In a recent newsletter, Brian Kurtz of Titans Marketing quoted his late mentor Marty Edelston, founder of Boardroom Reports (best known for the Bottom Line newsletters):
“Fiction is not worth your time. We don’t need to escape but we always need to learn through business books.”
Despite my enormous respect for both Brian and Marty, I vehemently disagree. This is adapted and expanded from my response to Brian:
Really shocked that a marketer as astute as Marty would say this. Fiction and poetry and drama (and visual art, music, dance, etc.) are windows into souls—keys to understanding psychology—extremely useful for every marketer who is not trying to sell a universally needed product. And as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a universally needed product. Toilet paper comes pretty close—but there are plenty of people who use bidets, or who live in cultures that have other ways to clean up. Historically, we all managed to do without TP for most of human history—a point reinforced by the packaging of the Trader Joe’s recycled TP I sometimes buy.<end of my note to Brian>
I feel that my effectiveness as a marketer is deeply rooted in the insights to the human condition that I get through literature, music, visual art, movies, and other forms of creative expression. It’s hard for me to imagine invention or innovation without them. It doesn’t surprise me that the earliest human artifacts include works of visual art that tell stories (cave paintings and pictographs)—and that they are present in many ancient cultures all around the world. I’ve personally seen them in places as far apart as Western China and New Mexico.
Let them into your own life. Not just because you’ll get marketing insights, but because you’ll feed your soul. My initial attraction to the arts had nothing to do with marketing—but once I was immersing myself, I became a much better marketer.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands
Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands
By Sarah Towle
I don’t usually review resources dedicated to uncovering and solving big social problems without an obvious business context—but I’m making an exception for this historical and current analysis of the incredibly cruel US immigration “system”—which is not at all systematic in its functionality, only in its cruelty and racism.
And while it may not be obvious, business is definitely a factor in this cruelty. The private prison/detention system is a huge beneficiary, building massive profits out of the exploitation and even torture of those who fled for their lives. The human traffickers and smugglers who help bring people and products across the border are running businesses, albeit illegal ones. Also, the roots of the border crisis have a lot to do with US policies going back a century and more that prioritized profits for giant agribusiness companies growing such crops as coffee and bananas. The term “banana republic” actually came out of that long-running exploitation—and so did the dual crisis of drugs ravaging the US while US-made guns ravage Latin America.
Towle explores both, as well as the devil’s partnerships between those private entities and some of the most repressive agencies within our federal and state governments—some of which have their own roots in the slave abduction rings that operated before the Civil War—and the way both have abused those in their custody to the point where torture is the only word to call it. Both the agencies and the profiteers are aided and abetted by a shadowy network of right-wing organizations organized by a man named John Tanton (p. 140)—a name I hadn’t encountered before reading this book, although his impact has been felt in repressive laws, repressive judicial appointments, and much more.
These tangled webs may help explain why oppression and arbitrary (often illegal) treatment of low-income immigrants of color are a curse in our society whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.
Towle is a good writer and researcher. She tracks down long spirals of causes, long histories of completely unnecessary cruelty and barbarism directed at those who came to the US seeking protection. All-too-often, they find the opposite. And she makes the point over and over (p. 105, for instance) that attempting to deter migrants from entering doesn’t work, and won’t work as long as they are fleeing direct threats to their own and their loved ones’ lives.
As I do, she would love to see policy based on what we say we believe in as a country. It was the US that in the aftermath of WWII pushed hard to get other countries to accept asylees and refugees.
Personal note: I have been involved in immigration justice activism since the spring of 2019 and I met many of the activists Towle profiles when I participated in an eight-day witness delegation to the US-Mexico border in early 2020.
Note: Towle is based in London and currently touring the US. If you are in or near Massachusetts or Connecticut, this flier outlines a series of events from November 12 to 20. I’ll be attending her program this Wednesday evening, November 13, at Amherst Books along with my wife, D. Dina Friedman, author of recent poetry and short story collections on immigration themes (if you’re in the room, please say hi to me). She will also be in Northampton, Hartford, Worcester, and Boston.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss the July newsletter. My father died when there was one more thing to finalize, and my assistant didn’t want to bother me to get that clarification. And I was so busy dealing with his death that I didn’t even notice the newsletter hadn’t dropped. So the July issue didn’t actually get published. “We now resume our regularly scheduled programming” 😉
Amplifying Abundance with Social Impact: Shel Horowitz and Elaine Starling
Elaine Starling is the host of an incredible podcast called “The Abundance Journey.” I was her guest for the July 11 episode and it was such a rich and potentially life-changing conversation that the highlight notes I took when I listened to it ran over 800 words. I consider it the best interview I’ve ever done, and I’ve done hundreds.
So I’ve decided to turn those highlight notes into the lead article this month.
I do recommend listening to the whole thing. We covered twice as much as I jotted down. You can watch the entire amazing 54-minute show at https://youtu.be/b9t2yyJai_M or listen without video at https://player.captivate.fm/episode/31aa13ab-7fdd-418d-87f4-fee96a18a02a. The numbers on the left are the minutes and seconds into the recording where that insight shows up. Enjoy!
1:45 Elaine: Environmental/social good and profitability is a both-and, not an either-or
7:10 Elaine’s intention-setting exercise and 78-second silent meditation
9:14 Shel: How I got started on this path: It goes back to embracing the non-monetary abundance that “fell into my life as a high school student.” And then, in November, 1999, founding Save the Mountain and expecting 20 people at the first meeting and a five-year campaign. “The abundance, the abundant universe, was out there waiting for me to do better than that…we won. In 13 months flat, we protected that land!”
11:07 activist since age 12, marketer at 15.
11:32 “This campaign took everything I knew about marketing and put it in an organizing context.”
11:48 Victory mindset was key to achieving the victory.
12:00 “How could I bring some of the stuff from the social change/environmental good world into the business community?”
12:45 Elaine: “A form of abundance is your personal involvement and engagement…when you contribute your own gifts and skills and abilities, it gets amplified and comes back to you” and to the whole community.
13:30 Shel: There’s also the incredible abundance of solar energy, a year’s worth every hour. “So the planet, the solar system, is very abundant.” And I get my heat and hot water from the green energy system on my neighbors’ farm. “The whole world is a both-and. Either-or choices are so retro!”
14:58 My personal definition of abundance.
15:47 “Every trip I take is a lesson in abundance,” including visiting an entire country powered by renewable energy.
16:37 Elaine: Centuries-old ideas from developing countries have given us technologies that we can adapt and use.
17:28 Shel: Indigenous wisdom of 10,000 years ago combines with modern technology to create a spiral of abundance. We’ve learned to grow organic with just as high yields as chemiculture, and a new infrastructure (community gardens, farmers markets, etc.)
18:52 Biomimicry—how the land designs itself for localized conditions—and what creature to ask about how to engineer a bridge.
19:40 My role as a popularizer and demystifier for concepts worth spreading.
20:10 How conservation can create abundance (example: the power of how we use a toothbrush)
22:00 Bottom-line, quantifiable benefits of incorporating environmental and social change into the DNA of a business.
23:14: How to unpollute a dead or dying lake.
23:46 How to do really low-budget ($50-$100) solar hot water, insulated pipes, and no-detergent laundry and slash your use of fossil fuels.
25:26 The surprising climate championship by an ultra-profit-driven retail chain not known for its social conscience.
28:15 Elaine: What has to shift in your perspective to embrace this approach?
28:38 Shel: Business is too-often a taker economy, extractive—and those businesses are not good corporate citizens. But we all have to live here, and we have other generations to pass on our legacy. That includes the natural beauty as well as the natural resources. So one big shift is to go from being just a taker to a contributor. Doing things in systemic, regenerative ways. Ray Anderson from Interface was a great example of a CEO who changed his mindset. His company continues his legacy with innovations such as modular flooring tiles and tiles sourced from rescued abandoned fishing nets.
30:09 The chocolate industry was started by social pioneers like Milton Hershey and the Cadbury brothers—but later, they lost their way.
31:42 Why Ben & Jerry’s chose to sell to Unilever, what unusual management model they were able to negotiate, and how Unilever successfully propagated some B&J’s innovations across many of hits huge array of brands.
33:02 A small, profitable company that was founded specifically to be ethical, socially just, and environmentally friendly.
34:10 Baby steps: A social-good audit uniquely tailored to each business (I can help with this—pizza example). Ask yourself “What can my business, my organization, my family do?”
37:50 How my Guerrilla books exemplify the abundance mindset through partnering with competitors—and how partnering can open doors.
40:20 Elaine: Partner with organizations, corporations, nonprofits who share your vision.
40:36 Shel: My immigration justice activist group is count-on-your-fingers tiny, but we partner with many organizations locally, nationally, and internationally—and have leveraged that to influence far beyond our numbers.
41:35 Three free gifts from Shel. And (43:14) a much more valuable 30 free consultation to “get you on the path to what is the best thing for your particular organization to combine social good, environmental good and a successful business.”
43:49 How I benefit from offering that free consultation. “I want a better world because I want to live in a better world.”
45:18 How activism turned something important into international news.
ACTIVATE YOUR ABUNDANCE Elaine’s testimonial about Shel’s episode.
