Clean and Green Club, July 2025

10 Jul, 2025 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Going Beyond Sustainabiilty with Shel Horowitz

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: July 2025

Due Dilligence, Deepfakes, Gullibility—and What it All Means for Marketers

Photo Credit: This Is Engineering via Pexels

Sunday morning, June 22, I sat down at the computer and glanced at the list of suggested next plays after the YouTube video I’d watched the previous evening. One caught my eye: a major figure in the White House had told the Black leader of an African country, “sit down, boy” during a debate on national US TV. That level of blatant racism is shocking even from this openly racist administration, so I clicked through.

The story was a riveting description of the African leader’s supreme grace under pressure, responding passionately and from the heart in a way that broke down barriers, declaring the humanity not just of himself but of everyone in his country and continent, and then several members of the audience (including one identified by name and position) jumping in to thank him.

It was a beautiful piece of writing. I often multitask while listening to videos but I gave it my full attention, even though the obviously AI-generated narration (a smooth and comforting male voice) mispronounced words, paused in the wrong places, and such—and even though the White House personality was not identified by current title but as a “former political spokesperson.” That made me wonder if this incident was from before January 20, 2025 when T took office—and if that were true, why hadn’t I heard about it before? I also noticed that the video used still pictures of the two figures that were obviously taken in different locations. There were a number of other caution flags.

What I found really odd, though, was that not only was the TV show not named, there was no link to the actual clip. More than the narration errors and script glitches, that made me wonder if this incident actually happened. Still, the video brought tears to my eyes.

Hoping it WAS real, I went looking for it. First, I searched for the White House staffer’s name plus “sit down boy”. (I am deliberately putting the period outside the closing quote mark, UK-style, to make it clear that the period was not part of the search.) That brought dozens of results, all using variations of the same script—but with several different narrators and different pictures of the two principals. I also found a recent and powerful speech by the African leader, attacking Western imperialism (including when it’s disguised as charity) and Western hypocrisy, which I watched. This seemed like a very different personality than the one in the first video. But I didn’t find the actual TV show. Hmmm.

My next step was to add the word “broadcast” to my search string. Most of the page 1 results were the same ones again—but there was also one from the fact-checking site Snopes. By this point, I wasn’t surprised to discover that there is no evidence these two people ever appeared in the same studio at the same time.

Implications for Marketers: What Do YOU Think?
You’ll read my thoughts about what this sort of thing means for marketers in Part 2, next month. But I want to hear your thoughts as well. Please hit reply (don’t change the subject line), tell me how this scenario affects your thinking about marketing (as a marketer and/or as a consumer), and let me know if I can attribute your quote by name and/or title. Please do it while you’re thinking about it. I will accept comments through August 1.

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.

Cliff McCarthy and I, both of us members of Clamshell Alliance since the 1970s and the newly formed statewide Commonwealth Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy were interviewed by Glen Ayers and D.O. Ogden of Cliff and Shel on the MA governor’s attack on a 1982 citizen referendum passed into law by more than 2/3 of voters on Valley Free Radio’s Enviro Show. Cliff was one of the key organizers for that referendum: https://rss.com/podcasts/enviroshow/2103435/

My press release about this new coalition was picked up by at least two papers (before the group had a name): https://www.gazettenet.com/Local-advocates-push-back-against-Gov-s-nuclear-energy-repeal-62165076

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.

Hands Across the Hills: A Grassroots Project to Bridge America’s Political Divide, Letcher County, Kentucky & Leverett, Massachusetts 2017-2023

This remarkable book came out of an even more remarkable four-year dialogue project between residents of a county that voted overwhelmingly for Trump and a small town that voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2017. Unfortunately, they only printed enough copies to fill the advance orders—but fortunately, it’s available as a no-charge e-book.

Talking to the other side has never been easy, and it’s even less so in the highly polarized climate driven by social media and conventional media that value clicks and sensationalism more than they value truth, communication, or working together to 1) find common ground, then 2) organize toward common goals. Yet if we only talk within our own bubbles, all we do is reinforce othering and dehumanize the other side. Real peace is always through dialogue and often through some sort of reconciliation process. That’s how it happened in Ireland/Northern Ireland, South Africa, Sierra Leone, many countries in Latin America…and if there’s any hope for Middle East peace, they will have to talk and listen to each other a whole lot.

Hands Across the Hills (HATH) was an organization that attempted to humanize opponents and replace othering with understanding. HATH (the book) is about that common ground. Working not only across political differences but from very different cultures, education levels and economic classes (and with vastlty different generational traumas), these folks built trust in a multi-year process that involved alternating delegations. Kentuckians came to Leverett. Then Leverett residents visited Kentucky. And then the Kentucky folks made a return trip. COVID forced cancellation of a planned second visit to Kentucky, but the groups stayed in touch over Zoom. A business in Letcher County took its name from a café in Amherst, the bigger college town that borders Leverett. Leverett people were crucial in pitching in when their Kentucky comrades were hit with epic flooding.

A lot of attention went into designing and facilitating the encounters. Leverett resident Paula Green, who had done peace building and de-escalation in war zones from Bosnia to Rwanda, and Ben Fink, director of a network of community institutions in Letcher County, took primary responsibility to make sure the gatherings were safe, nonjudgmental, able to discuss hard issues—not to convince anyone but to understand the other perspectives—and included a wide range of fellowship enhancers from homestays to shared community meals to sightseeing, above and beyond the fellowship that was already building from the formal sharing circles and discussions.

Beginning with how the organization and the program were conceived and some of the early successes, the book also faces the hard truths that some things could have been better. While each group had read materials and watched videos to get a sense of the other culture—and to inoculate against the fear of being seen as hostile outsiders—there was too little preparation for the differences between working-class coal-mining families living in very basic housing and the largely upper-middle-class academic families of prosperous Leverett (pp. 8, 120-122). Both communities took some heat for failing to reach out to those who think differently in their own community (pp. 125-128). The Leverett group had tried earlier to set up dialogue with local Trumpers but were repeatedly rebuffed.

The Letcher County delegation skewed heavily toward Appalachians of Scottish-Irish ancestry, many generations removed from the immigrant experience. Though both communities were almost entirely White, Leverett’s group was more multicultural, and included several Jews who had family that either fled or were caught in the Holocaust. For some in the Kentucky group, these were the first Jews and the first children of immigrants they’d met. Many of the Leverett people were back-to-the-landers from more urban backgrounds, while the Kentuckians had been on their land for generations.

And yet they were able to discover many commonalities. Both lived in mountainous rural areas, both valued the land and their community intensely, both had similar forms of traditional music and dance. New Englanders’ beloved contra dances include many of the same moves as Appalachians’ equally beloved square dances, just done in two lines rather than squares. From either culture, those dances are likely to be powered by a live band with fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and other acoustic instruments.

And both groups ultimately wanted the same things: strong families, decent work, being valued for who each person is. The differences surfaced in the paths to implement those values. For instance, the Kentucky folks felt universal gun ownership was a way to keep safe, which appalled the Massachusetts group (p. 89). But then they dug a bit deeper to find out why. In Leverett, if someone calls the police, an officer will show up right away. In Letcher County, it could take 30 to 60 minutes to navigate the rough roads across sparsely populated areas. So even “sweet little old ladies” (p. 90), have to take primary responsibility for their own protection (p. 91).

HATH gained both local and national media attention and was successful enough so that organizers in both communities began to train other people to facilitate these types of dialogue groups and story circles, create these kinds of theater experiences, and create strong community networks within and across geography. And one of the most interesting and powerful sections of the book is a 30-page section of Appendix I that contains a thorough organizing manual (pp. 169-198), with major sections on fostering dialogue, cultural organizing, and communication. This would be useful to organizers in many issue-focused campaigns as well.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

Clean and Green Club, June 2025

8 Jun, 2025 1 Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: June 2025

Do you need to pay or get paid from people in other countries? I’ve been using Wise for about a year and a half. It’s easy, quick, and so far has been completely reliable. They are offering a no-fee introductory special if you use this link and don’t spend more than $600 in the transaction. DISCLOSURE: I will receive a credit if you sign up through me—but I would not recommend them if I were dissatisfied.

How We Can Harness More of Our Own Brain Power to Get Better Results From Other Humans and From Machines

Photo Credit: Google DeepMind via Pexels

We’ve all heard that most of us humans only use a tiny fraction of our brain power. The figure of 10% is often bandied about. While typically, we use quite a bit more than 10%, we also use nowhere near 100%. But of course, our brains are often busy making sense of information supplied by outside factors: people, other living things, new environments, things we’ve read, watched, or listened to—and, especially in the last few years, artificial intelligence.

So here’s a big insight: when we can harness information from those outside stimuli more effectively, we boost our own processing and our understanding of the world.
This insight came to me while reading a fascinating article (don’t be put off by its awkward title) by Christopher S. Penn, “How to Use Generative AI to Pivot Your Career.” Penn is a master of extracting far more utility out of AI tools such as Chat GPT and Claude than most of us have done. His secret? Using extremely carefully crafted and very involved search queries.

I’ll give an example in a moment.

But first, let’s think about something simpler: search engines. Many people have discovered over the years that the more specific the query, the more useful the results. So if you try a search query of only one or two words, you’re likely to get a lot of useless results and have to sift through to find the good ones. But a longer query will often take you right to your goal.

Say, for instance, you’re walking the neighborhoods of a city you don’t know well and you want to relax with a cup of organic coffee. If you just search Ecosia, Google, Bing, etc. for “organic coffee,” you’ll get dozens of listings showing where to buy beans online. You might see some nearby cafes listed but they won’t be easy to find in the clutter, including cafes on the other side of the country. But change the query to “organic coffee near me eat-in,” and you’ll probably see several good choices directly after the sponsored results.

