The Clean and Green Club

1. How Can I Best Accomplish the End Result?

Too often, we focus on the tool: asking questions like “how do I get a new tractor?” But what is a tool? It’s a means of accomplishing a task! So the real focus should be on the task: “How can I get this done?” Asking “how can I get harvestable plants” might lead to plowing with draft animals—or to no-till farming techniques.

Green entrepreneurs (or frugal ones) refine that question. It morphs into “How can I accomplish this with the fewest resources?” Money and time are resources. So are raw materials, energy, water, plant seeds, animals, and so forth.

The people at Maya Pedal, the organization profiled in the bicimaquina article, understood this. They looked around and realized there were a lot of junk bikes out there that could still do plenty of useful work, just not as transportation. They’ve come up with 19 different models so far.

Bicycle technology is cheap, accessible, understandable, and versatile. In fact, my latest book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World mentions a number of creative bike technology uses, even including a bike-powered trash hauling company. I also know of a fitness center that harnesses the energy of their bike-pumping clients to light the room.

Also, I’ve put a link to the in-depth written interview with me on Forbes.com.

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

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

But I responded as a marketer. I want people to experience more delicious meals made with local organic ingredients, and by the way, without meat. I’ve been vegetarian for 43 years and see vegetarianism—particularly when based in local, organic foods—as one of the easiest ways to slash your carbon footprint. I don’t preach about it, but I remind myself constantly of Buckminster Fuller’s quote, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This was my comment on his Facebook post:

Here’s why I do it. A lot of my work as a marketer is to foster ideas that make the world better—like the idea that eating locally grown organic foods can be appetizing. I carry these ideas beyond my paid work and see a well-photographed plate with a tasty-sounding description as a part of my activism that uses my marketing skills. I’m selling the sizzle, so to speak. And interestingly enough, many of my food posts get high engagement. It’s not uncommon to get 20 or 30 likes and several comments from people far away wishing they could come share my food. It’s also a vicarious pleasure for many people, just like sharing travel pictures. And finally, since the caricature of social media is the boring “what I had for breakfast” tweet, I want to prove that it’s possible to talk about what you’re eating in an attractive, even seductive manner. But I find Facebook a much better platform that Twitter. Need more room than 140.

Why did I post this, really? Because I am always looking for ways to put my ideas in front of new audiences. On some level, I’m a marketer every waking moment. And I hope you are too.

Marketing can be fun. And we can all learn from each other.

Here are a few examples of my foodie Facebook posts. Let me “focus group” you: do you find these capture your interest? Do they make you want to explore new foods? Am I succeeding as a spokesperson for this idea? Please share on the Comments page and we can all learn from this.

I’ll start with one that contained eight pictures (including the three just below). Obviously, some of the text refers to pics of the garden harvest that I’m not including here.

Who could believe that all these frost-sensitive veggies (1st pic) were still in my garden on October 24? Even a tiny (but absolutely delicious) zucchini. It’s supposed to go down to 34°F tonight, so I harvested everything fragile. In the harvest pic, you can see some of the beans have speckled pods. Those pods were too tough to eat, but the beans inside were great (2nd pic). 3rd pic is probably the last near-100% from-our-garden dish of the year (except I cheated with a bit of organic local shallot grown three miles up the road). Beans in pods, beans removed from the tough pods, tomatoes harvested green last week and now finally ripe, and that itsy-bitsy green non-polka-dot zucchini (I’m dating myself, I know—who gets the reference?) Served it with (local organic) sweet potato and organic (nonlocal) lentil tacos and a green salad, shown here when it was all still from Next Barn or our garden. Later, I added olives and hazelnuts. And while I was waiting for Dina to come home, I sliced up and began drying our remaining supply of home-grown jalapeños, most of which actually got to ripen and turn red on the vine. The ones I picked today were green. #locavore

Another great #locavore dinner: frozen corn and zucchini with dried tomatoes, local cheddar cheese, and salsa; sweet potato, tot soi, shallots, garlic, and ginger in peanut sauce; spinach-arugula-carrot salad with goat gouda, local brie, sunflower seeds, local home-roasted squash seeds flavored with cayenne and salt, and local apple. All the veggies and fruits other than what was in the salsa were local and organic. The zucchini, tomatoes, butternut squash were from our own garden. Two of the three cheeses were local. The peanut butter was locally ground but not locally grown. I don’t think anyone does peanuts around here. But there is a farm that does local organic ginger, and we buy it exclusively.