48:12 Shel is…a Niagara Falls of brilliance. I’m so grateful for Shel for opening my eyes to all the possibilities… I love his definition of abundance: opening up yourself to the probability that the universe will support you…Schedule time to read Shel’s book or get on his calendar for a consultation.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Deepak Saini interviewed me on “The Impact your Business can have on Global Issues.” We covered: my earliest social change influences; win-win-win-win-win and the abundance mindset; how “instant” movements don’t come up out of nowhere; right and wrong ways to do alternative energy; how business benefits from building in environmental and social good—and steps any business can take to figure out where they should create their specific impact; my own health regimen (something that almost never comes up in interviews).
I will be presenting a virtual program to the Thomas Yoseloff Business Center of the New York Public Library. This event will be open to the public without charge, over Zoom. It is scheduled for September 16, noon US Eastern. Click here to register.
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead
By David Bollier (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021)
David Bollier and I met for coffee several months ago. Without discussing it ahead of time, we each brought a copy of our most recent book to give to the other person—and that so embodies the theme of this book that I had to start with it. Although we live one town apart and do similar work, our paths so rarely intersect that the book I was giving him is eight years old, and his was three. I think we met 1:1 only once before, probably about twenty years ago.
Modeled loosely on the 1960s-era Whole Earth Catalogs, The Commoner’s Catalog is a heavily annotated collection of resources on dozens of subtopics under the umbrella of collaborative economy. Some are familiar, like food co-ops, land trusts, open-source software, Transition Towns, and worker-owned businesses. Some were completely new to me, like a collaborative, “value-sovereign,” and feminist initiative around blockchain (p. 96). Some partner with government entities, such as a reparations project in Mississippi that sued the federal Department of Agriculture and used its 1999 $1 bn settlement to fund the initiative (p. 88), or like Peru’s project to protect species diversity of indigenous potato varieties (p 55).
The book is divided into short sections, each with a few articles. it’s crammed with resources: URLs or publishing information for books, articles, videos, organizations, and even processes. I wrote down 42 page numbers listing books I might review in future newsletters! And many of those pages contain multiple books.
A few among many key insights:
Collaborative ventures are often created out of stress—as a response to a system that tries to crush people, or as a response to disaster, for instance
Commoners can influence the creation of new laws and businesses that not only allow but encourage collaborative success
Successful models of resources held in common and managed by collaborative groups are all around us. I knew that the World Wide Web was placed into the commons by its creator, Tim Berners-Lee (and what a magnificent gift that has turned out to be)—but even though I’ve used them since I got my first smartphone many years ago, I had no idea that Android phone operating systems are based in open-source Linux.
The “tragedy of the commons” concept that open-source is inevitably corrupted by private greed just isn’t true—especially if the communing systems are designed to be resilient, self-policing, and serving the needs of users and ecosystems. A corollary is that the model of the lone-wolf genius entrepreneur achieving magic all by himself (and it’s usually a him in these stories) is also flawed. Most geniuses had a lot of help creating their successes.
I really only have one criticism. Presumably to save paper, the layout is deeply challenging. Most people who would want a paper copy are going to skew older, but this book’s design is a nightmare for older readers. All this information is crammed into 114 8-1/2 x 12 pages. The introductory text to each section is nice and readable but the specific narratives are in a tiny font and many of the resources are in even tinier print, plus the eye flow isn’t always easy. It took me about a month to read it because I could only do two or three pages at a shift. I’m someone who reads small print on paper better than a lot of my cohort (I’m 67). There’s no way I could recommend this paper edition to my wife, who was 39 when she started refusing to look at a printed phone book (oddly, she can read much smaller print on screen than I can, so an e-edition may be better for people with eyes like hers).
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Should You Offer Replays of Your Learning and Networking Calls?
Photo Credit: August de Richelieu via Pexels
You’ve probably noticed that some marketers make their recordings available indefinitely, some for a limited time with the option to buy permanent access, and some, if you’re not there live, you missed it.
I vote yes, not just for replays but also for saveable transcripts. Think of it this way: The more available you make your material, the more people know about you, get exposed to your viewpoints, and perhaps become followers.
Even if your call is to promote a time-sensitive offer, the recording can be doing marketing on your behalf long after the offer expires. If people love what you say and click through to the offer page, greet them with a message like: “Thank you for your interest in [name of program]. That offer has closed, but you can put your name on a waiting list for the next round, [give the date if you have it]. And if you’re not already on our mailing list, add your name here [hot link to your signup form] so you will be the first to know about opportunities like this and you won’t miss out next time.” You can still get these people into your tribe, where they might buy a different offer down the road.
It’s much easier to attract someone as a customer if they are already part of your knowledge tribe. That’s the real meaning of the slogan “content is king.”
Another benefit of course, is that you can still share your information and your pitch before your offer expires. Many people have competing priorities and sign up for meetings knowing that they can’t make the slot but hoping for a recording. They’ll probably listen promptly, especially if you note in your follow-up email with the recording link that it’s time sensitive.
And I recommend replay links that provide on-demand playback, rather than fixed times. If you are in my time zone, the Eastern United States, and you do a late morning or early afternoon meeting, you’re not going to get attendees from Australia, 14 hours ahead of you in their big Eastern cities, or China, 12 hours ahead. And you may not get many from Europe in the evening or late afternoon. But we live in a global economy and it makes sense to accommodate people in any time zone.
Of course, you want to make exceptions if you are planning to sell a replay package from a summit, if you’re an activist organizing an action, etc. But give people a three-to-five-day window to listen to the recordings first, and save them so for instance you can give away one session (with the presenter’s permission, of course) to entice a purchase of the whole set. After all, you put in a lot of time and energy to think about the content you presented, make the presentation, and create the offer. Why not let as many people as possible reap the benefits and get interested in what you are selling?
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
I will be presenting a virtual program to the Thomas Yoseloff Business Center of the New York Public Library. This event will be open to the public without charge, over Zoom. It is scheduled for September 16, noon US Eastern. Click here to register.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
By: Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions, 2015)
I started reading this book with no thought of reviewing it, but I found it quite relevant. I thoroughly recommend this wonderful combination of science, spirituality, indigenous wisdom, and poetic language.
Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi Nation of the Anishinaabe, is a botanist, storyteller, poet, mom, and gardener. Deeply proud of her heritage, she looks at issues like catastrophic climate change and cultural survival under an oppressive and powerful society through the lens of her nation’s oral history. And this is key: she is not just sharing folklore but taking a deep dive into indigenous ways of thinking.
In Potawatomi culture, plants and animals, even rocks, are people (p. 23), and calling them “it” would be extremely rude (p. 53). They all have gifts to share and needs to be met. Pecans and sweetgrass are two among many plants whose gifts she explores. We human people can take their gifts and give them some of ours, recognizing as we do that gifts are relational, not transactional; that their value multiplies when the gifts are shared; and that gifts come with responsibilities (pp. 26-28), including giving thanks (see especially the long and wonderful section on the traditional Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, pp. 107-117). I will personally be thinking about how I can thank the land as I’m harvesting in my garden this year.
If we never take more than we need, never hoard or close off the bounty from others who also need it, the culture will be in balance and sustain itself for tens of thousands of years—as it did before the arrival of the Windigo: takers who take far more than they need, try to keep all the wealth for themselves, and give little or nothing back (often, but not always, of European origin). For 500 years, Windigo colonialists have attempted to stamp out the indigenous culture, sometimes through wars; sometimes through forcing Native children into boarding schools that punished the use of original language, clothing, and customs; sometimes through the scourge of alcoholism—and sometimes by dumping so much pollution into natural places of beauty and abundance that the land is rendered useless.
She describes in horrific detail one such toxic site. Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, New York State (pp. 312-322). The Solvay Process Company (formed in 1881 and eventually merged into Allied Chemical) dumped directly into the lake for decades. As far back as 1907, New York State threatened legal action. Ice harvesting was banned in 1901. And that was long before mercury and chlorine processing moved in alongside the salt industry that polluted the lake since the 1830s. But even this desolate landscape can return from the dead—when multiple species learn to cooperate (p. 332). Cooperation is a key tenet of successful societies living in balance (next month’s review of David Bollier’s latest book on the commons will say more about that).
Language is another key aspect. What we name is what takes importance. Thinking shapes language and language, in turn, shapes thinking. In English-language botany classes, Kimmerer never learned a word for the force that pushes mushrooms up through the soil in one night. Potawatomi, an almost-extinct language with only nine surviving native speakers as of when she began studying it, taught her the word: puhpowee (pp. 48-49). In Potawatomi, 70 percent of words are verbs, while in English, 70 percent are nouns. In other words, English is based in things while Potawatomi is based in activity or states of being/becoming. The key distinction is not gender or human versus nonhuman, but whether a thing is alive—so they use different verbs for hearing a person or hearing an airplane engine. (p. 53).
Kimmerer loves English, but she also loves Potawatomi. “With the beautiful clusters of consonants of zh and mb and shwe and kwe and mshk, our language sounds like wind in the pines and water over rocks, sounds our ears may have been more delicately attuned to in the past, but no longer. To learn again, you really have to listen” (p. 53). After her initial frustration with a language that has a word meaning “to be a bay,” she found her epiphany:
An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page… In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead…defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live…the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers… (p. 55, italics in the original)
And that paragraph demonstrates the poetry I was talking about earlier. She has written an achingly beautiful book with many important messages woven in. I intend to go back to it every few years, at least to read my handwritten notes. Treat yourself!