It may be useful to think of AI tools as supercharged search engines that may or may not tell the truth. Because they are more complex, their instruction sets benefit from being more complex. Thus, the first of several AI prompts Penn uses to get his desired result is 400 words long. You can get to it easily by doing a command-F (Mac)/control-F (PC) on the article for “You are a world-renowned psychologist.”

Let’s look more specifically at this prompt, in the order these appear:

“You are a world-renowned psychologist, a leading expert in personality science.” He gives the tool an instruction to treat itself as a knowledgeable expert—a great, easy hack to up the quality of results.
“Your primary function is to analyze textual input and produce a comprehensive Big 5 Personality Analysis.” Further refining the expertise and presetting the AI to deliver an analysis of the five traits his model uses.
“Your analysis must be objective, precise, detailed, and strictly based on the content of the provided text.” The machine is not allowed to bring in outside sources, only the documents that Penn provides. (He explains why he’s using these particular inputs.)
“Assign a numerical score on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 indicates a very low presence of the trait and 100 indicates a very high presence of the trait as inferred from the text.” Penn is creating an objective measurement system and eliminating any ambiguity about which way the numbers run.
“[P]rovide a thorough analysis explaining your reasoning for that score. This explanation must:
Be precise, objective, and detailed.
Cite specific examples, phrases, themes, or linguistic cues from the provided text as evidence to support your assessment.” The machine must not only justify its assignment of the numerical score, but also cite its sources.
“Base your analysis solely on the textual evidence provided. Do not make assumptions or introduce external information about the author or context unless it is explicitly present in the text.” With different words, repeating the need to rely only on the documents it was specifically fed for this task.
“Every claim or score attribution must be linked back to elements within the text.” Again, creating barriers against the tool making stuff up.
“At the beginning and end of your entire analysis, you MUST include the following disclaimer:
‘This personality analysis is generated by an AI and is based solely on the provided text. It is intended for informational and reflective purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional psychological assessment or diagnosis.’” This serves two functions: reminding the researcher that the machine is not infallible, and protecting against legal liability if someone does something stupid and blames the analysis.
“You will receive a block of text for analysis.
Begin analysis upon receiving the text.” The researcher has delineated both the scope and the timeframe.

This is a lot to do for simple requests but makes perfect sense for Penn’s complex stated goal of using documents such as his LinkedIn profile to conduct a personality audit. And he openly states that he has generously allowed his material to be used as a template. So if you have a different sort of probe, you just need to create similar questions and plug them in.

AI’s greatest strength may be in doing this kind of research at timeframes no human can approach. I personally wouldn’t have AI write anything I were delivering to a client or publisher. But I could definitely think of research situations where it could save many hours. How have you used AI tools to increase your productivity, your understanding, and ultimately, your brain power?

Ted Nugent Is Wrong on the Facts

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.

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.

Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons

Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei, editors (Routledge, 2019)

Food is usually considered either a market-based commodity or a government-supplied necessity. The authors describe a third option: food as a resource collectively governed by producers and consumers, perpetuating age-old traditions and cultures while adapting to modern times with a need to manage resources for sustainability. They combine a holistic, global analysis with an openly communitarian, anti-capitalist, anti-mega-agribiz bias that may disturb some readers—but even if you’re totally pro-capitalist, they show alternative models of functioning within established markets. It’s also intersectional (examining the sometimes-conflicting needs of human rights, poverty eradication, and regenerative agricultural practices) and examines both historical and contemporary perspectives, going back to the enclosure acts that removed land from the commons hundreds of years ago—and recognizing that eating is not only a nutritional act, but also a way of preserving culture and building community at the same time.

This important resource isn’t a traditional anthology (where each chapter is disembodied), but a true collaboration; the authors consistently refer to each other’s chapters. I found that very refreshing. I’d even call it an act of love.

The book is also a major research work, with hundreds of notes and references (mercifully separated out at the end of each chapter). It draws case studies from around the world (among them Canada, Cuba, Hungary, South Africa, the UK, and the US), some in considerable depth and others in brief overviews.

A few among many points (noting the first time each shows up in my notes, as many show up several times throughout the book), including some that I agree with and some I have concerns about:

Food solutions can help solve many other planetary crises (p. 16)
Commodification both raises prices and erodes community values (p. 26)
Food scarcity is artificial; much is wasted and/or poorly distributed (p. 33)
Commoning can reinvent food systems (p. 43)
Current approaches to charity food distribution and food waste are unacceptable because they stigmatize poor people and inflict low-quality, often culturally inappropriate food on folks who see no other choice (pp. 48-49); both charity and agriculture must also be designed to pay workers fairly (p. 124) and not to silence poor people or acquiesce to oppression (p. 128)
Local governments can have a major impact; several cities have signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Act to create a sustainable and just urban food system (p. 78); good local governance can make charity unnecessary (p. 122) or place restrictions on or eliminate subsidies to large multinational food businesses (p. 125)
Treating food as a public good means addressing freeloaders and hoarders, as well as corporations that privatize profit but socialize costs (p. 88); that’s more likely if it’s organized as a commons (p. 96)
To understand poverty, study the rich and the industrializers (pp. 142-143)
Traditional culture is not a cure-all; issues like gender equality (p. 151), resource depletion, low productivity, and encroachment by corporate junk food, high-meat diets, etc. need to be addressed
Successful commons are typically self-governed and solve conflicts through resource-management rules that address four components: the resource, community, rules that govern access, and the value the resource creates (pp. 174-175); they don’t have to be homogeneous (p. 198)
Big Ag’s privatizing of resources through patenting, enclosures, and other methods can be thought of as a theft of traditional agricultural knowledge (p. 176), often drawing on traditional methods and seeds but sequestering that knowledge and those resources (p. 218, p. 221); its emphasis on developing pesticide-resistant plants is an attack on the environment and public health (p. 192)

Since my review is already long, I’ll skip my notes on the second half of the book, many of which deal with country/region-specific practices.

One big criticism: This topic was so fascinating that I took ten pages of notes. BUT I also put up with a very un-reader-friendly writing style (mired in dense academese) and spent five months reading just a few pages at a time to get all the way through it. I would love to see more academics write for ordinary human beings with the goals of readability and content absorption.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, May 2025

12 May, 2025 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: May 2025

Do you need to pay or get paid from people in other countries? I’ve been using Wise for about a year and a half. It’s easy, quick, and so far has been completely reliable. They are offering a no-fee introductory special if you use this link and don’t spend more than $600 in the transaction. DISCLOSURE: I will receive a credit if you sign up through me—but I would not recommend them if I were dissatisfied.

How to Keep Your Business Relevant when the Government Hates You

Protesters respond to warrantless ICE arrests

As a USArian (a citizen of the US—I often use the term to reflect the reality that “American” is a word that applies to anyone from the tip of Argentina to the northern edges of Canada and Alaska), I find myself in a country whose central government is not just actively involved in the destruction of everything I think of as good in government, but also attempting to extend its censorship into the private sector as well.

If you are a citizen of Hungary, North Korea, Russia, or other authoritarian regimes—or you lived in Brazil under Bolsonaro, Chile under Pinochet, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) under apartheid, or Germany and the countries it invaded under Hitler (among many other examples) this looks alarmingly familiar to you.

But for us in the US, at least those of us who are White (especially those who are also heterosexual and Christian and have some economic stability), it’s new and terrifying. We are seeing abuses of power unlike anything we experienced under Reagan, Bush I and II, and even this would-be-king’s first term. We are seeing the government telling private businesses, hospitals, universities that they will be penalized heavily if they were known to support a different candidate, defend facts regarding climate science and the environment or who got elected in 2020, represent an opponent in court, or have documents that contain the initials DEI or the phrase diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Still worse, we are seeing kidnappings by federal government agents of people who are in the US legally. They are not showing warrants, not providing basic information such as where the arrestees are being taken, and often sent thousands of miles from home (sometimes to be imprisoned in another country) without even a court hearing. We have a commander-in-chief who has shredded our foreign alliances, cratered the best economy in the world, calls for the US to take over two different sovereign nations and one sovereign territory (Greenland), betrays a country invaded by his friend Mr. Putin, and openly admires dictators around the world. And we are seeing the safety net torn to ribbons, our most private data turned over to an oligarch whose intentions are highly suspect, and both the dictator and that oligarch enriching themselves at our expense while throwing up roadblocks against holding them legally responsible for their actions.

So what can a business or institution do to not just protect itself but thrive in this perilous time?

Remember that just because the government doesn’t like what you’re doing, it doesn’t mean you can’t find support. The majority of people in the US do not agree with what he is doing. They find value in a government that protects people and planet, keeps its word, and upholds the rule of law, and they will patronize companies and institutions that act on principle. Look at what happened to sales at Target, which capitulated to government demands to drop DEI, and Costco, which refused. Target’s shopping visits dropped by five million in the four weeks ending February 9; sales were down 7.9% by early April with a one-day drop of 11% when they experienced a one-day boycott—and this doesn’t count the cost of lawsuits to reverse the shift. Revenue fell by $12.4 billion in revenue and shares of its stock fell to a four-year low of $27.27 per share. But Costco, which stood strong, apparently picked up a lot of those people who abandoned the red-and-white bullseye—gaining 7.7 million store visits in the same period. Its stock price at closing was $1008.30 on May 2, 2025 (the day I wrote this) compared with just $743.90 a year ago, and 68% of US shoppers supported the company’s decision.
Position your organization as courageous and willing to risk the dictator’s wrath in order to continue doing the right thing. I wrote a foreword for a client recently that took this approach. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“What does it mean to publish a book on sufficiency when the new president is the opposite of everything this book stands for? Carol speaks eloquently about sharing resources and evening out income inequity, greening the planet, and accepting differences. Trump ran on a platform of greed, exploitation of the earth and its resources, polluting and destructive non-renewable petroleum- and coal-based energy, bullying, lying, cheating, and hatred of the stranger. Wouldn’t this be the time for Carol to let her book quietly die? Isn’t she out of step with the culture?I would argue that not only is she not out of step, but the United States—and the world—needs her right now.” [I then list five reasons why.]
Organize with others to present a united front. Bullies are afraid of resistance. When they get capitulation, they push for more—but when they get pushback, especially organized pushback involving large numbers of people, they often back off. This administration has shown plenty of vulnerability. Don’t be like the disgraced law firms and universities that knuckled under to ridiculous demands without fighting back and then discover—gee, what a surprise—that their oppressor wants even more. Emulate Harvard, not Columbia, in your response to the bullying.

¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/03/31/how-truth-social-and-crypto-helped-donald-trump-double-his-fortune-in-just-one-year/
² https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025-04-27-Minority-Staff-Memorandum-Elon-Musk-Conflicts.pdf
³ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/sales-effect-of-target-capitul-SiT16OS9QQ6nWW6pJE4PJA

Indivisible’s Advocacy Director Reports from the Front

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.

Tim B. Green interviewed me on the Crush It Club (all the way from Japan!). My interviews don’t usually focus on corporate culture, so this was a fun one for me, as a non-corporate solopreneur, to talk about:

Why you need to be sustainable both in the environmental/social good space AND in your business finances
How to succeed in the publishing process
How to write a press release that captures attention instead of putting the reader to sleep
How copywriting can transform organizational culture
Why environmentalism went from fringe to mainstream, and how the planet itself is reacting
Why I avoid doom-and-gloom environmental messaging
A career-path book recommendation for those who are wired to be interested in many things
Whether you should be an inventor or a product developer, and how they’re different
Why individual action matters even if it feels too small to make a difference—even down to how we brush our teeth
Tim B. Green’s leadership lesson for Elon Musk
Why the Lone Ranger inventor doing it all on their own is a myth
How the best bosses can create a good employee culture AND steer deep sustainability and social justice transformations that even survive their tenure
Three key questions to ask as you begin the transformation process
Why the world’s largest and perhaps most profit-driven retailer chose to go deep into sustainability—and benefit handsomely from that decision
How to create “a series of interconnected wins”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOhwPAGvACs

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.

Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Corporate Responsibility

Instead of a book review this month, here’s a wonderful roundup of a few “bigly” innovative corporate ventures combining sustainability and profitability. Some are quite well known, like Cisco, Land O’Lakes, and Delta. Others, like Six Senses and Cadence, are companies that hadn’t been on my radar at all. Although I constantly write and speak about sustainability, most of these initiatives were new to me.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91269270/corporate-social-responsibility-most-innovative-companies-2025

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, April 2025

11 Apr, 2025 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: April 2025

How to Capitalize on Awards and Recognition

Photo Credit: RDNE Stock Project via Pexels

Awards are validation by a presumably neutral third party with clout. So don’t be afraid to brag! Here’s a small sampling of what’s possible:

As soon you can, put a banner on your home page and product page that your book, film, art, recipe, or whatever is an award-winner. Use the award logo, if possible. If you get a second award (or honorable mention/finalist), change the text to “multiple-award-winning”
Put it front and center in your next newsletter/blog
If the award has a logo, add it to your retail packaging. For a book or CD/DVD, put it on the front cover. For retail packaged goods, the front panel of your box, jar or can. For plastic bags with a cardboard label, put it on the label.
Add it to your email sig
Send out a personalized brag to all your contacts including media, people who hire you, people in your coaching groups, etc.
Send something out to selected media

If you come up with more ideas, let me know. I might list them (and credit you) in next month’s newsletter.

How to REALLY Cut Government Waste

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.

Acres of Clams

Acres of Clams, a film by Eric Wolfe

This new documentary chronicles something I was not only directly involved in but that I consider one of the most important things I’ve ever done: Clamshell Alliance and the mass occupations of the nuclear power plant construction site at Seabrook, New Hampshire, USA.

Clamshell organized two small nonviolent occupations at the site in the summer of 1976, with 18 and then 180 people. On April 30, 1977, about 1800 to 2000 of us gathered at the site, and I was one of 1414 arrested. The following April, some 20,000 came to the legal rally that Clamshell and the state negotiated before a prospective fourth occupation, and the following year, a group of militants who rejected the Clam philosophy of nonviolent action had an action of their own. I was involved only in the 1977 occupation—and in the current revival of Clamshell as an organization, and wrote some small parts of the current Clam website.

This review is the perspective of a participant, not an “objective journalist.” The country and the world were changed by our work. And we participants continue to learn and grow from those actions. I’ve never met anyone who participated in Clamshell’s actions who claimed to be untouched by the experience. I document why I thought Clamshell was so important and how we changed the world in a blog series I wrote for the 40^th anniversary of the 1977 action. And the timing of this review in my April issue again attempts to honor that amazing and very successful temporary community in the custody of the state.

Like my essays, Eric doesn’t pretend to be objective. His film is both a reflection on his own experience and a look at the wider movement. He looks at the origins of opposition to the Seabrook nuke, the betrayal by a state government that subverted the will of the people in Seabrook and several nearby towns—who voted not to accept the project—to the power company’s agenda, and how these threads began to coalesce into Clamshell.He looks at:

How Clam adopted principles like active nonviolence and consensus decision-making, and where we found the trainers who could spread these concepts
How local residents provided crucial logistical support, including staging areas
How Charlie King’s song “Acres of Clams” became the Clamshell anthem
How the governor (Meldrim Thomson), the state Attorney General (future Supreme Court Justice David Souter), and the publisher of the only state-wide daily newspaper (William Loeb of the Manchester Union-Leader) attempted to fend off the movement
How the faction disaffected after the 1978 compromise did their own action but failed to gain local support

By far the largest attention is to the events of 1976 and 1977, but the movie does cover the movement’s unexpected nationwide expansion following the 1977 occupation, along with such important events as the release in 1979 of Hollywood’s “The China Syndrome” and the news just days later of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown. And it tracks the movement into the late 1980s, though without a lot of detail. Eric also includes much more recent interview clips with many of the core activists, reflecting on the changes we wrought and the continuing work so many of us have done.

If you want a good insider’s look at how to create a movement that accomplished significant change without giving up its joy and creativity, see this film. If you participated in Clamshell or any of the dozens of similar organizations and want to remember your passion, see this film. If you want to understand younger relatives or co-workers who are involved with movements such as Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, etc., this film might help. And if you want to catalyze the safe energy movement amid massive pressure to bring the zombie nukes back into the power mix, or simply want to debunk the myth that the social change movements of the 1960s suddenly morphed into navel-gazing complacency, arrange a public showing of this film.

Personal note: The reason I was at Seabrook in the first place was because three years earlier, I’d done a report for a college class on “the pros and cons of nuclear power.” I quickly discovered that there were lots of safety, environmental, and economic cons—but no pros. My first book, published in 1980 in response to the Three Mile Island accident, was about why nuclear power is a really bad idea. My participation fed my involvement in the safe energy/green power world, both as an activist and as a consultant to green and social-change businesses.

See “Acres of Clams” at https://youtu.be/RPuE9oKh6-I

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, March 2025

14 Mar, 2025 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: March 2025

Share

Six Questions to Ask Before Bringing Anything New to Market

Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio via Pexels

Use this framework not just for physical and virtual products, but also for services, organizational structures, policies, and even ideas and mindsets. It’s almost impossible to produce anything new without some negative impacts, but the overall effect should be strongly positive. Looking at the net results…

As its primary purpose, does it make people’s or other living creatures’ lives better?
Does it help the earth?
Does it meet the tests of the Precautionary Principle—avoiding harm through unintended consequences? I’d thought this was an invention of the last couple of decades, but the source article says it dates back at least to 1729. Unfortunately, even centuries later, it has still not been widely incorporated into product development. These days, we even base international treaties on it. And yet, we continue to develop and release products that cause great damage and little benefit.
Can it be produced sustainably? It should reduce or at least keep from worsening pollution and human carbon footprint, use materials that are readily available over the long term, avoid hurting other people or other species, create zero net waste or even harness existing waste streams to clean them up while making the item, provide workers with good working conditions and fair compensation, and create a good return for owners and investors.
Is there a viable market? Is it something people or organizations can be persuaded to want enough that they buy it?
Do you have good ways to reach that market?

If these questions were standard practice already, hundreds of thousands of useless or harmful products would never have been unleashed on the earth and its inhabitants. And we’d be looking very carefully at how to develop such industries as clean energy, AI, and crypto in ways that minimize the damage and maximize the good—and refusing to even consider any expansion of nuclear fission, coal, fossil-fuel combustion, destructive agricultural and construction practices, or other technologies that have been proven extremely harmful—and for which many alternatives already exist.

What questions would you add to the list? If I get good suggestions, I’ll feature them in a future newsletter.

Share

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.

Business Growth for Good Summit Mastermind

As a reader of this newsletter, you know I’m a strong advocate for profitably addressing environmental and social needs through business. You can get a six-hour immersion and learn from some of the leaders in this space by attending the Business Growth for Good Summit Mastermind on March 20th, 2025, from 11 AM to 5 PM US ET on Zoom—at no charge! Connect with fellow entrepreneurs, get insights from top experts, and receive personalized coaching in live hotseat sessions. And the best part? By participating, you’ll be supporting United For Mercy as they build global partnerships for good and address equity and economic development in Rwanda.

