretical (p. 130)—while in a different country, the positions might be reversed. At its extreme, the consequences of marginalization include death; I happen to be reading a poetry collection dedicated to a martyred white gay man, Matthew Shepherd (October Mourning, by Leslea Newman).

All of this affects how we communicate, and how we communicate also affects bias behavior. Language creates thinking and believing patterns (pp. 124, 126, 184). Inuit languages include dozens of words for snow, while corporate English has dozens to describe different strata in management. In Hebrew or Spanish or German, every noun has a gender. In English, that’s not true. How do we think differently as a result? How does social media, which can organize both positive and hateful movements, and which can amplify (go viral) and distort (fake news) messaging very quickly (pp. 164-165), shift the dynamics?

The good news: we can overcome the conditioning. Peru and Ecuador managed to settle a 175-year-old border conflict in just 77 days in the 1970s, by using a “process-oriented mentality” to really listen to each other (p. 173). The two presidents won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so, because they were able to treat the other’s point of view as just that, a point of view (p. 179).

Interestingly, this kind of inclusive thinking works better, even when it’s not easy. “Belonging has to include the uncomfortable” (p. 180). He lists eight factors in effective diversity training (pp. 196-197), notes that “breakdowns can be the source of breakthroughs” (p. 213), and stresses the importance of staying civil when you and the other person disagree (p. 214). At its best, as in Nelson Mandela’s leadership in post-Apartheid South Africa, idealism and practicality come together to create something amazing (p. 215).

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.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, October 2017

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

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:

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

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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, September 2017

5 Sep, 2017 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, September 2017

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

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/

Connect with Shel

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What I Told the Democrats, and Why

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.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2017

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.

New on the Blog

How Do you Know when Advertising Claims Are Real?

13 Ways Democrats Could Have Won in November

Fight On, Beautiful Planet!

Why I Don’t Hate “The Donald” (and What I Feel Instead)

Environmental Consciousness in Portugal

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

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.

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, May 2017

10 May, 2017 2 Comments

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, May 2017

This Month’s Tip: Why I Threw Away This Letter

The fund appeal above is from a group I’ve supported often in the past. It’s a group that does great work. But I got only as far as the salutation before I knew it was going straight into the recycle bin. I stopped to scan it so I could share it with you, and then off it went into the mighty blue bin.

Why? Because I’ve made a pledge not to respond to manipulative marketing, and I consider this manipulative. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know I’ve been calling for honesty in marketing for many years. And whenever someone markets to me in a way I don’t consider honest, my wallet stays securely in my pocket.

I would not have objected to a salutation of Dear Dina (my wife’s first name). But when a mass mailing uses a font that looks like handwriting to cross out Dear Friend and change it to Dina, I feel insulted. Clearly, this is an attempt to make this think a human being has been involved in the change.

I’ve received fund letters from local charities where the generic salutation was replaced with our names—but those are typically done by hand and signed by someone we actually know. And yes, I give those letters more careful consideration, and usually give something. In other words, this technique works when done correctly. There’s nothing manipulative about that. A real person has gone through the list, selected people in his or her circle, and personalized those letters.

But doing this on an entire mass mailing, using a handwriting font—that’s deception, pure and simple. We do not know the president of this organization. We’ve supported this group in the past, but I don’t like being tricked into making a contribution. So instead of giving some bucks, I’m sharing this with you.

In case you’re wondering, I checked the envelope. The stamp was presorted first class, an in-between option that’s cheaper than regular first class but more expensive than bulk mail, and requires the same sort of pre-processing that third-class bulk mail does. You can’t easily hand-edit a letter in a presort mailing. In other words, the odds are 99 to 1 that it was not hand-corrected.

NOTE: If you’re wondering why I’m sharing a letter dated last November, it’s because that’s when I wrote this article. I often work several months ahead with the main articles and sometimes the book reviews. This didn’t feel so time-sensitive but I needed to bump it up.

