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.
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.
Here’s a numbered checklist to move your organization forward, fast:
Make your sustainability and social justice initiatives self-funding, generating at least enough revenue/savings to cover their cost. This will make them kill-proof when belts get tight.
Go first for the low-hanging fruit that produces easy and substantial gains, then use the savings and new revenue they generate to go deeper.
Get deep buy-in up and down the hierarchy: C-Suite support is crucial—but so is support from line workers.
See your workforce as an “innovation factory”: set up systems to collect, acknowledge, and—where appropriate—implement site-specific and corporate-wide sustainability ideas and projects in ways that make the works feel not just seen and heard, but appreciated and valued. If not implemented, express gratitude for the idea and explain what would need to happen to make it viable.
Collaborate outside silos and even outside the company. See your work as helping the planet by allowing best practices to emerge and cross-pollinate.
Think bigger. Sustainability keeps things from getting worse. Regenerativity makes things better! Work to create and market profitable products and services—and mindsets— that uniquely match your company’s strengths and interests and that make a difference on issues like hunger, poverty, racism, other kinds of othering, and even the big, scary stuff like war and catastrophic climate change. Consider that most wars are largely about resource issues, and that a truly ecofriendly world would make a lot of those resource issues go away.
Remember that we already have solutions for many of these problems—but we have big marketing challenges to broaden awareness and adoption of these solutions, dispel the myths spread by those who see themselves at risk if the world changes, and change the course of development so it moves all of us forward to a better world. (For specific solutions, look to several of the books I’ve reviewed in this newsletter. Just in the past year, those would include The Climate Challenge, February 2024; From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, November 2023; The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions, October 2023; The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society, September 2023; Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, May 2023. See also my older reviews of Drawdown, The Climate Almanac, Biomimicry, and Cradle to Cradle, among others. You should be able to find most of these at IndieBound.org (an alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookstores).
Look to nature for inspiration and for engineering. Nature has already solved most human engineering problems, better, more efficiently, and more elegantly than our best science has done. Watch Janine Benyus’s terrific TED talk.
Look beyond your own industry for ideas and possible collaboration partners. Remember that Velcro® was invented for the space program, and the drive-up window so popular with banks and food/beverage service has been adapted to many industries, even dry cleaning.
Reap the benefits. Once you’ve achieved some progress, start marketing those accomplishments (and your future path of even greater progress) to gain higher customer and employee loyalty, a better reputation, access to funding, and more. But don’t exaggerate! If you’re caught greenwashing or purposewashing, all those benefits will go up in a plume of CO2.
There you have it: ten best practices for sustainability and regenerativity. And if you want help from an expert, I’m offering my readers a half-hour consultation at no charge ($100 value) to explore how you might harness them in your own organization, through the end of April, 2024.
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.
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants By: Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay Books, 2013)
Gladwell is known for books like The Tipping Point and Blink that turn our worldview upside down. This book will still turn your world upside down, and yes, some of the examples are from business. But it’s really about power dynamics and their perceptions, and I think they apply even more in the activist arena. He looks at how to use the power of being the underdog to shift the balance—starting with the famous conflict between the future King of Israel and a huge, powerful, unvanquished warrior (pp. 3-15).
But oddly enough, even that battle, which has become a metaphor for underdog victories for thousands of years, isn’t what we think it is. While refusing to fight on Goliath’s own terms, David was not coming into the battle weak and unguarded. In his day, a person who knew how to wield a slingshot effectively had a huge advantage: ability to attack across a much bigger distance than anyone relying on swords and physical strength. Slingers were the elite troops of their day, more equivalent to Navy Seals than to helpless shepherd lads. And Goliath’s size led to physical disabilities. In Gladwell’s analysis, he had a hard time moving his oversize body and suffered from poor vision. He couldn’t see David, couldn’t see the stone streaking toward his forehead until it was too late, and couldn’t get out of the way in time once he understood the attack.
Every book on power dynamics I’ve ever read shows that the underdogs who succeed dictate the terms of their engagement. We see it in the corporate world, where Avis marketed being #2 into a reason to excel in customer service (“We Try Harder”), where Apple told us to “Think Different,” and Walmart bcame the world’s largest retailer by opening in small towns other retailers hadn’t bothered with. We see it in the activist world: Saul Alinsky used the power of poor people’s movements super-creatively, including a fart-in against racist bankers. ActUp harnessed a tiny but very visible band of gay men to demand action on AIDS. The Yippies threw dollar bills into the air at the New York Stock Exchange, using Wall Street greed to show the shallowness of US corporate culture on national TV news. And numerous actions in the civil rights, feminist, environment, and other people’s movements, often led by underdog people of color or from economically and socially disenfranchised communities, have given us thousands of examples of how to prevail when the odds don’t appear to be in your favor.
With the exception of the US Civil Rights movement, the above examples are not in Gladwell’s book; rather, they arise from my own decades-long examination of power dynamics—and that’s the lens I bring to the lessons I extract from this book. As an example, his analysis of how Wyatt Walker, a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. essentially tricked Bull Connor into a response that was perhaps not as violent as it was portrayed but catalyzed the country in support of the movement (pp. 165-193) is just fascinating.