My own session, Profit by Being a Prophet: Turn Your Environmental and Social Values Into Marketing Advantages, will offer you ready-for-action advice on product development, marketing, shifting mindset, and more—with examples ranging from solopreneurs to Fortune 50 global companies.

Visit https://go.eventraptor.com/summit/business-growth-for-summit-2503/shelhorowitz to register at no cost and be part of the movement! (Disclosure: if you upgrade to the paid package, I will get a small commission from the organizer, Michael Whitehouse.)

Share

Awakening Social Responsibility: A Call to Action

Awakening Social Responsibility: A Call to Action

By Rossella Derickson and Krista Henley (Happy About Books, 2007)

To my readers in other countries: I recognize that I have couched my review in the context of US politics, because the current situation is a lot of my motivation for choosing this book at this time. But I also note that more and more countries are facing climate-hostile, anti-safety net, anti-human rights governments and many economies are tumbling. So perhaps you might find this review useful after all.

It seems very relevant to revisit this book. I just checked and it’s still listed on the publisher’s website, HappyAbout.info (NOT .com). It was published in 2007, during a deep recession and the Republican, anti-environmentalist, anti-safety net, anti-human rights presidency of George W. Bush.

Less than two months into another Republican presidency, the new administration has already begun to destroy the wildly successful (though inflationary) economy and the many environmental protection laws passed since the 1960s. The strength of that economy was due in no small measure to Biden’s support of the green energy transition, of small manufacturers and the sales and distribution businesses that support them, and of the social safety net.

All of that is going away fast, as the new administration follows through on its many proposals to green business, torpedo the economy, and even the very structure of the federal government. The incoming administration is undermining pretty much every planet-centered or people-centered program and agency they inherited. Instead, they’ve focused on persecuting immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ folks, women, and especially anyone they perceive as a political enemy…turning our most private records over to a chainsaw-wielding technocrat who (like his patron) is directly benefitting financially from many of his illegal moves…turning off research websites that we taxpayers paid for…tax cuts for the super-wealthy funded by service cuts against the poor and middle class…undermining the parts of government that defend and protect people and planet while unleashing its power to be vindictive… It’s going to be an ugly and painful four years and a lot of innocent people will be hurt by these plans. Businesses will lose their workforces, families will be torn apart, and ordinary people with little savings will be devastated as the new tariffs make almost everything scarcer and more expensive.

And this time, the president is a convicted felon and civilly guilty sexual predator driven by his own lust for power, his own greed, and his own desire for retribution, and caught in an astounding 30,573 lies in his earlier term (and many thousands since). Fortunately, this time the grassroots resistance is already organized (though not as publicly visible as in the past) and the business community is actively taking steps to minimize the economic damage—including steps to protect and expand the environmental gains of the past 60 years or so. And fortunately, we have sites like http://archive.org and https://restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/ to preserve the legacy of the good work done by previous governments/

Which brings us to the book. The question that led me to choose this anthology for review is how did the green and climate movements not just survive a recession and an unfriendly government but become so much stronger? Using the same business frame I’ve been bringing to this newsletter for 21+ years, the many authors and interviewees of Awakening Social Responsibility have a clear answer for us: Make the business case for doing the right thing!

When a business realizes that it can reduce costs and raise revenues by such actions as:

lowering carbon footprint
using fewer resources
increasing efficiencies
switching to green building techniques, materials, power supplies, and waste management

It will protect those investments and even expand them.

The 34 chapters of the main text are divided into 10 introductory chapters in Parts I and II that lay out the framework, 8 case studies from the corporate world, 15 nonprofit narratives, and a concluding chapter on the role of HR departments. Most chapters are quite short; several of the 23 case studies are only two or three pages. Each lists people to contact for more information, though many of the contacts may have changed.

Some insights from the framework chapters:

“Approach CSR Corporate Social Responsibility] from a strategic, income-producing orientation.” (Alis Valencia, p. 24)
“To live peacefully together on this planet, we need to be in new relationships especially with those far distant from us.” (Meg Wheatley, quoted by Dinesh Chandra, pp. 27-28)
To transform mechanistic corporations into organic living systems, we must empower individuals and think globally. (Dinesh Chandra, p. 33)
Implement CSR not because of public pressure but to achieve better management and better outcomes. Consider hiring a Chief Responsibility Officer. (Kirk Hanson, p. 3)
Find ways to reuse everything. Borrow the four-part Natural Step framework developed by Karl-Henrick Robert and adopted in Sweden: 1) Stop basing the economy on extraction and concentration of natural 2) or human-made resources; 3) stop impoverishing nature through displacement, overharvesting, etc.; 4) ensure that everyone can meet their basic needs. (Marvin Brown, pp. 42-43)
Use and analyze results from the assessment tool on pages 45-59 (Azure Kraxberger) and the questions on pages 66-68. (Pravir Malik)

From the corporate case studies:

Look to the value of CSR and not just the values. Be strategic and innovative as you develop programs that create social and environmental good that meets stakeholder demands. Your CSR initiatives have to be much deeper than just marketing or just philanthropy. (Christine Arena, p. 72)
Walk your talk: The Gap revoked 200 of 464 contracts with Chinese manufacturers because they were keeping two sets of books (Dan Henkle, p. 81); the law firm Cooley Godward Kronish used its massive pro bono program to attract young, idealistic lawyers (Maureen Alger and Ashley Kanigher, p. 93); Adobe donated to 136 community organizations and offered employees 23 volunteer activities in just one year. (Michelle Mann, p. 102)
Turn community benefits into profitable products and services, as Advanced Transit Dynamics did, selling aerodynamic enhancers for truck trailers that would save companies $3000 per trailer even before factoring in today’s higher fuel prices (Andrew Forrest Smith, p. 150).

And from the nonprofit world:

Get granular by helping not just the company you consult to but individual employees who want to better themselves (e.g., reduce weight, stop smoking) or immigrants needing help integrating and finding work. (Act Now, pp. 107-109; Upwardly Global pp. 115-117)
Harness technology to achieve outcomes that wouldn’t otherwise work. (Bring Light matching tech-savvy young donors with charities, pp. 131-132; Human Connexus using microfinance technology for charity donations to individuals in need, pp. 133-134; iReuse finding takers for massive waste streams)

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, February 2025

14 Feb, 2025 No Comment

F<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: February 2025

Share

Networking, Part 2: Can You Hate Golf and Still Be a Great Networker?

Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels

This is the third of the three-part series to get you in the groove for success in 2025, and the second on networking. So if your set of resolutions include getting better at networking, you’ll find extra value in last month’s and this month’s tip.

A reporter recently posted this query: “I’m looking for people who network and socialize professionally other than on the golf course.” As a non-golfer who has shoulder issues and poor spatial skills, I thought my response would make an especially good newsletter article at this “resolutionary” season. Here’s my slightly modified answer:

Yes, you can be an avid networker without ever picking up a golf club. I have a huge network and have never played golf. I discovered this as a high school student when another passenger on a New York City public bus interrupted and joined a conversation I was having. She became a close friend. Here are four of the ways I network:

I build up a history with people I admire by commenting on their newsletters, either through direct email or as a public comment on the post. This is how I built relationships with people like Seth Godin and Bob Burg, both of whom endorsed my most recent book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (my second co-authorship with Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing).
Many of my networking successes have arisen out of shared interest groups: small-publisher or green business support groups both online and in-person, Chambers of Commerce, religious communities, grassroots social and environmental action organizations, involvement in the arts (substitute sports, the sciences, hobbies, etc., if that’s how you’re wired), and similar affinity communities. I still maintain both business and friend relationships with people I met in these contexts decades ago.
Cold pitches can work too. My pitch to Guerrilla Jay to be my nominal co-author was nine years after he’d been approached by my publisher to blurb my book Grassroots Marketing. We’d had almost no contact in between. (I’ve continued to network with his widow, by the way—and got a lovely endorsement for my speaking after presenting at one of her conferences.)

And my totally-out-of-the-blue pitch letters got one client a book endorsement from 1960s basketball superstar Bob Cousy—and got another client in front of Hollywood director Ed Zwick. That second client actually did some informal screen consulting on his movie, “Defiance”; she had been active in the events that film described. And many of my own book endorsements, including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, have come that way.
Zoom is a great networking tool. In addition to zoom meetings set up expressly to network, I’ve initiated conversations over Zoom chat or followed up via LinkedIn with people who seem to have common interests on learning calls. This had led to some very productive 1:1 meetings online and in person.

Share

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.

Business Growth for Good Summit Mastermind
As a reader of this newsletter, you know I’m a strong advocate for profitably addressing environmental and social needs through business. You can get a six-hour immersion and learn from some of the leaders in this space by attending the Business Growth for Good Summit Mastermind on March 20th, 2025, from 11 AM to 5 PM US ET on Zoom—at no charge! Connect with fellow entrepreneurs, get insights from top experts, and receive personalized coaching in live hotseat sessions. And the best part? By participating, you’ll be supporting United For Mercy as they build global partnerships for good and address equity and economic development in Rwanda.

My own session, Profit by Being a Prophet: Turn Your Environmental and Social Values Into Marketing Advantages, will offer you ready-for-action advice on product development, marketing, shifting mindset, and more—with examples ranging from solopreneurs to Fortune 50 global companies. Visit https://go.eventraptor.com/summit/business-growth-for-summit-2503/shelhorowitz to register at no cost and be part of the movement! (Disclosure: if you upgrade to the paid package, I will get a small commission from the organizer, Michael Whitehouse.)