New on the Blog

What Role Can Nonstrategic Mass Movements Play in Social Change? https://greenandprofitable.com/what-role-can-nonstrategic-mass-movements-play-in-social-change/

Why “Popularity Contest” Surveys are Useless https://greenandprofitable.com/why-popularity-contest-surveys-are-useless/

40 Years Ago Today, We Changed the World (five part series beginning https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-1/ and linking from each installment to the next

What I Told the DT Administration: Business Case for Paris Accord https://greenandprofitable.com/what-i-told-the-dt-administration-business-case-for-paris-accord/

Hear and Meet Shel

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

Karina Crooks interviews me on the Business Code Podcast: https://businesscodetalk.com/podcast/shel-horowitz/ :

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

I missed Book Expo America last year after attending every one since 1997. But it’s back in NYC and my daughter is NOT getting married the following week (as she did in 2016), so I will be attending (May 30-June 2). Contact me if you’d like to meet for coffee.

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—From Dictatorship to Democracy

From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp (The New Press, 2012)

Social change—eliminating such evils as hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change—has been at the core of my work for more than four decades. Long before I started wrestling with the idea of harnessing the business community to achieve these big goals through profitable products and services back in the early 2000s, I devoted significant volunteer time to making a better world.

And now that the government of my own country, the United States, is taking significant steps backward, I will occasionally step out beyond the business world and find inspiration and information from completely different channels.

This month’s book review is one of those. Gene Sharp is the preeminent applied nonviolence theorist in the US today. I first discovered his work in the early 1980s and read all the way through his very dense, three-part Politics of Nonviolent Action back then, after hearing him speak.

So I was excited to find a much shorter and more readable distillation of his work that I feel comfortable recommending here. It’s only 138 pages, but it may shift your thinking about how to not just achieve social change but actually overthrow dictators. In fact, Sharp has been cited as an influence by nonviolent warriors around the world, including the Arab Spring movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, among others.

While some agents of change see them as points on a continuum, Sharp makes a clear distinction between nonviolent and violent struggles:

Strategic nonviolent methods—which use not just visible protests but many tactics involving withdrawal of cooperation from the regime—tend to work better and faster: “Withdrawal of support is…the major required action to disintegrate a dictatorship.”
They create sympathy among the populace, while violent struggles create alienation and anger toward the agents of change
They play to the strengths of the protestors, while violent tactics play to the government’s strength (since the government is always better armed and usually better trained in fighting)
They create decentralized movements and alternative governance structures that spread leadership skills much more widely—and this becomes key when planning for and setting up the replacement government
They generate a peace based on freedom and justice, and not on repression

Sharp has a strong preference for deeply strategic campaigns, and notes that while tactics might shift during repression, the overall strategy should be carefully nurtured; the repression is designed to get the movement to abandon its successful strategies, and thus is a sign of victory (pp. 90-91). And if the populace is willing to endure repression, repression or the threat of it will not longer be enough to prop up the dictatorship (pp. 106-107).

He suggests starting with small, low-risk campaigns that lead to relatively easy victories, celebrating them and then expanding the demands. And he provides some excellent strategy checklists, such as seven positive characteristics of successful nonviolent political defiance (p. 44) and eight factors to consider when preparing to take power (pp. 84-86). He even looks at how to win over the military in ways that don’t foster a coup d’état (pp. 100-101), and how to defeat a coup if one happens (pp. 117-118).

And he notes the importance of being prepared in the event of either rapid or slow-moving victory (p. 111)—something I learned the hard way when Save the Mountain, a movement I’d started—achieved its goals very quickly and had no second stream of activity to take up the energy; our organization, which could have played a role in many other campaigns, simply withered away. Expanding out to the level of ending a repressive government, if the activists are not prepared to create a government, someone else will step into the vacuum, with potentially disastrous consequences for freedom.

Successful nonviolent regime change will be more permanent and well accepted if it takes seriously the charge of protecting the rights of its citizens, including its minorities. Sharp points out (p. 122) that following the victory, the citizens are now well-schooled in how to bring down governments, will be resilient and resistant against future attempts to grab power at the expense of citizens, and willing to struggle together to achieve a free and just society.

The book concludes with a list of 198 nonviolent tactics grouped into six broad categories:

Economic noncooperation: boycotts (6 subcategories)
Nonviolent protest and persuasion (10 sub-categories)
Social noncooperation (3 subcategories)
Economic noncooperation: boycotts (6 subcategories)
Political noncooperation: strikes (7 subcategories)
Nonviolent intervention (5 subcategories)

Even if your current organizing has much more modest goals than regime change, this book will give you a solid grounding in theory and many practical tools. Highly recommended.

