The Clean and Green Club

Then I took a break from activism for nine years. At about age 12, I had two radicalizing experiences and I’ve been an activist ever since. First, I bought an adult ticket but was made to sit in the children’s section of a local movie theater. This is the first time I can remember experiencing discrimination against me personally. I was so annoyed that I vowed never to return to that theater. I’ve kept that vow for 48 years so far. And second, a few months later, I went to my first rally about Vietnam in October, 1969. A speaker said the war was undeclared. That destroyed all my faith in the checks and balances we heard about in social studies class. I started questioning everything.

2. What are some great hacks for boosting your productivity?

• Hootsuite and Buffer, to better manage my social media
• Reading while indoor-biking
• Repurposing replies in discussion groups, columns, etc.
• HARO and Speakermatch: tools that connect me with people who want media sources and speakers.

3. How do we align our professional goals with positive change in the world?
I’ve chosen to motivate business to create positive change through enlightened self-interest. Guilt and shame don’t work. But the profit motive does.

4. How do we determine which problems in the world we should begin changing?
We have many choices. Ask yourself what sings to you—or what so deeply disturbs you that you can’t leave it alone. I’ve chosen hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change: four that I feel are big and scary enough that many people are shut down about getting them done, but manageable enough to actually lend themselves to creative solutions in bite-sized chunks. I just have to show that we’re not helpless; we all have the power to help create solutions.

5. How do we get others to actively support our cause?
The first thing is convincing them that change is possible. I look at the movement I started that saved our local mountain. All the “experts” told us it was impossible. I set out to prove them wrong. I thought it would take five years, but we got it done in 13 months flat—involving thousands of people along the way.

6. How do we begin to realize we can change the world?
Look at what ordinary people have done throughout history. Rosa Parks was a seamstress; Lech Walesa (founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement and later Poland’s president) was an electrician in a shipyard. Save the Mountain engaged farmers, storekeepers, school children—people from every walk of life.

7. How can businesses generate a profit by positively changing the world?
By finding niches to fill. By creating and marketing products and services that address these issues in some meaningful way. And hundreds of companies are doing this. Two examples among many: 1] Solar-powered LED lights that replace toxic, flammable, expensive kerosene. 2] A gourmet brownie baker that hires and trains people considered unemployable.

8. Why do you love positively changing the world?
It’s in my blood. I’ve been in the activist world since age 12. My mom was an activist before me. If a black family was told an apartment was already rented, Mom would go and try to rent it. What’s really exciting is in the last few years, finding ways to integrate the concept of regeneration—making things better—into businesses that are already primed the think about sustainability. That’s why I set up a website at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

9. What are you doing to soar higher?
I’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to connect business success with solving these big social problems. I’ve written the book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’ve done the TEDx. I’ve attended and spoken at some pretty cool conferences. Now I want to find a critical mass of clients who will hire me either to create this kind of transformation in their own company or to enable their small business clients or nonprofit partners by sponsoring my work.

10. How do we stay motivated during the most challenging times along the journey?
Understand that it can be a long journey. The first protest against slavery in what is now the US was from a small group of Quakers in 1688. It took until the 1750s to convince fellow Quakers to oppose slavery, and more than 100 years after that before the US abolished slavery. The pace of change has picked up. It was less than a decade from the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott to the passage of major federal civil rights legislation. The movement for same-sex marriage rights started only in the late 1980s as a fringe movement, but by 2004 it was legal in Massachusetts, and by 2015, it was legal in all 50 states. So we have to remember how much progress we’ve made, celebrate our victories, and strategize on how to expand them and create the society we really want.

11. Please let me know what offer you would like for me to share with my attendees. This can’t be a paid product but it can be a landing page with an autoresponder leading to a paid product.
Social change business readiness assessment: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/your-self-assessment-how-ready-are-you-to-achieve-deep-social-change-in-your-business

Sampler from Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ (click on the sampler link)

With that all understood, NOW we can look at the storytelling piece. According to Koorhan’s research, telling stories is 22 times more effective than trying to convince with only facts

Koorhan sees infallibility as just not that interesting—so the stories can’t be about showing your perfection. Better: show the struggle—how you (or your client) got from a bad place to a better one, for instance. After all, filmmakers telling the stories of “broken heroes” are the most effective storytellers ever (pp. 29-30).

When you stay true to your mission, your stories create high trust for your brand (p. 38). As I’ve said for decades, your brand is not the visuals and slogans, but the “the sum of all experiences the customer has with you” (p. 41). In other words, your reputation is at stake every time anyone in your company interacts with a customer.

Koorhan makes lots of lists in the middle of the book and then elaborates on them. Here’s a list of some of his lists, each presented with explanation, and context:

• Seven ways to brand your strongest benefits (pp. 43-47)
• Six types of stories (pp. 47-51)
• Four more elements of a good story (pp. 72-74)
• Six steps to identify your brand message (pp. 79-82)
• Twelve archetypes to factor into your psychographics (pp. 82-92)

The last third of the book continues the tutorial on how to create successful stories, with an emphasis on the aspect of connection. Some of his tips:

• When considering which pieces to add and which to leave out, ask yourself if including this bit serves the story (p. 102)
• Remember that authentic and humble will always be more meaningful than jargon and spin (p. 103)
• Make both the video and text about them, not you (p. 115); a great way to do that is to dig for how a client felt before working you, and how that same client feels afterward (p. 100)
• When networking in person, just listen first. If it’s appropriate, tell your no-pitch, relevant story. Then, and only if asked, do you go into your very brief pitch (pp. 118-119)
• If doing anything in installments, use TV-style teasers to build interest for the next episode (p. 124)
• When you tell your story the right way, the right people will respond (p. 134)

One little gripe: poor design. We’ve all heard, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s very true of this book. The information inside is good, but the cover would have looked dated and amateurish in 1990, and the interior layout, while better than the cover, is mediocre—easy to read, but again, not professional. I was actually quite surprised to see a self-publishing coach listed in the acknowledgments, because if this had come through my shop, I would not have let it go to press without hiring someone to improve the design. (Yes, I still help people get their books published, even after adding the business-social change work). So forgive it the design flaws and go read it for the content.