The Clean and Green Club

Watch the 3-minute video at the top of Expand Furniture’s Smart Space-Saving Ideas page. Don’t multitask; you need to see people going through the few seconds of converting a piece of furniture from one use to another, or storing it in tiny spaces when it’s not needed.

I found three takeaways for you in this short video:

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The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon (Motion Publishing, 2011)
 
The Internet is constantly changing. And yet, this book that was written (and rushed into print) seven years ago is still remarkably current. Some of the specifics have changed, certainly. Twitter doubled the maximum size of a Tweet about a year ago. Facebook abandoned API support for posting by third-party applications just this month.

But most of the principles remain the same, and all companies in his “Gang of Four”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—not only remain robust but have continued to expand. And each also shows some significant problems.

Even in 2011, Simon saw Amazon as a company offering integrated shopping across many categories, far beyond books. Many people still thought of Amazon as a bookstore back then; now it’s a retail giant more akin to Sears; it even owns Whole Foods. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, personally owns the Washington Post. Yet anticompetitive practices and less-than-friendly labor policies continue to show up.

Several years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple continues to innovate—and develop non-price-sensitive markets—in computers, telephony, music, and other areas. It’s now the most highly valued company in the world. Yet that value could tumble at any time. Simon discusses why companies like Microsoft and MySpace have lost the competitive edge. Apple, especially on the hardware side, is a company I personally see as vulnerable.

Facebook has grown its user base enormously and competes with Google not only as an advertising venue but also in video (Facebook Live), images (Instagram), and chat. But as in 2011, it still faces privacy scandals, and now, content scandals like trollbots as well.

Google, in turn, has a social network (Google Plus) very similar to Facebook, although nowhere near as popular. And Google also has moved outside the computer world. While continuing to dominate search and (via Youtube) online video, it’s also gone into such wildly divergent technologies as driverless cars. You could argue that this is a logical extension of products like Google Maps and Google Earth. But it’s a pretty big leap from GPS to vehicle operation. The driverless vehicle project has had its share of pitfalls, too—including a fatality. It wouldn’t shock me if Google bought Tesla at some point; I see many parallels between these two companies.

In the 2011 book, Simon is enthusiastic about open APIs that allow outside developers to easily build new utility into the platforms. Since I was reading his book just as Facebook was restricting posting access from third-party apps such as HootSuite, I wrote to him and asked what he thought of the changes. He directed me to a blog post he wrote in 2012: https://www.philsimon.com/blog/platforms/the-gradually-closing-platform-strategy/

But enough about what’s changed since this book came out. Let’s discuss the content that remains relevant.

Simon argues that these four giants—three of which were recent startups (mid-1990s to mid-2000s)—got their preeminence because they switched from one-trick ponies (Amazon=books, Apple=computer hardware, Facebook=seeing what friends were up to, Google=Internet search) to much broader capabilities integrated in a “platform”: an “ecosystem” of interrelated applications and capabilities that allows a user to perform many and diverse functions without leaving…that can add new capability simply by adding “planks” either developed internally or integrated from outside providers (pp. 22-23). Successful platforms keep raising the bar on technology, both to create more powerful user experiences and to scale up; they’re happy to build more capacity than they need now, so that it’s ready when they need it—and until then, they can use the excess to charge other companies for services (e.g., pp. 134-135).

Key to this model is the concept of “prosumer” (p. 6): a person who both produces and consumes. The Gang of Four have made us all into prosumers; each of us creates lots of content, and consumes even more. And every time we do something in either of those roles, at least one of these four companies is likely monetizing it somehow. Even if there’s no cost to the user (and that’s often the case), someone is collecting marketable data…selling ads…and integrating those two functions to serve ads directly related to that user’s activity patterns: searches, clicks, photo tags, downloads, video views, etc. (e.g., p. 122). For me, as a business writer and consultant, and for my wife, as a novelist, this often has humorous results; we’ll see ads for things we have no direct interest in. But for the average consumer, the computer can seem scarily prescient, serving ads for a new freezer after mentioning on social media that you had no room in your current one, for instance.

Another key is the network effect: the more people use certain technologies or platforms, the more useful they are to other users. If you had email in the early 1990s, you had a tiny circle of contacts—and you needed different email addresses to connect with people on different systems. And you did this from a desktop computer in a fixed location, over slow and balky dial-up phone lines. I got my first email address in 1987: a long string of numbers running over Compuserve. I gave up my account within a few months and didn’t try again until 1994. By that time, AOL made it easy to do email. And then the original Netscape browser made it just as easy to explore the nascent Internet. And then there was enough critical mass to pursue broadband, which in turn made it possible to do far more online.

