Month: October 2010

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker has gone over the edge. Rather than attacking incumbent governor Deval Patrick on his record, Charles Baker pulled a number out of a hat and claimed Patrick could raise the income tax from 5.3 to 7 percent. Patrick has never announced such a proposal.

According to the Boston Herald story,

During a press conference at Fenway Park [map], Baker said he felt comfortable with his conclusion, which he printed on a poster that was used as a prop, because of Patrick’s record of passing tax increases and the lack of specific plans from Patrick to solve next year’s $2 billion projected budget gap.

Here’s what Baker has done in my household: I have been weighing the merits of voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose politics are much closer to mine than Deval Patrick’s, or voting for Patrick, the Democrat, because he could win and would be far better than his two other rivals. Patrick has been a decent, but uninspiring and sometimes clumsy governor. Baker not only has views I find icky, but this latest faux pas has me questioning his core ethics (and where is the outrage from Fox News, dare I ask?) Cahill, the independent candidate, has made a series of remarks that make me extremely uncomfortable, including some that I and many others interpret as bigoted.

Thus, between hearing a recent Patrick speech and finding myself agreeing with almost everything he said, and my deep concerns about living under either a Baker or Cahill administration, I will be marking my ballot Tuesday for Democratic governor Deval Patrick. Charles Baker can take at least some of the credit for my vote.

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

I’ve written a great roundup of the cool Green trends I discovered walking the floor of the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in Washington, DC this weekend. some amazing stuff in fashion, transportation, shelter, food, and more. They’re doing another one in San Francisco November 6-7.

This will be the lead article in November’s Clean and Green newsletter, which will be published next week. If you’re not a subscriber yet, visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ to sign up, so that you’ll see this coverage (no charge–just put your e-mail in the space at the upper right). You’ll also get eight freebies: Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla–and a series of seven action tipsheets covering:

  • Green printing (eight specific steps)
  • Saving energy (six steps)
  • Reducing waste (ten ideas)
  • Conserving water (five ideas)
  • Green transportation (six steps)
  • Deep-Green measures (six steps)
  • Effective Green marketing (six ideas)

So what are you waiting for? Just visit <a href=”https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/”>https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ and leave your e-mail in the form at the upper right.

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Green Business, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Shortly after starting my blogging career, I switched from Blogger to WordPress and began hosting the blog on one of my own sites, Principled Profit. Since the blog was called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Blog,” this made sense. I also had a radio show called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show” from 2005-09, and of course, my award-winning book at the time was Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

But from now on, my blog’s primary home will be on GreenAndProfitable.com, and the blog will be known as the Green And Profitable blog

So after all this time, why change? I still feel a lot of empathy for the brand, after all.

First of all, as a condition of publishing my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, John Wiley & Sons required me to take Principled Profit off the market; they didn’t want my self-published book competing with theirs.

#2: Yes, I have a website at https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com—but that didn’t seem the right place to put the blog. I’m in a thinking-big mood lately, and I wanted something that would encompass the whole world of successful green business, not just the marketing slice.

And finally, I’ve had a long-held dream (at least 25 years, maybe longer) of being a syndicated columnist, kind of like George Will but with progressive, earth-centered viewpoints. I want to use the “bully pulpit” to make a difference on the environment, move the world toward ending hunger, poverty, and war, and reach a lot of people who haven’t read my books or e-zines. I’ve sent out column queries a number of times over the years, but so far, no luck. (I have served as a non-syndicated columnist for various publications over the years, most recently Business Ethics for over two years, until the magazine rebranded.)

With some good coaching from my Mastermind group, I’ve decided to move forward and begin at least by self-syndicating a column called—want to guess?—”Green And Profitable.”

I’ve long been a believer in speaking, writing, and consulting reinforcing each other and moving forward both a business success profile and a social agenda. If I can begin to find newspapers and magazines to take a monthly column (and pay at least a little something for it), I’m hoping my ideas will reach enough people to make a difference in the world. And as the climate crisis worsens, I feel like I can not only be an antidote to all the doom and gloom, but a conduit for ideas that people can incorporate into their own lives…ideas that make a real difference in the world and in my readers’ personal success.