Sustainability Unveiled with Jessica Hunt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iiC7FebCv8 (just released February 13)

How saving a mountain inspired me to take social change into the business world
Why socially conscious companies have to create pleasant work environments, for their own protection
How to deal with imperfection in your sustainability quest
What I disagree with Greta Thurnberg’s approach
How to make sure your corporate philanthropy is in alignment with both your larger purpose and your product line
Why a successful social entrepreneur turned down an exclusive for the biggest opportunity in his industry in decades
How to create allies for change within your internal organization—and beyond
How to work for change within the business world without alienating people who have more rigid ways of thinking
How one simple lifestyle change can save millions of gallons of a precious resource over a lifetime
Why progress in the green world will continue despite the opposition of right-wing governments
What I might do with the potential 30 years of work I might still have,. at age 68
What gives me hope in tough times

From Hilary Samuel of Asleep at Last: Sleep-deprived? Instead, jump out of bed with energy and alertness! Discover your sleep type to escape your pattern of sleeplessness. Next join Sleep to Thrive: Wake Up to Your Life!, starting in mid-March to transform your sleep and your life.

Share

And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture

And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture

By Bill Wasik (Viking, 2009)

An examination of how messages, memes, chart-topping bands and other quick-peaking cultural phenomena gain and then lose traction, by the man who claims to have invented flashmobs. I almost put it down several times, because the first three chapters felt like a celebration of some of the most obnoxious aspects of our culture that elevate something for a brief moment and then let it die.

I’m glad I stuck with it, though. Chapters 4 and 5 and the conclusion redeemed the book and provided a great deal of insight—including some self-reflection about why some of his stunts (and those of other manipulators he cites and often interviews) might not have been the best course of action, and in some cases weren’t even ethical (pp. 129-133).

The book was published in 2009 (which means likely written in 2008) and feels a bit quaint sometimes: He’s all over what happens on MySpace, but doesn’t even mention Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, all of which had already been running for several years.

This would have been one of the first books to really look at how communication shifted when everyone could be a creator and anonymous creators could achieve (although not necessarily maintain) stardom—and, from that stardom, influence the culture. A lot of the science we take for granted now wouldn’t have been done yet.

Still, the insights on how memes worm their way into our brains and change the way we think and act feel extremely relevant as I write this just two weeks after the 2024 US presidential election, where memes overpowered facts and someone was elected who was widely known as a serial liar on a mass scale.

This, for instance, feels eerily prescient:

“…the Internet and confirmation bias are conspiring to erode what remains of reasonable political discourse…even the most assiduous news fan can consume an entire day’s reading by simply ingesting only those tidbits that support his or her own views; and…the network of political blogs…has evolved into a machine that supplies the reader exactly this prefiltered information (p. 165).

In an age where everything is trackable, being an influencer doesn’t just change the culture. It also changes the content creator. It’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to tweak your content to get more Likes, shares, comments, etc. (p. 28). While eyeballs were the commodity in the TV ads of the three-network era, now it’s clicks. And we know precisely how many people clicked. If we want to go deeper, it’s not hard to find out how long they kept the article open, which subsequent links they clicked, and even how their eyes (and their brains) processed the material And this is why when you read a story even in respected legacy media like the New York Times, you’ll see a bunch of click-bait headlines.

However, some of this data may not be what it seems to be. As an example, I will often open an interesting link but not get around to reading it for days or even weeks. While the measuring tools would show me as engaging with this content, I’m actually ignoring it until I have the right moment.

Clickbait, in my opinion, certainly contributes to our collective short attention spans and craving for the adrenaline rush. We spend so much energy seeking out the superachiever outliers (he calls them Black Swans; we usually know them today as Unicorns) that we neglect the slow-and-steady Kaizen-style advances (p. 151). But so many of our supposed Black Swans turn out to be deeply flawed, like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. And for every Buckminster Fuller or Alice Walker, there are tens of thousands of others building the slow advances that take the whole culture forward.

We treat news as an extreme sport, and that makes it really hard to gain any deep and meaningful understanding of our world. Nanostories are NOT real stories (pp. 144-152)—and to achieve greatness in any artform, “we must learn how to neuter our nanostories” (p. 182). And both Left and Right have eroded the perception of legacy media as trustworthy (p. 154). In fact, our views of candidates and their policies are actively manipulated by “hundreds of thousands of self-taught pundits” who see message creation as more important than organizing (pp. 158-159).

Wasik makes an interesting distinction between Orwellian (1984) and Gladwellian (The Tipping Point) psychological manipulations (p. 136). The former concentrates power in the hands of an authoritarian government, while the latter lets any of us exercise some usually relatively small degree of power.

And even virality experts get it wrong. A lot. Wasik describes several of his own failures, including a site called OppoDepot (pp. 158-162) that gathered all the accusations against candidates, regardless of party, one web page per candidate. He experimented with several permutations but couldn’t get traction.

Finally, he turns his attention to the systemic failure: “I even have felt tempted, like Time’s ‘You’ issue, to lionize viral culture as a people-powered paradise. But I have also seen the day-by-day destructiveness of the Internet churn, of the manufacture of nanostories with little regard for their ultimate truth” (p. 183).

And then he explores “how to sap the machine of its tyrannical power”: gathering solutions that include month-long “Internet Ramadan” (proposed by jake Silverstein), a weekly “Secular Sabbath (Mark Bittman), and thinking in 10,000-year timelines (the Long Now Foundation, whose founder Danny Hillis cites the builders of Oxford’s New College Hall, whose 14^th-century foresight led them to plant a forest to supply replacement beams that were needed hundreds of years later) or “time-shifting” by reading ancient magazines as if they were new (pp. 183-185).

He settles on urging all of us to become Stoics, who accept the good and the bad, rather than Epicures, who only choose the finest things (pp. 186-187). This, he says, will lead us to embrace “more sustainable approaches to information, to novelty, to storytelling. We cannot unplug the machine, nor would we want to, but we must rewire it to serve us, rather than the other way around. And for that, we must learn how to partially unplug ourselves” (p. 187).

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, January 2025

13 Jan, 2025 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2025

Share

Personal Message from Shel: Evolving This Newsletter in a World Caught in the Cross-Hairs

Welcome to 2025, a year that’s only two weeks old and already fraught. This is a challenging time. Business leaders who believe business can make the world better for the planet and its residents will face intense scrutiny and pressure to fold our tents. But if we stand firm, if we continue to act on our sense of ethics, our decency, and our knowledge that environmental and social responsibility is a business success strategy, we will eventually prevail!

My heart goes out to readers and their loved ones who have been directly impacted by the dozens of recent massive climate events such as the floods in the US Southeast, Libya, and Uganda, earthquakes in China and Vanuatu, fires in California, cyclones in Mozambique and Sri Lanka, volcanic eruption in the Philippines…and by human-caused disasters, including the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the massive migrations from areas that are no longer safe, and more.

Speaking of human-caused disasters—here in the US, starting on January 20, we face an openly authoritarian, openly bigoted, and openly corrupt administration that brags about how it will undo our progress on environmental and social issues and attacks personal freedom. This new government plans to act not as a force for the greater good, but to enrich kleptocrats and make life miserable for “enemies” within.

And many senior executives are pushing hard to enable that undercutting within their own organizations. Companies are shredding DEI programs, universities are struggling to come up with something equitable to replace welcoming admissions policies deemed illegal by a partisan Supreme Court, and both social and mainstream media are adopting policies that kowtow to authoritarians, from eliminating fact-checks and enabling hate speech to suppressing criticism of the new regime. And alas, similar governments already exist in Hungary, North Korea, Russia, and elsewhere.

But there’s some good news, too: Several countries, including Brazil, Chile, and Columbia, have tossed out right-wing dictators. Others including Germany and France turned back far-right candidates and slates. In the US, many left-of-center candidates and ballot initiatives won even in states that went for Trump. And that’s just the beginning. Visit this page from Nonviolence News for a torrent of more good news, most of which I hadn’t even known about until their newsletter crossed my desk. I don’t see everything on their list as good news, but the vast majority certainly is.

Also, under-the-radar organizing by progressive grassroots organizations is massive. And these groups are finally working together. I went to one national Zoom meeting that had 140,000 registrants, 100,000 attendees, and the active participation of at least five national grassroots groups. Individually and collectively, they’re crafting and launching to best create nonviolent strategies to resist Trump policies and nominees—quickly marking the first victory in November with the almost immediate collapse of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, which culminated in the release of the US House ethics report on his long list of transgressions.

Because we’re entering such challenging times and the topics I cover are directly influenced by government policies and public perceptions related to business I will adjust my focus a bit. This newsletter will pay more attention to success stories in fostering progressive attitudes and blocking the slide toward authoritarianism. This will probably show up most often in the monthly review of a book or other resource—whether or not there’s a direct and obvious business connection. I hope these success stories inspire you to continue and expand the good work you’re doing, both within and outside of the business sphere.

And now, on to this month’s tip and resource review.

Networking, Part 1: 5 Easy Secrets to Networking Charisma and Success—WITHOUT Being a Jerk or Feeling Cheapened

Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels

The 54 “rocket thruster” strategic questions from Seth Godin I shared last month were part 1 of a three-part series on priming yourself for success in 2025. This month and next month, we’ll look at networking as a life and business skill.

Relax! You don’t have to be “That Guy/That Gal” that everyone wants to run away from. They may think they’re networking, but they’re actually engaged in alienating. Even if you hate traditional networking, you may find that my approach is a lot more friendly and brings better results—because it’s not about how great you are but about how useful your help can be to others.