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Photo Credit: Diva Plavalaguna via Pexels
Democratization Changes Everything, Part II In Part 1 of this article, we looked at how democratization has changed in punditry and fundraising. In this second and final installment, we examine the changes in a third area, and look at how these shifts in many industries change the way we do business, and the way we live.
Networking and Learning Especially since Zoom was so widely adapted during the pandemic, alternatives to expensive and draining in-person conferences are everywhere. From the comfort of my farmhouse in Massachusetts, I’ve attended major conferences put on by the UN, by various green business associations, and by businesses or organizations in Europe, South Africa, Asia, and the other side of my own country—as well as dozens of networking and learning calls including a monthly salon of environmental visionaries that’s always a highlight of my month. One of the two activist groups I’m involved with meets exclusively online (allowing the involvement of people in all four mainland US time zones) and the other, although all the members live within a 30-mile radius, mostly meets online.
Because I’m a good networker who participates actively in breakout rooms and posts resources to chats, I count many new friends from online events, including a green entrepreneur who was 16 when I met him at a Zoom pitch event in San Diego four years ago, a man a decade my senior who shares a lot of my vision for achieving peace in the world, a woman who is extremely skilled at facilitating challenging/triggering discussions on fraught topics, and an Australian with a compelling vision of integrating environmental work into the business world at a much higher level. And the democratization piece is that now, anyone with a $16/month Zoom subscription can host conferences for 100 people at a time, with no travel costs—and then make the recording available as long as they want. I began online professional networking in 1995 and have watched the technologies improve. Zoom in 2024 is a lot better than Zoom in 2017, which I think was when I started using it. And even 2017 Zoom was better than Skype, which was better than email discussion boards, etc.
Implications In a world where anyone can be a pundit, an educator, a conference organizer, a political candidate, a product launcher, or a fundraising Ninja, the rules are very different than where everything is stratified, job titles have limitations, and resources are scarce. This is true whether you are a marketer, business owner, activist, academic, creative, government worker—or some combination.
Here’s a wild hypothesis: because so many limits and barriers have gone away, we see the world as abundant and that in turn helps us become more creative. We can be looking beyond either-or to both-and, or even many-and. We can imagine vastly different ways of solving problems—and if we can imagine something, we can figure out a way to do it. Here are some creative solutions we’ve already discovered:
Using biomimicry to develop gecko-like adhesives, spider-web-style building materials, bamboo houses that can grow their own replacement parts, and termite-inspired zero-energy HVAC systems
Harnessing the power of moving water not through eco-catastrophic massive dams but through no-dam frisbee-sized hydroelectric plants with near-zero environmental impact
Building net-energy-positive houses—as Amory Lovins did all the way back in 1984—that despite a location in the cold Colorado Rockies, don’t need a furnace because they stay warm enough without one to grow bananas
Purifying water using only the properties of light and natural temperature change
The four mass-scale climate restoration technologies explored in the book I review this month, Climate Restoration (I mention them in the review, but to really explore them you’ll need to read that book).
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Still working out the details, but it looks like I will be presenting a virtual program to the Thomas Yoseloff Business Center of the New York Public Library. This event will be open to the public without charge, over Zoom. The probable date and time: September 16, noon US Eastern.
Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race
Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race By Peter Fiekowsky with Carole Douglas (Rivertowns Books, 2022)
Fiekowsky starts by arguing two points that I didn’t think of as in contention:
The Paris climate targets are woefully inadequate, and net zero atmospheric carbon growth is nowhere near enough. In a world with carbon levels already passing 320 ppm (parts per million), we need to actually reverse global heating to get our atmosphere back to conditions that we know can sustain life (pp. 8-9, 22-25, and elsewhere, with a particularly grim look at what life would be like meeting the Paris targets on p. 8).
We have the capacity to solve the problem by implementing technologies that are relatively permanent (workable for at least 100 years), able to scale up rapidly (removing at least 25 gigatons of carbon per year), and able to attract investors to finance them (p. 33).
He obviously travels in a different world than I do, a world of high-level scholars and big investors who need to be convinced of these two axioms. I have never heard a single climate scientist claim that the Paris goals would be enough, that an average temperature rise of even just 2 degrees Celsius would not spawn massive changes around the world. And for at least a couple of decades, I’ve been convinced of humans’ ability to solve the problem. He apparently has found it difficult to convince colleagues and influencers of this, and strikes a tone I find unnecessarily defensive.
But the things I’ve always thought of as our most positive steps toward mitigating catastrophic climate change—such as afforestation (massive tree planting), complete and rapid conversion to true clean energy, and shifting our industrial/agricultural/construction processes—are, in Fiekowsky’s world view, less important than some big technological developments I wasn’t familiar with.
He identifies four industrial revolutions that meet the three criteria listed in the second point, above, plus a social trend that has long been part of the mix—and he says these, combined, could easily reduce atmospheric carbon to less than 300 ppm, with only minimal lifestyle changes. These five big innovations are:
Synthetic limestone that will allow carbon-negative construction (Chapter 3, pp. 83-97)
Seaweed and marine permaculture underwater forests (Chapter 4, pp. 98-114)
Iron fertilization of the oceans (Chapter 5, pp. 115-141)
Oxidizing methane to convert it into longer-lived but less harmful CO2 (Chapter 6, pp. 115-141)
Reducing the human impact on climate by reducing the size of the human population (Chapter 7, pp. 162-181; something environmentalists have been advocating since at least 1968, when Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s landmark The Population Bomb was published)
These solutions, each described in great detail in its own chapter, including the benefits, challenges, revenue streams, and investor appeal, do involve geoengineering—something I’ve been skeptical about in the more commonly discussed variations of, e.g., destroying existing weather patterns and replacing them with wild untried schemes. But the particular interventions—unlike any other geoengineering project I’ve ever heard of—are also biomimicry. Fiekowsky studied how nature has stoped previous global heat waves and then recalibrated again when it got too cold. Then he found scientists and entrepreneurs who have figured out how to replicate those eons-old models that were not engineered by humans but by oceans and continents.
While I’m not a scientist, I have done extensive reading on climate, and as far as I can tell, both the science and the business analyses are sound. His big challenge is convincing the world of his two initial points. Read the book yourself and see if you think he’s on the right track. I do.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Five Weeks to Set Up a Profitable Green/Social Justice Business—Only Eight Spaces Available
If you’ve always wanted to run a business that makes the world better, this is your chance to get personal guidance from Shel Horowitz (me, your newsletter writer), an internationally recognized expert in environmentally and socially conscious business (bio below). In just five weeks.
Format:
Five 75-minute interactive and participatory online group sessions, plus a private 45-60-minute consultation with Shel: you get to choose either a single session or splitting it into two half-hour sessions at the time they’ll be most beneficial for you (I’d recommend scheduling at least one session after the final class, but that’s up to you). And a mutual-support private group on LinkedIn just for those who are currently enrolled in or have gone through this program.
Each group session will consist of
Attender check-ins on how they moved forward/what they’re pleased about/new challenges (for the first session, we’ll have introductions instead that follow a specific format to keep the discussion moving and focus on the important parts)
A learning unit presented by Shel
Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
Wrap-up and next steps
Members will have access to recordings and informal transcripts, to the best of our ability. You’ll probably find it helpful to replay the sessions or review the transcripts.
Topics:
Session 1: Identify your green and social equity opportunities.
Session 2: Rough out products or services that yourorganization (a business, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, educational or medical institution, government agency, etc.) can develop to address those opportunities.
Session 3: Use Shel and the group to evaluate your ideas and choose your first green and/or social equity offering.
Session 4: Understand the basics of marketing your first green/social equity product or service to three different populations—vastly increasing your potential market and giving you a significant competitive edge.
Session 5: Outline your personal path to move your idea from conception to completion: what steps you’ll take to make it real. Opportunities to continue receiving support.
One-to-one Consultation: 45-60 minutes total, in one or two sessions at the point in the five-session program that will provide YOU with the most value. Shel can help you see the unique strengths of your operation and guide you toward possible offerings, help you list and implement your next steps, steer you toward very helpful resources, and more.
Mondays, 3 pm ET/noon PT, May 20, 27, June 3, 10, 17.Click if you’re ready to sign up. Is This Program Right for You and Do You Qualify?
You will benefit from the program if you can say yes to at least three of these questions:
Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
Have you ever considered what kind of a difference your organization could make on the issues that matter to you most—if you focused some energy on those issues within a business framework?
Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
Are you eager to discover how your specific business can thrive by combining profitability with environmental and social good?
How to Apply:
With only eight spaces available and to make sure everyone has a fair chance at a slot, here’s the easy application process: You start by making sure you can answer yes to at least three of the questions above. Then fill out the simple questionnaire online. If your answers fit the program, Shel will schedule a quick 10- to 15-minute one-to-one call to explore a bit more. After the interview, you’ll be notified quickly whether you’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or asked to wait until you’re more ready.