The structure of the book is unique and interesting also. Each chapter is named for a person whose narrative is central to that chapter, but other narratives are woven in. He’ll bring an example from earlier pages, whether David the shepherd warrior, several dyslexics (pp. 99-122)—one who bluffed his way into a career in finance culminating in running Goldman Sachs, others who became an A-list lawyer and a super-successful Hollywood producer—or the unlikely immigrant captain of a basketball team of 12-year-old girls (pp. 19-38) that kept beating the overwhelming favorites.
Gladwell always finds ways to gain insight that flout conventional wisdom. Are small classes better for learning? Gladwell says highly skilled teachers who can successfully manage large classes are better educators than incompetent teachers with smaller classes (pp. 38-44 and elsewhere)—and there has to be enough critical mass to foster deep discussion in the classroom. His other education example is even more surprising: students with career goals in STEM often do better at less prestigious colleges, where they don’t feel crushed by the geniuses (pp. 63-96).
The book deliberately crosses siloes. Not just sports, academia, and corporate, but also such examples as medical research (pp. 125-164), military strategy in Vietnam (pp. 276-295), open defiance of Nazi orders (pp. 263-275), a police career turning ghetto “bad kids” and their families into motivated citizens (pp. 209-217), and helping to create peace in Northern Ireland (197-231). So no matter what industry you’re in, you’re likely to find value. It’s got a good index, extensive notes, and a readable style, too. Order from your favorite independent bookseller at https://bookshop.org/p/books/david-and-goliath-underdogs-misfits-and-the-art-of-battling-giants-malcolm-gladwell/15735366?ean=9780316204378
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.
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 your organization (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, Pricing and 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.
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 (after March 27–I’ll be off-grid until then). 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 your organization 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.
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.
When “If You Build It” Actually Works (it does once in a while)
Photo Credit: Jason Renfrow Photography via Pexels
Most of the time, the famous advice from “Field of Dreams,” “If You Build It, They Will Come,” is total nonsense. The market rarely rewards innovation for its own sake and almost never rewards innovation when it’s priced way higher than the market leaders unless you’re specifically targeting the luxury market (where high price is seen as a status symbol)—or a market whose needs were not well met by previous, cheaper competitors.
In the computer world, the original Apple Mac is an example of that second category. The Mac carved out a significant set of niches (music, publishing, computing for people with disabilities, visual arts once it had color), but it never really took off in the mainstream until Microsoft re-engineered a Mac-like interface for the PC (Windows 95). It might have come out of the gate a whole lot faster if it hadn’t been about a thousand dollars more than a more powerful but harder to use IBM PC clone. Steve Jobs’ next big innovation, the NeXT, went absolutely nowhere, just like the earlier Lisa that offered most of the features the Mac offered but with a $10K price tag that was simply not acceptable to the market.
Most truly innovative cars were failures, like the 1937 Cord, the 1955s-1975 dolphin-shaped Citroën that could raise and lower on demand (which sold well in its native country of France but poorly elsewhere), the 1930s Chrysler Airflow, and the half-car/half-boat Amphicar that croaked out just 3878 units in four years. I can think of two wildly successful exceptions: The Model T Ford, whose rampant market penetration was because huge innovations in production enabled pricing at about 1/20 the price of competing cars. The actual car was old-fashioned even for its time, though—still requiring a hand-crank start even in its late incarnations more than a decade after the introduction of electric starters, for instance. And then there’s the Prius—not the first generation based in the boring and ugly Tercel body, but the classic hatchback of the second generation. It targeted the eco-conscious market, could hold four passengers and a considerable amount of gear, and it was relatively reasonably priced. It wasn’t the first hybrid on the market (as noted, not even the first Toyota hybrid)—but it was the first to make driving a family-friendly hybrid cool and sexy.
Let’s look at a few other times when “If You Build It, They Will Come” actually worked: when does something actually go viral?
Google Search went viral because it offered a vastly better experience on multiple counts: easier to use, better interface, way faster, and best of all, far more relevant search results—at zero user cost. As far as I can tell, Google wasn’t even accessible outside Stanford University’s private network until 1998. By July 1998, Google had become a verb. But it wasn’t until 2000 that Google began to monetize its search tool by soliciting ads, at which point it was already the default search tool for most people. I usually start my searches at ecosia.org so that my searches plant trees (and so Google doesn’t have even more of my data). 80-90 percent of the time, I’m ok with those results. But when Ecosia falls flat, I copy my search into Google.
McDonald’s became ubiquitous because it delivered on a promise of cheap family meals, rapid service, and consistency across whole countries (they localize their menus and vary quite a bit from country to country, though)—and because often, you could spot those golden arches from the highway before approaching the exit. It was never about having a great experience with the burger (which I loathed even as a meat-eating pre-teen and early teen; I did not miss McD’s at all when I went vegetarian at 16).