Listen to the Best Interview I’ve Ever Done
Kymm Nelsen of the Conscious Leadership Podcast managed to pull more from me than anyone else has ever done. In 51 minutes, we covered so much that I list 17 separate points on my interviews page —and that was not a complete list. It’s one of three shows I’ve added to that page. Visit the page to scan the list and note what to listen for—and of course to click over and read it.

And watch this space for links to interviews by Internet marketer Willie Crawford, PR queen Annie Jennings’ Elite Wire, Lisa Faulkner of Game Changers, Ali Salman of Escape the 9 to 5 Grind, and Karina Cooke of the Business Code Podcast.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles:

Shel’s done 20 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

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 2016

10 Dec, 2016 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, December 2016

Making the Business Case on Climate Change to Trump
Last month, I mentioned that I wrote to Trump and made a business case for continuing to honor Paris. You can read my open letter on GreenBiz.com, https:/www.greenbiz.com/article/making-business-case-climate-change-trump . Interestingly, I read recently that Leonardo DiCaprio had given Trump and his daughter copies of his video on climate change, which I believe makes a similar case.

This Month’s Tip: 10 Reasons to Build Social Responsibility into Your Business

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

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

You generate consumer loyalty; customers feel good about supporting socially/environmentally responsible businesses, and are even willing to pay higher prices.
Customers become allies in both product development and problem resolution.
You create deep loyalty among your employees; they’re happy to go to work each day, and they brag about working at your firm. This improves productivity and employee retention. And that employee loyalty reduces training and onboarding costs; it even creates a pipeline to find new employees among your current employees’ friends and family.
Customers, employees, suppliers, and distributors do some of your marketing for you.
You’ll have an easier time raising capital. Your options will expand beyond traditional investors and banks to crowdsourcing. Consider entrepreneurial platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, and Barnraiser—as well as sites dedicated to social change and environmental crowdfunding, such as https://startsomegood.com/ or https://www.ioby.org/ . You can also attract corporate sponsors and even grants.
It’ll be much easier to find joint venture partnerships that leverage more than one organization’s skills for the benefit of all.
As you start to go public about your social response efforts, you’ll be asked to share best practices as a speaker and/or writer (which have lots of benefits of their own).
Media will be happy to tell your story—and you don’t have to pay to get that exposure.
If you do screw up, you’ll have more latitude while you make it right.
You lower both the risk and the weight of negative consequences from boycotts to lawsuits.

Isn’t all that worth some extra complexity?

Next month: How to Choose the Right Social Responsibility Path for Your Particular Business. And meanwhile, wishing you a very happy holiday season, whatever holiday you celebrate.

Hear and Meet Shel

Master marketer Willie Crawford interviews Shel Thursday, January 26 (rescheduled from December 1). And he will take questions live on the air. Watch next month’s newsletter for listening instructions.

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

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

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—Power and Love

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

I’ve been working for social and environmental change since 1969. That’s even longer than my time in marketing, which started in 1972. Back then, what I was marketing was my views on social issues, especially the Vietnam War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles:

Shel’s done 16 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

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). 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, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He 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 2016

9 Sep, 2016 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, September 2016

Exercise your brain for a good, green cause: Visit https://greenandprofitable.com/lets-have-some-fun-with-a-stillborn-nuke-a-contest and enter your fun/outrageous AND your most practical ideas for what to do with a nuclear power plant that is never going to be finished. The best one in each category get a bunch of goodies from me as well as media publicity.

This Month’s Tip: Event Planning and Marketing Lessons from a Wedding, Part 3

Marketing/addressing audience needs

The first two parts of this three-part series focused on the logistics of a complex event. But typically, you have an event in order to further your organization. So even if it’s only for your own employees, it serves a marketing purpose. This final installment will look at the marketing aspects.

As a Vendor, Be Agile and Adaptable

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

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

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

Be Accessible and Communicative—Build Client Confidence in You

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

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

As a Client, Find Out What Can Be Negotiated

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

As a Marketer, Be Creative but Stay on Message

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

The finished wedding canopy

Build in Interactivity and Social Media

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

Honor Diversity

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

Honor Your Commitments—and Go the Extra Mile

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

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

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

Hear and Meet Shel

I’ll be a guest on Nicole Holland’s Business Building Rockstar Summit sometime the first 10 days of November. We taped an AWESOME deep-dive interview–and I’m in awesome company of rockstars including Marisa Murgatroyd, Dorie Clark, Lou Bortone, and several other very cool people. Each call will be available at no charge for 48 hours. If I don’t have it nailed down by press time for the October newsletter, I’ll send out a special bulletin when I have the details.

