Month: July 2010

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico shows a number of lessons. Taking them to heart, as individuals, as business people, and as a country, will be crucial. First, four specific lessons from this disaster. Points five and six address our long-term energy future.

1. It is absolutely essential to have tested remedies in place in case of catastrophic failure. BP’s throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach would have been laughable, except that it was sickening. It became clear very early on that the company had absolutely no clue how to contain a large oil rupture. You don’t make those experiments after the failure, but well in advance—before you ever deploy any potentially dangerous and highly disruptive technology—you’d darned well know how you’re going to deal with an emergency. And those solutions will have been tested and demonstrated to work. BP clearly had no clue that working a mile underwater was different than working on the surface, and should never have been allowed to operate.

2. Don’t give the fox the keys to the henhouse. Government oversight was spotty, at best, and that led to a situation where BP was allowed to override the good judgment of its own engineers. Enforce the rules we’ve enacted to protect our people and our planet. BP so obviously neglected its responsibility to public safety and environmental responsibility that I wrote a post back in May wondering whether there was a good case to bring criminal charges agaisnt the oil giant.

3. When you take massive shortcuts with safety, when you cut corners in the name of short-term profit, the financial consequences are often more severe than doing it right in the first place. BP will be spending tens of billions of dollars that it could have easily avoided, by spending a few hundred thousand dollars upfront on safety equipment, and by heeding the warnings of engineers who said before the accident that their path was unacceptably risky.

4. Even redundant safety devices can fail. We saw this with the Titanic, with Three Mile Island, and with Deepwater Horizon. Engineers are not always skilled at anticipating how different systems interact, and what happens to a system downline from a system failure.

And now, at the federal policy level…

5. Deepwater Horizon is a wake-up call to move away from centralized, polluting energy technologies. The risk of gathering so much energy in one place is significant, and when catastrophes happen, they happen BIG. There are a dozen reasons why oil (and fossil fuels generally) cannot be the long-term answer. And there are a dozen reasons why nuclear should never have been deployed in the first place, of which catastrophic accident is certainly one. A major nuclear accident would make Deepwater Horizon seem like a leaky neighborhood sewer pipe. There are still parts of the Ukraine left uninhabitable by Chernobyl, 24 years ago—and even that was not as severe as the worst-case accident. We MUST change our economy over to non-polluting, renewable, decentralized technologies such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, geothermal, and of course, conservation/deep-energy-efficiency retrofits.

6. This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. All deep-sea offshore drilling needs to be shut down until the appropriate safety measures are in place so that Deepwater Horizon is not repeated. It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than to keep it in to begin with.
Long-time environmental activist and Green consultant’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

This post is part of today’s worldwide BloggersUnite event, Empowering People With Disabilities.

As my Boomer generation ages, and as our parents move well into the elder category, I reflect often on something I learned as a young organizer with the Gray Panthers (1979-80): the idea that society had best learn how to incorporate people with disabilities into active daily life, because most of us were going to grow into that category sooner or later. Accidents, injuries, degenerative diseases, and the general aging process mean that most of us can’t physically do some of what we used to do.

But it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t be useful and productive. Role models are all around us. My Gray Panther chapter leader was a woman in her 70s who could barely see or hear and had some walking disabilities. She could still give fiery speeches once I brought her to the senior center we’d be speaking at that day–and at age 70, she’d taken up yoga and become a vegetarian.

In fact, long before there was consciousness about disability rights, I was raised reading about some of the intellectual and artistic superstars with disabilities. Helen Keller is the most famous, a widely respected author, speaker, and thinker who could neither see nor hear. Also, the inventor and scientist Charles Steinmetz and President Franklin Roosevelt, among others. Grandma Moses, one of America’s most famous painters, never picked up a brush until age 76–and that left a 25-year career as an artist before her death at 101.In our own era, physicist Stephen Hawking comes to mind.