While European-style coffeehouse culture’s been easy to find in cities like San Francisco and NYC since at least the 1950s, Starbucks brought a watered-down/sugared up version to middle America. They made it not about getting a caffeine-energy shot but about the experience of being coddled (including customization). Starbucks proved people would pay several dollars instead of a dollar or less for a superior experience—and that sugar-laden frozen drinks could be marketed as coffee. What I find most interesting about Starbucks is the thousands of independent and unique coffeehouses that sprang up world-wide once Starbucks proved the market—offering, usually, better coffee and a better experience.
Chat GPT exploded unbelievably quickly following its public unveiling in November, 2022—because, like Google, it made users’ lives easier while being easy to use (unlike many of the AI tools that preceded it)—so easy that in some circles (like academia and journalism), it’s considered a cheat. As a writer, I see uses in research and planning, but my final drafts will be human-created, thank you, and my references will be verified. Some worries about overreliance on AI include its tendency to spew authoritative-sounding nonsense(including distortion through omission)—and the way its programmers largely ignored copyright.
Amazon succeeded in part because its founders were unusually patient and well-resourced. They were willing to lose vast amounts of money: $3 bn in the first ten years as a public company. Remember that they started in just one niche: their slogan was “Earth’s Largest Bookstore” and their user proposition was the then-unique long-tail ability to get pretty much any title, quickly. They were a boon to micropublishers closed out of physical bookstores because their sales numbers would never justify shelf space—and their practices such as charging less to buy a book than bookstores had to pay to obtain it and forcing those small publishers to pay a wholesaler rather than a retailer discount were a menace to physical bookstores, which closed in huge numbers. (These practices are among several reasons why I do nearly all my book buying in local independent stores.) Founded in 1994, the company only had its first profitable year in 2003 and continues to swing between wildly profitable and wildly unprofitable—it $2.7 bn in 2022.
Looking at these five examples, it’s clear that virality is hard to create, or even predict. It helps if your offering is superior, your price is low or zero, if it makes people’s lives easier or fills a niche. It also helps if you’re good at marketing. But none of this is a sure thing. Still, if you want to create one of those success stories, I hope you find this analysis useful.
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.
Participating in Mari-Lyn Harris’s Change Maker Summit, March 20 & 21. I’ve done several events with her and usually end up listening to most of the other speakers because she does a good job. https://events.mari-lynharris.com/change-maker-summit (my segment was taped quite a while ago, but because of my trip, I can’t drop in for live Q&A)
Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy
Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational AdvocacyBy: Sam Daley-Harris (Rivertown Books, 2024)
The author has been an activist leader for many decades and has started several national groups and consulted to many others. Most of the book is stories from member activists, focusing on how to win a campaign—and how empowering it is to participate meaningfully. The final 80 or so pages are Daley-Harris’s practical advice on the nitty-gritty of carrying out these campaigns.
Daley-Harris is a great advocate for “transformational advocacy”: empowering volunteers to go deeper into the process, get out of their comfort zone, make an actual difference, and feel really great about themselves and the difference they’ve chosen to make. In other words, these are ordinary people who’ve come into their power through active participation.
Much of the book comes out of Daley-Harris’s first group, RESULTS, formed in 1980; the first edition of this book was published in 1994, when those efforts were recent/ongoing and the activists’ memories were fresh. His activists from around the country and around the world share their own empowering journeys of learning not just to contact elected officials and media editorialists but to do so in ways that create victories—not just from those already predisposed to support an effort, but also from those who started on the other side. The relationships may take a long time to build, but when activists are both well-prepared and respectful, progress can be made.
Daley-Harris has little use for “checkbook activism” organizations (my term, not his) that don’t want to train and supervise an active core of dedicated volunteers but simply want to raise money and collect petitions or form e-mail submissions:
When someone deeply cares about an issue and they are offered the opportunity to add their name to an online petition, they feel that they’ve done what they can and move on…But they have been robbed of an opportunity to make a difference, and the issue has been robbed of a voice. (p. 277)
He wants activists to actually be active—to take action and get out in the trenches: write letters, meet with influencers and lawmakers, train others, etc. And he’s worked really hard to create infrastructure that trains and supports these activists, including ongoing conference calls, democratized trainings that allow people to quickly get up to speed on an issue and learn how to effectively speak publicly about it, and more.
Even Daley-Harris didn’t start as an activist. He was a symphony percussionist! But he attended a meeting organized by The Hunger Project and saw that he could make a difference—and oh, what a difference he made! He organized chapters, formed coalitions, recruited celebrity spokespeople, and learned how the system worked and how to work within that system to make real change. And these actions, done properly, can dramatically shift national policies over time. The book chronicles several major victories, among them:
Making Oral Rehydration Therapy—a simple mix of common ingredients that costs pennies per dose and has saved tens of thousands of lives in developing countries—an integral part of US foreign aid policy as part of a new emphasis on child survival (pp. 86-105)
Saving the International Fund for Agricultural Development (pp. 106-121)
Passing the Universal Child Immunization Act and tripling the original budget for life-saving immunizations from $25 mm to $75 mm (pp. 122-142)
Revolutionizing foreign aid to incorporate microlending and address the very bottom of the economic pyramid through the Self-Sufficiency for the Poor Act (pp. 143-166)
Co-organizing and publicizing—and pressuring world leaders to participate meaningfully in—annual World Summits for Children (pp. 188-210)
Rescuing funding cut by President Clinton for global child survival programs (pp. 211-218)
Daley-Harris loves to share the methodology and works hard to train activists from other organizations. Several groups have adopted the RESULTS tool kit, most notably Citizens’ Climate Lobby. And groups in countries with parliamentary governments such as the UK, Canada, and Australia have adapted these methods (pp. 219-230).