Also in November, I’ll be a guest on Jena Rodriguez’s The Brave Entrepreneur podcast. Details next month.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

These days, we’re all bombarded with marketing messages–most of which are digital and lack a personal touch.

By accurately replicating handwriting, Thankster gives marketers a unique advantage through personalized handwritten cards. The result? Happier customers and higher conversion rates. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/thankster/

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—Connect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles:

Shel’s done 13 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links (scroll all the way down to Recent Interviews & Guest Articles).

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). 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, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He 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).”

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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 2016

2 Jun, 2016 No Comment human energy

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2016

This Month’s Tip: Human Energy: The Next Frontier?

Cats seem to spend about 18 hours a day NOT doing—either sleeping or vegging out in a sunny spot with no more activity than a loud purr. We humans, on the other hand, have close to the opposite ratio. OK, so some of that time is sitting at a desk and not doing much with our bodies. But a lot of it uses kinetic energy: movement.

Of course, we’ve been using direct-capture of human energy for tens of thousands of years, at least as far back as the invention of hammers and canoes. But turning it into electricity and powering devices with it is only a few decades old, as far as I know.

Why has so little attention been paid to harnessing this movement source of energy? It’s not like the concept is new. I remember hearing about a few pioneers capturing human energy back in the 1970s. And eight years ago, The Mother Earth News ran this article: https://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/pedal-powered-generators-zmaz08onzgoe.aspx – here’s an excerpt:

David Butcher’s experience is a case in point. Every morning he goes out to his garage and pedals a stationary bike for at least a half hour. The effort he puts into his workout isn’t wasted on friction as it is in most fitness gyms. Every pedal stroke makes electricity that is sent down a cable to his office in the house to power several small electrical devices. Pedal power recharges his electric razor and his cell phone, runs a computer monitor, and periodically runs the compressor that tops off the air pressure in the tires of his vehicles. David also runs the bike generator directly to a water pump whenever necessary for aerating and filtering the small backyard fishpond.

David works out of his home office in San Jose, California, as the client services director for a Web agency, and he sits in front of a computer most of the day.

Windstream Power, another company mentioned in the article, brags that it’s been doing this since 1974! So we’ve been able to convert human output to electricity for 42 years now. Isn’t it time we had a mass movement to capture at least some of that wasted energy?

Other people are also converting treadmills to capture kinetic energy (see https://www.paddockenergy.com/bike.htm ).

My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ , discusses several examples of bicycle power, among them the Copenhagen Wheel, a nonmotorized device that stores a bicyclist’s kinetic energy and releases it when that rider needs extra power (like going uphill)—and a bicycle-powered trash-hauling fleet that has successfully competed with trucks in my own area for many years.

And what better place to do it than fitness centers? Texas State University retrofitted 30 elliptical trainers to capture the electricity: https://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/12/Kilowatts120709.html , calling it “the largest human power plant in the world.”

That claim could well be challenged in India, where a two-month-old pilot project called FreeElectric, https://billionsinchange.com/news/billions-in-change-free-electric-india-pilot-may-2016-update , is bringing light and power to places that never had it:

Kids are able to do homework after the sun sets, freeing them to help their parents or play outside with their friends while it’s still light. Shop owners are able to continue conducting business through the evening as opposed to closing their doors at dusk. Classrooms are able to power laptops, tablets, and flat-screen televisions, connecting students and teachers to knowledge, people, information, and ideas from all over the world.

On a smaller (and much cheaper scale), a fitness center in my area started capturing kinetic energy with its exercise bikes several years ago.

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/

Hear and Meet Shel

Ronald M. Allen interviews Shel on the Manage Change show, TODAY, June 15, 7 pm ET/4 pm PT https://www.blogtalkradio.com/managechange/2016/06/15/shel-horowitz–going-green-raises-your-companies-revenues

WEBINAR FOR INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS OF NEW ENGLAND/ASSOCIATION FOR SPECIAL SALES, “Green Audiences, Green Titles, Green Printing“ NEW DATE Thursday, June 23, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7842561726385736194 – this is a brand new program I’ve never done before, highly recommended for any publisher considering producing books for the green market and/or greening your production.

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