Now, with disability activism and a much greater visibility following the 1988 Americans with Disabilities Act, we see over and over again the talent and resources we had lost by shutting people with disabilities away and out of the mainstream. We’re a long way from full equality, but we’ve sure made progress.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Yankee Candle’s world headquarters is a few miles up the road from me. Today’s paper had a short article about recruiting people to dance in one of their commercials, to be filmed in the flagship store, in an attempt to go viral and be shared around thousands of times on YouTube.

The company is modeling the attempt after the very popular series of videos of performances appearing to erupt spontaneously in public places, such as the massive dance rendition of Do Re Me in the Antwerp, Belgium central train station, which has accumulated 18,245,307 views since March 2009 (an average of 1,140,332 views per month).

But I think the company fails to grasp something important: you can’t force social media, and it’s very hard to deliberately get a commercial to go viral. The ones that do, like Honda’s “The Cog” video, are innately interesting and only secondarily promoting a product or brand.

Interestingly, even that famous example has only had 759,774 views, 11 months after it was posted. I’d have expected several million at least. This was a commercial that must have cost a fortune to engineer and set up, and who knows how many takes to get everything in the two-minute sequence working perfectly. Yet only an average of 69,070 people are seeing it in a typical month. When you consider that several million probably watched it as it aired on TV, that’s rather pathetic, ultimately.

Of course, I haven’t seen Yankee Candle’s commercial yet; it’s still being filmed. But I doubt it will have anything like the power of the Antwerp dance.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

The Senate can’t pass a jobs bill or a carbon cap bill, but had no trouble finding $60 billion for war.

All I can say to the Senate is, shame on you people! You’ve got your priorities all wrong.

And I can also say to Progressives that we need to reclaim the discourse in this country. If we don’t create pressure for change, we get the same old same old, even from the administration that was elected on a platform of change. Let’s get out there and make some noise.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Right-wing bloviators spewing bile and calling it “news” have been a fixture on the political scene for quite a few years now. And they’ve had influence far beyond the numbers of “true believers.”

While it’s hard to understand why anyone would pay attention to these mouthy masters of misrepresentation (take that, Spiro Agnew!), we see their influence in the raucous but marginal Tea Party gatherings, in the intransigence of the “Party of NO” in moving any policy agenda forward, and in such incidents as the forcing out of the amazing Van Jones as Obama’s Green Jobs advisor and the defunding of a national community organizing group based on the actions of a couple of idiots (even though most of those approached in the sting refused to go along)–by that logic, we could have defunded Congress centuries ago.

So it’s with gladness that I report that as soon as it became obvious that the widely circulated video of black official Shirley Sherrod making what sounded out of context to be racist remarks–and which forced her unwilling resignation–turned out to be just the opposite–a story of how she overcame her internal racism and did the right thing to help a white family–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made a public apology and offered her a job again.

The hatemongers lose this round. Now…how aobut revisiting the Van Jones incident.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, language, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

My friend Ken McArthur blogged about his internal struggle in not confronting racist remarks from his substitute barber. I gave him this advice:

It’s not too late. Go back and find him. Tell him, in a respectful, not angry way, “Ever since you cut my hair, I’ve been thinking about some of the things you said and how much I disagree with them. I’ve been beating myself up for not challenging your racism when you expressed it. So today, I’m going to stop beating myself up and tell you that I didn’t appreciate your put downs of those who look different from you, and I’ll not have you cut my hair again.” Then stand still and listen for dialogue. It may be quite vitriolic, but you may be able to go deeper. And you owe him that much.

You do this, not for his soul, but for yours. But there may be a side benefit of reaching his, too (maybe not right away).

Thanks for being brave enough to share this post. I look forward to the follow-up post about what happened when you went back. And how lucky you are that you have the opportunity to “undo the not doing.” I can remember a couple of incidents in my teens where I failed to interrupt racism or sexism on the street and never knew the identities, never had the chance to back and make it right. 40 years later, I still feel guilty.

