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 Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

Maybe my family’s organic garden (and my neighborhood) is a microcosm of the changes in the world ;-). We normally stop getting zucchini by the end of July. Last year, it went halfway through August. And this year, the one surviving plant finally died today, and I harvested the last two very tiny zukes on October 7. The season was approximately five weeks longer than usual,even though hey like hot weather and we pretty much didn’t have any.

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are normally extremely prolific until the first killing frost, usually very late in October. This year, the season peaked in early August, and even at its peak, we had far fewer than usual. I did manage to put a few pints of sauce in the freezer, and a few jars of dried tomatoes in the pantry, but the abundance that normally covers our entire counter never materialized—and the tomatoes had pretty much gone away by September 1, producing only one or two not-so-big tomatoes (many of them bloghted) and a handful of cherry tomatoes every few days since then. Normally, our six plants produce two or three dozen every day this time of year.

Our berry bushes were odd this year, too. The one blueberry plant gave one to two pints a day for about ten days, but one of our raspberry plants produced next to nothing, and the other a fairly paltry amount. On the very best day,I got half a pint. Ditto our blackberry bush. Normally,I’m able to put several pints by. This year, I managed to gather together and freeze a single half-pint of mixed blackberries and raspberries in July; we ate the rest as it came in, and it wasn’t much. But the bigger raspberry plant actually produced about eight very tasty fruits in September, a time when we’ve never gotten berries from it before.

Our celery was severely stunted, only about six inches high and mostly leaves, on very thin stalks. In the past, we’ve had celery that looked as good as supermarket varieties. We grew potatoes for the first time, and they came out great.

Nobody cultivates them, but I like to go gather Russian olives this time of year. I went to one of the two groves I know and found a total of one berry from several dozen plants. Fortunately, I know another grove, which was its usual prolific self.

Farmer neighbors who grow winter squash did not get a crop this year. Neither did several of the local apple farmers.

In short, not-normal is the new normal in the garden. Do you think, just maybe, global climate change has something to do with it?

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, General Commentary, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Hyperion Contact Us page

Dear Hyperion Books:

All I wanted to do was to send you a review copy request so I could review “Stirring It Up” by Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirshberg. I review books on socially and environmentally conscious business.

I went to your contact page expecting to find a press contact. But all that’s there is how to write to you if I want to contact one of your authors directly. There’s no way to contact ANY of your departments, except a few social media links.

Oh yes, and from my desktop computer, your Twitter page link goes to one spammy tweet from last November that I don’t think is yours. Oddly, on my laptop, it goes to a no-such-account page, as does your Facebook link.

I even went to your bookseller page, where I found a link to the Disney media center–which includes media pages for lots of Disney broadcast properties but not Hyperion.

Surely, with all the resources at Disney’s disposal, you could have a person in charge of media contact for Hyperion, and you could list at least one way to contact you that actually works. There’s not even a phone number!

In the 21st century, there’s absolutely no excuse for companies to barricade themselves behind windowless fortress walls. Empowered customers don’t just get mad; they tell their 10,000 closest friends on Facebook or Youtube (“United Breaks Guitars” is up over 14 million Youtube views). If I were a paying customer with a gripe, I’d probably be buying “hyperionsucks.com” right about now.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

When Bank of America bought Countrywide Bank for $2.5 billion in 2008, it inherited Countrywide’s infamous toxic mortgage policies.

By 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that the acquisition had already racked up $20.6 billion in charges related to Countrywide’s shady mortgage practices:$8.5 billion to investors, $5.5 billion into a defective-mortgage payback fund to cover future claims, and $6.6 billion in various other costs.

And now there’s more bad news for the company’s shareholders: a $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department over the Countrywide mortgages. And let’s not forget the legal bill, now around $70 billion, not to mention the possibility of criminal prosecutions.

In short, Countrywide’s disgusting practices have now cost Bank of America over $107 billion: more than 50 times the acquisition price.

Lessons to businesses:
1. Business ethics is a lot cheaper than predatory practices
2. Be very careful when you buy toxic “assets” that turn out to be big liabilities

I’ve been making the case since at least 2002 that green and ethical business practices are more profitable than crooked ones. If you’d like to know more, please pick up a copy of my . It’s been on the best-seller list at least 32 months, so I guess people find it pretty useful.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

A front-page story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that a court ordered a utility company to buy the organic grass-fed cattle farm it ruined by driving a powerline through it. Nice to see David beat Goliath every once in a while.