Wish me luck!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Good article on Triple Pundit about how to discuss environmental issues with people who either don’t care or are actively hostile to the Green perspective. Five talking points you can use to reach people via their own self-interest.

The list includes the sweeping headings of population, education, “natural capital,” and the economy.One particularly thought-provoking point in the natural capital category: the easiest and cheapest half of any natural resource is always extracted first, meaning the environmental and economic impact of continuing to extract starts climbing very steeply once the low-hanging fruit is gone. This is why gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon when I was a kid, and floats between $2 and $4 in my area currently (much more expensive in Europe, by the way).

But on the whole, this article doesn’t give a lot of ammunition to environmental advocates in the trenches. The next step is to take these categories and make them specific and actionable, and really appeal to the self-interest of those listening.

Examples?

  • Whether or not you care about climate change, you should care about the huge inflationary spiral caused by soaring fuel prices. If we can reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent, that means your dollar will continue to go a lot farther than it would otherwise. Otherwise, it will continue to get worse because the oil that’s easy and cheap to get is already used up.
  • Do you know I saved 40 percent of my paper costs in my business, just by switching to a two-sided printer and using the double-side feature? Do you think that could work in your business?
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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice

Today is another Blog Action Day for social justice, and today’s topic is water. My slant on this, as someone who writes about environmental issues, is that access to clean, safe water is both an environmental and a justice issue. And that the easiest way to promote safe, clean water around the world is for us resource hogs in the developed countries to be much more careful not to squander the good water we are privileged to have.

Here are some facts provided by Blog Action Day (emphasis added):

1.      Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it’s no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.

2.      More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.

3.      Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water. They do this while carrying cisterns weighing around 40 pounds when filled in order to gather water that, in many cases, is still polluted. Aside from putting a great deal of strain on their bodies, walking such long distances keeps children out of school and women away from other endeavors that can help improve the quality of life in their communities.

4.      It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger. That 6.3 gallons covers everything from watering the wheat for the bun and providing water for the cow to cooking the patty and baking the bun. And that’s just one meal! It would take over 184 billion gallons of water to make just one hamburger for every person in the United States.

5.      The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst.

So…not to leave you sunk, here are a few easy and cheap/free ways to use less water:

Don’t run the water unnecessarily! Whether washing dishes or brushing your teeth, think about low-water methods. For those dishes,  clean the insides with a
soapy sponge and then only turn on the water (at modest force) to
rinse. For tooth brushing, wet the toothbrush, turn off the faucet, brush, wet again to rinse–you’ll use teaspoons instead of gallons.

Unbottle yourself. Save bottled water for places where tap water is not safe to drink. Bottling water consumes vast amounts of water (several times what’s actually in the bottle), energy, and plastic (much of which ends up in landfills). And lots of bottled water is nothing more than expensive public water supply water anyway. In much of the developed world, filtered tap water tastes as good as many bottled brands and has a far lower environmental and financial footprint.

Eat less (or no) meat–see #4, above. As a 37-year vegetarian, I can tell you that the wonderful cuisines of the world opened up to me when I stopped eating meat. I eat healthy, tasty, nutritious food, and I don’t miss the stuff I used to eat.

Sign the Blog Action Day UN Water Rights Petition:

 

(For more water saving tips, please see my e-book Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.)

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shannon Cherry posed an interesting question on her blog: how encouraging should she be of people who want to train with her and then essentially remarket her stuff? Should she be a thought leader, or build a brand?

I was perhaps a bit rambly in my response (even citing the Old Testament—Abraham as a persuasive marketer!), but I still think it’s worth sharing here, since the question touches on a number of concepts I’ve explored over the years:

  • How much should you cooperate with competitors?
  • Is the world grounded in abundance, or in scarcity?
  • How does it benefit you when you train a competitor?