The book makes frequent reference to 18 activist commitments, but oddly enough, there’s no list of all 18 together and they are not spelled out in a group until pages 256-271, which lists them all but interrupts the list with commentary. You won’t have to work so hard to find them because I’ve gathered them for you:
Provide a Powerful Structure of Support
Know Your Why and Share It
Overcome the Fear of Making Big Asks of Volunteers
Create a Focused, Inspiring Agenda
Embrace an Expansive View of Who People Are
Cultivate Inspiration and Idealism
Enroll Others
Select the Right Staff
Increase Your Skills Through Practice and Learning
Embody Integrity
Overcome Fear and Catalyze Breakthroughs
Nurture Authentic Relationships
Be Vulnerable
Practice Partnership, Not Partisanship
Move People Up the Champion Scale (from opponent to neutral to supporter to advocate to leader to champion, p. 269)
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.
This email from GlobalGiving, a UK-based nonprofit, might be the best letter to donors I’ve ever seen—and it’s not even a direct fundraising pitch. My reaction was to immediately write to them asking permission to reprint their letter and analyze it in my newsletter. As you can see, they responded with a yes (in a gracious and warm brief note).
First their message, then my analysis in the footnotes:
[Subject line] Thank you for your generosity, SHEL1
Hi SHEL,
As we approach the end of the year and reflect on the many moments that defined it, I am in awe of people like you. Your support of organizations like The Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project2 has touched so many lives, and I want to take a moment to express my profound gratitude for your generosity.3
Your gift hasn’t just funded a project, it’s uplifted a community. 4 Across the globe, locally-led organizations are pillars of change and innovation.5 They understand their communities’ unique needs and dreams, and thanks to your support, they can continue their invaluable work and grow their impact.6
This year, many communities are facing heartbreak and conflict. The circumstances under which local nonprofits are working are truly unfathomable7 and yet they inspire me with their ability to hold onto hope.8 I strive to hold them in the light, to stand beside them, and to send a deep desire for healing.9
Your generosity has touched countless lives.10 As we move into the season of gatherings and gratitude, know that you’ve made a difference.11
May your holidays be a reflection of the hope and joy you’ve given to others.12
With heartfelt gratitude,
Victoria Vrana
CEO, GlobalGiving13
1 Here and in the salutation, they use personalization, which is a good thing when not done to excess unless there are typos—but I would have run the mail merge through a case changer so regardless of how the subscriber entered their name, only the first letter was capitalized. 2 Mentioning a specific charity with a link to that charity’s page on the GlobalGiving site is brilliant. It creates a direct connection with the results of donors’ gifts. Right at the top, the landing page lists the year that organization was founded, the total raised for this charity on the GlobalGiving platform, the years the two organizations have partnered, and the number of projects funded. Then a 22-word mission statement, followed by clickable listings of 22 funded or fundable projects with donation links to the ones that haven’t been fully funded yet. 3 This sounds sincere. It’s grateful, but not obsequious. 4 A perfect way to pull in the bigger goal of sweeping transformation. You’re not just funding one project. You’re uplifting a community. 5 And now it’s gone global, and it’s about massive transformation. 6 But then it circles back to the people on the ground, doing the work. So we have local to global, to local someplace else. 7 Yes, she’s tugging on a pain point—but it’s not the focus of the letter. 8 And she moves immediately to hope and optimism rather than trying to dig a “misery hole” (as far too many nonprofits do). 9 She includes a prayer—without calling it a prayer, which can be a divisive label—for those dedicated workers she just cited. I found that a lovely touch. 10 Another pat on the back for her donors. 11 This is as close as she comes to a fundraising pitch. She states explicitly that the recipient of this letter has made a difference. She implies that the donor could continue to make a difference by giving again, but she has too much respect for her readers’ intelligence to come out and ask. And this, to a person who sees a gazillion fund appeals, especially in the last six weeks of the year, is really refreshing. I happen to be writing this on Giving Tuesday and I received about 50 fund appeals today. I didn’t even open them. Too many and not a good way to quickly tell the good organizations apart from the lesser ones. Her letter arrived on US Thanksgiving Day. I’m betting that a lot of people might be motivated to give because she DIDN’T ask! And yes, I am aware that this is heresy in the marketing world. 12 Another really sweet touch, and again, something that could have turned saccharine in the hands of a less skilled copywriter. She reflects back the light and good that the donor has done—right back to the donor. 13 She’s literally putting a face on the organization by including her picture. The email also used a template to add color and visual interest (I would guess Constant Contact). And she DOESN’T include a PS—another marketing heresy. So don’t be afraid to break the rules. Know what you’re doing and why, know why these rules have been developed over time. But then don’t be afraid to violate them and follow your heart.
