Month: November 2014

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Ethics in Government, localism/locavore, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with ,

This week, a judge ruled that the Business Improvement District in Northampton, Massachusetts was organized without following certain laws. The judge ordered the immediate dissolution of the BID, putting several people out of work and leaving the city bereft of services it had performed.

For the past few years, the BID has cleaned the streets of downtown Northampton, maintained its planters, helped the city with snow removal, funded the holiday light decorations, and organized or assisted with various special events to promote the downtown business and arts  communities.

No one doubts that the organization did great work. But from its inception in 2009, it’s been fraught with controversy. Northampton BID was empowered by the City Council to negotiate contracts to perform these services in March, 2009—and just five weeks later—even before the BID was officially formed in July, 2009—a group of dissenting downtown property owners filed a suit claiming the petition signatures for the formation of the BID were not properly collected or certified. The BID could only form if at the owners of at least 297 properties within the proposed district agreed.

There was controversy over whether the enabling law wanted the count based on parcels or property owners—an important distinction, since many property owners owned multiple parcels. As the BID collected them, owners were allowed to vote once for each piece of property they owned or controlled in the district. One owner signed 15 times.

But there was also controversy about several other areas:

  1. Had enough diligence been expended to verify that the signatures were legible and that they were from people with ownership or delegated authority? The judge invalidated 63 that he could not read, bringing the critical mass well below 297, and strongly criticized the city government for failing to check the signatures carefully.
  2. Was it ethical to redraw the district’s boundary lines prior to formation, to include more properties owned by supporters (including Smith College, by afar the largest landowner in the downtown area) and exclude several owned by opponents?
  3. Membership fees paid for all the services the BID performed. When the BID was accepted in 2009, membership was voluntary. But a change to state law in 2012 made membership compulsory.
  4. A July, 2014 vote on whether to extend the BID’s charter through 2019 used voter eligibility rules that excluded all the people who were forced to join in 2012, and passed 40-0.

As someone who has written two books and used to write a column on business ethics, I find that these other issues sway me. No matter how much good the BID does, it cannot justify its actions as an organization that tramples on the rights of its opponents.

When you tell people that an organization has a voluntary membership, and then you make it mandatory to join and pay dues, that’s wrong. And it’s even more wrong to then exclude the recalcitrant members from voting on the organization’s future. It brings to mind words like “deceitful” and “slimy.” And yes, when your charter depends on certifying participation, you make sure those participants are properly certified.

The Sky Won’t Fall

It is a hardship when people are put out of work just before the holidays, with no notice. I feel sorry for the BID’s workers, and I hope the business community steps forward to hire those folks, even if the jobs are temporary.  While it would have made more sense to me if the judge had ordered a more gradual phaseout, letting the organization honor its commitments and its payroll for a couple of months to deal with past obligations and commitments already made, I disagree with BID proponents who seem to think the sky will fall.

Yes, it will be a scramble to get a holiday lighting program in place in time for the retail season. But it can be done. Presumably, it will not be difficult to transfer the contract from BID to the Chamber of Commerce or some other organization.

Yes, it’s going to impact the downtown when the BID employees who’ve been picking up trash stop doing it. But the city has a Department of Public Works.

The BID did not exist until five years ago. And the downtown thrived. When another program, the Northampton Honor Court, stopped picking up the downtown trash, it was a hardship and the downtown definitely looked more tired. But others stepped into the breach.

Again, I support the good work that the BID performed. But I do not support a process that’s tantamount to bullying, don’t support a double standard for BID supporters and opponents, and think it’s completely immoral to bring the organization in as a voluntary effort and then change the rules. Yes, I recognize that it was the state, and not the local BID, that changed the rules, but the blame for rigging the election to continue under the new terms is most definitely local, and deeply unfair.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In yesterday’s post, “Does Making Decisions Lower Our Math Skills?” I looked at Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day.” He describes why President Barack Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day. Yesterday, I looked at the part of Petrone’s article that supported Obama’s reasoning, claiming that too many decisions weaken our brains. I took issue with that, as you’ll see if you click through.