Note from Shel, Your Presenter/Facilitator, on Enrollment, Pricingand Scheduling:
This first round is a pilot program, limited to eight people. A minimum of four is required to run the program. Future programs are likely to be more expensive and accommodate up to 12 people, so this is a time you can get more in-depth attention from me at a more affordable cost. I was advised by multiple experts that I should be charging $1500-$2000 for this program, but I want to keep it affordable—and I recognize that you’ll be road-testing it with me and helping me refine future versions. So, pricing for this first round will be just $675 in one payment or two payments of $375. The next iteration of this mastermind will likely be in the $995-$1195 range. This initial bargain price will not be repeated.
Mondays, 3 pm ET/noon PT, May 20, 27, June 3, 10, 17.Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.
Your Instructor/Facilitator, Shel Horowitz
With more than 20 years at the intersection of profitability and environmental/social good and more than 20 additional years in small business marketing and in activism, Shel’s “superpowers” include:
Finding your social change sweet spot: how you and yourorganization are uniquely positioned to create and market profitable products and services that address crises like hunger, poverty, racism/othering—even “unsolvable” ones like war and catastrophic climate change (the answers will be different for every business or nonprofit). Your offering will be based on your skills, interests, and capabilities.
Creating compelling ways to tell “the story behind the story” that generate interest, empathy, and engagement—in a press release, on a web page, in interviews and speeches, etc.
Writing informational and marketing materials that make a compelling case for you, your products and services, and your focus on higher good: reasons for your prospects to choose you!
Helping you write, publish, and market a book that establishes your expertise and credibility while helping to influence others toward a better world (Shel has published ten books under his own name and ghostwritten others, through big NYC publishers, small presses, his own publishing company, and a subsidy house, so he has expertise in whichever model will work best for you).
Suggesting win-win-win partnerships that broaden your market, add more capabilities to your offerings, and increase revenue opportunities. Shel can also write powerful introductory letters to your potential partners like the one that enabled one of his clients to do script consulting for Hollywood director Ed Zwick. Doing two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson was Shel’s best partnership in his own career.
Helping you secure knock-it-out-of-the-park endorsements and positioning those blurbs for visibility and sales. He wrote the letter that got one client a testimonial from basketball superstar Bob Cousy. Shel’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has 22 endorsements including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, green living and green business experts Alicia Bay Laurel, Jacquelyn Ottman, and Joel Makower, social media gurus Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Go-Giver Bob Burg, BNI founder Ivan Misner, and other prominent people.
I note in the opening paragraph of this month’s book review (Democracy Awakening by historian Heather Cox Richardson) that this is the third consecutive month I’ve reviewed a book that gives a window in changing the power dynamics in order to create lasting social change.
Shifting power dynamics is why we know this month’s author in the first place. Despite the rise of many authoritarian regimes around the globe, general social trends clearly show that power is being democratized in some very important ways. Electoral politics dynamics, shaping public opinion, fundraising, organizing movements, and of course, the buying process are really different than they were 30 years ago. Let’s look at just three of these.
Shaping Public Opinion
In this country’s early history, pamphleteers printed or went to a print shop to print their own works. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin became not just influencers, but folk heroes—and they did it without the help of a mainstream press. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, the mainstream media took hold. In the 1960s when I was growing up, the news, for the most part, was what Walter Cronkite or Huntley & Brinkley said it was on TV, or what the New York Times saw as part of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Our consciousness not only in news but in culture and life was shaped by just three major television networks, and the typical family might only consume one or two news sources.
National media still exist, of course. But with hundreds of thousands of media channels diluting the audience for any single one, there was no longer a national consensus about what was important and where to learn about it. At the same time, media broke out of geographic and time isolation. If a reader wants a European or Middle Eastern perspective, it’s easy enough to jump on the website for Der Spiegel or Al-Jazeera. And the days of needing to watch the news at a particular moment are long gone. We live in a world of unlimited reruns and pause buttons.
For the past several decades, opinion makers can once again, finally, develop an audience without the help of a mainstream media platform. While self-publishing never went away (think Walt Whitman or Anais Nin), it had existed on the margins. But by 2000, we suddenly saw a big shift: a return to the dynamics that had lifted Paine and Franklin in the 18th Century. Commentators like Greg Palast and Beverly Harris suddenly found a following.
24 years later, hundreds of self-made pundits have built significant followings, often leading to book contracts. But tens of thousands of others, using those same platforms, toil in obscurity.
Richardson is one of those newly strengthened voices. Her daily Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, has tens of thousands of readers. So do newsletters from Rubert Hubbell, Jessica Craven, and so many others.
This model has upended power relations between commentators and their public, at least from my perspective. I start my day reading Richardson and Hubbell along with business commentators Seth Godin and Bob Burg. And I read Craven’s Sunday good news roundup. While I frequently follow links to mainstream-media commentary such as Rachel Maddow and Seth Myers, I don’t seek them out, just follow links when their stuff someone or some algorithm sends me something that looks interesting. I do subscribe to various news bulletins from the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian, as well as several green business and climate publications. Sometimes I read the summaries and don’t click through; other times I might click three links in a single newsletter. But those self-published four are the first places I turn to when I log on each morning.
Multiply me by tens of thousands of others, and you can see that both Left and Right are building audiences through individual newsletters, a few subscribers at a time. Add in social media chatter, which tends to aggregate like-minded audiences, and we see that the established media has much less influence than it used to. As a society, we now crowdsource our wisdom and to some extent our conclusions.
And this is one of the reasons why things seem so much more polarized. We’re not getting the middle voices so much, and the ends of the spectrum get far more traction than they used to.
Fundraising
You’d never know it looking at the number of fundraising letters coming into my postal mailbox every week, but fundraising has also seen sweeping change. Any of us can now set up a campaign on one of many platforms. While Kickstarter is the most famous, hundreds of alternatives exist (many with much more fundraiser-friendly models). To name just a few (listed for informational purposes; these are not endorsements and you should do your own due diligence): GiveButter, Chuffed, and Zeffy serve nonprofits, Barnraiser and Harvest Returns help farm and food businesses, Mighty Cause and SeedInvest fund activists, Patreon assists musicians, and GoFundMe and IndieGoGo can fund pretty much any venture. These and many other crowdfunding platforms have allowed inventors, creatives, charities, and for-profit businesses to capitalize without relying on vulture capital, banks, or predatory lending.
[This article continues next month, examining one more category and discussing what this means for marketers, business owners, activists, and creatives.]
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Overcoming the challenges in creating a successful business.
The art of merging world-saving with business growth.
How ethical, green businesses aren’t just good for the planet—they’re great for business success.
Four diverse markets for green products, from the eco-enthusiasts to the skeptics, and how tailoring your pitch can win them over.
Global conflicts, and how resource competition fuels them.
Easy-to-implement socially conscious business practices.
How activism can boost your business and fill your soul.
And much, much more
A much shorter 21-minute interview with Mari-Lyn Harris of Heart at Work on her Creating an Impact podcast, which also aired on her Summit for Changemakers.
Mari-Lyn has had me on her podcasts and telesummits many times and we always have a great conversation. Despite the short length, we managed to cover:
Motivating from excitement about new possibilities instead of despair and gloom
Creating initiatives that have multiple benefits (and often, few or no disadvantages)
How green initiatives offer ROIs that outperform almost any other option
Why we need to go beyond sustainability(keeping things from getting worse) to regenerativity (making things better)
Why the so-called Green Revolution that started in the 1940s was really a failure
How funding small, well-chosen initiatives with tiny donations can create deep and lasting change–and how I personally used this method to start libraries in two developing countries
How I can help businesses and organizations find enormous value in the social change and environmental work they do
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America By: Heather Cox Richardson (Viking, 2023)
Why am I devoting a third consecutive book review to a book on power dynamics? Some of it is coincidence—but the play of power dynamics in the 2024 US presidential election probably helped bring Democracy Awakening, David and Goliath and Reclaiming Democracy to the top of my reading pile. Next month’s book review will be entirely different: a handbook on reversing the carbon problem.
As a historian, Richardson has a very different approach than Gladwell the visionary or Daley-Harris the activist. She puts this moment with a would-be dictator facing 91 criminal charges into a historical context that starts before the Revolutionary War, continues through the major threat to US democracy before, during, and after the Civil War (a struggle between slavers/segregationists and those who saw their mission as expanding the reach of liberty), and moves into the 20thth and 21stst centuries with the slow-building right-wing attempt to return to the “glory days” when white males controlled those they saw as inferior—culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
We know that Trump in some ways is different. Never before has a president been so willing to lie (the Washington Post documented 30,573 lies during his term.) Never in my lifetime has a US president been so openly corrupt or so blatant in using his office to grow his personal wealth and business revenues—or so openly racist, misogynistic, ableist, and cruel; so demanding of personal loyalty while giving none in return; so enamored of some of the worst dictators in the world; so inept at policy; and so emotionally insecure that he needs to brag that anything good was because of him (while being conspicuously absent when it’s time to admit he was wrong).
But Richardson shows that Trump, while extreme, is a logical consequence of decades of policy.
We will never know if Trump would have happened (or been so successful) without the earlier almost continuous attempts at subverting democracy, from Jefferson—yes, the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence—pushing winner-take-all presidential state-by-state voting in a blatant attempt to win the presidency under the new rules (p. 185) and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act betrayal that could have turned the entire US into slaveholder territory (p. 197) to Richard Nixon squelching negotiations with Vietnam until he was firmly in the White House so Johnson could not claim a victory. That playbook was used again in 1980 by Ronald Reagan to block a hostage-release deal with Iran until Jimmy Carter had left the White House (p. 49), and Trump used a variant in first demanding action on immigration in order to get funding for foreign crises, then torpedoing that action as soon as it became apparent that it might actually pass.
This sorry history has many roots. The KKK chose white robes so they would appear to be ghosts and spook Blacks into intimidation (p. 27). A pro-slave senator physically attacked Senator Charles Sumner in 1856 (p. 197). Hitler slurred the groups he tried to destroy, such as Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as “Indians” (p. 167).
Richardson also examines the little tug-of-wars in values in both current US political parties. But one thing she doesn’t do satisfactorily is to explain how the Republican Party of liberation that managed to win the presidency in just its second attempt (and that under Lincoln made huge strides toward a more equal society) became the party of racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism while the Democrats, who embodied blatant racism through the 19thth century, somehow became the part of working people regardless of color, gender, sexual orientation, or physical abilities. To me, that’s a rather shocking omission.
Despite this flaw, it’s a well-written book that fills in a lot of details about the past 200+ years and girds us well to protect our democracy again going into November.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Sorry to be a few days late this month. The fault is all mine; in the midst of a health crisis with my dad and a trip to Florida to help sort it out, I neglected to move the main article from my stay-at-home computer to the one I travel with. I asked my housesitter to send it to me, but I think it sounded too complicated for her.
The good news is this issue is a really good one, starting with your chance to get some awesome skills in developing/expanding your own green/social change business, continuing through a guest main article on one of my favorite topics, and including for the first time in a while some chances to hear me on podcasts and read recent press coverage. It concludes with a review of a wonderfully thorough and deeply optimistic climate crisis book focused on ACTION: of individuals, organizations, and citizen groups.
Enjoy! And please feel welcome to comment on any or all, either by leaving a note online or by replying to this email.
Warmly, Shel
Before we get to this month’s tip, an important and limited chance to really up your green/social equity business game:
Five Weeks to Set Up a Profitable Green/Social Justice Business—Only Eight Spaces Available
If you’ve always wanted to run a business that makes the world better, this is your chance to get personal guidance from Shel Horowitz (me, your newsletter writer), an internationally recognized expert in environmentally and socially conscious business (bio below). In just five weeks.
Format:
Five 75-minute interactive and participatory online group sessions, plus a private 45-60-minute consultation with Shel: you get to choose either a single session or splitting it into two half-hour sessions at the time they’ll be most beneficial for you (I’d recommend scheduling at least one session after the final class, but that’s up to you). And a mutual-support private group on LinkedIn just for those who are currently enrolled in or have gone through this program.
Each group session will consist of
Attender check-ins on how they moved forward/what they’re pleased about/new challenges (for the first session, we’ll have introductions instead that follow a specific format to keep the discussion moving and focus on the important parts)
A learning unit presented by Shel
Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
Wrap-up and next steps
Members will have access to recordings and informal transcripts, to the best of our ability. You’ll probably find it helpful to replay the sessions or review the transcripts.
Topics:
Session 1: Identify your green and social equity opportunities.
Session 2: Rough out products or services that yourorganization (a business, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, educational or medical institution, government agency, etc.) can develop to address those opportunities.
Session 3: Use Shel and the group to evaluate your ideas and choose your first green and/or social equity offering.
Session 4: Understand the basics of marketing your first green/social equity product or service to three different populations—vastly increasing your potential market and giving you a significant competitive edge.
Session 5: Outline your personal path to move your idea from conception to completion: what steps you’ll take to make it real. Opportunities to continue receiving support.
One-to-one Consultation: 45-60 minutes total, in one or two sessions at the point in the five-session program that will provide YOU with the most value. Shel can help you see the unique strengths of your operation and guide you toward possible offerings, help you list and implement your next steps, steer you toward very helpful resources, and more.
April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Click if you’re ready to sign up
Is This Program Right for You and Do You Qualify?
You will benefit from the program if you can say yes to at least three of these questions:
Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
Have you ever considered what kind of a difference your organization could make on the issues that matter to you most—if you focused some energy on those issues within a business framework?
Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
Are you eager to discover how your specific business can thrive by combining profitability with environmental and social good?
How to Apply:
With only eight spaces available and to make sure everyone has a fair chance at a slot, here’s the easy application process: You start by making sure you can answer yes to at least three of the questions above. Then fill out the simple questionnaire online. If your answers fit the program, Shel will schedule a quick 10- to 15-minute one-to-one call to explore a bit more. After the interview, you’ll be notified quickly whether you’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or asked to wait until you’re more ready.
Note from Shel, Your Presenter/Facilitator, on Enrollment, Pricingand Scheduling:
This first round is a pilot program, limited to eight people. A minimum of four is required to run the program. Future programs are likely to be more expensive and accommodate up to 12 people, so this is a time you can get more in-depth attention from me at a more affordable cost. I was advised by multiple experts that I should be charging $1500-$2000 for this program, but I want to keep it affordable—and I recognize that you’ll be road-testing it with me and helping me refine future versions. So, pricing for this first round will be just $675 in one payment or two payments of $375. The next round of this mastermind will likely be in the $995-$1195 range. This initial bargain price will not be repeated.
Tentatively, I will schedule for Tuesday afternoons at 4 pm US Eastern. If you are seriously interested but Tuesday afternoons aren’t good for you, reach out to me. If I can get a minimum of four, I’m willing to run a second group concurrently. We will do our best to provide recordings and transcripts.
April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.
Your Instructor/Facilitator, Shel Horowitz
With more than 20 years at the intersection of profitability and environmental/social good and more than 20 additional years in small business marketing and in activism, Shel’s “superpowers” include:
Finding your social change sweet spot: how you and yourorganization are uniquely positioned to create and market profitable products and services that address crises like hunger, poverty, racism/othering—even “unsolvable” ones like war and catastrophic climate change (the answers will be different for every business or nonprofit). Your offering will be based on your skills, interests, and capabilities.
Creating compelling ways to tell “the story behind the story” that generate interest, empathy, and engagement—in a press release, on a web page, in interviews and speeches, etc.
Writing informational and marketing materials that make a compelling case for you, your products and services, and your focus on higher good: reasons for your prospects to choose you!
Helping you write, publish, and market a book that establishes your expertise and credibility while helping to influence others toward a better world (Shel has published ten books under his own name and ghostwritten others, through big NYC publishers, small presses, his own publishing company, and a subsidy house, so he has expertise in whichever model will work best for you).
Suggesting win-win-win partnerships that broaden your market, add more capabilities to your offerings, and increase revenue opportunities. Shel can also write powerful introductory letters to your potential partners like the one that enabled one of his clients to do script consulting for Hollywood director Ed Zwick. Doing two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson was Shel’s best partnership in his own career.
Helping you secure knock-it-out-of-the-park endorsements and positioning those blurbs for visibility and sales. He wrote the letter that got one client a testimonial from basketball superstar Bob Cousy. Shel’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has 22 endorsements including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, green living green business experts Alicia Bay Laurel, Jacquelyn Ottman, and Joel Makower, social media gurus Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Go-Giver Bob Burg, BNI founder Ivan Misner, and other prominent people.
April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.
Build Your Spirits and Your Business with this One Shift
Photo Credit: fauxels via Pexels
Why Kindness Builds Success
Guest article by Rob Hatch
[Editor’s Note: I was introduced to Rob by the legendary Chris Brogan, his colleague at Owner Media, several years ago, and I read both his newsletter and Chris’s faithfully. Their styles are extremely different—Rob is the grounded, practical one while Chris is the big dreamer—and both give solid advice with a very personal touch. I’ve also corresponded with him repeatedly and find him to be every bit as much a mensch as this article suggests. This post originally appeared in his November 23 newsletter. You can read his bio and subscribe at the link in his byline, above –Shel]
“Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest” – J.B. Pritzker.
This quote was from the Illinois Governor’s commencement speech at Northwestern University.
Too often, we excuse behaviors that are…well, unkind. When discussing the achievements of remarkable individuals, we sometimes overlook lousy behavior. We may even cite their insolence as a critical element of their success or, worse, attempt to emulate it.
However, being a jerk is not a requirement for success. In fact, it is kindness that conveys strength and instills confidence.
You can be kind and still have high expectations.
You can be kind and still hold people accountable.
You can be kind and still be honest and direct.
You can be kind and still make difficult decisions others disagree with.
You can be kind and still be firm in the face of challenging situations.
I can’t promise it will make you the smartest person in the room. However, when I consider how to frame my success, I want kindness as the foundation.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Mari-Lyn Harris, who has interviewed me several times for various summits, taped a great interview with me that was scheduled to air on February 12 as part of her Change-Maker Summit. Then she had to postpone her whole summit for health reasons.
And Kevin Lee has had to postpone two tapings for his Power Marketing podcast.
I will post the links to both of them on the archive page for this month’s newsletter (click on any of the Read More buttons in this email) as I receive them.
It’s been a while since I had this section in the newsletter–but this year, I will be actively pursuing podcast interviews once I get back from a trip to China at the end of March. So hopefully this will be a more-or-less regular feature again.