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.
Heart Centered Business: Healing from toxic business culture so your small business can thrive
Heart Centered Business: Healing from toxic business culture so your small business can thrive by: Mark Silver (Wildhouse Publications, 2023)
How I wish someone had given me this book 41 years ago when I was brand new in business, very unsure of myself, and confused about how I would fit in to a business culture I had learned to despise! Of course, it was only published this year. But I hope it finds its way to many progressive and holistic people who are starting or struggling with heart-based businesses.
The book is a treasure trove, mixing conventional business wisdom (e.g., the crucial roles of business systems, marketing, and financial literacy—and some really excellent advice (p. 84) on pricing) with very UNconventional approaches such as:
It’s totally understandable that you might worry about participating in a business culture that has embraced some really icky stuff—but there’s absolutely no reason you have to embrace the ick. It is possible, and in many ways actually easier, to run an ethical, heart-centered business that exists to serve (and he infers that maybe we who follow this path can eventually help change that culture).
Marketing, as far too many businesses practice it, is responsible for quite a bit of that ick factor—using disinformation, pressure tactics, pain-point hyping, and attempting to funnel customers into ever-larger purchases whether or not the offer is right for them. But again, there are plenty of ways to market that are in total alignment with the purpose and mission of a heart-centered business. Silver devotes a lot of space (pp.123-165) to marketing the right ways while rejecting the slimy approaches.
Overnight success is not only uncommon, it’s undesirable. Much better to let your business gain traction organically, and it’s fine if it takes a few years to really get solid. He suggests having the resources to let the business evolve toward viability, when possible. I recognize, and I’m betting he does as well, that sometimes we don’t have that luxury.
Silver is strongly influenced by decades studying and practicing Sufism. His 12 chapter titles give a great introduction to his philosophy, including, among others, “Healing Your Relationship with Business”, “Healing Your Relationship with Money”, “The True Purpose of Marketing”, “What Your Heart Needs So Your Business Can Succeed”, and a powerful two-page unnumbered final blessing just called “A Blessing.”
Silver divides a business lifecycle into four stages: Creation (pp. 76-89); Concentration (pp. 89-100; Momentum (pp. 102-109); and Independence (pp. 110-120). Interestingly, he doesn’t see Stage 4 as seen desirable for many businesses, and spends most of those pages helping business owners evaluate whether they actually would benefit from embracing Stage 4 or if they’re better off hanging out in Stage 3. He also cautions that it could easily take two to four years to move from Stage 1 to Stage 3, and it might take just as long to move from Stage 3 to Stage 4 (p. 122). For many of us with very small businesses, attempting to scale, and to create a business that can survive our own involvement, is simply not worth the effort—and as someone who has stayed a one-person shop with some freelance help for four decades, I really respect him for being willing to say this in public.
Marketing also has different stages in Silver’s view—he calls them journeys: Becoming Known; Nourishing Those Waiting; and Supporting Referrals. They’re less linear than the business stage; sometimes, they even overlap. And instead of the worn-out funnel metaphor that assumes everyone will take the same path and arrive at the same destination, he praises the “garden path,” where everyone can determine their own route, their own sequence, and their own destination within a larger whole.
In discussing the Third Journey, he points out something obvious and true but ignored by far too many businesses: if you’re seeking referrals, make sure you have the systems in place to handle them. In my own referral handling, I take this very seriously. If people are spending some of their precious social capital to do you a good turn, you need to follow up properly, explore whether there’s a fit, express thanks, refer to others if appropriate, etc. Otherwise, your existing client’s good experience will be damaged by their referral’s poor experience, and neither is likely to patronize or endorse you again. It’s pretty easy to do this correctly, so be ready when others come knocking.
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.
I tried to watch an SNL skit sent to me by a marketing colleague. First, a hoodie ad at 2:49–so I went and did something else. I have plenty of sweaters and almost never buy from online ads. Then they hit me with a 49-minute ad for some nutritional thing. No way to fast-forward to the end, so I exited immediately. And I never got to see the skit.
Good morning, YouTube. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that pissing off your customers is not a smart business strategy?
Never mind the mismatch of message and market (I don’t purchase nutritional supplements other than vitamins)—you don’t hit ANYONE with a 49-minute infomercial when they want to watch a three-minute video. The only thing YouTube accomplished with this was that henceforth, if people ask what video platform I recommend for their content, the answer will be Vimeo. And if I were running that nutritional company, I’d be hiring a different Chief Marketing Officer. It’s totally desirable to offer a 49-minute infomercial to those who are seeking detailed information—though it would be much better to offer a dozen 3-minute videos covering specific aspects plus an overview. But it’s totally counterproductive to jam it into the eyes and ears of people who weren’t even looking for that type of product. This unfortunate company actually paid YouTube to piss me off. Ugh!
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.
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by: Rob Hopkins (Chelsea Green, 2019)
When I did my TEDx talk several years ago, I called it “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare!” So I was primed to love a book that looks at possibility as both an open door—and a door opener. And indeed, I loved it!
Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Towns movement and of Transition Town Totnes (the community in the UK that created the concept), envisions a world where it’s always OK to ask questions, to try out new ideas, and to think holistically at local, regional, national, and global levels. He envisions societies that embrace—and democratize—the arts, follow patient-centered/student-centered health and educational models (including Reggio Emilia, p. 93, which was the educational model used by the elementary school my own kids attended), use biomimicry to harness nature’s wisdom develop over eons, and more.
While many of his examples are drawn from either the Transition Town movement or living experiments around the UK, he goes well beyond these sources, drawing on currents as diverse as comedy improv, art therapy, temporary takeovers of town squares and other public spaces—all leavened with a lot of play and humor—in locations as widespread as: Bolivia; rural Iceland; Jackson, Mississippi; Mexico including both extremely rural Chiapas and extremely urban Mexico City; Bologna, Italy; both modern and ancient China, to name a few. His thinking is influenced by practical visionaries from speculative fiction authors Moshin Hamid of Pakistan and Ursula LeGuin of the US to today’s Extinction Rebellion global youth movement.
Some of it we’ve heard before, like making sure to get away from our screens and devices and out into nature, get off social media and into real-world human-to-human connections. And some might be new, like the idea that “boredom is your imagination calling you” (p. 79).
A lot of it is telling the stories of people who dared to think and feel differently—and then build new and different kinds of experiences, institutions, and even entire communities out of those new thoughts and feelings—from the movement to declare all of London the UK’s first city-wide national park (pp. 62-64, 126-128) to a school system that supplies its cafeterias with student-grown organic food (p. 155) to asking the kinds of questions that create longing and wonder (p. 126).
Hopkins himself asks great questions, including how would we need to evolve democracy to replace “the imagination-devouring dragon of endless growth and economic development…with something more humane, more interesting, and better suited to meet the needs of the people and the planet?” (p. 142, and his answer posits the creation of a national Ministry of Imagination that would be involved in all aspects of governance).
Each chapter title is actually another sweeping question:
What if we took play seriously?
What if we considered imagination vital to our health?
What if we followed nature’s lead
What if we fought back to reclaim our attention?
What if school nurtured young imagination?
What if we became better storytellers
What if we started asking better questions?
What if your leaders prioritised [he’s British] the cultivation of imagination
What if all this came to pass?
For Hopkins, imagination in all its forms, and the art across many disciplines that it generates, is essential—and he says it’s long past time for the educational system to acknowledge its importance. After noting that creative pursuits generate more jobs than aerospace, automotive, fossil fuels and life sciences together, he continues:
Being involved in art at school can increase cognitive abilities by 17 percent and improve attainment across all subjects. Students from low-income families are three times more likely to get a degree and twice as likely to vote if they do art in school. They are also more employable. (p. 88)
Ask yourself—and your government—the sorts of questions Hopkins does. And read this book. It could change your life.
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.
One cool way to get the juices flowing AND have quite a bit of fun is to make stuff up and then write promotional material for it. The first time I remember doing this was in 1978 or 1979, when I worked as a manuscript reader for a New York City literary agency. A particularly bad manuscript led to this poem (copyright 1979 by Shel Horowitz, all rights reserved):
Advertisement (Melodramamine)
And now, from the makers of Dramamine, for motion sickness…
an exciting new product,
Melodramamine, for EMOTION sickness.
Yes, this special formula will overcome that nasty, nauseous feeling
from indulgence in overwritten books.
Let Melodramamine return YOU to the world of literary enjoyment.
Use only as directed.
My 2000 book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World had a few examples, too. One was a series of six radio commercials for a fictitious Armenian grocery: five illustrating how the same business could target different market segments on different shows—and one demonstrating how they could get too clever and forget that the purpose of an ad is to get people to buy (that one involved singing apricots and the arrest of their importer). While Grassroots Marketing is officially out of print, I still have copies for sale, with the price reduced all the way from the original $22.95 down to just $10 before shipping for the paperback, $10 and no shipping cost for the PDF ebook. (And while you’re on my shopping cart, why not pick up a copy of my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World? It’s all about building environmental and social good into profitable products, services, and mindsets. You’ll save on shipping costs by getting both at the same time.)
And sometimes, I make up products without writing copy for them. Anyone who wants to start a Chicagoland heavy metal festival called Illinoise or a nonsmoking vegan casino in (guess what city) called Las Vegans—you have my blessing. My daughter enjoys this kind of game too. Years ago, she came up with L’Auberge d’Aubergine, which translates as The Eggplant Inn. So, besides a few laughs, what do you get from doing this sort of exercise?
Most of all, you get a creativity jumpstart. It gets your brain thinking in different ways. You think about what’s missing in the marketplace and what niche you night fill (not with your imaginary product but with a real product that you imagine and then create)—and you think about what makes a good name for a product, service, company, or even an idea, which is a very good skill to have. I actually have a section of Grassroots Marketing covering eight factors to consider in choosing a name. And for those doing social change and planetary healing, it’s a way of expanding what’s possible. Conceiving of something can be a first step to achieving it. For every invention that happened through serendipity, a lot more showed up by doing the work.