The Web Bender, Jack Humphrey, and JV Queen Gina Gaudio-Graves
interview me on Leverage Masters Radio Tuesday, June 27, noon ET/ 9 a.m. PT. Listen by calling 646-478-0823, or listen live online at https://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/jvqueen , or later on replay at https://TheLeveragists.com

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

Practical Bliss: The Busy Person’s Guide to Happiness by Lisa Broesch-Weeks (InBliss, 2016)

Several times a year, an interviewer asks me, “what was the best decision you ever made?” I always answer, “the decision in my 20s to have a happy life.” That decision influenced everything else from that day forward. I believe it has been the key to my productivity, and the change I’ve made in the world.

Yes, it was a conscious decision. And yes, you can choose that path as well.

My client Lisa Broesch-Weeks can help you get there. She sent me a copy of her book, and as soon as I saw the title, I knew I’d like it. As a busy person, I love the idea of happiness for busy people, and I love the idea that bliss can be practical. She uses “bliss” and “happiness” pretty much interchangeably, seeing bliss as simply a more complete version of happiness (p. 96). I see more of a difference: bliss is more of a temporary high, while happiness, to me, is an ongoing state—but for this review, I’ll accept her near-merging of the terms.

Happy people. Lisa says, have figured out how to advance their purpose—which will be a verb, not a noun (pp. 44-48) and will be widely different for different people—with every part of their lives. And their purpose is not tied to serving one particular individual (p. 58).

They don’t beat themselves up striving for perfection; they’ve replaced stress-inducing words like “search” with power words like “explore” and “uncover” (p. 57). At work, they’re more productive and more engaged. Gallup put the cost of “employee disengagement” at $300 billion per year (p. 18), so there are dollar figures on that engagement. And at home, they enjoy better relationships, better health, and better brain function (pp. 21-24).

A lot of keeping happy is basic self-care: not letting yourself get overstressed…learning to say no to tasks that don’t advance your purpose or to people who deplete your energy…taking time for vacations, exercise, and other self-care (pp. 27-28) …and making space for your passions and pleasures. She reminds us that machines don’t run without time for recharging and maintenance, and neither do people (p. 26).

More stuff doesn’t create more bliss. And neither does running on the “hedonic hamster wheel” (p. 78—what an amazing metaphor!). And certainly you don’t get there by neglecting your passions in favor of something that feels “more important” but usually isn’t (p. 96). She points out that no one else is going to relieve you of your “optional obligations and stressors” and offers strategies to get rid of them in ways that don’t alienate others (p. 104).

Not all stress is avoidable, of course, and she provides help with managing the mandatory stress. As an example, she suggests worrying less about the need to appear constantly busy and more about how to add value (p. 111)—and shows some ways to shift focus from what’s wrong to what’s right, phrasing our goals and accomplishments in ways that the brain can hear and absorb, and act upon (pp. 119-126). Once concept I especially loved was the idea of gratitude for the wonderful future you expect, and not just for a present that may or may not seem fulfilling. She notes that this transformation helped her “put myself in situations where I would make it easier for success to find me” (p. 134). Time in gratitude, she says, is not an expense but an investment.

As the book wraps up, she advises on how to thrive despite happiness “haters” and how to forgive them (pp. 154-156). Though some of her advice may seem obvious, it can be hard to see from the outside, and always worth reminding ourselves: “I have what might be startling news. Living in bliss is a journey, much more than a destination…you may not know when you’ve arrived (p. 141, emphasis in original).

