Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life

​​​​This blog was launched on December 29, 2004, which means it just
turned one year old. So allow me to wallow in a bit of reflection,
please.

I’d delayed blogging for a long time, because I’d
thought that to be taken seriously, a blogger needed to post daily. I
even tried to organize a group of non-blogging marketing pundits to
each take a day of the week in a communal blog. That effort went
nowhere, but I think at least three of us now blog regularly. Once I
realized that many bloggers post once a week or less, I knew I could
handle it.

I started the blog with a few agendas. I wanted to:

  • Create a platform for my ideas and rants, of course
  • Open a doorway to a syndicated op-ed newspaper column (a dream I’ve had for decades) Support the Business Ethics Pledge campaign
  • Become more widely known in the worlds of business ethics and progressive politics
  • Develop new readers who would then buy my books, subscribe to my newsletter, etc.

    And
    in fact, in the spring, I went through my blog entries, selected seven
    or so, polished them, and submitted them to four different newspaper
    syndicates–all of whom turned me down. But I’ll keep trying.

    The
    blog has veered away more often than I’d have expected from what I’d
    originally thought of as its core topic: business ethics. But I already
    have a platform to talk about that: my newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit.

    It’s
    also hard to tell what impact it has, or where people are learning
    about it. I get very few comments, and many of them are from people
    I’ve steered to the blog via a post to a discussion list or one of my
    newsletters.

    So, this year, one of my goals is to build more traffic to the blog, which will be mirrored both at blogger.com and on my own PrincipledProfit.com site.

    There
    have been a few signers of the Pledge that I believe found me via the
    blog, and a few useful contacts. Hopefully, over the next 12 months,
    I’ll be able to know for certain that the blog is helping to shape the
    discourse.

    And meanwhile, there’s revamping the PrinProfit site,
    hosting my radio show (which I hope to syndicate as well), getting
    publicity for the Pledge, selling more foreign rights, and tons of
    other stuff. somehow, I find time to do at least some of it, between
    client copywriting and consulting projects.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    Ken Lay has always had chutzpah; now he’s trying to paint himself as a victim.

    The St. Petersburg Times rightly says that won’t wash:

    Lay
    said the villains in the Enron case are federal prosecutors, who have
    hidden the truth in a “wave of terror.” Lay apparently equates the
    deaths of innocent people at the hands of suicide bombers with his
    indictment in the corporate scandal. Such hubris takes a lot of nerve,
    but then Ken has plenty of that.

    To which all I can
    add is they are absolutely right. This man caused financial harship for
    his loyal employees. I hope they make him pay back every penny of his
    ill-gotten gains.

    If the actions of Ken Lay disgust you, consider signing the Business Ethics Pledge to make a public (and marketable) stand for business ethics.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    ​​​​The big dustup over GWB’s admission that he broke the law in having
    the NSA spy on American citizens has gotten even a lot of prominent
    Republicans upset. Columnist George Will, about as conservative as they come, called it a “mistake” the other day. And several GOP Senators (Spector, McCain, Hagel, and Snowe, among them) are saying, “hey, wait a minute!”

    Oh
    yes, and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) quotes no less an authority on
    presidential misconduct than John Dean, Nixon’s counsel during the
    Watergate affair, as saying GWB is the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offense.

    And
    yes, I think it’s appalling that Bush not only condones illegal spying,
    but does so enthusiastically and repeatedly. To show just how much they
    don’t get it:

    At the White House, spokesman Scott
    McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, “Any time you
    hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires —
    a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When
    we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about
    getting a court order before we do so.” McClellan said the quote
    referred only to the USA Patriot Act.

    (The above quote is from a Washington Post story by Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer, dated Wednesday, December 21)

    But…I think there are far more serious high crimes and misdemeanors that are worth going after.

    Congressman John Conyers points some of them out in his just-released report, “The
    Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception,
    Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War    .”
    With over 2000 US soldiers dead, by some estimates much more than
    100,000 Iraqis in fresh graves, and countless wounded, that’s where I’d
    start the impeachment proceedings, if it were up to me. And continue
    through corporate corruption, election rigging, shredding the
    environmental and economic safety nets, and a bunch of other stuff. In
    the context of all this, the spying scandal is the least of it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    To me, the most scandalous part of this latest Bush administration scandal–that GWB personally authorized and oversaw illegal spying on American citizens–is
    not event he spying itself, though that’s certainly bad enough (and one
    more reason why these dangerous and immoral people ought to be
    impeached). This program is so “out there” that a lot of prominent
    Republicans, including Arlen Spector and John McCain, are deeply
    concerned.