Engage deeply. Too many people either cower at the back of the room at a networking meeting, speaking only with those they already know—or “work the room” shoving business cards in people’s faces and excusing themselves (or just walking away) a few seconds later to prey on the next victim. But networking is not about the number of superficial and worthless contacts. It’s about making real connections. I once spent an entire 90-minute Chamber of Commerce meeting talking with ONE individual—and I consider that meeting a rip-roaring success.

Some steps to reach those deeper levels of engagement:
a) Begin with a compelling and non-routine question. Examples: Why did you choose to get involved with this organization? What’s the thing you’re most proud of in your career? Can you describe a typical day? If you were in charge, what would you do differently?

b) Listen well. Make the other person feel seen and heard. Resist the temptation to fill up the spaces with stories about how what you did was similar or better. Instead, ask some probing questions about what you’re hearing. Stop every once in a while to rephrase what you’ve been hearing in your own words, so the other person knows you not only pay attention but you get it.

c) Ask what the person hopes to come away with from this event.

d) If they don’t flip it back to you, ask if you could tell them a bit about what you do and what you’re looking for. If they grant permission, begin with your…
You-know-how self-intro. Start with a question that feels obvious—and follow up immediately with what sets you apart in a way that excites the listener enough to ask “tell me more!” This formula is a much more interesting conversation starter than a simple job title—especially one that people think they already know all they need to about. So, for example, instead of saying “I sell solar panels,” you might try “You know how energy costs have quadrupled since the new century started? I help small businesses return to those lower costs while cleaning up the environment, lowering their carbon footprint, and creating better health outcomes at the same time.”

Here are two I’ve used: one to attract clients for a specific service, and the other to bring them into my broad niche. For a specific service: “You know how so many press releases are so boring you could read them instead of using sleeping pills? I write ‘story-behind-the-story’ press releases that go far beyond the usual who-what-where-when-why to make your company sound fascinating—it’s like reading a novel except it’s the truth.”

For the overall niche: “You know how the so-called ‘experts’ always say you can either have a business that makes a good profit OR one that does good in the world? I’m here to tell you that not only can you have both, but if you do it the right way, your profits actually go UP when you build in environmental and social good.
Connect around common interests. Keep your ears open as you walk through an in-person networking event, and visit the chat frequently if you’re at an online event. Keep your radar up for common interests. In person, you can interrupt gently if you make it relevant: “I couldn’t help overhearing that your daughter is on the soccer team. I played as a kid and the game still excites me.” Online, it’s easier, because you can often chat directly to an individual participant, attenders will often pop their LinkedIn profile into the chat, and in many cases, you can save the chat. (f you can’t, click the interesting links as they appear; this is much easier from a computer than from a phone).
Make intros/send resources. When someone tells you something that resonates, consider how you can be a resource. This might mean bringing them over to meet someone who you either met earlier in the event or already knew, or making an email intro. Take the ten seconds to tell each of them WHY you’re making the introduction. You may also find you have resources to share: the name of an important book on the subject, a handout you found inspiring, a movie you think they’d enjoy, a technique you’ve done well with, the contact info for a practitioner who can help them…
Follow up quickly and personally! You can be great at networking during the meeting, but if you never follow up—or follow up with something insincere and obviously generic—it’s all wasted. In person, I jot a note on the person’s business card about why I took the card and what I’m supposed to send them. Online, I start a transcript as soon as I enter the call and save it periodically (if the host has enabled these features). Afterward, I can go through the transcript and boldface my to-dos. And I try to set aside some focused time within 24 hours to respond. In my e-mail, I won’t just say that I enjoyed meeting—but thank them for deepening my understanding of the specific (named) subject, enclose a resource I promised, etc.

Finally, a shout-out to some of the people I’ve learned networking skills from: Bob Burg (author of Endless Referrals and The Go-Giver series), Nancy Juetten (author of Bye-Bye Boring Bio), Michael Whitehouse (a/k/a The Guy Who Knows a Guy), Susan Harrow (author of Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul), Linda Kaplan Thaler (author of The Power of Nice), Tim Sanders (author of Love is the Killer App, Jack Mitchell (author of Hug Your Customers), Ivan Misner (founder of Business Networking International). Apologies to the far too many others to list here. You can go a lot deeper if you read their materials.

Share

Can We Still Thrive in a World Caught in the Cross-Hairs
(This post is a slightly modified version of the introduction to this issue. I posted it as a blog in order to facilitate sharing, if you are so moved.)

Can We Still Thrive in a World Caught in the Cross-Hairs

(This post is a slightly modified version of the introduction to this issue. I posted it as a blog in order to facilitate sharing, if you are so moved.)

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.

Michael Whitehouse is bringing me on to speak at TWO of his summits: Authentic Marketing, February 11-13, and Business Growth for Good, March 20.

Michael bills the Authentic Marketing Summit as a chance to move past outdated tactics, embrace innovative alternatives to hype and high pressure, and engage, captivate, and grow your audience by establishing genuine connections. When I’ve gone to Michael’s events, I’ve always found them worthwhile. There’s no cost to attend. There is an upgrade package, of course (and if you buy it I get a small commission). Here’s what I’m presenting:

No-Hype Marketing
Have you been taught that the more in-your-face you are with your marketing, the more successful you’ll be? When you’re the buyer, are those the companies you choose to spend your money with? If not, why would you think that stuffing hypey marketing messages down your prospects’ throats is effective? You want marketing that woos your prospects —NOT sales that happen in spite of your marketing. This brief 15-minute introduction will focus on where to find your ideal buyers—and how to woo them once you do. Click here to register

On March 20, I’ll be presenting Profit by Being a Prophet: Turn Your Environmental and Social Values Into Marketing Advantages. You’ll receive the descriptions of the event and my talk in next month’s newsletter, along with the registration link.

Share

Life of Libby: Chasing Peace & Justice with Humor, Guts, & Passion

Life of Libby: Chasing Peace & Justice with Humor, Guts, & Passion

By Libby Frank with Heather Shafter

As we enter a dark time in our nation’s politics, it’s worth remembering that thousands of other activists have survived very dark times, both in the US and around the world. I remember reading a book called Laughter Wasn’t Rationed, written by a German Christian who got through Nazism by focusing on keeping a sense of humor and enjoying the subtle jokes that were told at Hitler’s expense.

So I was glad to pick up Libby Frank’s new activist autobiography that talked about life as an activist during the repressive McCarthy era—and before, and since. Libby was never one to keep silent, despite the risks. She says, “I have struggled against the ‘shh’ my whole life” (p. 21) and “the fact that folk groups were attacked and surveilled and attacked by the federal government shows that we were having an impact” (p. 48). After getting a better-than-expected response following a presentation about a fact-finding trip to the Middle East in the 1970s, she reflected, “I learned again that in speaking out, one can find allies—and by not speaking up, you’ve lost already” (p. 118).

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and teaching at many Hebrew schools and Jewish Folkschools across her career, she also had a lifetime of advocating for unpopular causes, embracing feminism, racial justice, and even Palestinian rights as a teenager in the 1940s. She was the one who got Pete Seeger and Lee Hays to change “all of my brothers” in “If I Had a Hammer” to “my brothers and my sisters”—just by coming up to Pete at a concert in 1951 and asking, “why just ‘my brothers’?” (p. 46).

She went much more deeply into Palestinian rights in the 1960s as founder and chair of the Middle East Committee of Women’s International league for Peace and Freedom (p. 104), which made her an outlier in the Jewish community. She made several fact-finding and activism trips to the region and stayed involved in that cause for decades.

Following a stint as director of the Bergen County (New Jersey) Peace Center, she returned to WILPF as Executive Director for five years and continued WILPF’s Middle East work long after she was forced out of her paid position (pp. 166-167). After leaving WILPF, she held several other activist leadership positions, as fundraiser and then Executive Director at Women Strike for Peace, and then Director of the U.S. Peace Council.

Libby was always looking out for innovative, highly visible ways to increase impact. I love the story she tells about being one of ten women holding a banner on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and telling the cop who asked her to leave that spot that it wasn’t her decision to make, because they worked by consensus—and then the ten of them had a looooong discussion (keeping the banner visible the whole time) before finally agreeing to shift location (pp. 171-172).

Libby didn’t live to see her book published. It was in final production when her husband died in October, 2023, and she added an afterword in tribute to him. Seven weeks later, she died unexpectedly. And the biggest lesson she leaves me with is reinforcing my long-held conviction that yes, each of us can make a difference, and that impact is amplified when we work with others.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, December 2024

3 Dec, 2024 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2024

Share

Rocket Thrusters for Your 2025 Success: Seth Godin’s 54 Strategy Questions

Photo Credit: Mikhail Nilov via Pexels

Yes, this is a lot to take in at once. But it’s well worth your time—so much so that as soon as I read it almost two months ago, I asked and received Seth’s permission to share it with you so it could inspire your New Year’s resolutions—and more importantly, your New Year’s actions. I strongly encourage you to spend some time with it. If it’s too much all at once, you could look at five a day for 21 days.

While this piece is exceptional, I’ve been reading Seth’s daily bulletins for many years and often find value. If you’re not already a subscriber, start brightening your mornings. Many of his daily posts can be read in two minutes or so.