Note: Although I have done some consulting for Lisa, this review is not part of that arrangement and I am not being compensated for it.

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Shel & This Newsletter

Example #1:

BSR’s Statement on the U.S. Administration Executive Order on Climate Change

BSR regrets today’s executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, a set of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policies that are intended to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels and cut carbon pollution from the power sector by 30 percent by 2030. In combination with the administration’s dramatic cuts to climate programs at the EPA and U.S. State Department, this announcement undermines policies that have stimulated economic growth, consumer savings, job creation, infrastructure investment, private-sector competitiveness, and public health.

Example #2:

Trump Administration Climate Action Rollback Decision Is Misguided and Economically Damaging

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Climate Action Plan, including withdrawing support for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, “is completely misguided and ignores the irreversible clean energy economy that is already underway, creating good-paying jobs and economic vitality in communities across the country,” Ceres President Mindy Lubber said in a statement today. Lubber served as the EPA Administrator for the New England Region in 2000.

What about each release did you find effective or ineffective?

Ask yourself just two questions: which worked better for you, and why? Then scroll down to see what I felt worked well and poorly about each.

If you’d like me to include your results in a summary (you won’t be identified), please drop me a note with your answers.

Shel’s Analysis:

While the BSR release did a better job understanding the need for rich content, with numerous links and a picture, the copy was pathetically weak. This press release:

1. Used a wimpy headline that doesn’t take a position
2. Chose a stock photo that doesn’t add anything to the reader’s understanding—why not a photo of demonstrators thanking a company for providing clean energy and good jobs?
3. Made a terrible verb choice in “regrets”—which makes it sound like an accident that was BSR’s faults—rather than a much more appropriate verb, like “condemns”
4. Buried the real story in the second paragraph, which has hard-hitting facts to make a clear case against the Executive Order:

Just 18 months ago, the U.S. federal government estimated the net economic benefits of the CPP at US$26-45 billion, with consumers set to save US$155 billion from 2020 to 2030. In addition, the CPP provides regulatory support to the clean energy economy, which, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy and Employment Report, supported more than 3 million U.S. jobs in 2016. The public health benefits are also significant. Research suggests the Clean Power Plan could prevent 3,600 premature deaths and more than 300,000 missed work and school days by cutting pollutants that contribute to soot and smog. – See more at: https://3blmedia.com/News/BSRs-Statement-US-Administration-Executive-Order-Climate-Change#sthash.qUNCeiiF.dpuf ”

I would have used a headline like “BSR: Trump’s Short-sighted Reversal of US Climate Change Leadership Could Cost Consumers $45 Billion and Kill 3600?—and then moved right into a bulleted list of the facts. I also would break up BSR’s long paragraphs.

This very long press release has enormous amounts of juicy content, but you’d never know it from the headline and lead. Even further down, it notes that companies investing in carbon mitigation are seeing 27% return on investment, 29% revenue increases, and 26% reduction in carbon emissions. Isn’t that a lot more newsworthy than “BSR regrets…”?

The Ceres release, while also flawed, is much better. It starts with a headline expressing a strong point of view (although we don’t know who is stating this point of view), moves into a sound bite, and finishes the first paragraph with a significant and highly relevant credential.

So what are the flaws in the Ceres document?

1. The release itself is pretty much all rhetoric, without the facts to back it up. BSR had the facts, but didn’t call attention to them.
2. There’s no link to Lubber’s complete statement (and only two links in the whole release).
3. The important point about losing competitive advantage to China is all the way down at the bottom of the release.
4. No graphics at all.

I missed Book Expo America last year after attending every one since 1997. But it’s back in NYC and my daughter is NOT getting married the following week (as she did in 2016), so I expect to be attending (May 30-June 2). If there’s interest, perhaps we can organize a gathering.

Proud to be a speaker at Marc Guberti’s Content Marketing Success Summit, June 6-17. Other speakers include Ray Edwards, Ana Hoffman, and Jay Papasan. Details next month.

