The Clean and Green Club

• Concrete that sequesters CO2 rather than emits more of it (Bank of America did a building this way, and the exhaust air was three times as clean as the intake air)
• Altered wind patterns through urban rooftops, modeled after the reverse-hydraulics of an Indian forest
• Artificial leaves that—just as real leaves do—convert sunlight to energy far more efficiently, and using far less expensive inputs, than today’s solar panels
• A robot hand with more agility and dexterity, because it was inspired by cockroaches’ spring-like feet
• Desalination systems that not only create drinking water from the sea at a fraction of the energy requirement, but can green the desert at the same time.
• GeckSkin, an ultra-powerful adhesive developed at the University of Massachusetts after studying the way gecko lizards climb walls
• The Biomimetic Office Building, whose designers encourage starting not with reality, but with the ideal, and then seeing how close they can come to it. They “found inspiration from spookfish, stone plants and brittlestars for daylighting; bird skulls, cuttlebone, sea urchins and giant amazon water lilies for structure; termites, penguin feathers and polar bear fur for environmental control; and mimosa leaves, beetle wings and hornbeam leaves for solar shading.” [End of excerpt]

• Design whole systems for multiple benefits, rather than components for single benefits
• Redesign production to close all the loops in a system and eliminate both waste and toxicity
• Reward service providers and customers who do more and better, with less, for longer
• Reinvest the resulting profits in scarce natural and human capital regenerativity model can have a huge impact not only in developed countries, but in areas of deep poverty, too.

1. Start with certainty
2. Anticipate
3. Transform
4. Skip your biggest problem
5. Go opposite (I might consider that a corollary to #4)
6. Redefine and redirect
7. Direct your future

Even without reading it, I’d come to embrace some of these, as well as the lens of abundance that he brings to all of it—through studying systems thinkers like Amory Lovins (see this month’s main article), Janine Benyus (she’ll be profiled in May) and John Todd (July). But I didn’t have the framework to see how all the pieces relate to each other. Now I’ve taken tons of notes and I see the whole picture a lot more clearly.

Perhaps Burrus’s biggest insight is that we have to look at two very different patterns of change: the inevitable (and highly predictable), and the uncertain. Calling these hard and soft trends, he looks at key drivers of change, such as technology and demographic patterns, and extends the lines from the present to the future.

It astounds him that more people don’t do this, because the hard trends at least are in plain sight. Watching the baby boom—a hard trend— begin in the 1940s, why didn’t municipal planners and educators understand that they’d better start building new schools before those vast numbers of new students started banging on the door? And watching that same bulge work its way through its lifespan, why are we not planning effectively for the coming wave of elders and the services they’ll (we’ll) need? They’ll be quite different from those serving prior generations, from boomer video games reliving the generation’s great moments to “unretirement homes” that facilitate volunteerism while providing services (pp. 29-32).

Planning for hard trends is about anticipating and capitalizing on them. We know that Boomers will move their demographic bubble up the age ladder. We know that technology makes many things smaller and more powerful. But planning for soft trends is thinking about how to change behavior—how to affect the outcome. We can anticipate that Boomers will want active lifestyle choices in retirement. We can be ready for Millennials who demand greener business practices. We can create educational models that feel relevant even to ghetto kids who don’t expect to see their 20s (pp. 223-224).

And business success is easy if you consider both types of trends when planning new products, services, and corporate capabilities. You can predict the future if you leave out the uncertain parts, he jokes—and he backs up this joke with a multi-page chart outlining some of his successful predictions from 1983 through 2008 (pp. 24-26; the book was published in 2011, so he probably wrote it in 2009). We need anticipation; agility is no longer enough. (p. 42) And you can leapfrog the stuck places by measuring tomorrow’s benchmarks (p. 46) instead of adopting today’s best practices (which will be obsolete soon enough).

Sometimes it takes a bit of mental jiu-jitsu: instead of trying to beat your competitor at its greatest strength, find a different frame, where your strengths and their weaknesses position you for success (p.188). Often, this means turning a commodity item that people typically only purchase based on price into a unique experience. And Burrus says anything can be decommoditized (pp. 192-193), citing examples like underwear (Victoria’s Secret), coffee (Starbucks), and even junk removal (800-GOTJUNK).

Much of the book walks us through examples of how various industries could anticipate the need for change, but usually don’t. He spends five pages showing how the US auto industry could take what they know for certain about the future (e.g., fossil fuels will be less and less important, shipping cost will drive more manufacturing close to the end user, and cars will need to fit the narrow streets of places like India’s cities) and reshape itself to effectively compete—and dominate (pp.32-37). This means thinking globally. Much of the world’s new and powerful thinking will come from developing nations, as adequate food, energy, and water begin to free people in those culture from focusing only on basic survival (p. 139). And much will come from thinking differently about resources—something I’ve advocated for years. For example, the Internet and the sharing economy allowed pharma giant Eli Lilly to crowdsource the wisdom of scientists, paying only for results (p. 113)—while other companies harness children’s creativity or rent computer power at night from schools that only needed it in the daytime.

And Burrus walks his talk. As an epilogue (pp. 250-263), he describes his own experience starting a software company using the Flash Foresight principles. Determining that smartphone apps met all the demographic criteria but the existing revenue models were not profitable, Burrus set up a company to not just write some apps but reinvent how creators can monetize their work—and created an app suite in real estate that could be repurposed in many other industries, using the same software engine. Using a virtual workplace model, generating revenues by selling recurring subscription charges to vendors who wanted to be in front of his customers, and garnering a tone of Tier-1 media coverage and blogger attention, Burrus’s Visionary Apps succeeded quickly and with hardly any head-banging.

Go read this book and think about how your company can leapfrog its stumbling places and not just catch the next wave but maybe even create it.

Note: Burrus has a new book out: The Anticipatory Organization. Visit that link to get a copy at no charge.

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.