Mind you, I’m no saint. I have successfully confronted oppressive behavior at times, left it unchallenged at times, and confronted the behavior without effecting any change at other times. Once I got an obscenity-laced tirade directed at me by name and religion, and that was scary (she later called up to apologize). But I’ll always be proud of the time I intervened with a child whose mother was about to lose it over his tantrum in the supermarket (I got the kid laughing by quacking at him)–and always be ashamed that I did nothing to intervene years earlier when a man was verbally abusing his girlfriend on the streets of New York.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with ,

By Alexis Bonari

[Editor’s note: Yes, this is fairly elementary—but it’s nice to be reminded of the basics once in a while. If this topic interests you and you want more depth, I recommend Stephen M.R. Covey’s Speed of Trust as well as my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).
—Shel Horowitz]

In our ultra-competitive business world, it is easy to excuse treading on the wrong side of the line that separates necessary competition from sleazy behavior. The younger generation—those in their teens and twenties—have been bombarded with the idea that honor and ethics are relative terms. In other words, if everyone else appears to be cheating the system, it’s “ok” for me to do the same.

Do ethical people get left in the dust?

So, what really happens to businessmen and women who try to play by the rules of good business ethics? Do they get pushed aside by their more competitive, meaner contemporaries? The answer would appear to be “no”.

There’s a reason for everything.

Everything has a source, an origin. Even if we believe that ethics are relative, they still must come from somewhere. Our modern business ethics are founded on philosophical principals that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Humankind has continually refined these rules of conduct so that people can interact with each other in a positive, non-violent manner. Therefore, there is a practical, utilitarian purpose behind agreeing to a code of ethics.

It’s all about trust.

Essentially, we work together best when we feel that we can trust each other. Doing business is the ultimate form of working together. If an individual has questionable dealings in their past, it is highly likely that they will suffer some sort of backlash for it, be that publicly or privately. Take the executives at Enron as an example. They employed very aggressive, hyper-competitive strategies for amassing wealth. When investors felt they could be trusted, they were given huge sums of money. As their underhanded dealings came to light, they became the poster-children for unethical business practices and were reviled by a nation.

Although unethical business practices might result in short-term success, this rarely translates into stable business relationships in the long run. In this sense, those who choose to take a strong ethical stance generally come out ahead in the end.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching various online college degree programs. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , ,

Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:

1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.

2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.

3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.

A very good news day, all in all.

Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Energy & Sustainability, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Carmen, Costa Rica: A banana tree is a graceful thing, especially when it gets old and tall. Thousands of acres of bananas may look beautiful, but to me, the vast plantation was the most depressing place I saw in Costa Rica.

Carmen is a company town. Both Del Monte and Chiquita have facilities there, and the banana fields stretch for miles, broken only by thin strips of border plantings separating the fields from the roads and from each other, or by the drab company houses and the packaging facilities.

Most of our trip around Costa Rica has involved protected wilderness areas, and we’ve seen what bananas look like in nature; they grow a few here and there amidst the astounding biodiversity of the rainforest. Thousands of trees in orderly rows would not be found in nature.

A nearby organic farmer told us that this kind of monoculture requires enormous amounts of pesticides and herbicides. Not so good for the planet in this country that prides itself on its eco-consciousness.

That claim is somewhat at odds with what we observed and heard. Yes, the country has done a great job on land preservation, putting aside 25 percent of the country as protected areas. But we saw a lot of people applying pesticides (usually not wearing protective gear) on the fields along the roadsides. We saw almost no organic products in the stores. And a coffee merchant told us that hardly anyone rows organically because the yields are too small (something that’s even more true on a biodiverse farm, where farmers have to harvest different crops in small amounts and develop markets willing to take those small amounts). My guess is that in such a humid climate, it’s really hard to keep the pests down. Even the much smaller banana farms we saw protected the fruit from animals and insects with blue plastic bags (which then make it much easier to harvest the fruit, too.

And then there’s the matter of conditions for the workers. We met someone who had interviewed some of them, and she told us the spraying is done aerially and the workers are unprotected. They work 11-hour shifts with no break and get paid strictly on piecework.

I understand now why I once heard an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, promoting her wonderful locavore book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating locally. She said, “some of my friends gave up meat to make the world better. I gave up bananas.”

I’ve been buying only organic bananas for a few years; I think I need to find a source for bananas that are not only organic, but fair trade. The way they are grown commercially is not sustainable, and doesn’t make me feel very good.

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