The Web Bender, Jack Humphrey, and JV Queen Gina Gaudio-Graves
interview me on Leverage Masters Radio Tuesday, June 27, noon ET/ 9 a.m. PT. Listen by calling 646-478-0823, or listen live online at https://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/jvqueen (or later on replay at https://TheLeveragists.com )

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

The Best of Us: People, Profit, and the Remaking of Modern Leadership by Cleve Stevens, Ph.D. (Beaufort Books, 2012)

If you’ve ever explored the world of “prosperity consciousness,” or seen the movie, “The Secret,” you’ve probably encountered the Law of Attraction (LOA). This is the idea that we can use our thoughts, feelings, and especially our mindsets to shape the reality we want to experience—and its corollary: if our lives are a mess, our attitude probably bears some responsibility; shift our attitude and we get better results.

While I’m not an LOA groupie, I do find merit in the concept. In my 20s (long before I encountered any LOA teachings), I made a conscious choice to have a happy life, and I noticed the effects very quickly. As an example, within a year of that decision, I had to waste a whole day of precious vacation to mail packages of crafts we’d purchased back to my house from Mexico. The old me would have fretted and fumed and wasted the whole rest of our vacation being angry at the lost day. But the new, happier me focused on “what a great story I’ll have to tell my grandchildren!” I wouldn’t even have my first child for another three years, so this strikes me now as quite remarkable.

And in my 50s, just a few years ago—with guidance from prosperity teacher Marilyn Jenett, who I’ve mentioned a few times in the “Friends Who Want to Help” section of this newsletter—I used LOA principles to visualize a recalcitrant tenant finding a great place to live and moving out voluntarily, which was a necessary step before we could sell that house. I have no proof of cause-and-effect, but I do know that after about six weeks of complaining that she would never find a comparable place for anywhere near the low rent we had charged, she found a place and happily vacated, and the sale went through.

What does all this have to do with a book on corporate leadership? This: Without ever using the phrase “Law of Attraction” or the acronym “LOA,” Stevens has written a dynamic exploration of using LOA not to gain personal wealth but to be a world-class leader (and he sees material wealth as flowing easily to those who exercise this kind of leadership).

Key to his view is taking complete personal responsibility for everything that happens to or through you, even for things over which you have no control. He recognizes that the lack of control starts with what kinds of families we’re born into and continues throughout life, but still makes a compelling case for acting as if you were in charge of your own life, even when outside factors chart the overall course. And doing this opens doors to great achievements, and ultimately to personal greatness. Stevens offers multiple roadmaps and exercises, including five acts (pp. 227-228) and nine traits (pp. 305-314) of transformation.

Mindset is a vital part of Stevens’ approach. Reminiscent of Yoda telling us “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” Stevens asks us to expand our horizons and get out of our own way. One of the most fascinating pieces is his distinction between options (narrow choices imposed by others) and possibilities (limitless, self-chosen, driven by intention that creates its own fulfillment mechanism).

I took eight pages of notes on this book. Obviously, there’s a lot I could share but I don’t want to saddle you with a 5000-word review. So here are ten more among my takeaways, among the several dozen:

1. Transformative leadership loves profit—not as the end goal but as a byproduct of something higher: “capitalism cubed” (p. xxii)
2. “Reasonable” and “reform” don’t get us to “transformative”; we have to be bold—and when we do, we run circles around the old-style transactional-leadership organizations (pp. 20, 330)
3. Hatred can never create lasting good; it has to emerge from a positive vision of the possible (pp. 50-51)
4. We play the victim because we lack faith in our ability to achieve our objectives—but we can learn to change these belief patterns by dong the right things with sufficient intensity and consistency (pp. 99, 102, 132, 134, 135)
5. Intention is about internal power, not willfulness, which is an external force (pp. 165-166)
6. Courage is not fearless; it’s about facing the fear until we can emerge from our self-made masks, not about powering through the fear as if it didn’t exist—fearlessness is a form of stupidity (pp. 202-205, 218)
7. Loving, authentic criticism rooted in genuine desire to help the other person improve is usually well-received; phony disguised personal attacks are not—harness “radical honesty” but never use truth as a weapon (pp. 216-217, 292)
8. Don’t be paralyzed by fear of failure or a need to conform in order to be liked (pp. 263-264)
9. Few things are more empowering than “standing strong and tall for someone else” (p. 325)
10. When moving an organization forward, first get agreement on the WHAT; there’s time later on to figure out the HOW, especially since the transformational process typically takes 12 to 36 months (pp. 334, 345).