One thing Simon doesn’t really discuss but fits in very well with his concept of platform is the interrelationship between number of users and ease of use. The whole idea of the platform is to make it easy and comfortable for users to stay within the system, as Google and Facebook do so well (e.g., pp. 113-117)—and as AOL tried to do but failed once Netscape opened up the rest of the online world (pp. 181-183). When the system is easy to use, more people use it. When a user base reaches critical mass, developers make it easier. Thus, with more users, developers figured out how to send email across different networks, and most people could get by with just one email address. And as email became the standard, and more people turned to the Internet for information, more websites sprang up, and ways to exchange information over the Net became more sophisticated. You could send documents! You could FTP videos and other large files! You could check your email from a remote location! And as first Apple and then Google built a user base for smartphones while the cloud allowed off-site data storage, suddenly you could do all this on a device that fit in your pocket, creating another revolutionary wave.

Much of this is because of something he does discuss, in some detail: successful platforms innovate constantly. Google even requires employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time on non-core projects (p. 120)—and that’s led to many new products. Simon shows 78 different Google application icons (p. 117), a number that’s probably much higher now.

Why are these platforms so successful? They make things easier for the user, who has to master far fewer interfaces. They encourage collaboration and build community. They put a lot of resources into both technology infrastructure and technology innovation. They’re willing to try things that fail in order to get to things that win big (p. 200)—and are preparing for Web 3.0, the “semantic web” (p. 239).
He also looks at why some other companies didn’t achieve this type of success, and what the risks are to these four giants as they become larger and more bureaucratic.

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’re likely to find this book useful in understanding how business in the first quarter of the 21st century is different than even the last quarter of the 20th.

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In downtown Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, you’ll find a very unusual industrial park: a place where brewery wastes turn into a growing environment for mushrooms—and in the process create an enjoyable biopark, a green and vibrant ecosystem in the middle of the business district, where downtown workers can enjoy a unique natural setting.

Welcome to the Intervale, 700 acres of sustainable enterprises and ecofriendly public spaces.

This project is one of many lasting gifts to the earth—and to the business world—from John Todd. Todd defines ecological design as “the intelligence of nature applied to human needs”: a new partnership between the ecological needs of the planet and the physical and commercial needs of human beings that can “reduce negative human impact by 90 percent.”

Todd described a project on Cape Cod to save a pond that was receiving 30 million gallons of toxic landfill waste a year. His staff remineralized the pond by adding a rock floor and brought the dead bottom water up to get light with floating windmills. They installed restorers: solar and wind-powered biosystems that process the contaminated water through a series of cells, each with different ecologies—integrated networks of microorganisms, higher plants, snails, and fish. Each of these mini-ecosystems removes specific toxins from the water. Designed to work as a system, the restorers—nine cells in this case—digested 25 inches of sediment within two years—and the water is clean enough to drink now. “This pond was constipated; we uncorked it,” says Todd.

In Maryland, Todd worked on a project to clean up waste from a large chicken-processing plant. The highly concentrated waste was being dumped into a lagoon that flowed directly into Chesapeake Bay. “We planted restorers with 28,000 different species of higher plants and animals. It grew very quickly. Each was designed to break down or sequester different compounds. We reduced the electrical power to convert the waste by 80 percent and cut capital costs in half.” This kind of system is “very effective in agriculture, because it’s cost-effective enough for farm use.”

One of the underlying principles in this work is sharing resources among different pieces of the system and changing the paradigm about what’s left over. Instead of disposing of a waste stream, Todd encourages people to think about how to use that material as an input. The goal is zero emissions: no waste generation at all. If wastes are considered as inputs, they can lead to new commercial enterprises—for instance, a mushroom farm. All of a sudden, the cost of waste disposal turns into capital for a new revenue stream.

This is how the natural world works, at least when undisturbed by human pollution. When these systems are integrated together, they not only eliminate waste, but also provide shared synergy, reduce costs, spread technical and legal expertise, and create both economic and environmental improvements—as occurred at the Intervale, where biowastes feed a commercial fish farm that also cleans the water, and the waste heat from a wood-fired power plant is recaptured to heat the complex. “I begin to see a model for college and urban food production. We can begin to think of strengthening our own food security in these troubled times. We’re creating a new culture based on earth stewardship.”