—Shel

Here’s Seth:

My new book (published October 22) contains more than 500 questions. Here are some to get you started:

Who is this project for? Who is my smallest viable audience?
What change do I seek to make with this project?
What is my strategy to make this change happen? Can I articulate it clearly?
What resources and assets do I have to dedicate to this project? Do I have enough kindling to burn this log?
What is my timeline for this project? When does it ship and what is my deadline for calling it quits?
What systems am I currently working within? Does the system want what I have to offer?
What systems would need to change for my project to succeed? How can I create the conditions for that change?
Where will I cause tension? What resistance should I anticipate from others (and myself)?
What are the status roles and affiliations at play?
How big is my circle of us and circle of now? What can I do to expand them? What about my audience’s circles?
Why would someone talk about or recommend my project to others?
How can I create the conditions for a network effect to develop around my project?
Where are the feedback loops, and which ones move my work forward or slow it down?
Which games are being played? Who sets the rules?
Which games are winnable, which are oppositional? And which games don’t need to be won, simply played?
What can I learn to increase my odds of success? Where can I gain that knowledge?
Where is the smallest viable audience? How do they think about status and affiliation?
Which false proxies are likely to distract me? What matters?
Am I taking advantage of the shift being caused by a change agent? Or do I need to become one?
What asset would transform my project? How do I acquire it?
If an early adopter talks about my project, what will they say?
Where is the empathy? Does my work align with the actual motivations and interests of the audience?
What is the tension that I’m eagerly creating in the system by showing up with my change?
Am I building the scaffolding people will need to adopt and move forward?
Does this help the dominant forces in the system continue to achieve their goals or does it challenge their status quo?
What’s my position? Are people who choose an alternative making a good choice based on their needs?
What can I learn from comparable projects that have succeeded or failed?
Is my strategy simple to describe and hard to stick to?
What partnerships, alliances or collaborations could increase the scaffolding around this project?
Am I tapping into an insatiable desire?
What’s the process for altering the strategy based on what I learn?
Is my strategy resilient enough that we can actually look forward to surprises?
Is the network effect sufficient to insulate me from a race to the bottom? Can I create a network that is built on abundance, not scarcity?
Is the change I’m making contagious? How can I alter the culture I’m creating to make it more so?
How will early successes of my project make later successes more likely?
What are the tropes and requirements of the genre I’ve chosen?
How do we gain insight into the probability that our assertions will work out?
Can I make it easier for others to decide?
Where are the non-believers, and how do I avoid them?
How does my project tap into existing social desires for status, affiliation, and/or security to help propel its adoption and spread?
What frayed edges, anomalies, or contradictions in the current system could serve as leverage points for introducing my alternative?
What metrics is the current system optimizing for? How could my strategy re-align incentives and feedback loops around different measures of success?
How does my project seek to shift part of the culture from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset?
What incumbents might perceive my project as a threat to their power or position? How does my strategy navigate those political dynamics?
How can I design for network effects, enabling each new participant to create value for all the other participants?
What sunk costs might prevent potential stakeholders from embracing my approach? How can I lower the perceived switching costs?
What are the common scripts or objections I expect to encounter? How will I constructively respond to skepticism and resistance?
How will engaging with my project help people become who they aspire to be? What identity and worldview does it invite them to step into?
How can I lower the barrier to entry and make it feel easy and irresistible for people to take the first step with my offering? Where is the scaffolding?
How do I shorten the delay in the relevant feedback loops (or learn to thrive with a longer delay)?
How do we lower the decision-making barrier to invite participation? Can we make it easy for people to say, “I was right all along?”
How can I avoid becoming trapped by sunk costs if my initial strategy proves ill-fated? When should I pivot vs. persist? Where’s the dip?
Can I improve project hygiene? What are the standards and conversations I’m avoiding?
How will I resist the social gravity and “pull to the center” over time as my project matures and faces pressure to conform?

When asked for a bio, Seth humbly responded, “Seth writes a blog at seths.blog. He’s a teacher and the author of 22 international bestsellers.” So in case you don’t know his work, let me give him a better intro than he gave himself. He’s one of the foremost business futurists of our time and someone who sees and interprets for us—more clearly than most—the cascading effects of a world where new technologies, new thought patterns, and new ways of doing both business and social good have all begun to overlap. In the many years I’ve been reading his daily blog and some of his books, he’s changed the way I think about many issues and expanded the toolset I use to make sense of the world.

—Shel

See the original/subscribe to his blog at https://seths.blog/2024/10/the-strategy-questions/ )

Share

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.

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.

Share

There’s a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum’s Amazing 10 “Rings of Power” for Creating Fame, Fortune, and a Business Empire Today—Guaranteed!

There’s a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum’s Amazing 10 “Rings of Power” for Creating Fame, Fortune, and a Business Empire Today—Guaranteed!

By Joe Vitale (2006 edition)

Let’s get a few things clear right at the start:

There’s no evidence that Barnum ever said “there’s a sucker born every minute”—but there IS evidence that one of his competitors said it about Barnum’s customers.
While Vitale makes a case that Barnum acted within an ethical framework based on deep religious faith, I personally have a problem with one aspect of Barnum’s ethics (more about this in a moment).
I find the hypey subtitle a big turnoff. But because of the cover design, I didn’t even notice it had a subtitle until I sat down to write this review, despite seeing the cover daily for the roughly three weeks it took me to read the book.
Full disclosure: Joe Vitale is an acquaintance and has been helpful in my career.

About number 2: Barnum repeatedly created promotions that deliberately misled people into attending his shows. While the material often contained disclaimers, the focus was on undermining the prospect’s rational incredulity and replacing it with irrational credulity (examples on pages 27, 32, 89, 93, and 134-135). That’s not how I run my business and I hope it’s not how you run yours. Barnum rationalized it by saying (probably correctly in 99% of all cases) that he always gave people more than their money’s worth and did not encounter disgruntled customers. But still, while he delivered value, he made deceptive promises about the “marvels” visitors would experience and then delivered value on the 850,000 (p. 64) much-less-promoted museum items.

Notice how Barnum’s copy here includes several qualifiers and prevarications, but buries them in the emotional triggers of hype while turning scientific doubt into controversy—which always sells (combining the quote from p. 108 with a version in The Independent that starts a few lines earlier but omits the 45 words beginning “and its natural existence”):

“Engaged for a short time, the animal (regarding which there has been so much dispute in the scientific world) called the Fejee Mermaid! Positively asserted by its owner to have been taken alive in the Fejee Islands, and implicitly believed by many scientific persons, while it is pronounced by other scientific persons to be an artificial production, and its natural existence claimed by them to be an utter impossibility. The manager can only say that it possesses as much appearance of reality as any fish lying on the stalls of our fish markets—but who is to decide when doctors disagree? At all events, whether this production is the work of nature or art, it is decidedly the most stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection. If it is artificial, the senses of sight and touch are useless, for art has rendered them totally ineffectual. If it is natural, then all concur in declaring it THE GREATEST CURIOSITY IN THE WORLD.”

Look at all the “modern” copywriting tricks squeezed into that paragraph: Time limit, controversy, authority (scientists, doctors and the unidentified manager), exoticism, appeal to multiple senses, superlatives—and curiosity.

Yet Barnum himself says, “Anything spurious will not succeed permanently…[customers] will denounce you as an imposter and a swindler” (p. 210). I guess he felt that his use of weasel words and his delivery of entertainment value were enough to keep him out of that despised category.

Still, this book is worth your time. Vitale does a great job of illuminating Barnum’s core principles (pp. 19-25): 1) Choose a business that brings you joy; 2) keep your word; 3) be all-in; 4) avoid alcohol and drugs; 5) “let hope predominate, but be not too visionary”; 6) focus on just one kind of business; 7) hire well—and fire when you hired poorly; 8) commit to substantial marketing; 9) stay frugal/avoid vanity and extravagance; 10) rely on your own efforts—”be the architect of [your] own fortune.”

Despite #10, Barnum bet heavily on joint ventures. He took risks on unknown performers, made them superstars, paid them well—often a percentage of the gate—and engendered deep loyalty from these partners. He was also extraordinarily adept at marketing, using both paid ads and media publicity extensively. And his fans really did feel like they’d gotten more than their money’s worth, because he believed “the noblest art is that of making others happy” (p. 65).

Barnum is also a model for thriving despite tragedy. His life was a continuous exercise in resilience (pp. 43-44, 141-153) as his uninsured museum was destroyed twice by fire, his mansion burned down, he went bankrupt, he was briefly jailed, and even faced a lynch mob ready to hang him—not to mention the devastating deaths of multiple loved ones. But he always bounced back.

I also admire the way Vitale frequently shows how Barnum’s acumen can be applied in the modern world, as well as the historical continuity of Barnumesque techniques through PR geniuses like Edward Bernays in the 1930s (p. 75) and Paul Hartunian in the 1980s (p. 130).

So yes, get your hands on a copy—but go in with your eyes and ears open to the story behind the story.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, November 2024

4 Nov, 2024 No Comment

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2024

Share

Why Marketers Need Poets (and other creatives)

Photo Credit: Anna Pou via Pexels

In a recent newsletter, Brian Kurtz of Titans Marketing quoted his late mentor Marty Edelston, founder of Boardroom Reports (best known for the Bottom Line newsletters):

“Fiction is not worth your time. We don’t need to escape but we always need to learn through business books.”

Despite my enormous respect for both Brian and Marty, I vehemently disagree. This is adapted and expanded from my response to Brian:

Really shocked that a marketer as astute as Marty would say this. Fiction and poetry and drama (and visual art, music, dance, etc.) are windows into souls—keys to understanding psychology—extremely useful for every marketer who is not trying to sell a universally needed product. And as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a universally needed product. Toilet paper comes pretty close—but there are plenty of people who use bidets, or who live in cultures that have other ways to clean up. Historically, we all managed to do without TP for most of human history—a point reinforced by the packaging of the Trader Joe’s recycled TP I sometimes buy.<end of my note to Brian>

I feel that my effectiveness as a marketer is deeply rooted in the insights to the human condition that I get through literature, music, visual art, movies, and other forms of creative expression. It’s hard for me to imagine invention or innovation without them. It doesn’t surprise me that the earliest human artifacts include works of visual art that tell stories (cave paintings and pictographs)—and that they are present in many ancient cultures all around the world. I’ve personally seen them in places as far apart as Western China and New Mexico.