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

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

My grandfather used to read all seven of NYC’s daily newspapers (most of which have since gone out of business) in order to triangulate a picture of what was *really* going on.

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

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L’Engle

When I usually review books about sustainable business, customer skills, marketing and the like, why am I recommending a classic children’s fantasy novel from the 1950s?

Here are some of the reasons:

1. This book has amazingly useful things to say about resistance to totalitarianism, nonconformity, the role of science, and defying expectations—all of which seem particularly relevant on the world stage right now.
2. It’s a fun read that might take you only an hour or two, involving a 12-year-old girl and her companions on a classic Joseph Campbell-style Hero’s Journey to rescue her father and save the universe, visiting several planets along the way.
3. The discussion of tesseracts—folding space in on itself to shorten interstellar travel from millennia to minutes—should spark some excellent creative thinking on themes like: 1) nothing is impossible, 2) we can solve the biggest problems we can imagine; 3) collaboration makes all the difference.
4. I discovered Wrinkle at age 9 and credit it with helping me survive a very difficult time in the first half of my second decade. I gained enormous strength from it and have read it at least a dozen times.
5. You might know a kid—or a grownup—who really needs this message right now.
6. Last but not least, I read a whole business book this month that I decided wasn’t appropriate for the review column and the next one I started is large and I’m nowhere near done with it.
7. I think it might be fun to mix in an appropriate novel every once in a while. The column has only covered nonfiction since I started it in 2003, but so many novels have changed the world. Arts, including literature, have an important role to play in creating our ideal world, and I should honor that once in a while.

I welcome your feedback on this. Oh, and if my review intrigues you, I interviewed Madeline L’Engle for two hours, back in the early 1990s, on the difference between truth and fact (she has since passed on).

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

An entrepreneur asked on a discussion list for “best ideas to apply entrepreneurial skills to social enterprise” for a social entrepreneurship bootcamp in Taiwan. Since I’ve spent the last two months showing you how to move forward with social entrepreneurship, I thought you’d benefit to see some of the caution flags, too. Here’s the relevant part of my response:

The earlier a company can build in holistic thinking, the better. I see way too many would-be social entrepreneurs go off half-baked on a poorly conceived project that can actually make the situation worse on the ground. For example, many people jump into the famous Buy One Give One model without thinking through the effect on the pre-existing local economy in the target developing area. It has to be done in ways that don’t undermine the struggling local entrepreneurs. Others create something very dependent on continued input from the developed-nation partner but don’t create the structures to make sure that input IS in fact continued.

I see it as a strength that you want to include marketing, and that your vision of marketing includes storytelling. Social entrepreneurship companies are uniquely positioned to benefit by telling the right story to the right people. I do think some of the pieces you’ve identified may want to wait until the organizations are more established, and that the format should be interactive and not pure lecture.

You may find it helpful to view the ways I bring this material to an audience, by viewing my TEDx talk, https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 (click “event videos”) or my 4-minute demo reel, which is footage from this year and somewhat more evolved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooSVbHQ5Ik You would definitely benefit from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World—and you can download a sampler at no cost at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world

If your situation is similar to this entrepreneur’s, here are some other cautions to consider:

Changing the World through Business
The Most Important Question to Create Eco-Friendly Technological Leaps

New Uses for CO2? Elkington’s Latest Out-Front Thinking

$10 Million to Charity—Another Cheer for Patagonia!

When Does Social Change Work Become a “Calling”?