Of course, if you’re in the market for a new business name and would rather not do it yourself, drop me a line. While I’m not a professional naming consultant (and I don’t charge like one either), I have named a fair number of things over the years.
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 Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions
The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions by Urvashi Bhatnagar and Paul Anastas (Chelsea Green, 2022)
Yes, another book brimming with examples of companies that re-imagined and then reinvented, piloting initiatives that if widely copied would go a long way toward greening the planet. I’ve reviewed plenty of those, and this will not be the last one, I’m sure. A few things make this one different:
Anastas’ expertise in green chemistry
A data-driven, quantifiable scorecard that companies can use or adopt to drive innovation, working on the principle that before you improve something, you have to measure it
Emphasis on large corporations
A proposed shift in the sustainability conversations at those corporations—from risk management to strategic opportunity (first introduced on page 14 and a theme throughout the book): “We can achieve superior performance, convenience, efficiency, and profitability not in spite of a focus on sustainability but because of it” (p. 28)
In my consulting, I personally don’t generally begin with the data, preferring to start with the vision and then figure out how the engineers can get us there—but I don’t think either approach precludes the other. And while I run a one-person business and don’t ever expect to be an employee of a huge corporation, I still found significant utility in this book. The writing is clear, and the data-driven outcomes are impressive. Small businesses and solopreneurs have to think differently about implementation, but can still draw many useful lessons.
Bhatnagar and Anastas design their whole-lifecycle scorecard around four principles: waste prevention, maximizing efficiency and performance, supply chain renewability, and safe degradation at the end of a product’s lifecycle—and measure three categories of impact: environmental, employee, and community (p. 16). One key takeaway is to design safety and end-of-life considerations in from the beginning—preferably by turning waste into monetizable inputs for other products (pp. 48-50, 81-83).
As a marketer, I find it odd that their scorecard aims for the lowest possible score: a zero in each metric. I would have designed it to give points for good initiatives so that a higher score provides companies with a clear and obvious marketing benefit. But even though it gives the book its name, the instrument is only a small portion of the content.
Much of the rest is examples of companies jumpstarting eco-friendly and socially just innovation. To list a few among many: design electronic chips WITHOUT generating 600 times the product weight in waste (p. 63); sequester not just whatever carbon you create but some of the backlog (p. 65); lower not just carbon footprint but water footprint (pp. 73-74); eliminate toxic chemical flame retardants by switching to non-flammable materials (p. 80); extract and recycle the water in human waste while turning urine into electricity (pp. 116, 118); replace forever chemicals including poisonous plasticizers such as phthalates with safe, degradable alternatives (p. 133) and chemical insecticides with yeast-grown non-toxic ones (p. 144); change pharmaceutical packaging so extra doses can be used instead of thrown away (p. 136); eliminate hunger by approaching food waste differently (pp. 147-149); extract and reuse materials like nickel and cobalt from used batteries (pp. 151-152); fund more expensive green and social justice initiatives through the savings in health care costs (p. 174)…
A few organizations get extended case studies, some including their full scorecards:
Electronics giant Philips (pp. 106-112; 191-197) already generates 70 percent of revenue from green products and services and is aiming for 100 percent.
Hospital system Gunderson Health (pp. 159-161) parlayed a $2MM investment into annual savings of $1.2MM—that’s an astounding 60 percent annual ROI— including slashing the cost of managing pharmaceutical waste from $151,000 to less than $10,000 per year.
Janitorial products company Coastwide Laboratories (pp. 161-170; 177-185) re-engineered its product line to combine functions in fewer products, marketed its private-label solutions to some of the largest manufacturers in the country, and brought distribution in-house, allowing them to market honestly as the lowest cost solution even while increasing the product price (because the customer only needed one product to replace two or more).
P2Science, maker of eco-friendly silicones for cosmetics and hair products, boosted yield to 95 percent while simplifying the production process.
The book is also full of sets of principles and steps that would be useful to companies of any size. And it has a terrific index, which I wish more publishers would model.
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.
To all those, like me, who are entering the Jewish year 5784 tonight: Shanah tovah!
This Month’s Tip:
Rule-Breaking Wordless Ad Convinces a Word Nerd
Home being sold by singer Ray LaMontagne
Spend six minutes with this video, designed to sell a 104-acre estate belonging to the singer Ray LaMontagne, with an asking price of $5.25 MM. What did you notice?
Here are a few things I spotted:
1. It breaks a rule of mine that text is more important than visuals. There is not one word spoken, and almost no text displayed—just the property address in the first frame and a slide of contact info for the agents at the very end.
2. It breaks a well-known real estate rule to show rooms empty, so prospects can imagine their own furniture and taste imposed on the property. These rooms are lushly furnished and one of them prominently includes a full-size hand-loom, before we’ve even seen the kitchen.
3. Nearly the entire first minute is focused on the setting, most of it emphasizing an almost tactile immersion in the natural world. We don’t get to go inside except for one brief early glance until 1:25, almost a quarter of the way through. And the natural theme is carried through into the house by the presence of plants and flowers, the capturing of sunlight, etc., and returns in the quick tour of outbuildings and grounds at the end.