The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming
The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming By: Guy Dauncey
Actually, Dauncey presents far more than 101 solutions. Each two-page “solution” covers a broad topic, and within that framework, he might include a dozen or more. As an example, I opened randomly to solution #58, “Build a Smart Grid” (pp.192-193). Those two pages begin by pointing out issues with the old-fashioned grid and challenges that will render it obsolete. Then it presents a vision of the many improvements a smart-grid world would offer, from evening out the consumption highs and lows to eliminating the need for “peaker plants” to lowering homeowner electric bills—and notes potential overall savings in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Then it provides three action steps for electric utilities before concluding with six methods to address storage of renewable energy in the short term. It also includes a photo with caption, a sidebar with 15 websites to learn more, a quote from an expert, five reference citations to the extensive endnotes (22 pages’ worth)—and, amazingly, about two column-inches of white space.
Other solution spreads include charts and graphs, sidebars with citizen action steps (nine of these at solution #62 fill almost half a page), and many more resources (solution #32’s resource box includes 26 websites instead of a photo). The book designer did an amazing job of making everything except for the single-page final solution #101, which basically just tells the reader to get involved in whatever way is meaningful to them, fit exactly two pages.
And before we even get to the solutions—grouped into 11 economic sectors such as farming, governments, communities, activism, manufacturing, transportation, etc.—the first 75 pages are devoted to an overview that looks deeply at how humans have altered the earth’s current status—and what that means for our future.
I found quite a bit to agree with here, including several points I’ve been making for years in my speaking and writing. A few examples:
Mindset is key. We have the technology to solve many of the biggest human-created problems, but the biggest battle is convincing others that yes, we can—and, in fact, we must.
When you scrape away the superficials, war is usually about competing claims for resources such as energy, which he focuses on. I would also consider water, minerals, harbor access, etc. And because resource issues are solvable, peace actually is possible.
The business case for addressing these issues (not just climate but the many related slices like hunger, poverty, and various kinds of discrimination) is so strong that executives should be asking managers why they are missing the enormously profitable opportunities in being part of the solution.
We’re all in this together. While business and the profit motive can be significant movers toward the better world we’d all like to envision, government needs to use its regulatory power as well. And activists need to pressure both business and government. And academics, engineers, and scientists need to research cutting-edge solutions. And NGOs need to create the awareness not just of the problems, but of the solutions.
Because it was published back in 2009, many statistics in the book are probably obsolete. Even back then, his numbers showed an overwhelming case for shifting to clean energy. But the good news is the performance of clean-energy technologies compared with fossil and nuclear is likely to be even better, because prices of renewables have plummetedwhilefossil fuels have fluctuated wildly but tend toward higher prices (and are more expensive now than they were in 2009).
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
In a recent newsletter,Ian Brodie discusses having a signature style for your public-facing writing: the stuff that you write to draw an audience specifically to YOU (or, fellow writers-for-hire, for your client). You might have to subscribe to see it; I had to subscribe (again) to get into the archives so I could share the direct link. He describes several possibilities in some detail:
Cause-motivated maverick
Serious expert
Charming and funny
Angry ranter
Experienced friend
Brodie recognizes that his list is not complete. And here’s one I’d add: Passionate purveyor (PP).
I think a lot of you are probably PPs: you run some kind of artisan business where quality and craftsmanship matter far more than volume. Maybe you make the product, maybe you sell or service it. Maybe you run a retail store that showcases your curation of those kinds of products, and you don’t just put stuff on the shelves but work with your customers to understand their needs and help them sort through the offerings to find the perfect one for them at that exact moment.
Two days before writing this, my wife and I spent $2000 on a bed set from someone who did just that. Yes, we probably could have saved a few hundred dollars elsewhere—but even as frugal as I am, I wanted the guidance. (And I bought the floor model, which knocked the $3800 price down by $1800). We went to three bed and mattress stores that day, starting with the one that got the sale. The other two convinced us that we had made a good choice not just in what we bought, but in whom we bought it from.
You want to be the best so your customers and clients will fall in love with what you do (and, perhaps subconsciously, by extension you want them to fall in love with you—nothing wrong with that!). You might do this through your sales floor personnel (as the bed store did), but also with personal touches in your signage: the way you describe a certain cheese, or an incisive book, or the comfort and quality of the all-natural fabrics you use—in short, telling the product’s story in a compelling way.
My first understanding of the power of the PP approach harnessed to story-based copywriting was through Drew Kaplan’s DAK catalog in the 1980s. I think he could probably have fascinated me into wanting to buy a cardboard box. While I would only buy a few items a year from him, I would eagerly devour the catalogs, reading about products that didn’t interest me at all just to catch his enthusiasm—his passion. The link above takes you to an archive that allows you to download any of the catalogs just by clicking on the cover, no charge.
If this is what you do, make it very clear in your marketing. People will pay more to do business with experts who understand how to find the best match for each and every buyer—who understand that one size never fits all, who can make them feel special and send them home with exactly the right thing.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Fantastic Fungi Directed by Louie Schwartzberg
I’ve been fascinated by the intricacy of nature for decades and began to pay attention to non-animal natural systems around 1971, when I took high school electives in ecology and field biology. I remember discovering the book The Secret Life of Plants a few years later—and listening to Stevie Wonder’s album with the same title when HE discovered the book. At the Bioneers-by-the-Bay conference in 2005, I heard the late Dr. Lynn Margulis give a fascinating slide talk on the secret life of bacteria (the link will take you to her section of my report; only rough notes on the beginnings of her talk, as I couldn’t take notes in the dark when she ran the slide show). I’ve known for several years that trees not only communicate with each other but act in ways that benefit the forest even if that collaborative action puts the individual at risk—just as people sometimes do. And for at least a few years I’ve known that the primary inter-tree communication system is the underground mycelial network: in other words, fungi.
Neither plant nor animal, fungi are the most diverse kingdom in nature, with something like a million species. About 20,000 of those species produce mushrooms as their reproductive organs. And this movie tells some of their astonishing story—including (and this I’d never heard before) that the evolutionary tree of mammals branched off from mycelium. If it was controversial even as recently as 98 years ago to claim that humans are descended from other primates such as apes, imagine the backlash when people start hearing that we’re descended from mushroom networks!
“Fantastic Fungi” would be worth watching for the cinematography alone. Time-lapse movies allow us to see the opening and blossoming of dozens of mushrooms, often in clusters and sometimes accompanied by plants opening right next door. The natural landscapes run the gamut from dense forests to arid canyons. It’s as visually stunning as a Jacques Cousteau film.
But there’s so much more in this roughly hour-long movie (the YouTube version I saw was an hour and twelve minutes and included material before and after the actual film). The filmmakers interview a number of leading-edge scientists across several disciplines such as ethnopharmacology, as well as food writer/chef Eugenia Bone and natural wellness celebrity Dr. Andrew Weil. They also interview two cancer patients who were part of a clinical trial involving psylocibin, both of whom described the experience in deeply spiritual terms.
Are you wondering, why is Shel reviewing this movie—what does it have to with environmentally- and social-equity-friendly business or how social change happens? I would make the case that it’s directly relevant. Understanding the natural world, the complexities of interdependent species across different kingdoms and the threat to civilization if these networks are destroyed is crucial to preserving them, and thus preserving humans on Earth. And it happens that the day I watched the movie and wrote this review, I also became aware of an attempt to pass a law in Brazil that would trash the Amazon basin and evict indigenous people so the whole thing could be industrialized—cutting off the regenerative system that is probably keeping our planet alive. Understanding the fungal world seems like an important first step in protecting that natural heritage, in the Amazon and elsewhere.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
In her book, Orwell’s Roses (see book review, below), essayist Rebecca Solnit writes,
Past and present support for authoritarians and denial of their crimes among those who are supposed to be the left has long made me wonder what, if anything, the term left means, since at other times it means those who support the human rights, freedoms, and egalitarianism that are antithetical to this
Perhaps I have an answer for her: Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian are often thought of as linear: as a journey of static points along a continuum. Some people even see this “linear” journey as age-related: that most people grow more conservative and more comfortable with repression as they get older.
Maverick that I am, I see the world differently. My theory is much more circular. Think of two circles, intersecting at two 90-degree angles at opposite ends of each circle (180 degrees apart)—kind of like this drawing of a hydrogen atom, but with only two circles. One circle embodies points on the left-right spectrum, the other marks degrees of loving freedom or loving repression.
What are those points of intersection? Left and right come together at both libertarian and totalitarian ends. Similarly, along the freedom arc, they meet at both left and right. I see very little difference between Fascist thugs of the Right and Stalinist thugs of the Left; they are both into suppressing dissent and inflicting an all-powerful state. And this, I believe, is how the socialist George Orwell—who fought in the militia against the Franco version of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War until he realized that totalitarians of the Left were equally dangerous—came to write two of the most powerful anti-Communist books ever written.
Finding and Harnessing That Common Ground
On the freedom side of the spectrum, it’s no coincidence that Right- and Left-libertarians have both used the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag from the revolution that created the United States of America. Both value personal freedom enormously, but not necessarily the same aspects of freedom. For someone on the progressive side, it might be the freedom to wear clothing more typical of a different gender, while a conservative might be more interested in reducing regulation of small business. And people on both sides might advocate for various positions on issues ranging from homeschooling to firearms to organic foods to unrestricted speech.