Marketing/Customer Service
Will Budweiser’s Gamble Pay Off? (analysis of the company’s immigration-themed Superbowl ad)

Why I’ve Boycotted My Neighborhood Theater Since 1969

A committed author is always looking for book promotion opportunities

And THIS is Why Trump Won!

The Election and its Aftermath
George Lakey: DT’s Repression is a Huge Opportunity for the Movement (if you pick just one article on the blog, make it this one)

I DID Give Him a Chance…And That’s Why I March

And THIS is Why Trump Won!

10 Reasons to Resist Nonviolently, Chanukah, And Barbara Kingsolver’s Message

If you’ve been around the independent publishing community for any length of time, you probably know the name Deltina Hay. Here’s her latest project: Elearning Delta is a full-service elearning solutions company, specializing in innovative course development and custom learning management systems. The Elearning Delta team can produce your elearning project from the ground up, providing full production services all the way through your ecommerce solution. (https://elearningdelta.com)

I’ll be moderating two panels at Ethical Corporation’s 5th Responsible Business Summit NY taking place on March 27-28 2017 at the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel.

The Summit offers three focused tracks all shaped to uncover the REAL potential for CSR to drive profit, accelerate growth and change culture. Over 200 major-corporation delegates will attend to hear 45+ senior level speakers. And I’ve arranged to save you $200 on the conference fee. Just use the code, MP200, when you register at https://events.ethicalcorp.com/rbs-usa/register.php

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

People Shock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule by Tema Frank

It’s been a really long time since I’ve reviewed a customer service book in this space. While I love writing about deep sustainability, occasionally I will revisit the basics and review a book on customer service, marketing, or general leadership. As a marketer, I see customer service and leadership as part of marketing. Get customer service wrong, and it doesn’t matter how brilliant your ads and messaging on, how clever your company colors—you’re toast.

This is a nicely written book by someone who was a corporate insider and moved into independent consulting for companies in desperate need of better customer service. And as we all know, a whole lot of companies could benefit from some coaching and consulting on that end.

Frank builds her book around a simple formula:

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

Happy 2017. May we all come together for a better world. I worry greatly about the future of my country: the US. I recognize that this newsletter goes to people who may have very different politics than mine. I offer these first five paragraphs in a spirit of dialog. Even if you don’t agree with me, as a businessperson who cares enough about social responsibility to be on my list, you need to have a sense of what’s going on in your logical market. But if you really don’t want to know this, skip down to this month’s tip.

But I take hope in knowing that the power of social movements is stronger than the power of governments. We will continue to work for the environment, for social justice, for better conditions for all, and for a climate where bullying, misogyny, and racism are no longer acceptable—and I hope you join me.

Thus, my wife and I will be marching in the streets of Washington, DC on January 21, holding the new president’s feet to the metaphorical fire on Inauguration Weekend.

Similar rallies are being held in several major US cities. The Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/events/2169332969958991/ and you can find one near you at https://www.womensmarch.com/sisters . Although they’re calling it a women’s march, they’ve made it very clear that men are welcome.

One easy specific action you can do if you agree is to Like the Facebook page 3NoTrump. Each week, my wife, daughter, and son-in-law provide three easy but meaningful actions you can do to not stand idly by: phone calls to make with the phone number and a sample script, copy-and-paste emails, that sort of thing. Already, we’ve been able to celebrate victory on a couple of the projects they’ve posted.

As I do once in a while, I’m sharing a note from her. Just because working with her has been transformational for me and might be for you. I am not compensated for any referrals to her. Doing this just to help her—and you.