4. Subtle reminders sneak in about LaMontagne’s career—the mixing board, the beautiful piano—reinforcing that this house belonged to a celebrity.
5. It’s EFFECTIVE! I tend to be a hard sell, but if I were in the market for a multimillion-dollar historic home/estate/retreat center, I’d be setting up an appointment. Admittedly, falling in love with this property is easy for me because I live three towns away and am familiar with the area, happen to love the town where it’s located, and already live in a (much more modest and significantly older) historic home. I see the negatives: excessive reliance on open fireplaces (highly polluting and not efficient—and for me, a health irritant); no green features highlighted anywhere in the video—which means the house is probably an energy nightmare; possible absence of a two-base kitchen sink; lots of buildings and acreage to maintain, meaning a payroll. But they wouldn’t keep me from making a bid if I had a reason to own such a property.
With LaMontagne’s fame and celebrity friends, and an asking price that will seem really cheap in those circles for those used to California or New York prices, I’m expecting this house will not be on the market long and the video will probably be taken down once a deal closes. If it’s already gone when you go to look, you can see if a copy shows up on Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, or at least view still pictures on Zillow.
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.
Recommended Book: The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society
The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society by Gunter Pauli (Xlibris, 2017)
What can termites show us about zero-energy air conditioning and heating, or zebras about keeping cool outside on a hot day by turning themselves into air current machines?
How can coffee farmers create a new high-protein, high-profit crop that regenerates forests, protects oak trees, and has an economic return far greater than just the coffee bean—from the 99.8 percent of the plant that’s usually thrown away?
How can mosquitos teach the medical world how to make injections painless?
These are some of the many questions Pauli asks and answers in his amazing book. Pauli’s solutions are rooted in both biomimicry—learning from the plants, animals, fungi, microbes, and even rocks around us—and replacing invasive chemistry with eco-friendly physics. And he has decades of practical experience designing, funding, and implementing these systemic, holistic solutions and helping small communities build whole new economies from these insights. I heard him speak at a conference about 20 years ago and was blown away, so I was thrilled to get my hands on his book.
Right from the beginning, pages 2-3, he lays out four principles (with several subsections):
Be Constantly Inspired by Nature
Change the Rules of the Game
Focus on What is Locally Available
See Change as the Only Constant
Taking inspiration from nature starts with understanding nature’s own principles: everything has at least one purpose—and usually several purposes, nothing is wasted, solutions are very efficient and use the least possible energy and materials, everything is interdependent and part of a complex ecosystem with many parts, and course-correction happens automatically.
Pauli’s solution set—much of it tested in real-world projects—includes circular systems where “residue” (he prefers not to think of it as waste) becomes input for the next link in the loop. So the 99.8 of the plant that coffee processors now pay to get rid of becomes fertile ground to grow shitake mushrooms (p. 10, p. 135, and many other references) as well as provide several other benefits including odor control (pp. 137-138); medical supply companies can mimic the mosquito’s conical penetrator to reduce injection pain; HVAC designers can copy termites’ ancient zero-energy temperature control for buildings (pp. 53-56)—or the way zebras’ stripes create convection currents and vortices that keep them cool outdoors in the hot African summers (pp. 56-57). Architects can design inexpensive earthquake-proof bamboo homes and regenerate the bamboo far more quickly than a forest (pp. 253-255).
Pauli envisions a world where we no longer need toxic batteries, health-hazardous radio-wave-based Internet (he prefers to use light), or even solar and wind farms. Innovations with cascading benefits across multiple industries will make them obsolete while raising living standards, health outcomes, local self-reliance, and connection with community. And much of this is stuff we already know how to do. Three among many examples:
Seaweed-based (p. 112) or even maggot-based antibacterial protection (p. 162) can replace antibiotics
Tomato processing residue can be turned into sunscreen and lipstick (pp. 181-182)
Mining, that traditionally dirty industry, can create paper from stone tailings (pp. 214-215), as well as pure drinking water as a byproduct while chelating bacteria can detoxify the metals that used to pollute that water (pp. 218-19).
He’s posted 109 more at https://www.theblueeconomy.org/en/project-library/ Pauli says we humans were designed to live in alkaline environments, yet many human constructions create an acid world that’s not healthy for us. Since this was the first time I encountered this idea, I checked with Terry Cline of Dwellright. Terry is an architect and Feng Shui practitioner who pays a lot of attention to the interaction of human factors with spaces. He and I are each other’s clients and friends. Terry agrees that our lives would be better if they were more alkaline.
One caution: while Pauli’s ideas are brilliant and his/his colleagues’ implementations are astonishing, his writing is less approachable than it could be (one more pass by a skilled editor would have helped a lot). He’s Austrian and he writes with the dense syntax of his first language (German). He’s also a non-linear thinker, so the book’s organization is a bit rough (and made worse by the lack of an index in a book that cries out for one). And I wish he would not revisit the same examples over and over again. But it’s worth the struggle. I took 9 pages of notes and feel that my life is better for reading it.
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” 😉
Victoria Vrana