Still, Tea-Party libertarians (the real ones, who actually believe in individual freedom even for those who don’t look like them or share their backgrounds) and civil liberties progressives have more in common with each other than either do with the Fascists and Stalinists.
What this means is that politics can indeed create strange bedfellows. You may find opportunities to coalition with people whom you disagree with on many fundamental issues—but where you agree, you can work together, powerfully and effectively.
Want real-life examples? How about these two:
In 1999, I founded a movement called Save the Mountain, to stop a proposed luxury home development that would have ruined the four-state view at the top of the much-loved state park immediately abutting the site. In the press release announcing the group’s formation, I wrote (as close as I can remember it), “Mr. ___________ [developer’s name] has vastly underestimated the love that people of Hampshire County have for this mountain.”
And it was true! By using messaging that crossed all demographic and psychographic divisions, attracting not just environmental activists but farmers, store owners, academics, local politicians, and more, we created a near-consensus movement that could routinely bring 400 people out to public hearings in a town of 5000—and we achieved near-total victory in just over a year. Even though I expected to win all along, even I’d thought it would take us five years.
Since 1994, environmentalists and Tea Partiers in the Green Scissors movement have worked in coalition to expose and oppose wasteful government spending on things that aren’t good for the environment. They recognize they’re stronger together than separately.
Aging Doesn’t Mean Ossifying
As for people getting more conservative with age, I disagree with that too. From my initial flowering into activism at age 12, I was constantly influenced by my elders—sometimes people who were 60 or more years older than me. I’ve been to two birthday parties four years apart for women who were still passionate activists on their 100th birthdays (the link goes to my blog entry for the earlier one, in 2015). I remember after my arrest during the Seabrook Occupation of 1977 that the largest and most vocal faction inside our armory was the “gray hair caucus,” numbering at least 100 out of the 700 or so gathered inside.
And at 66, I’m still an activist, working on progressive causes such as immigration justice and protection of diversity—but also on showing the business world that addressing the environment and our toughest social issues can be profitable. There have been victories and defeats along the way—but if I make it to 100 like my two friends, I expect I’ll still be doing my part to improve the world.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Solnit, a well-known voice in progressive politics, shows us a very different side of Eric Blair, the complex bundle of contradictions better known as George Orwell. The world knows him as a dystopian author of Animal Farm and 1984: two scathing novels attacking Stalinist Totalitarian Communism. Academics also know his work chronicling the lives of coal miners in his native UK, the impact of imperialism in Burma (where, as a young man, he was a police officer), and fighters in the Spanish Civil War (where he was a soldier fighting against Franco’s fascists). Solnit knows him as an avid gardener with a special passion for roses—who sought refuge from polluted London first in the small cottage where he gardened in 1936, and near the end of his life on a farm on a remote Scottish island where the last eight miles of the journey could only be done on foot; a fighter for the principle of clear language and opponent of government or corporate euphemisms; and above all, an optimist who maintained hope all the way through his life.
Why am I reviewing this book HERE, in my newsletter? What relevance does this fascinating portrait of a many-faceted man have for my audience of business leaders involved in social and environmental good, with an interest in marketing?
First, because Orwell was incredibly aware of the interplay of humans with the natural world. Second, because he was involved in social causes throughout his adulthood, even putting his own life at risk several times. Third, because he himself was a solopreneur, running a little shop in the cottage with his wife. Fourth, because Orwell, himself an outcast as a working-class student at elite Eton and then as an Eton-educated person seen as trying to be better than his peers (p. 22), understood that history is shaped by people on the margins. Fifth and perhaps most germane, because this book has a lot of relevance in its discussions of messaging, building positive AND negative movements, and influencing culture.
Solnit starts (p. 8) by noting that planting can be a semi-permanent legacy; trees we plant might outlive us by generations, sometimes centuries. A tree in my front yard was planted in 1916, when my oldest grandparent was 11; I’ve eaten carob from the 2000+-year-old tree that sustained Shimon Bar-Yochai when he hid from the Romans in a cave in northern Israel for thirteen years when people who had known Christ were still alive. Orwell suggested planting an acorn for “every time you commit an antisocial act (p. 10).”
Solnit has a gift for lyrical writing. She refers to the Carboniferous Era as “a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago” (p. 60). Here’s another of many beautiful passages:
Much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passages of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm… (p. 189).
Solnit celebrates Orwell’s joy in the natural beauty and simple pleasures around him, decrying the puritan, humorless aspects of the Left (e.g., pp. 91-92). Having been criticized for making space for pleasure travel, daily time in nature, and eating delicious food instead of being an activist every waking minute, I appreciate this celebration, and the third-party validation she offers through people like Emma Goldman. In my 20s, I proudly wore a t-shirt with a picture of Emma and a distilled version of her response to an activist who criticized her for dancing, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I still agree, even though the shirt wore out long ago. Solnit gives the complete and accurate quote, in context (p. 114).
So much more to say, but this is already long. Quick highlights:
Class perspectives on how we experience nature (p. 163) and beauty—and their interaction with justice/injustice, including visiting a sweatshop “rose factory” in Colombia (pp. 189-219)
How authoritarians exploit lies and gaslighting (pp. 222-224)—and the dangers of letting them create and control history (pp. 222-228 and in numerous references to 1984 protagonist Winston Smith’s career expunging inconvenient history from the written record)
Orwell’s surprising critique of Gandhi as dogmatic and questioning his tactics (pp. 263-264)
Right at the end, a key insight: Orwell wasn’t a prophet of doom but a merchant of hope (pp. 259-264). Orwell issued warnings, not prophecies. Warnings give people the option to change, and avoid calamity. In his own words, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe [in 1984] necessarily will arrive, but…something resembling it could arrive” (p. 262), “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection” (p. 263), and “Our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have” (p. 264).
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
A spork seems like a great invention—until you actually try to eat soup or spear a vegetable. Then, you discover it’s a compromise. It can do some of what a spoon does, and some of what a fork does, but for the most part, does neither very well.
The early 3-in-1 printers were like that, too. Dot-matrix (low-quality) printing, horrendous fax and scanning software, and expensive general awkwardness. They didn’t catch on until they got a lot better. Now, with high-resolution laser printing and quality scanning, good reliability, intuitive software, and smaller footprints both in price and square footage than having three separate devices (well, okay, two—I don’t know a lot of people who still use fax), they make a heck of a lot of sense. My first one, a gift from the manufacturer, retailed for $1200. It had a good laser printer but the scanning software was so awkward I had to relearn it each time I used it. My current one was only about $150, does two-sided printing, and takes up much less space. Once I figured out how to batch scans, my only complaint is the lack of autofeed for scanning. Fortunately, I don’t scan very much.
At this point, even if you only needed scanning or fax capabilities once in a while, why wouldn’t you buy a 3-in-1?
So—What’s the Lesson Here?
This: Usability, quality, and simplicity are as important as convenience. Convenience is only appreciated if you’re not compromising usability, quality, and simplicity. My current printer passes the test—not with flying colors, but adequately for my purposes. The spork, despite its brilliant simplicity, fails—and so did the $1200 printer I no longer have. So, if you’re designing a convenient solution, make sure you don’t leave essential performance tools on the cutting room floor.
In the green world, that might mean making appliances or even floor tiles modular and easy to disassemble, so if one part fails it can be replaced easily and inexpensively. It’s why single-stream recycling (sorted later, not by the user) is so popular. It means that if you offer compostable coffee cups, you should make sure the tops are compostable as well—AND you should have a collection point for used ones at your retail location and other convenient spots.
PS: Even sporks have their uses. I discovered recently that the spork is awesome for scraping out a can of wet cat food. But I don’t think I’d buy one just for that purpose.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage by Daniel Burrus (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2017)
A few years ago, I reviewed Burrus’s earlier book, Flash Foresight. This book revisits that territory and expands from it. While aimed at large corporations, much of his advice holds for small businesses, including solopreneurs like me—even if we don’t have the kinds of financial and logistical resources big companies can throw at a problem. Note: I am using his preferred capitalization.
His main theses?
If we divide our forecasting into inevitable Hard Trends (e.g., Baby Boomers are aging out of the workforce and into eldercare services) and malleable Soft Trends (Boomers take their hard-won knowledge with them as they exit), we will know how to both anticipate and be ready for the inevitable changes and consider whether we want to impact the soft ones—such as creating a way to capture that soon-to-be-lost experience-based knowledge through the exit process.
Checking whether we are using Hard (data-based) or Soft (gut-based) Assumptions can help avoid disaster. Trends based on Hard Assumptions are much more likely to come true.
Many of the disruptions are caused by three technology trends: faster processing speed, higher bandwidth, and better/more storage. Others are caused by the changing relationships these tech trends enable.
Even though phones, tablets, and personal computers might face hardware limitations, these three trends allow us to push more tasks out to the cloud—which has, for practical purposes, no such limitations.
Disruptive approaches can be created and harnessed by “Opportunity Managers” who can spot the possibilities and ride the exponential curves. And if you don’t disrupt, someone else will (p.129).
Be a contrarian. Innovate instead of competing. Choose to be extraordinary every day and ask the questions an extraordinary person would ask (p. 157). Skip the obvious problems and anticipate/plan for the deeper ones so you can turn them into opportunities—especially when you see the low-hanging fruit others aren’t noticing. Zag when others zig.