“I work as a business and life coach and a Certified Hypnotherapist. Working on your goals and letting go of the thoughts and feelings no longer helpful to you assists you to move forward in your life and work and create wellbeing for yourself and for others. You can do these separately or combine them together. To see how they can assist you to go forward, call Oshana Himot, MBA, CHT, at 602-463-6797 or email oshanaben at yahoo.com ”

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

Born on Third Base by Chuck Collins (Chelsea Green, 2016)

One-percenter Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Meyer fortune who went to prep school with Mitt Romney, has written a dramatic and well-penned book on why wealthy people will benefit from getting out of their isolation bubble and getting down and dirty in social change organizing. It’s a great read, and a very provocative one—and it includes reader-friendly features including a resources list, detailed notes, and a thorough index (yay!). His primary audience is the wealthy themselves, with a secondary audience among organizers who would like to enlist one-percenters to work in and/or fund their efforts.

And he walks his talk. He gave away his own fortune, and he’s been community organizing on class and climate issues for more than 30 years.

Collins says many of the one percent are actually disadvantaged by their wealth. It binds them to a set of conventions and isolates them from meaningful community in the wider world. When he had a fire, the neighbors from the trailer park he’d organized came over with casseroles and offers of help. When he needs access to a tool, he can often borrow it. He notes that this kind of gift economy is additive, not zero-sum. Generosity creates more generosity; there are no losers if it’s done with balance and good intention.

But the wealthy, isolated in mansions within “gated communities and gated hearts,” don’t often experience those resilient and vibrant relationships. When they can buy whatever they want, they don’t bother to tap into those community resources. When the civic infrastructure fails them, they have the luxury to opt out and take advantage of for-profit private-sector alternatives—while the poor have to either suffer or agitate for change. Collins suggests instead that the wealthy stay and fight, “be the squeaky wheel,” and get results for the entire community. As an example, he organized to improve conditions at the local municipal swimming pool, rather than fleeing with his family to a private country club. He suggests forming “resilience circles” that build deep community while addressing neighborhood (and global) issues—and urges wealthy allies to tell their stories.

Wealthy people also have the resources to address systemic change through the economic system. As his late colleague Felice Yeskel said, they can work at “the intersection of personal change and system rewiring.” Collins is heavily involved in the climate movement, and he quotes a study showing that superior attention to climate risk correlates well with superior financial metrics. Thus, wealthy investors can choose to invest in conscious businesses. And the socially responsible investment sector is growing exponentially.

The one percent, he notes, is not a monolith. He divides the sector into five “neighborhoods”: substrata of class, ranging from “Affluentville,” with incomes in the $680,000 to $3 million range, on up to “Billionaireville,” a rarified enclave of just 540 households at the very top.

Many of those in the lower strata of the upper class are reachable, he says. Once they see the disconnect between their lives and the lives of others, once they understand the benefits that accrue by replacing purchasing power with real community, once they realize that when others climb out of poverty, it is not an attack on them—they will join and stay involved as long as they’re treated as human beings with something valuable to offer, and not just as either a human ATM machine or a target for class anger. He quotes social change theorist Gar Alperovitz: “You learn by engagement, not by hanging back.

And it’s in those risk-taking leaps that we find the excitement, the meaning of life.”

After more than 40 years of organizing and marketing for social and environmental change, a lot of his points were familiar to me. But one that wasn’t was his shocking chapter on charitable giving. Apparently, many family foundations are basically a way to scam out of paying taxes and do very little genuine charitable work. And this is part of how 22 percent of wealth now devolves to the one percent (most of it to the top 1/10 of 1 percent), more than doubling the 9 percent figure of 1978.

Collins is not anti-capitalist. But he distinguishes generative (healthy) capitalism from degenerative (unhealthy) manifestations. He shows numerous examples of how the wealth can make a difference day to day, and how wealthy people can grapple with their own issues around wealth. The book ends very powerfully, with his story of going back to his childhood community of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and discovering that he still had friends there whom he could turn into allies—he didn’t have to be alienated from others in the one percent just because he was working full-tine on social change and had given away his fortune.

And on the very last page, he shares an amazing metaphor: “Our job is to serve as hospice workers for the old world, the old story…and midwives to the new world, the new story.”

Disclosure: Chuck Collins and I lived in the same social change community in 1980-81. I didn’t know him well, but we traveled in the same circles.

About Shel & This Newsletter

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.