These concepts can also work easily in developing countries. Todd designed a water treatment sustainability project for a refugee camp, using a long transparent pipe to expand and contract gases. The range of temperatures and conditions is so great that it kills viruses.

Todd notes, “The biotech industry looks for magic bullets—single solutions to complex problems. Nature is a symphony”; it doesn’t work that way.

For more information about this award-winning, life-changing book (Shel’s favorite by far among the 10 he’s written) and to get your very own copy—visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ Find out why over 20 world-class entrepreneurs and green business experts including futurist/blogger Seth Godin, Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, pioneering green business author Jacquelyn Ottman, GreenBiz.com Executive Director Joel Makower, and many others. If you buy a paper copy directly from Shel, he will happily personally inscribe and autograph it for you or the person of your choice.

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Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design, by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson (Holonomics Publishing, 2017)

Let’s get something out of the way right at the start: despite the subtitle, this isn’t a book about product design; it’s about designing magnificent customer experiences based in core values. I’ve covered several books on that theme over the years, and I consider it part of the core knowledge base for all social entrepreneurs and marketers.

And yes, customer experience is absolutely part of marketing. Maybe the most important part. The authors point this out consistently, starting right on page 4: “’customer experience’ refers…to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors…and every person who comes into contact with the business.” The Robinsons set a goal of congruence: what a business says, means, and does should all align (p. 6). And on page 11, they set out five hard-nosed MBA-type statistics demonstrating why businesses should embrace this thinking.

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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

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I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

Think about this: Whatever engineering challenge we face, nature has probably already solved it.

Imagine the fortunes awaiting companies that can roll out a construction material as strong and lightweight as spider silk…a desalination process as cheap and effective as the one that mangrove roots use…a water collection method as powerful as the one used by the Namib desert beetle. John Kremer talked about “biological marketing”—so why not biological engineering, also known as biomimicry? It’s just as miraculous—and just like biological marketing, the results can be outsized. Nature has figured out Zero Waste, and figured out how to do pretty much anything that humans feel a need to do: housing, transportation, flood resistance…

These technologies have been around for thousands, maybe millions, of years, and they outperform what we humans have come up with.

Meet Janine Benyus, TED speaker and author of several books on biomimicry. When she walks you through Lavasa, India, where native vegetation has not grown for 400 years, and tells you that the area gets 27 feet of rainfall during the three-month monsoon season and basically nothing the rest of the year, you know that maintaining a thriving city here will be challenging.

Yet, immediately abutting this city, she finds proof that nature knows quite well how to handle this environment: a hilly wilderness area that, despite the alternating torrents and droughts, experiences zero erosion. As she walks us through this wilderness, she shows us adaptations like an anthill built with curves and swales, so that it doesn’t get washed away in the flood. She walks us through a sacred grove there, cool and delightful even in the dry season, and lets us understand that our cities could be just as pleasurable to live in.

She shows us a 1500-year-old live oak tree in Louisiana that has designed itself to withstand hurricanes, and points out that only four of New Orleans’s hundreds of live oaks were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

And whether it’s in India, Louisiana, China, or New York City, she captures metrics like carbon sequestration, energy and water use from those neighboring wilderness areas—things no one has bothered to measure in the past—and then cheerfully announces, “Because this is happening in the wild land next door, no one can say it’s impossible. A city that does this, that’s generous in its ecosystem services, is going to be great to live in.” She describes ecosystems in terms like “generous” and “competent,” and reminds us that the human species, at 200,000 years old, is still a baby, and we can learn much from our “elders” in the plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacterial realms.

Her approach combines human-built infrastructure and nature-built ecostructure together to provide “ecological services” that contribute to meeting per-acre and per-block metrics, carried in part by the buildings and in part by the landscapes.

Species adapt and evolve over time, growing more able to influence their environment while being influenced by it in turn—and most of these adaptations are positive both for the organism and the ecosystem. Maladaptations create room for better-adapted species to move in. Species that fail to provide these ecological services are maladapting, and will be replaced by those that do contribute, she says. She remains optimistic that humans will learn to positively adapt, and be welcomed by other species.