I would add one more to his three megatrends: exponentially better ease of use. That, in turn, democratizes the technology. Ease of use takes something out of the realm of engineers in lab coats and puts it into the pockets of ordinary people, even kids. Compare a DOS interface from the 1990s (or worse, a punch card-driven mainframe of the 1970s) with the few simple, well-labeled icons on a smart phone—WOW! My first experience going online was CompuServe, in 1987. Not only did we have to use command-line prompts, we had to deal with 10-digit all-numeral user names—so we never knew who was writing to us. And my creakingly slow 300-bps modem connection was very balky, so I was constantly getting thrown off. After a couple of months, I gave up. Now, nine-year-olds and ninety-nine-year-olds can get online with a few clicks.
And this means that any of us—a preschooler, a solopreneur, someone just learning a written language—can become a disrupter and harness the early-mover advantage. Even as a home-office solopreneur, I disrupted the local portion of an industry all by myself, back in 1984, after buying my first computer (an original 128K Mac). At that time, my business focused on typing term papers with some resume writing—using an involved process of interviewing the client, writing and editing a draft, having the client approve the wording, and then typing a final, formatted copy. Suddenly, I could do the whole thing in one shift. I put a little half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages reading “Affordable Professional Resumes While You Wait.” Clients loved the speed, quality, and low price. Within about a year, it was the biggest part of my business—for a decade. And after that success, each time I switched my focus again, I looked for an approach that was at least a bit disruptive and different from what everyone else was doing: from popularizing “story-behind-the-story” press releases in the 1990s to staking my position around the idea that business can profit from building deep environmental and social responsibility into core products and services, which has been my core mission for almost a decade now.
Be sure to read Appendix A, a list of 25 principles in the book, and Appendix B, an expanded glossary that serves like an alphabetically organized Cliff Notes; they come after the acknowledgements and author bio, but before the thorough index. These two together will deeply reinforce the learning. Appendix C is about his video program.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Be sure to read the blog post, This Could Change Everything–it’s crucial to understanding a big shift that’s upon us. The link is below the main article and seasonal message.
Marketing Lessons from a Fruit Tree and a Spider Web? Yup.
Last month, we talked about operational reasons why one size DOESN’T fit all. This month, we continue that conversation, but look directly at why it doesn’t work in marketing either—looking to nature for examples.
I’ve been really interested in biomimicry for many years, and have written and spoken about how it can improve our engineering and design. My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, even has sections about biomimicry visionaries like Janine Benyus, Amory Lovins, and John Todd. It also has a section on John Kremer’s concept of biological marketing, where he talks about a single ear of corn generating thousands of ears.
But it was only just last month, on a beautiful day where I spent half an hour telling a prospect why I was uniquely qualified to write him a marketing plan for a venture that actually is unique (synthesizing ideas from at least three different industries) and then another hour planting garlic, that I really GOT how biomimicry applies to marketing.
Let’s ask some questions of our friends in nature.
Reporter: “Fruit tree, what’s your marketing plan?”
Fruit tree: “You’re going to think this is really funny, because it’s not a human thing—my marketing plan is to be eaten.”
Reporter: “Wow, that sounds crazy. How does that even work?”
Fruit tree: “Birds and animals nibble my fruit, then they move someplace else, poop out my powerful seeds—and my little babies, little clones of me, grow in all sorts of places I can’t reach (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m rooted deep into the ground. Not only is this how I reproduce, it’s the only way I can travel—and I love to travel).”
Reporter: “How about you, Spider—what’s your marketing plan?”
Spider: “Remember that famous book, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches by Joe Karbo? He was so lazy he took his idea from me. I’ve been doing lazy spider marketing for 250 million years [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_spiders], and Joe-com-lately didn’t show up until 40 years ago. All that talk about passive income, that’s my jam since before there were any humans. OK, I do work hard spinning a fancy web—but hey, the artistry feeds my soul and the craftsmanship feeds my body. Because once it’s done and my web looks gorgeous, all I have to do is lay back, quiet down, and wait for some company to drop by—and get stuck until I can have a nice snack. It’s eco-friendly, too, by the way. Zero carbon footprint—and without me and my sisters and daughters, this world would be overrun with pesky bugs.”
So what are the lessons here? I’ll offer two of them. If you come up with others, I just might mention you and your idea.
1. Just as the fruit tree’s marketing plan wouldn’t work for the spider and vice versa, a marketing plan for a B2B (business-to-business) green engineering firm would be useless to a B2C (business-to-consumer) weatherization company, even though are both are sub-slices of the green building scene. Your marketing plan has to make sense for your products and services, your market niches and their demographics/psychographics, and yes, your mission, values, and impact on the wider world.
2. Both the tree and the spider offered benefits. The tree’s ultimate client is its own progeny, but to achieve that ultimate goal, it offers food to hungry animals in search of sweetness—just as so many industries (social media networks, Internet search tools, and traditional media, to name three) entice users with services—but their real clients are buying eyeballs, or data. And the spider, perhaps aware of her own arrogant reply, points out the bug protection benefit to us, which helps to neutralize a predator (humans kill a lot of spiders).
If you need help thinking through the best ways to apply this in your particular organization, I’ll happily give you a 15-minute phone or Zoom consultation. Request a time at https://calendly.com/meet-shel/15min (Note: Calendly sometimes offers times it shouldn’t, and I sometimes miss the notifications—so after you get instantly “confirmed” from the Calendly robot, you’ll also get a manual confirmation or request to shift from me.)
Blessings of the Season
If you celebrate a special holiday at this season, such as Christmas, Chanukah (I do that one), Kwanzaa, or Solstice, may you enjoy many blessings and joys in your celebration. If you celebrate a holiday at a different time, such as Ramadan or Diwali, may the blessings I’m sending now ripen and blossom at the time they apply. Here in the U.S., we also celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year; many parts of Asia mark that time a month or two later. Jewish culture celebrates several New Years, the earliest of which is Tu B’Shvat, the New Year for the Trees (this year, it’s the evening of February 5th and all day February 6th. And the one you’ve probably heard of, Rosh HaShanah, is always in the fall, usually in September.
Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Changeby Tom C.W. Lin (Berrett-Koehler, 2022).
Lin urges coalitions between activists and capitalists. Since I’ve written four books on activist business success (most recently, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World), I’m very familiar (and agree) with that case.
Lin covers some ground that I don’t. I appreciate his analysis of both sides’ strengths. He cites corporate skills in communications, operations, and accountability (p. 104)—and I’d elaborate to specify analytical/data capture/measurement skills (accountability), exponentially larger resources (operations), and global presence. But I see activists as the better communicators; their passion, tenacity, and creative tactics capture public attention, at no cost, that corporations often have to purchase.
And I appreciate his call for both groups to enlist governments—with far larger resources than activists and corporations combined—as partners (pp. 151-152), and how much power those combinations can bring to bear. He starts off with the four—four!—teenage Parkland shooting survivors who not only organized a massive Washington million-person demonstration (plus satellite demonstrations around the world) in just six weeks but also actually got gun safety legislation passed into law in notoriously gun-friendly Florida (pp. 1-4). Later (pp. 109-113), he discusses JP Morgan Chase’s $200 million economic and skills investment—in close collaboration with local government, business, and activist organizations—to rebuild Detroit’s shattered economy. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon freely acknowledges its self-interest. This effort turned it into “the home bank,” with 65 percent market share (p. 112). The company plans to replicate the effort elsewhere.
He documents many other corporations benefitting through social and environmental advocacy and argues that companies should choose their activism targets according to their strengths: logistics for a delivery service like UPS, housing for AirBNB, financial activism for banks… (p. 153). And he notes that social and environmental action can attract more impact investors and more capital (p. 115).
Also, recency creates relevancy. Lin documents many events and trends that hadn’t happened yet when I wrote my books. He covers the revulsion of CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg against the previous administration’s policies of deliberate cruelty, open racism, othering of numerous groups from Muslims (pp. 72-74) to women to people with disabilities to protestors exercising their rights to dissent to immigrants—even to the point of caging children (pp. 76-79). He also chronicles business response to the nationwide elevation of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (pp. 86-89), the gender gap and #MeToo movement (pp. 92-96), and the attack on democracy itself that culminated in the violent riot of January 6, 2021 (pp. 79-81).
Refreshingly, he warns against over-reliance on corporate saviors (pp. 117-131). Corporate elites (especially those not yet changed by diversity efforts) may slant their causes toward the most mediagenic or the ones with the largest financial stake (p. 127) rather than the most important, may attempt to deflect attention from bad actions in other areas, may water down legislation, etc. And causes without profit potential still need attention—thus, he sees a major role for government.
He encourages companies to see their purpose-driven mission not as PR but as a key element in the company’s core identity (something I’ve advocated for years). And he applauds the many ways activist corporate execs are making changes from the inside.
But he lacks deeper analysis of business’s ability to benefit by addressing really big problems in a systemic way. Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a lot more depth there. In short, the books complement each other, and you’ll benefit by reading both.
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.comhelps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss the July newsletter. My father died when there was one more thing to finalize, and my assistant didn’t want to bother me to get that clarification. And I was so busy dealing with his death that I didn’t even notice the newsletter hadn’t dropped. So the July issue didn’t actually get published. “We now resume our regularly scheduled programming” 😉