Here’s what I wrote:

Shannon, I’ve experienced this tension many times. It’s easier to make my peace with other people getting wealthy (wealthier than I am) from my ideas, when I remember a few things:

1) As someone who describes myself as “in constant learning mode,” I have drawn from dozens of teachers and books over decades, synthesizing what works for me and putting my own imprint on the overall combination–which has quite a bit of original thought mixed in as well. But let’s face it: 80% of what I know and teach owes some debt to someone, somewhere—but not the same someone. So when someone borrows form me as part of their own larger mix, I’m OK with that (especially if they’re considerate enough to acknowledge me).

It would be a bit different if someone took and bottled everything I know as their own. I certainly get teed off when I see other people’s bylines on something I wrote—unless it went out as a press release, and then I see it as a supreme complement (I still remember the bylined NY Times article from maybe 10 years ago that lifted whole paragraphs from a press release I wrote for a client). But if someone takes one or two of my ideas and mixes it with some from others and some of their own, I think they are the legitimate owners of that “marketing salad.” I can’t think of any marketer whose ideas are 100% original; even Claude Hopkins studied his predecessors. Some, like Jay Abraham, Janet Switzer, and Dan Kennedy, may have more originality than most, but they are not working in a vaccuum. I suspect strongly that Dan Kennedy studied Jeffrey Lant, and that Lant studied Melvin Powers, and that Powers studied John Caples and Hopkins, and back it goes, past Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin, at least as far as the Biblical Abraham, who used his marketing skills to persuade God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find ten righteous people. (Abraham won the argument, but couldn’t find the 10.)

2) I was so enchanted by Alex Mandossian’s concept of “the paradox of syndication” that I put it in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. This is kind of a bit like Godin’s Idea Virus: you get your stuff into as many places as possible, and it grows for you. A great example of this is Amazon: With the brilliant idea to offer a no-inventory, no-work bookstore to all sorts of mom-and-pop websites in the mid-90s, Amazon became a powerhouse. It was years later before so much of the action moved to Amazon’s own site; in the early days, it spread by offering this no-work profit center to anyone who wanted it. Again, when someone spreads your stuff around, it’s on some level a deep complement. Of course, it’s much more of a complement if they give you credit. I’m a big believer in this; my books typically have long lists of acknowledgments and lots of sources cited in the text. But if your plan is to be a thought leader, it kind of goes with the territory.

For myself, I’ve decided that spreading the idea virus, being the thought leader, is more important to me than getting the glory, since I am motivated by a strong desire to create social change. But the glory certainly feels good! I think Nancy Marmolejo may have said it best in her comment:

Thought leaders don’t ask permission, they go for it. Be the one who makes this a “both/and” story, not an “either/or”.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary

Back to back, I saw two instances of organizations making a good step forward, but stopping half-way. Why do they stop there?

I’m in New York because I spoke at a conference today, at the Sheraton on 7th Avenue at 53rd. So of course, I took the E train from where I’m staying in Queens to the conference hotel. And since I was speaking, I had a handcart loaded with books to sell after my talk.

Getting off the train, I noticed an escalator up. Oh, good–it’s not much fun to carry 30 pounds of books and a cart up a crowded NYC public stair. And good, too, for anyone who pushes a stroller.

This is progress. When I was a kid growing up here, only a handful of stations had any kind of mechanized people lifter. A few escalators, a handful of elevators. Now, people with disabilities can navigate many parts of the system, but nowhere near the whole thing. The city is definitely making an effort.

However…the escalator only goes as far as the token arcade, and there’s still a flight of stairs from there to the street. And in the opposite direction, down to the platform, there is no option. It’s stairs–a loooong flight–or walk to another station. And no one in their right mind would take a wheelchair even on the part that has an escalator. Fail!

Inside the elegant hotel, I got to the conference room and was pleased to see, instead of the usual water bottles, the far Greener approach of carafes of filtered tap water and biodegradable (compostable, really) plastic cups. An excellent start–score one for Sheraton.

But to complete the circle, the hotel needs to collect those cups separately for composting. Instead, they’re going into the regular trash. Considering the premium price the hotel is likely paying for branded, custom printed compostable plastic, this is rather odd. Either the hotel should do glass, or collect the cups separately for proper, eco-friendly disposal.

Unlike the subway accessibility problem, which would be hugely difficult to re-do, this would be an easy fix, and would give the chain a lot more Green karma points.

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