A lot of her work is based on the idea that because each place is unique, the technologies we use should be matched to each place, as they are in nature. In nature, organisms ensure the survival of the species by protecting the survival of their habitat; they can’t directly take care of offspring many generations in the future, but they can protect the place where those future generations will live.

How can biomimicry change our patterns of design and construction? Thousands of ways. Here are just a few projects Benyus and other biomimicry researchers are working on:

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Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

DGB took a very clinical, engineer-like approach to deciding which charities to support and what activities to do—even what career to choose—for maximum impact but neglected many of the human factors. While I was still reading it, I went to an author talk by Amalya (“Ami”) Campbell and I thought her book Love Let Go would be the perfect antidote to my frustration.

Love Let Go, unlike DGB, is a very free-spirited approach to giving (DGB’s author would think it’s too free-spirited). It chronicles a church that had invested just USD $1000 into a mixed-income community affordable housing project in its Chicago neighborhood, back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, when that housing project was sold off, the church found itself with a $1.6 million windfall.

After long deliberation, the church leaders decided to tithe. They’d give 10 percent to their congregants, with only five words of direction: “Do good in the world.” This is introduced on page 8. Most of the rest of the book follows one of three strands:

• What the parishioners did with their individual checks (with a side story of how the media treated this story and what happened as a result)
• How the church—which had been struggling to get enough money for its own infrastructure— wrestled with what they’d do with the remaining $1.4 million (revealed, after teasing us all the way through, on pp. 183-184)
• Sharing the research and various philosophies on generosity that they sifted through during their long and very deliberative process

The impact from this one church and its congregants was quite impressive, but it’s only the beginning. Enabling a generosity mindset could be huge; in his Foreword, Richard Stearns of World Vision says that if every Christian gave an extra 60 cents per day (which works out to $219 per year), we could eliminate poverty in a single generation (p. xi). And yes, this is an overtly Christian book, probably the first I’ve ever reviewed. I don’t happen to be Christian, but I see no reason why this process couldn’t be replicated in non-Christian houses of worship and in non-religious organizations.

Generosity, say the authors, is our neglected superpower (pp. 3-4); using it involves the simple five-step process outlined on page 4. And we help ourselves when we get generous, opening ourselves up to all sorts of little miracles—and generosity begets more generosity (p. 95). People who give are as happy as those who double their income (p. 7). Even the bottom-income congregants, people whom no one would have criticized for using the $500 for themselves (including homeless Stephen Martin, pp. 106-107 and debt-ridden Kristen Metz, pp. 108-110, among others), found deep meaning in their giving. Of course, even a homeless man in the US is far wealthier than many people around the world; in 2015, a net worth of just $3210 was enough to put someone in the top 50 percent worldwide (p. 188).

All of this is based in something I’ve been teaching for years: an attitude of abundance. When you know the world will provide, it gives you the freedom to experiment. And while not every congregant’s $500 experiment was successful, most of them were—and several inspired even larger acts of generosity. The ones that failed were sometimes recast, for instance bringing in an established social service agency better suited to the mission (pp. 150-152). Another failure (according to the way most of us measure things) involved donating to the medical expenses of someone in need, who died nonetheless—but even this experience, which removed the money from circulation, offered many blessings.

Generosity has a twin, according to the authors: gratitude (pp. 153-166). Like generosity, gratitude improves with practice. When theologian Mary Daly says “you learn courage by couraging,” this church creates a corollary: we learn thankfulness by thanking (p. 161). And sometimes the most charitable thing you can do is to receive charity with grace, creating the freedom for others to feel the abundance of giving (p. 105, for instance). For the authors, this abundance mentality is embodied in the opening chapters of Genesis (pp. 43-44) and in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish (pp. 143-144), as long as we don’t let fear get in the way—something even the usually abundant-thinking Abraham was not immune from (pp. 51-52).

And here, abundance is coupled with awe (pp. 132-134). That’s something most of us rarely experience, but the process of giving away money to individuals who in turn gave it to others, as well as the much longer process of deliberating over the remaining money, created numerous moments of awe.

The book ends with a chapter-by-chapter reading guide that opens discussion of larger issues and how this kind of giving program can make a difference. The very last page (p. 195) notes that individuals, not foundations or corporations, make an astounding 81 percent of charitable contributions. Then it asks three questions, and I particularly love this one: “What causes you to be optimistic about the ability of one individual to make a difference in the world? How can you increase your exposure to these sources of optimism?

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