Let them into your own life. Not just because you’ll get marketing insights, but because you’ll feed your soul. My initial attraction to the arts had nothing to do with marketing—but once I was immersing myself, I became a much better marketer.

Share

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.

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.

Share

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands

By Sarah Towle

I don’t usually review resources dedicated to uncovering and solving big social problems without an obvious business context—but I’m making an exception for this historical and current analysis of the incredibly cruel US immigration “system”—which is not at all systematic in its functionality, only in its cruelty and racism.

And while it may not be obvious, business is definitely a factor in this cruelty. The private prison/detention system is a huge beneficiary, building massive profits out of the exploitation and even torture of those who fled for their lives. The human traffickers and smugglers who help bring people and products across the border are running businesses, albeit illegal ones. Also, the roots of the border crisis have a lot to do with US policies going back a century and more that prioritized profits for giant agribusiness companies growing such crops as coffee and bananas. The term “banana republic” actually came out of that long-running exploitation—and so did the dual crisis of drugs ravaging the US while US-made guns ravage Latin America.

Towle explores both, as well as the devil’s partnerships between those private entities and some of the most repressive agencies within our federal and state governments—some of which have their own roots in the slave abduction rings that operated before the Civil War—and the way both have abused those in their custody to the point where torture is the only word to call it. Both the agencies and the profiteers are aided and abetted by a shadowy network of right-wing organizations organized by a man named John Tanton (p. 140)—a name I hadn’t encountered before reading this book, although his impact has been felt in repressive laws, repressive judicial appointments, and much more.

These tangled webs may help explain why oppression and arbitrary (often illegal) treatment of low-income immigrants of color are a curse in our society whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.

Towle is a good writer and researcher. She tracks down long spirals of causes, long histories of completely unnecessary cruelty and barbarism directed at those who came to the US seeking protection. All-too-often, they find the opposite. And she makes the point over and over (p. 105, for instance) that attempting to deter migrants from entering doesn’t work, and won’t work as long as they are fleeing direct threats to their own and their loved ones’ lives.

As I do, she would love to see policy based on what we say we believe in as a country. It was the US that in the aftermath of WWII pushed hard to get other countries to accept asylees and refugees.

Personal note: I have been involved in immigration justice activism since the spring of 2019 and I met many of the activists Towle profiles when I participated in an eight-day witness delegation to the US-Mexico border in early 2020.

Note: Towle is based in London and currently touring the US. If you are in or near Massachusetts or Connecticut, this flier outlines a series of events from November 12 to 20. I’ll be attending her program this Wednesday evening, November 13, at Amherst Books along with my wife, D. Dina Friedman, author of recent poetry and short story collections on immigration themes (if you’re in the room, please say hi to me). She will also be in Northampton, Hartford, Worcester, and Boston.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club, October 2024

29 Sep, 2024 2 Comments

<!doctype html>

View online

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: October 2024

Share

This is the First Time I’ve Ever Done This

Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio via Pexels

In the 21 years since the first issue of this newsletter, I’ve tried to make it a voice for values that I hope you share: doing right by other people, doing right by the planet, acceptance of diversity, and not just fostering democratic and empowering outcomes, but reaching those outcomes through democratic and empowering processes. Because I focus on leveraging the power of profitable business to change society, and because many of you are not US voters, I’ve attempted to keep electoral politics out of these pages. I don’t believe I have ever endorsed a specific candidate for any office in this newsletter until now.

But we are at a critical moment in history here in the US. One candidate has largely endorsed the values I just listed.

The other attacks them at every turn, spewing hatred, putting down people who are different from him, threatening the vast numbers he perceives as his enemy with “retribution” (a direct quote) that includes massive incarceration and deportation, and assailing the very roots of the 248-year US commitment to electoral democracy.

This man also showed, during a previous term as president, that he doesn’t value the US’s hard-won positive relationships with other democracies around the world—but he does value the dictators who have figured out that if they pretend to adore him, they can manipulate him.

He’s a man whose speeches are almost always about his self-perception of greatness. A shallow,
superficial man who values the trappings of wealth and power but has no idea how to exercise those things responsibly. A convicted felon who a civil court found not only committed rape but slandered the victim.

Trump even attacks his super-loyalists like former VP Mike Pence and former Attorney General William Barr). He’s made it abundantly clear that his government will be a brutal culture of repression. He wants people who will agree to his every crazy whim and never bring up questions or concerns. He’s even gone after Greta Thunberg! And let’s not forget that he is a serial liar who lied 162 times in just one campaign event and an astonishing 30,573 times during his term (that’s more than 7,500 lies per year).

And Vance, his running mate, has admitted there was no truth to his crazy fantasy that Haitian
immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets—a fantasy that has led to threats of violence so extreme that Springfield, Ohio’s schools went back to remote learning

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are going about the task of putting together a government that will uplift all of us, continue to address the climate crisis through a myriad of ways, build on the already-remarkable economic turnaround that began under Biden, honor the rights of all ethnic, religious, and racial groups, welcome LGBT folks and people with physical disabilities (among the many groups their opponents have mocked and insulted), and bring well-practiced leadership to foreign policy.

Harris and Walz honor our tradition of dissent, acknowledge the humanitarian crises in Palestine,
Ukraine, and at the US-Mexico border, call for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, oppose dictators, and acknowledges the reality of the climate crisis that Trump repeatedly dismissively scorns and mocks.

Harris is far from my perfect candidate but she’s orders of magnitude better than her opponent on
every issue. And Walz has a remarkable record as a caring governor who has used the power of his office to make lives better in his state, someone who cares far more about his social legacy than about accumulating wealth on the backs of others.

Yes, Harris could be much better on several issues, especially the Middle East and energy policy. I
understand why you might want to consider voting third-party. I’ve voted third-party several times in
the past—but this year, Please Don’t!

Third-party candidates rarely even get beyond single-digit vote percentages, and that’s with one clear choice. Even Ralph Nader got less than three percent in a well-run national campaign in 2000—but that was a factor in having the nation suffer eight years of George W. Bush, including the disastrous and destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan wars and refusing to take meaningful action on climate.

This year, with at least three third-party candidates courting the progressive vote and none of them
getting any traction, the next president will be either the Democratic or the Republican nominee—and therefore, the election can’t be about turning our backs on a decent but flawed candidate in a doomed-to-failure attempt to pick the perfect over the good.

Until we have ranked-choice voting, a third-party vote ends up being a vote for the candidate you favor the least. Voting for a “perfect” but unelectable third-party candidate could shift victory to the most evil choice: Trump. This election cannot be a quest for unachievable perfection. It has to be about which candidate will enable those of us who are activists to better organize for more meaningful change while also making improvements that help people right now.

If you live in a swing state, your vote could mean the difference between democracy and dictatorship. If you live in a red state, you might help it shift blue. Many so-called “red states—including at least Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana, Arizona, Indiana, and Florida—have elected at least one Democratic statewide candidate (e.g., governor, senator) and/or voted Democratic in at least one presidential race in this century. With massive new voter registrations and unpopular Republican polices such as severe restrictions on reproductive freedom on the ballots of multiple states, even more formerly safe Republican states could be in play this year, surprising the pollsters.

And if you live in a blue state, you need to help ensure the margins of victory are so large that no one will believe Trump this time when he once again falsely claims the election was stolen. Jane Fonda’s short video gives a few more reasons.

Share

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.

Just a Few More Days to Catch This Full Replay!
My September talk to the New York Public Library’s Yoseloff Business Center was very well-received. The organizer wrote,

“Thank you so much for a great program and for being so generous with your time, knowledge, and insights!! The presentation was incredibly insightful, and the audience loved all the resources you shared… You presented that deck beautifully, filled with great info and resources that the audience loved…I had a consultation with a patron after the event, and she told me she loved the program. So you were a rockstar today! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Unfortunately, they only keep the replay up for 30 days, which means they’re probably taking it down October 15. I’m publishing the newsletter a few days early just so you can listen to the whole thing, uncut. I have permission to chunk it up and I’ll make those replays available—but I don’t have permission to give you the whole thing in one block.

So if you have a chance, visit Recording Registration – Zoom before it goes away—and let me know what insights you take away.

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.

Share

Backlash Didn’t Kill Green Investing

Backlash Didn’t Kill Green Investing
By: Paul Polman

We so often hear from mainstream financial writers on the inadequacies of social and environmental investment—but according to the many studies I looked into when researching my book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that’s simply not true. Former longtime Unilever CEO Paul Polman, whose excellent book Net Positive I reviewed in my May, 2023 newsletter, debunks it nicely in his article, “The Backlash Didn’t Kill Green Investing.” It’s only a few hundred words—so rather than writing a review of a few hundred words, I suggest you follow the link and read the original.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps 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.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

Powered by:

The Clean and Green Club

Clean and Green Club, July 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: July 2025

Clean and Green Club, June 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: June 2025

The Clean and Green Club, May 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: May 2025

The Clean and Green Club, April 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: April 2025

The Clean and Green Club, March 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: March 2025

The Clean and Green Club, February 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: February 2025

The Clean and Green Club, January 2025

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2025

The Clean and Green Club, December 2024

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2024

The Clean and Green Club, November 2024

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2024

The Clean and Green Club, October 2024

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: October 2024

Recent Entries

Powered by

Shel's Sites