Hmmm. Maybe this strategy can be applied (at least in Minnesota) by organic farmers suffering the double indignity of losing their organic status because of contamination by GMO plants from nearby farms, and then getting sued by Monsanto for illegally using the seed they didn’t want in the first place.

But a far better solution, of course, is to develop projects in ways that don’t threaten organic farms. We need more of those, not less.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation Tagged with , ,

Offices: too hot, too cold, and no Goldilocks to find the happy middle ground of “this one is just right.”

How can you find that happy medium that accommodates the woman in a sleeveless sundress ?and? the man in the suit…the person whose desk is a foot away from the air conditioning vent (which chills air far below the ambient room temperature) ?and? the one sitting in the hotspot caused by a sunny window?

The obvious solution is zoned temperature control, at a much more granular level than we typically get.

Here’s a really interesting article about temperature control in offices. Don’t worry; it’s not particularly technical. It’s not written for geeks, but for ordinary people trying to solve the problem.

It starts by discussing the problem in context: demonstrating several reasons why office temperature control usually doesn’t work very well.

Then it solves the problem with a smartphone app that lets individual users have a say in the temperature of their little area.

And here’s the really good news about this: in testing in one office building, HVAC bills dropped 23 percent. Lots more opportunity for savings, too.

There’s potential for much greater energy improvement. The General Services Administration (purchasing arm of the federal government) has prepared thinks raising office temperatures in federal buildings a mere two degrees F in the summer could save $1.87 million of our tax dollars. It has identified seven specific steps the federal government could take to drop energy use by an astounding 568.2 million kilowatt hours per year. Only two of them are in the “very expensive” category.

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

After a three-year pressure campaign from Green America and the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Geographic has agreed to include 5 percent recycled paper into its formula. The magazine earlier agreed not to use old-growth-forest paper fibers.

Of course, lots of magazines are already using recycled paper, many of them at a far higher percentage than 5 percent. Some, including the adventure travel magazine Mountainfreak and the eco-oriented earth Island Journal, already use 100% recycled paper.

But this is National Geographic! The slick-paper photo-intensive standard-bearer for educational travel.

In other words, out the window goes the argument from any magazine that the quality of their photography makes it impossible to use at least some recycled. If National Geographic can do it, any magazine can do it.

So this could be a game-changer in the industry. And it’s an industry that needs its game changed. Many major magazines still use 100% virgin paper. Of those that do include some recycled paper, most use only 10 to 30 percent.

And on the consumer side, far too much magazine waste goes to the landfill, and far too little to the recycling center.

Like so many industries, change happens when both consumers and producers are aligned in a goal of creating more eco-friendly products using more environmentally appropriate processes and materials. So if you subscribe to some paper magazines, ask your publishers how much recycled paper they use, and if they might use more.

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By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation Tagged with , , , ,

Don’t call me a potty-mouth, but today, I’m going to talk about porta-potties.

You see, I spoke at SolarFest again this past weekend, and once again, I noticed some major innovation. A few years ago at SolarFest, I first encountered vented porta-potties: a major new innovation.

This year, another one: Porta-potties earmarked “pee only,” with a catch basket to make sure the rule was followed.

These toilets are collecting urine to use as fertilizer on hay fields, under the auspices of the Rich Earth Institute. It’s a pilot project sanctioned by the US Department of Agriculture.

And I have to tell you, it smelled great even near the end of a big festival day. I’ve been in home bathrooms that didn’t smell as good.

We can and should incorporate these kinds of innovations into every aspect of society. Always, we need to ask ourselves how we can live better, use fewer resources, and generate less waste or turn the waste we do create into something useful.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

This year, at Book Expo America, I interviewed Enrique Parrilla, co-founder of pentian.com, with offices in Sevilla (Seville), Madrid, and Los Angeles. Pentian marries publishing services with crowdfunding—something I don’t think the publishing world has seen before, and something that to me at least seems more attractive than the typical subsidy publishing model of most publishing services companies (which is not, typically, a good deal for the author). How it works out remains to be seen—and meanwhile, here’s what Parilla had to say about it:

The main difference between Kickstarter etc. and us is that the backers provide the funds. [Kickstarter donors[ may get a signed copy, a named character, but that’s it. We wanted to create a connection between the author and the community. A financial connection. The backers receive a percentage of sales.

Benefits to author:
Every backer becomes invested in success of the book. You get a much more viral connection with the market, you have 20, 40, 50 backers.
You make every backer a publisher, and they obtain profit from the success of the book.

You present the book proposal to us. We own the entire production chain, layout, design, marketing, production, distribution. We’re able to assess the costs of publication, and publish at a substantially lower cost. We are not getting a fee on the production. Once the sales start, we work with the net profit. But the cost of production will change from one continent to another, so it is difficult to come up with percentages on the retail price. So we take all the net profits and put them in a big bag. 50% goes to the backers, proportional to their investment. 40% goes to the author. 10% goes to the publisher.

The model is disruptive in several ways:
The percentage to the publisher is much lower because so much goes to the backers and the authors. This is sufficient, because the cost of production is covered by the fundraising campaign, and we print on demand.

Initially, when we receive a manuscript or proposal, there is an evaluation. If the thing stinks, we will offer to fundraise for professional editing services. We will come up with a budget, custom made for each proposal. If they need an illustrator, we’ll budget for that.

We will accept anything not indecent or violent. We have done fundraising books for charities, novels, children’s books. 70% fiction, 20% nonfiction, and the rest is a hodgepodge.

Unlike Kickstarter, we put a cap on the funds to be raised. We are really striving to be fair and to provide a sense of urgency. If you see a book is doing well, if you do not jump in, you may be left out. We can do additional campaigns for marketing, etc., but once we set the budget, when it’s gone, it’s gone. So you see the funding accelerating rapidly when a book hits 60-70% of its funding goal. The viral concept works really well. People start swarming out, and we don’t always understand why—but when it happens, it happens very quickly. Some books sit at 5% and don’t get funded. The investors get the full amount returned. If the author raises half, we’ll look at options like digital-only format. We’ll look at options to make it work.

Backers do not have the certainty that a book will get funded. As a publishing company, we make sure the publishing happens and the book sees the light of day.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I just rewatched this TED talk by Amory Lovins: it lays out a step-by-step plan to slash our energy use through deep conservation (what he calls “negawatts” and “negabarrels” and switch to renewables, with gas as a transitional fuel. It doesn’t happen overnight, and relies heavily on profit incentives to businesses.

Lovins, who I consider the foremost spokesperson for sensible energy, is not some sort of radical do-gooder. He’s a businessman who’s made quite a successful career out of changing the way we think about energy. Just as two examples of what’s possible:

1. He helped the Empire State Building save $4.4 million per year on a $13 million deep energy retrofit–that’s about a 30% annual ROI.

2. His own house, built in the Solar Stone Age (1983) just outside Aspen, Colorado (ski country-COLD) is close to net zero, producing nearly all of the energy it uses (in 2001, he mentioned that the residence portion had a $5 monthly electric bill–even if it’s tripled since then, that’s pretty good for a 4000-square-foot house in the snowbelt). Now here’s the really remarkable thing: In Aspen, Colorado, this house has neither a furnace nor an air conditioner, and it’s warm enough inside to grow bananas. The extra cost of the energy improvements was essentially paid for by the capital savings of not needing those big clunky systems. So in other words, we’ve known how to do this for 30 years.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this party STARTED.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Trends/News, poverty, privacy, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Very interesting post on Business Week: “Can Small Businesses Start a Gay Rights Movement in Mississippi?”

I totally support nondiscrimination in any public accommodation or retail setting—and I’m delighted to see the “We don’t discriminate. If you’re buying, we’re selling” campaign in Mississippi. But at the risk of alienating some of my friends, l think service businesses–especially values-based ones—are a different case. Before you jump all over me—read the language I send to new prospects for my marketing and consulting services:

Please note that I reserve the right to reject a project if I feel I’m not the right person for it. This would include projects that in my opinion promote racism, homophobia, bigotry or violence–or that promote the tobacco, nuclear power, or weapons industries–or if I do not feel the product is of high enough quality that I can get enthusiastic about it.

Notice that this language doesn’t discriminate against a person or class of people–but it certainly does discriminate against a set of beliefs.

Now, if I reserve that privilege for myself, how can I possibly justify withholding it from someone else who runs a service business and has different values than mine?

Also, there’s a provider quality issue. If I were forced to write a piece of marketing copy for a product whose values I despised, I would do a terrible job. Even if I consciously tried to do my best, it would come out shoddy and insincere, because I wouldn’t believe in what I was promoting. By the same token, I can’t imagine why a same-sex couple would WANT to hire a homophobic wedding photographer (one of the examples cited in the article); the pictures will be terrible.

If you’re renting a room, buying a sandwich, riding a bus, patronizing a theme park…yes, you should have the right to be served. But if a service provider is being asked to use specialized skills to support a cause that service provider finds morally repugnant, I’m not at all sure we should coerce that behavior.

Please comment below. I’d love to get some good dialog going on this.

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