But I’m basically in agreement with the other part of Petrone’s article: there can indeed be solid branding reasons behind keeping a wardrobe choice to a bunch of identical black turtlenecks, as Jobs did. For jobs, the black turtleneck made a lot of sense, for several reasons:

  • It’s sleek and modern looking, like Apple’s product line (at least if you stay trim, as Jobs did)
  • It reinforces the “think different” culture at Apple, a company that has built its brand from the beginning on not being the corporate-zombie persona that wears conventional business attire and buys conventional (IBM) computers; the very first Macintosh ad said, “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

So now, let me jump into uncharted (and maybe shark-infested) waters: let’s look at President Obama’s wardrobe choice from a branding perspective. And let’s start by looking at the wardrobe choices of his own bed partner, First Lady Michelle Obama.

Michelle’s fashion choices for formal occasions are quite dramatic. Typically her outfits combine three elements: they’re bold, elegant, and surprising. She’s the most fashionista First Lady I can remember, surpassing even Jacqueline Kennedy.

Her husband Barack Obama, however, tends to dress “safe,” in conservative dark suits. When he wore a sharp-looking tan suit, he was heavily criticized—but I thought it was a good move, though years too late. (In fairness—the commentator who started it all said he didn’t care that the suit was tan, but he didn’t think it fit properly.) Still, in typical Barack Obama fashion, he retreated with his actions and went back to his power suits.

The problem is, those “safe” dark suits are at odds with the brand of his 2008 campaign: “change.” The boldness of his rhetoric wasn’t matched by the drab sameness of his attire.

I empathize with him. I don’t spend a lot of energy thinking about the clothes I wear, and I usually dress for comfort. I’m not particularly comfortable in suits and abhor neckties. But I do wonder—and here’s the big heresy:

Would President Barack Obama have had an easier time pushing an agenda of “change” if he had dressed the part?

If, starting on the campaign trail in 2007, he had emphasized Michelle Obama’s three wardrobe attributes of boldness, elegance, and surprise, would he have been better able to marshall support for his initiatives? Is the conformist wardrobe secretly saying “I’m not serious about change”?

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an odd one: Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day,”  describes why President Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day—and then supports Obama’s reasoning, saying that too many decisions weaken our brains. It’s gotten more than 1000 comments.

Leaving aside the flaw in the Obama example—he’s often photographed wearing something other than a suit—let’s look at Petrone’s claim, based on an L.A. Times article, “Too many decisions can tax the brain, research shows,” that too many decisions can lower math skills:

Two college professors…both found that a person has a limited amount of brain power in a day, so the more decisions they have to make, the weaker their decision-making process becomes…

Vohs…asked a group of random people how many decisions they made that day, and then asked them a series of simple math questions. The more decisions they made in the day, the worse they did on the math questions.

I was instantly skeptical.  1) I’d guess the more we train our brain to make interesting, challenging, important decisions, the more of those we empower it to make. But yes, if we fill our brains up with trivial decisions, we limit them.

And 2) there are many different kinds of decisions. Exercising critical thinking skills–or for that matter, intuitive snap judgments a la Gladwell’s “blink” theory–might actually boost our math performance. Other types of decisions could sharpen or weaken our math performance.

So I went back to the original article. The logic is far more nuanced than Petrone implies. What’s fatiguing is not how many decisions we make, but overwhelming choice in a single decision:

…When people have too many decisions to make — consumers end up making poor decisions, are more dissatisfied with their choices or become paralyzed and don’t choose at all.

And as the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to look for ways—often erroneous—to simplify the choosing process. If there are 100 kinds of cereal, instead of looking at all of the characteristics, people will evaluate a product based on something familiar, such as brand name, or easy, such as price.

Now this actually does make sense. Marketers know fewer choices = more purchases.

Come back tomorrow for a look at the branding (Steve Jobs) part of Petrone’s argument. (Subscribe to this blog so you’ll be notified.)

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On a LinkedIn discussion board, someone asked, “So, why has bettering the world become a mantra for a new generation of entrepreneurs?”

This sparked a very lively discussion, mixing the cynics and the optimists.

You can view this discussion here (you might have to join the group first).

My first comment was quick and straightforward, discussing my new work at Business For a Better World:

I’m 57 years old, been in business since 1981, and my business has *always* been about fostering a better world. This year, I took it further, beginning a campaign to show business how solving hunger, poverty, war, climate catastrophe, etc. is not only the right thing to do, but can be highly profitable (and we actually already have a lot of the technology to make it possible).

But as others responded, I felt a need to go deeper, and I want to share my responses to two of them with you:

Tim asked, “…If these entrepreneurs are so hot on giving to humanity, why not put their technologies in the public domain? There’s a topic for debate: Which is the better outcome, the Gates Foundation or Wikipedia?…”

Tim  – great question! The Gates example has always interested me, in that it follows the pattern of 100-150 years ago, when predatory ubercapitalists like Carnegie and Rockefeller began to seek out a higher purpose later in life and became uberphilanthropists–yes, some of Microsoft’s practices were quite predatory under Gates’ leadership. I can’t think of an equally prominent example in the years between the “Robber Barons” and Gates. (I also think Melinda may have had a lot to do with Gates finding HIS higher purpose–but he has fully embraced it and discovered it provides meaning in his life.) Most towns in my area of New England are still using little public libraries built with Carnegie money.

Warren Buffett is another very interesting example, but his choices and motivations, I suspect, were very different. Buffett never seemed to care personally about accumulating wealth to “better” his own life. He still lives in the simple ranch house he bought in the 1950s. And as far as I know, Berkshire Hathaway under his leadership was not a predatory company. It didn’t shock me when he gave away most of is fortune–to the Gates Foundation (which kind of brings this discussion full-circle).

But I propose that it is possible to be socially conscious from the get-go AND do quite well financially, and that getting wealthy is not a sin. Prominent examples include ice cream superstars Ben Cohen and Jerry Silverman, Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, and many others. I suspect the Chicken Soup guys (Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen) are in this category; they do not shy away from the trappings of wealth–but they also find many ways to use their wealth to better the world. Jack I know for sure started from very humble beginnings; I have no clue about Mark’s early years, nor can I quickly find anything in public sources.

Jennifer commented, “…The world is in crisis – how do we milk it for all it has now people are focusing on the bad guys that have put the world in crisis. ‘We make the world seem like we care’ – new market. But hang on – ‘we kind of do care – well some of us anyway’ – but hang on ‘the global village concept doesn’t seem to be working’ – Ok; so now what?

Let’s make the world betterment program a thing for entrepreneurs – get rich while you increase people hopes even though those hopes are false…”

Jennifer  – Yours is one of several cynical posts in this discussion, but yours is ambivalent while the others are pretty much set in stone. So I choose to engage with you. I think we need to harness the cynicism and skepticism about business’ ulterior motives to create the action we want, despite our suspicion of their motives. For me, seeking personal wealth has never been as important as making the world better. My millionaire colleagues would laugh at my income. Let them laugh! As long as I can motivate them to make a difference.

I am personally very cynical about the ability to solve our biggest problems–hunger and poverty, war and violence, catastrophic climate change–based on the ways we’ve always done it. Too often, we’ve tried to motivate on guilt, fear, and shame–and it doesn’t work.

So I’m taking a leaf from the libertarians and ubercapitalists and attempting to motivate based on self-interest. If your goal is personal material wealth and I can show you how to realize that goal by seizing the opportunity to make money, and the work that governments and NGOs have failed to do gets done, then fine, take your fortune and go live in your big house. Think about a super-profit-driven company like Walmart: not exactly a tree-hugger hangout. But Walmart realized years ago that there was a lot of money to be made selling organic foods, low-watt lightbulbs and other green products–and a lot of money to be saved implementing green into its own operations, deeply. I have many issues with Walmart in other areas, but on the environment, I give them BIG props. Working from the profit motive, they have done more to spread green consciousness *and* green *practices* through society than I have in a lifetime of speaking and writing and consulting.

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