    But what’s really shocking to me is that the New York
    Times apparently knew at least a year ago, and chose to hold back on
    the story. Yes, of course, they’d need to thoroughly check their facts,
    in case it was another attempt to entrap and discredit journalists, a
    la the Dan Rather situation. But once they were sure, I would think the
    story of a US President knowingly and deliberately breaking the law
    would be considered news.

    It’s unclear to me whether the story
    was in the Times’ hands before the 2004 election–but surely, if they
    knew, going public with that data might have changed the course of
    history, given that the results were already not only close but highly
    questionable.

    The Times utterly failed in its responsibility to
    its readers and the world. Is this the same newspaper that was so
    active in reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate?

    Moral
    choices in business lead to business success, says Shel Horowitz in his
    award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
    First.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    I suppose we should be grateful: this time, it’s not the government who’s paying pundits being. Still, it is disturbing to find out from both Business Week and the NY Times’ Paul Krugman that Tom DeLay’s good friend Jack Abramoff has been paying off think-tankers at the Cato Institute and elsewhere to spin op-eds that benefit his clients. And once again, there was no disclosure. Cato op-ed writer Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley, took payments of up to $2000 for each of at least 12 and as many as 24 columns promoting Abramoff’s clients.

    At least he has the good sense to say he made a mistake, as does his boss. What’s truly disturbing is the statement by another of Abramoff’s beneficiaries, Peter Ferrara (a noted architect of Social Security policy), who is completely shameless: “I do that all the time. I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”

    Oh, and Ferrara’s boss at the Institute for Policy Innovation, Tom Giovanetti, hasn’t figured out the problem either. Giovanetti accuses critics of a “naive purity standard…I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.”

    Ugly, ugly, ugly.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    Call me old-fashioned, but when I read stuff like this quote from Business Week’s Talk Show column (November 14, 2005)

    After
    the Securities & Exchange Commission launched a probe of accounting
    irregularities at Dollar General, Cal Turner Jr. in 2002 returned $6.8
    million that he had been paid for results that were eventually
    restated; he then stepped down as CEO. The gesture was lauded by
    BusinessWeek and others. But in the two years since, Turner has
    remained employed by — and paid by — Dollar General, based in
    Goodlettsville, Tenn. After retiring as chairman in June, 2003, Turner
    stayed on as an adviser to the board: In 2004 he received $275,000 plus
    $113,000 in perks.

    On Oct. 18, Turner fully retired and got
    another big payout. In an SEC filing reported on the Web site
    Footnoted.org, Dollar General disclosed that Turner is getting a
    lump-sum retirement payment of $1 million, access to the company’s box
    suite at Tennessee Titans games, title to a company-owned 2004 Audi A8
    that he drives, and up to $100,000 to cover legal and consulting
    expenses. Dollar General also is making a “gross up” payment to cover
    taxes on the package. Turner directly owns 3.3% of its shares, worth
    $200 million.

    I get pretty disgusted. Why do corporate boards persist in rewarding
    ethically questionable and/or poor management decisions? Is this the
    model we want to present to the next generation? I don’t think so, and
    I think he should give any penny of the cash and gifts back to the
    stockholders, and the board that allowed this should all resign.

    My thanks to David Batstone for calling my attention to this.

    Interestingly,
    the same Business Week column notes that every Ecuadorian employee at
    Occidental Petroleum’s Ecuadorian facilities got a bonus of $130,000 to
    $150,000, thanks to that country’s profit-sharing law. Yes, the
    janitors, the secretaries, the field technicians. With an average
    annual income of just $2180 nationwide, these 350 individuals could
    make a significant dent in the quality of life in their families and
    villages.

    And don’t feel sorry for Oxy; its $464 million in
    locally-generated profits can easily fund the 15 percent payment to its
    workers. The US, with its rampant overpayment of poorly-producing CEOs
    (as cited above), could learn some lessons here.

    Shel Horowitz’s Business Ethics Pledge models a different–and healthier–way to conduct business.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary

    Another must-read speech by Bill Moyers, one journalist who is not afraid to tell the truth and doesn’t try to hide it under “nice.”

    Moyers
    notes that, like the run-up to Iraq, intelligence leading to the Gulf
    of Tonkin Resolution (that opened the way to massive escalation of the
    Vietnam war) was faked–but not, he said, with LBJ’s knowledge. Moyers
    was working in the White House at the time.

    But then he looks at
    the Bush II administration’s penchant for secrecy, for deception, for
    rewarding its corporate cronies–and for interfering with the few
    remaining institutions in journalism that have any backbone left–and
    the results aren’t pretty.

    Ethics in both business and government is crucial–and achievable. Visit Shel’s site, https://www.principledprofit.com, to learn more.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    The State of New Hampshire gets a $5 million settlement from Tyco–and it’s using it to start a business ethics education program.
    The program will be administered by Myron Kandel, who has many
    connections in media (especially CNN, which he co-founded), government,
    and business. Kandel has already announced that he’ll use the program
    to help focus political candidates on questions of ethics as the
    barnstorm through the state during the run=up to the presidential
    primaries.

    Seems like a win all around.

    Ethics expert and ward-wining author Shel Horowitz is the initiator of the Business Ethics Pledge campaign.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Media Ethics

    If I’m a tad schizophrenic in my feelings toward search engine
    giant Google, it’s because the company sometimes seems like a
    many-headed hydra whose various heads have no clue what the others are
    up to.

    On the positive side: Google last October announced a wonderful plan
    to donate one percent of its stock value–just a whisker under a cool
    billion at the time of the announcement–to various change-the-world
    charities    –and to donate various other streams that push the total value well above that amazing $1 billion mark.

    This
    is wonderful! It makes sense both to advance founders Larry Page and
    Sergey Brin’s vision of the kind of world they want to live in, and to
    advance Google’s corporate goals of continued market dominance. (One of
    the initiatives, for example, is to help MIT develop $100 computers.
    Guess how they’ll link to the world?).

    Also on the positive side
    is Google’s ability to create a powerfully positive user experience.
    How did I find the above article? I received a Google News alert by
    e-mail for ethical business, that linked to a blog post by Joseph Newhard.
    After reading the article, which was more commentary than news, I
    wanted a more authoritative source to quote from, so I typed the
    following string into Google

    google “$1 billion” healthcare

    About three seconds later, I had the San Francisco Chronicle article I referenced earlier.

    Oh
    yes, and I’m typing this on a Blogger blog, owned by Google. If you’re
    reading it on my own site, I use Word Press for the mirror blog. And I
    switched my site-specific search engines to Google a couple of years
    ago, because it didn’t need me to tell it each time I added content.
    Though I’d love to see them add the feature of searching a few sites at
    once under common ownership that my old, clunky search engine offered.

    And
    I think it’s fabulous that Google now has a share value of $100 billion
    and profits of $968 million–because those profits are built on doing a
    lot of things right–first of all, creating a search engine that gives
    the right results if you know what to ask for, and gives them
    instantly. Second, not bothering with a revenue model until “usership”
    had built up. And thirdly, introducing its primary revenue model–a
    modification of the old failed model of web ads–as the brilliantly
    successful low-key, non-intrusive contextual advertising, with millions
    of partner websites who are benefiting from Google’ success. Obviously,
    it works.

    But then there are those other heads: Google
    Book, for instance, *almost* works. The ability to search books’
    complete text is great. The it’s-a-big-pie model that shares revenue
    with publishers by directing purchasers to publisher websites to buy
    the book is great. But what’s not great–and the Authors Guild is suing
    over it–i that Google insists it has the right to take books into the
    program without consent of the copyright holder.

    If there is
    any justice in the courts, Google will lose this case–and it will be a
    big, expensive mess. Just as an example–I’m delighted to have the text
    of my most recent book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
    First, in the program; I think that can only help sales. But I have
    deliberately refused to put in my older e-book, The Penny-Pinching
    Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook–because
    with that book, appealing to a self-defined frugal audience, it’s much
    more likely that a searcher would find the specific piece of
    information wanted and feel no need to then spend $8.50 to own the
    content. For authors of cookbooks, reference manuals, travel
    guidebooks, etc., involuntary participation in the program could be a
    disaster. Google could, I think, easily develop a form to submit to
    publishers enabling them to quickly import their entire catalog and
    check yes or no for the program. By saying “we have the right unless
    you opt out,” they’re acting like spammers, violating copyrights
    unnecessarily, and depriving publishers of the right to make decisions
    about how their copyright-protected material is used.

    And then there are some serious concerns about privacy. See for instance “Google as Big Brother” on the Google-watch site (scroll down to “Google’s immortal cookie”). If you want to find more, here’s Google’s own results page on a search for google privacy. Stories on Wired and elsewhere raise cause for alarm.

    Of
    course, Google isn’t the only company to be a bit erratic in its
    ethics. I could have easily written a similar article about Microsoft,
    or Ford, for instance.

    But Google does so much that’s right–I
    just have to wonder about their blinders on the copyright fronts, and
    take a watch-and-wait attitude on the privacy front.

    Shel Horowitz’s Business Ethics Pledge campaign
    seeks to create a climate where future Enron/WorldCom scandals will be
    impossible. He’s the author of the Apex Award winner, Principled
    Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

    Judith Trotsky wrote:

    For examples, I would urge you to tune in on the PBS Newshour. They have top figures from all over the world giving facts, providing their own points of view. This is reporting BOTH sides of any controversial story: you might not like what you hear, it might contradict some emotional need you have to believe differently, but it will present the ENTIRE story, not just one side.

    I was also trained as a journalist, and I’m sure there are many dedicated folks in the profession who see this as their mission. I have no doubt that Judith is one of them. In fact, I’ll point out that she was on the pub-forum list (where all three of the quotes originally appeared, along with a slightly different version of this response) for many months before I, at least–and I think of myself as pretty tuned in to clues on this–had any inkling of her politics, other than as a strong and forceful advocate for writers’ rights and an active NWU member.

    But unfortunately…

    • I don’t think journalism training is what it was in the 70s when I was trained, and certainly not in the earlier period when Judith learned her trade; today, the emphasis seems to be on glitz instead of news, and the tendency to spent absurd amounts of time following nonstories involving celebs while the real news is quietly sitting there on bloggers’ desks is just shameful
    • This is in part because real news is expensive, and many news orgs are now owned by non-journo bean counters who see their only stakeholder as the stockholder, and not the public they’re supposed to serve
    • It’s also because the Internet has even shorter lead time than daily newspaper of old–instant stories are not always fully researched
    • The definition of what covering both sides means has become quicksand: far too many journalists think that if they give equal time to a Democrat and Republican who share a position (say, just for the sake of argument, the drive to go to war in Iraq)…or spokespeople from both the oil and coal industries, but not a knowledgeable advocate of solar
      Many stories have far more than two sides; the mainstream, well-funded, easy access sources of the large industries and government institutions get heard, because reporters (who are totally overworked and under immense pressure) already have them in their Rolodexes and databases, and know they won’t get in trouble for going with known quantity (especially on TV
    • You will notice that certain organizations, and many members of the current administration, clearly favor those journalists who promote their policies–look how seldom a Helen Thomas or a Don Gonyea gets called on at those rare White House press conferences (I’m sure the notorious planted Jeff Gannon didn’t have this problem for his softball questions)–it is well-known in Washington that those journos who “play nice” also have access in the form of 1:1 interviews that are denied to the critical voices
    • Quite a few journos have simply been forced out for speaking truth to power–even such respected figures as Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue, and many lesser known ones who happened to work for the likes of Clear Channel and Sinclair

    Judy Sulik wrote:

    Also, sometimes a story shouldn’t have ‘two’ sides. If one side is
    correct and the other side is factually wrong, then giving balance to
    both sides so some kind of objectivity can be claimed, doesn’t lead to
    the truth.

    I totally agree; there’s not enough skeptical analysis. Propaganda statements on all sides are far too often simply presented as fact. And most people would be shocked and horrified to learn how much of the news is planted rather than investigated

    And Bob Goodman wrote,

    [a journalist who was covering the Vietnam war] was given the boot because he kept asking why only deaths that occurred during actual combat were reported as casualties of war–why people killed by a rocket launched into their barracks, for example, didn’t count. That’s a reasonable question that deserves an answer instead of a plane ride home. I’ll give the army and the State Department credit, though. They let him come home.

    Does anyone really believe the spin and propaganda? Now we learn that puff pieces are being planted at taxpayer expense and sycophants in the media are presenting them as news. That doesn’t do much for the already miniscule credibility of the news desk.

    I do see some clear ethical differences between PR for companies (which I do) and PR for governments. First of all, when a company hires PR firms or in-house staff, it is funded out of the company’s profits. But for the government, the person paying is the taxpayer–the same person being hoodwinked by misleading, feel-good “news.” Also, one can at least hope that the private folks subscribe to the PRSA’s code of ethics, which very clearly spells out responsibilities to the truth. And finally, private PR flaks do not have the luxury of ostracizing media people who don’t toe the preferred line.

    Of course government, business, and even Pub-forum wonks give you the information they want you to know. So do reporters. The difference is that reporters have to dig while government only dispenses. The more sophisticated we get technologically, the easier it is for people who are already secretive to pull “facts” that only they could know out of blackboxes that only they have access to and say that this is all theinformation we need and all we are going to get. Didn’t the USSR and Pravda do that?

    This battle comes up every now and then. I highly recommend the new movie, “Good Night and Good Luck,” which chronicles legendary TV reporter Edward R. Murrow’s and producer Fred Friendly’s battle against the repressive Senator Joe McCarthy. We desperately need more Ed Murrows in the journalism biz, especially the TV side of things–and they need to be given the resources to do their job, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were during Watergate.

    (My thanks to Judith, Judy, and Bob for their gracious permission to quote them, and to Pub-Forum for its usual stimulating discussion.)

    Shel Horowitz is the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge, which you can sign by clicking here, He writes frequently on media, ethics, and government. His most recent book is the Apex Award winner, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

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