The Clean and Green Club, April 2022

<!doctype html>

 

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 2022

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

Last month, I told you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

GBB will be happy to let you play with that assessment tool. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

The Sweet Spot Where Marketing Meets Social Change

I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing—and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):

  • What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
  • What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
  • What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
  • What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]

This intersection is so important to me that on the wall behind my computer monitor, where I see it many times a day, I have a poster that reminds me, “I help businesses find their unique sweet spot where profitability meets environmental and social progress.” It’s important enough that I’ve written four books making the profitability case for business to deeply embrace social change and planetary healing, and have also written about the success lessons activists can take from thinking entrepreneurially. It’s the basis for much of my consulting and speaking.

To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial. It’s a way of testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.

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.

The Beautiful Business

The Beautiful Business by Steven Morris

More of a meditation/inspiration than a how-to manual, Morris leads us through plenty of general guidance on how to build a business that makes the world better both in its attempts toward justice and in its attempts at art. While there’s certainly plenty of instruction, other books will be more useful if you’re looking for someone to hold your hand and steer. This one emphatically celebrates “your weird, your crazy…what makes you uniquely you” (p. xiii) and notes that “all edge-pushers are considered crazy by those who fear change (p. 4).Morris carries this artistic energy forward into the design of the book, which is set in an attractive unidentified modern sans-serif typeface that might be Avant-Garde, in various sizes—with the text augmented by numerous (mostly quite striking) black-and-white photos.

Morris sees purpose and profit supporting each other in a “both-and” (p. 8); in his “world of possibility” (p. 135), your win doesn‘t mean someone else has to lose. And in this world, it makes sense to play the long game that understands how abundance wins over scarcity. “Moral highlights” exist, but they are not binary (p.18); the truth is nuanced. Pages 33-34 provide a concise three-paragraph manifesto.

Art is integral and leadership is an art (p. 9) that can be beautiful. Creating something beautiful, value-laden (p. 51), and life-changing, even in something as traditionally unbeautiful as business, says Morris, is the path to immortality. He lists seven criteria (p. 52), 12 questions to guide growth (pp. 62, 64), and four tenets of the beautiful business (p. 67). And, like Apple’s designers, he sees simplicity as a form of beauty (p. 208).

Higher purpose flows throughout the book. I love his addition of Justice to the traditional Diversity, Equity, Inclusion acronym, turning DEI—which I’ve always found a bit too similar to DUI (driving under the influence) into the beautiful JEDI warrior a conscious business can become (p. 72). And I’m delighted that he sees that process, not just outcome, has to be beautiful: respectful and inclusive. Better process yields better outcomes, as he demonstrates by comparing actual command-and-control-style vs. inclusive meetings (pp. 112-117).

Morris freely acknowledges the shoulders he stands on. He quotes frequently from Brené Brown, Toni Morrison, Carl Jung, Buckminster Fuller, Peter Drucker, and many others. I love Brown’s differentiation between belonging—being where you want to be, with people who want you as you are—“I get to be me”—and fitting in—conformity (p. 74). I love the sweeping systemic thinking of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard: to change government, we have to change corporations, and to change corporations we must change ourselves (p. 249).

He devotes a big section (pp. 216-229) to psychologist Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. You’re probably already familiar with Maslow’s five stages: biological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. But I didn’t know that he later added three more: cognitive, aesthetic (#5 and 6)—and self-transcendence (#8).

The book is published by Conscious Capitalism Press; Morris concludes by describing four tenets of conscious capitalism and the BCorp assessment process (pp. 288-295). Then there’s a glossary (partially alphabetized and partially random, which is confusing). No index, unfortunately. To me, user-friendliness is also a form of beauty, so those two anomalies are surprising.

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 for, too.

————–

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

 

Powered by:

GetResponse

Leave a Comment

Name: (Required)

E-mail: (Required)

Website:

Comment: