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 Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Greenwashing, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

Like many environmentalists, I have serious issues with fracking: injecting a highly pressurized toxic sew of chemicals and water into shale rock, to blow it apart and release the gas trapped inside. This technology has spread widely in the last 15 years or so, and has been a lot of why fossil fuel prices have actually fallen.

In my mind, the big problem was always the risk to our water. We can live without oil, gas, coal and nuclear; there are plenty of alternatives. But we can’t live without clean, usable water, and fracking puts that at risk. There also seems to be a correlation between fracking and earthquakes, which should make anyone a bit nervous.

Now comes a new report that makes me further question the “wisdom” of fracking. Apparently, the gas is going to run out anyway. According to this article posted on the World Economic Forum website, the US, Norway, and Poland are among the countries where the much-ballyhooed potential for shale gas has turned out to be not so sweet and rosy after all. Norway dropped its estimate from 83 trillion cubic feet in 2011 all the way down to zero two years later. Poland reduced its estimate by 80%. And a new University of Texas study has the US shale boom pretty much ending in just five years.

So why are we investing billions of dollars in infrastructure and putting our water at risk? Why not use that money to push our economy further toward renewables like solar, wind, and small hydro? Why not retrofit every building with deep-conservation insulation, thus reducing the demand?

No wonder people around the country and around the world–including my own area of Western Massachusetts, where a proposal to pipe fracked gas has encountered fierce opposition despite gas company dirty tricks that extend to imposing a moratorium on new gas connections

Ask your utility company these sorts of questions. It’s your right to know.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, localism/locavore, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

In his daily blog, Seth Godin wrote today,

The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.

Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:

And, sadly, dozens more examples from around the world.

If you think “it can’t happen here,” do some research on Berlin in the 1920s–or read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). Or look at the scary anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts of violence that started showing up regularly in the US starting in the aftermath of 9/11/01 and are still escalating.

Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post By Yosef Rabinowitz, Managing Director, TBRC Cost Recovery

Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery
Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery

Back in 2003, I signed up a small business for telephone and internet service through one of the carriers that we represent at TBRC. After a few years of the client being on the service, I received a call out of the blue from a telephone bill auditor whom the client had hired to examine their monthly bill to see if there was any money to recover for past billing errors or if there was any way to save money going forward. The client wanted me to assist the auditor in his search.

In that instant, given that I had what I thought was an excellent relationship with my client, I felt blindsided and quite upset by the fact that he didn’t call me first (especially since we also do phone bill audits). My reaction internally was “Well that’s gratitude for you! After all the lengths we’ve gone each year in order to make sure that they’re getting great service at a great price? No WAY am I going to help them out with this audit.”

After about 30 seconds of (silent) childish brooding, though, my ego gave way to reason, and I did the right thing by guiding the auditor through the various charges on the client’s bill (he had never seen a bill from this particular carrier before).

That evening, as I went to bed, I had a bit of crisis of conscience. Even though I did assist the auditor, how could I have even THOUGHT to not help him, even if he’s a competitor and encroaching on my “turf”, so to speak (or so I felt in the moment when he called)? That’s not ME! That’s not who I am! I wrestled with this issue for several days (mostly in a state of quiet shame) before a friend pointed out a very basic concept of life:

We’re all human, and in the eyes of the law and common decency (and God, for those who believe), we humans are ultimately judged by our actions, not by our thoughts. So while I may have been upset at myself for even considering doing the wrong thing, I ultimately did what was right for my client (and my conscience) in the face of initially strong feelings to the contrary. I saw his point and felt a lot better after that.

Fans of the original Star Trek® series will recall the episode where Capt. Kirk comes through the transporter and is split into two beings…his good side and his evil side. The “evil” Kirk wreaked havoc on the ship with his impulsive behavior. However, the other Capt. Kirk, with only his good side and no access to his ego/evil side, couldn’t make any decisions. He NEEDED the “evil” side for that. And so do we. The bottom line is that life is going to throw “situations” at us from time to time. It’s OK (even natural) for ego to kick in at the beginning and make us WANT to lash out and do the wrong thing (it’s there to alert us that a need of ours isn’t being properly met), as long as we eventually keep ego in check so that we can move in the right direction.

Epilogue: Helping the auditor (rather than impeding his audit) worked out well in the end. Afterwards, he introduced me to the other 40+ telecom auditors in his company and a number of them have since referred clients to us for carrier services.

Yosef Rabinowitz is the Founder and Managing Director of TBRC Cost Recovery, LLC, a New York City-based consulting firm that examines business and nonprofit telecommunications bills for past billing errors and future savings opportunities. This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue Off The Hook, TBRC’s monthly newsletter.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, Ethics: General, language, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Pattern from a Japanese kimono
Pattern from a Japanese kimono
A group of Japanese-American protestors has embarrassed Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts into pulling the plug on the opportunity to stand in front of a Monet painting of his wife in a red kimono, wearing a similar red kimono.

As someone whose stepfather is Japanese, and who had to pose with my wife, my sister and her husband in the authentic yukatas (they’re like kimonos, but less formal and lighter weight) and obis (ceremonial belts) he gave us for some event–and as someone who has certainly seen my own Jewish heritage symbols appropriated and/or misused by mainstream culture–I can relate on some level her perspective.

But I also feel it’s crucial that we learn about the wider world around us, and that e.g. eating Thai food doesn’t mean you understand Thai culture. I think the experience of wearing the very elegant but very restrictive formal Japanese outfit with kimono and obi can provide a little window into what it was like to be upper-class female in 19th-century Japan. It saddens me that those teachable moments were lost in this.

I also do have concerns about how many other opportunities to touch another culture have been taken from us in the name of political correctness. A few years ago, a local high school even canceled a production of West Side Story because they were accused of racism–missing the entire point. Ditto the campaigns to purge high school classrooms of Mark Twain’s anti-racism classic Huckleberry Finn because it used the n-word, even though Twain’s purpose was to use that epithet (which, in his time, was probably the most common word to describe blacks) to build a bridge between the black and white cultures of 19th-century southern Illinois, right next to slave-owning Missouri.

To me, the correct response would have been for the museum to meet with the protestors and ask for their input in recasting the exhibit so it enlarged the educational aspect in a way that the Japanese-American protestors found appropriate–and for the protestors to have made that, rather than ceasing the exhibit, as their demand. Instead, it’s all this shouting at each other instead of talking to each other. Yes, you protest, but then you collaborate and build a greater whole.

Of course, an even more appropriate way to handle it would have been to involve local Japanese-American organizations in the planning and curation to begin with.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,
Phone (picture)
Dialing for dollars doesn’t always work. But dialing to convey important information does.

Most of the time, robocalls are used all wrong

I once wrote, “If you are trying to sell me something, or if you want my vote, I want contact with a human being who can answer my questions.” Yet I get robocalls all the time from clueless “marketers” who don’t understand this simple truth, or can’t be bothered with it. Worse, a lot of these calls are hangups, and far too many show up in the middle of the night. Would it be so difficult to program a function that blocks each area code between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m, local time? It won’t help cell-phone travelers but it will help a lot of home-based entrepreneurs who don’t always remember to turn the bedroom ringer off at night.

I have one message for these cretins:

–> Stop spamming me. I don’t buy from spammers.

I’ve spent years preaching the gospel of client-centered marketing. Marketing should be driven by the customer. You want to be found when the prospect is searching for great content about what you do. You want to be ready when that client calls or emails. But you don’t want to be spamming the prospect with canned, inflexible messages. It doesn’t work in social media, it doesn’t work in e-mail, and it doesn’t work on the phone.

But that doesn’t mean the technology should be tossed out. There are times I actually welcome a robocall, and other times when I tolerate them:

These robocalls are welcome:

  • From a school where I have a child enrolled, or the one where my wife works, announcing a closing or delay
  • From my town or state government, warning of a road closing, water service issue, etc., or giving polling hours for an election
  • From my utility company, updating me on a storm-related outage
  • From one of my credit card-issuing banks, flagging potentially fraudulent activity and offering to connect me with a human being if there is an issue

And these I’ll grit my teeth and tolerate:

  • A healthcare provider confirming an appointment
  • A business that I regularly patronize, announcing a special time-limited offer and giving me a reason why it can’t wait for me to check my e-mail
  • A reminder that an online or in-person event I’ve signed up—and especially one that I’ve paid for—is about to start

Notice a pattern? What do all of these have in common? I’ll skip a couple of lines so you can take a guess before I tell you.

Figure it out yet?

 

 

Here it is:

These are organizations with whom I have an existing relationship, using the tool to convey crucial information. They are not interrupting my day—or worse, my sleep—to sell me something. They are not horning on on me and forcing a relationship where none exists. The ones I welcome are telling me something I need to know; the ones I tolerate at least tell something they need me to know on the basis of our past interaction.

And that should be your guideline in using any intrusive marketing (or informational) method.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,
Spanish-language fundrasiing letter
Seven reasons why this letter failed to raise money from me

What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty.

  1. The letter is in Spanish. Although I do happen to speak Spanish, I’m not great at reading big quantities of it. And I’m pretty sure that whatever charity rented them the list, it’s one that does business in English. Which means most of the people receiving it won’t be able to read it at all.
  2. They’ve enclosed six cents of real American money. Which probably upped the cost of the mailing by at least a dollar apiece, because of the technologies involved in mounting coins precisely on circles, facing the right direction, etc. If they can afford to spend a dollar to send me money, they don’t need me to send them money.
  3. If I understand the Spanish correctly, they actually request that I send them back the six cents along with my donation. If this is supposed to weigh on my psychology and pull on my heartstrings, it fails. It just gets me annoyed that their gift is false.
  4. It’s not a group I’ve heard of, and they don’t do enough to build my confidence in the organization. Other than telling me (on the back) that 95 percent of contributions go to programs, and logos (again on the back) from Ministry Watch and BBB, they do basically nothing to convince me that this is a legitimate organization. There’s no reference to checking them out on Charity Navigator, nothing about what they’ve actually done with the money they received. All they tell me (translating) is “Founded in 1982, Food For The Poor is an interdenominational Christian organization that works for ending the suffering of the poor in the Caribbean and Latin America.” It doesn’t say how they accomplish this.
  5. I’m not a Christian and prefer to contribute to good works through nondenominational or Jewish organizations. So I’m not in their target market.
  6. I respond much better to pictures of people being empowered through changemaking organizations than I do to 1970s-Biafra-style hunger photos. And I think a lot of other people do as well; in my own copywriting, I emphasize the positive change, not the desperation.
  7. It’s addressed to Señor Sheldon Horowitz. True, Sheldon Horowitz (generally without Señor attached) was my name until I was 15. But as a junior in high school, I shortened it to Shel, and started coming out from under a lot of negative emotional baggage tied up with my birth name. In 1983 when I got married, Shel became my legal name. I didn’t move to my current home until 1998. Thus, there has never been a Señor Sheldon Horowitz at this address. Call people what they want to be called, not by a name they rejected. Yeah, I know, they were just buying a list—but it must have been a nonresponsive list, because calling me Sheldon predisposes me to reject the request.

The sad thing is, it would have been easy for them to do so much better. I actually went to Charity Navigator and looked them up anyway. They score very well on both financial and organizational criteria. They took in over a billion dollars in 2013, and funded programs with almost $985 million that year.

Too, the Charity Navigator site gives me a description, obviously written by the charity itself, that would have done a lot to assuage my concerns, had it been in the letter:

Food For The Poor (FFP) ministers to spiritually renew impoverished people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Established in 1982, FFP’s goals are to improve the health, economic, social and spiritual conditions of the men, women and children we serve. Food For The Poor raises funds and provides direct relief assistance to the poor, usually by purchasing specifically requested materials and distributing them through the churches and charity organizations already operating in areas of need. Since its founding FFP has distributed more than 63,000 tractor-trailer loads of aid to the poor. We have also built more than 84,000 housing units for people desperately in need of adequate shelter, and completed more than 1,475 water projects that provide lifesaving water and sanitation to hundreds of thousands of people in need.

Nice and specific about what they do and how they do it–so why not include it in their mailings?

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics: General, General Commentary, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Freedom to exercise one’s own religion is NOT the same as freedom to stuff that religion down others’ throats. This is what the right-wing Christians have not understood about the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. No one is forcing them to marry each other–and they do not have the right to keep others from marrying the ones they love, just because their religion doesn’t agree.

When my family was kosher, I went to private Jewish schools (yeshivas). It may have been that part of my parents’ reasons was to keep me away from the “corrupting” influence of non-kosher food.

This post is inspired by a report of a Canadian mayor telling Muslim parents the schools would not stop serving pork–a report that was a hoax (which took about seven seconds to determine). But just because the report was false (and probably motivated by someone seeking to stir up religious divisions) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the underlying issue: when does one person’s freedom stop and another’s start?

I am a vegetarian and I would never say to a school system, “don’t serve meat because it is offensive to me.” On the contrary, it is offensive to me when someone tells me I can’t eat the food I want because that food offends them, and I wouldn’t presume to make those choices for others. Sure, I wish more people would turn vegetarian, and I can list a dozen reasons why vegetarianism is good for the planet and good for our bodies.

I will say (and have said), “please don’t bring meat into a potluck at my vegetarian house.” A parent offended that foods he/she doesn’t eat are served in the cafeteria has other choices. There are schools where no pork is served–in fact, I know for certain that pork is not served at any Orthodox yeshiva or Islamic or Seventh Day Adventist school. It would be offensive if the Muslim kids and Orthodox Jewish kids and vegetarian kids attending public school were *forced* to eat pork. But it should not be offensive to sit in a cafeteria where others are eating it.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

How is opening a hair salon and beauty school related to social change? Hair cutters are not found in large percentages in social change movements crowded with professional organizers, academics, writers, school teachers, and the like.

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez (cover image)
Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez (cover image)

Which makes the best-selling memoir by Deborah Rodriguez (with Kristin Ohlson, published by Random House), Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil a unique and remarkable book.

Fleeing a series of oppressive and sometimes abusive marriages, Rodriguez goes to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2002, while the war is raging and the Taliban have just been kicked out–and stays for five years. Originally, she comes as part of a humanitarian agency relief crew. She’s just beginning to assist with trauma counseling and the like when word gets out that she’s a hairdresser. And she’s mobbed first by desperate women in the relief community, and then in the military, and then among the locals; the Taliban had shut down all the beauty parlors, and the few that opened up after their departure were typically using primitive equipment in less-than-sanitary conditions.

Very quickly, Rodriguez realizes that she cannot meet the demand on her own and sets up a school for beauticians, carefully selecting the women she think can be successful. The result is a city with dozens of western-trained professional hair salons owned by local women.

In an Afghanistan just emerging from Taliban control, women have essentially no rights. Vigilantes inflict their own “justice” on women violating the ultra-strict interpretations of Islamic law. Few work outside the home; fewer still run a business. While it isn’t what brought her to this work, Rodriguez realizes the transformative effect of what she’s doing; she comes to social change by making it happen.

This is a route to social change not often explored. Yet, exporting an existing career into new sectors and markets–not just cosmetology but all sorts of other possibilities–may be one of the easiest ways to get people involved in peace-building.

Bravo, Ms. Rodriguez!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Technology Tagged with , ,
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Daily_Eagle2.jpg

We have a kilowatt of solar electric on the roof of our 1743 colonial farmhouse. But a few years ago when the October Blizzard knocked out our power for three days, we couldn’t tap into that solar.

Officials in Brooklyn, New York recognized the problem. Brooklyn had a lot of power outages during Hurricane Sandy—and officials in the densely populated borough, home to more than 2.5 million people, have gotten state support to pilot a microgrid program that would allow Brooklyn’s solar systems to keep powering houses and workplaces if the grid goes down.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary

Editor’s note: Too much power can be as discomfiting as too little. Judi takes this analogy from a real-world electrical issue through some deep soul-searching I thought you’d enjoy.

—Shel Horowitz

 Guest Post by Judi Ketteler

Last week, during a storm, lightning struck the power sub-station just a few blocks away. At the time, I didn’t know that had happened. I just knew that our power flickered strongly. When it came back on, I noticed that the fan in my office was running more vigorously. It was louder. I turned it off and back on again, but it was still loud. I was in the middle of deadline, so I chalked it up to “oh well, whatever.”

Then I went downstairs to get some water. The lights in the kitchen were crazy bright. But . . . it had grown dark outside with the storm, so I thought my perception was off. Plus, I had been sitting at my computer all day. Perhaps my eyes were bleary and playing tricks on me, I thought. Even the light in the refrigerator was brighter. I’m really working too hard, I told myself.

All evening, I thought the lights were brighter, but I shrugged it off and didn’t say anything. By the next day, when the normally quiet bathroom fan sounded like a train, the microwave sounded like it was going to blow up, and the toaster oven burned red hot, looking like it would catch fire, I knew something freaky was going on. “We’re getting too much power!” I told my husband. His senses aren’t nearly as heightened as mine, but he couldn’t argue with a toaster oven about to blow.

I called our energy company, and they came out a few hours later. They measured the current we were getting. It’s supposed to be regulated to 240. Ours was at 275. “So that’s why everything is turbo-charged?” I asked the guy. “Yep. The regulator blew. If I were you, I’d go turn everything off and unplug it all until the crew comes in an hour or so. Otherwise, it might fry your stuff.”

A 75-watt light isn’t just a 75-watt light: it may be all the power that is safe, but it’s not actually all the power that is available. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to push it. I’d prefer not to fry thousands of dollars worth of electronics in my house. To that end, the energy crew fixed the sub-station later that day, and all was back to normal: a very good thing.

But this notion that there is more power available than meets the eye has been sticking with me. There is an explanation in the world of currents and voltage and energy regulators at electric sub-stations. But what about mysub-station? Do I have an energy regulator? Because I’d really like to find it.

What Regulates It, Anyway?

You know how some days, you’ve got energy to spare? It sizzles through you, as you knock thing after thing off your to-do list. You’re motivated, creative, and have all the right ideas at all the right times. I live for these kinds of days.

I just have absolutely no idea what creates them.

I could list what I think contributes. But it’s a long and random list, that ranges from caffeine to hormones to the phases of the moon to the amount of sleep I’ve gotten to the kind of food I’ve eaten to my husband’s mood at the time to whether or not my hair lays right that day to some inspiring movie or TV show I may have happened to watch or book I may have happened to read.

None of it is IT though. Like really it. That X-factor. The regulator in the sub-station.

What governs the amount of power getting through, not just to my physical body, but to the part of my brain that cares, has interesting and creative ideas, and—most importantly—the will the execute them?

I have learned that there are rhythms to my inspiration and creativity. If I’m in a good rhythm, I better go with it. If the muse is coming to me, for crying out loud, I better welcome her and not send her away so I can check email. Likewise, when I’m in a dark place—and I go there sometimes, because I am human—I can’t will myself out of it. I have to let the force of whatever woe me back.

It’s all the times in between, which turns out to be an awfully big chunk of my working life.

Big inspiration and energy? You bet I’ll follow. Down in the dumps? I accept it as a time to refuel. But status quo, ho-hum, low inspiration, trudging through it? That’s where I’d like to tweak my sub-station. Find the dial that turns up the voltage, just a notch. Or strike it with lightning, to shock it out of its banality. Can you make that kind of lightning, or, like actual lightning, is it solely an act of nature?

I honestly don’t know.

I want to respect my psyche’s natural balance, while finding my way to more of those inspired days. Because to walk into a room and feel the lights shining brighter? That’s sort of something. I know 240 is where the voltage in my house needs to stay. But I’d like to feel that extra bright light in my brain, just a little more often. I’d like to find that sub-station. Consider the search launched.

Warmly,

Judi

This piece by Judi Ketteler originally appeared on The Story Economy blog. Find her at judiketteler.com.

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