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 Eco-friendly, Environment, Ethics-International, Mindset, Science, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

One of the most fascinating talks I’ve ever heard happened this morning on a guided bush walk in Kruger National Park, South Africa, delivered from atop a huge termite mound.

Standing atop a giant termite mound, Ranger Nico explains why termites are critical in the South African ecosystem and how they make the giant predators possible. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Standing atop a giant termite mound, Ranger Nico explains why termites are critical in the South African ecosystem and how they make the giant predators possible. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

Termites are largely responsible for shaping and managing the ecosystem that allows the magnificent animals we see on safaris: the elephants, lions, giraffes, zebras, and more. They are master builders, creating mounds and underground caverns (two or three times as big as the visible parts of the mounds) that can stretch 50 meters into the earth.

Termites invented climate control millions of years ago. They move wet earth astonishing distances to plaster the walls, creating an ideal environment for the fungus their queen loves to eat, and they build chimneys—heat vents they can open and close—to maintain the ideal temperature for the queen’s comfort.
They are such sophisticated engineers that some plaster casts of abandoned mounds have required pumping in ten tons of plaster.

That queen starts tiny but eventually reaches a length of five inches or so, loses her legs, and turns her attention to hive management and reproduction. But not just any kind of reproduction! She picks the type of worker the colony needs at that moment and produces farmers, soldiers, attendants staff who attend to her needs as commanded by pheromones, flying termites (including scouts, wood scavengers, and future kings and queens who go off to start new colonies), and other types as needed.

These different types have biological differences, each equipped for their own mission. And she will lay about 40,000 eggs every day, but most of the young’uns will only live for a few days. Still, a large mound can have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

The queen outlives thousands of generations of her offspring. At the end of her 30- to 40-year life, she clones herself and produces one new queen, genetically identical, who will manage the same mound—so some of these mounds are centuries old, with a ruler identical to the mound’s female co-founder. Her partner is a king who fertilizes the queen, and paired couples fly off to start the new mounds—a complex process where both of them find a soft digging spot they can manage without the tools of the construction-worker termites and begin digging and egg-laying exactly three days before a significant rainfall.

The eggs take three days to gestate and require lots of moisture.
If a queen dies before cloning herself, the whole colony dies. Queens cannot be introduced from elsewhere, and the workers lose all interest in their tasks—or in living—without a queen.

And here’s why this is a problem: Not only do termites clear the dead wood around them by digesting it, the mounds and chambers provide enormous nutritional boost to the soil. Termites are what creates the richness that allows grasses, shrubs, and trees to flourish. Without all that, the herbivores like elephants, giraffes, rhinos, impalas, hippos, warthogs, etc. would have nothing to eat and would not exist. And without them, the apex predators including the big cats would not have their food.Close encounter on safari in Kruger national Park with a male lion. Photo by Shel Horowitz. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WRITTEN PERMISSION MUST BE OBTAINED TO REPRODUCE.

So if you’ve gone on safari and seen these beautiful animals in the wild, you can thank the termites. And the best way to thank them is to recognize their role and not use pesticides against them. If you live in a termite-prone area, treat the wood of your house instead of fogging the air with poison that poisons you, your family, and the much-needed termites—and help your friends understand that when we treat nature as a teacher and ally, the results are far better than if we treat her as an enemy.

Other tidbits from this hike:
• Elephants will destroy one marula tree at a time to get the fruit—but their digestive enzymes activate the seeds, so when they poop them back out and natural forces spread them, a thousand marula trees could germinate from the single sacrificed one.

• Elephant tracks look kind of like snowshoe tracks. You can tell females form males because if it’s a female, you’ll also find tracks from the babies.

• Spear grass seed will actually drill itself into a growing medium by spinning in one direction. Even though they can’t survive there, they will even drill into human skin and you can’t get them out with tweezers. Nico’s mentor used to always carry a medical scalpel to excise them. Nico prefers to avoid them in the first place.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Innovation, Mindset, Politics, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , ,
Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner's hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque. Credited to "Appaloosa" on Fliker
Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner’s hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque.

It’s sad that New Zealand’s amazing Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is stepping down. I’ve been an admirer since she first came across my radar during her campaign to lead that country–and I remain one. She has been a competent, non-bloviating voice of reason and compassion, as well as an excellent role model who proves that at not-yet-40–she took office at 37 and is now 42–a progressive woman can be an effective shepherd of government, even during a term that encompassed multiple global and at least two national crises.

She is my favorite of the current crop of world leaders, in fact.

When I went looking for the photo to accompany this blog, I found this text. Like the photo, it is attributed only to “Appaloosa,” who appears to be a photographer in French Canada and was unlikely to have taken the picture. It sums up my feelings perfectly:

In the aftermath the Christchurch, NZ mosque shootings, the world witnessed what a real leader looks like in New Zealand’s Prime Minister #jacindaardern.

72 hours after the tragedy occurred, Prime Minister Ardern mourned at a vigil in full hijab attire, and promised the nation would not only cover the costs of 51 funerals, but would look after the families and their expenses for as long as it took.

This, after announcing the New Zealand government would ban assault rifles.

It takes courage to lead a country at any time. When you also have to navigate a global pandemic, a world economic mess, a massacre and a natural disaster in your home country, and a rising tide of totalitarian, racist so-called populists, it’s no  wonder she feels her “tank is empty.” It also takes courage to know when it’s time to stop. My hat is off to her and I wish her the best in her next phase.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, Psychology Tagged with , , , , ,

Steam locomotive falling through a railway station wallWhen I wrote this article back in 2014, it was published in three places. But it’s long enough ago that I can’t find it online. The message is too important to let slip away, so I’m reprinting it here–unchanged except for adding one sentence.
–Shel Horowitz

I laugh whenever I hear that famous phrase, “failure is not an option.” It shows not only enormous ignorance of the real world and the human brain, but also enormous hubris.Let’s get real. Failure is always an option—with sufficient bad luck or timing, loss of motivation, key player defections, or inadequate funding. This doesn’t mean the task is impossible; it’s just that currently, for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem worth marshaling the necessary resources to finish the task. And when the stakes are high (brain surgery or piloting a fully loaded commercial jet, for example), failure is a terrible option with horrible consequences—but even that doesn’t guarantee success.

Sometimes, we can minimize the impact of choosing failure. Almost always, we can embrace it as a learning opportunity.

The trick is to fail cheaply and early—and maybe often, make your mistakes, and move on. See what can be salvaged, what can be reinvented, and what should be thrown in the trash. Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent the light bulb. Most people would say he failed 9999 times. He saw it not as a failure but as a 10,000-step process. In other words, our failures teach us enough to achieve our successes.

I’ve had my share of failures. This spring, for example, I set up a telesummit involving 17 speakers, plus eight bonus calls from my archives for those who purchased the recording package. I spent some money and a considerable amount of time.

And it failed.

The business model is proven. I just got a mailing from the organizer of another telesummit, and she reported 2500 signups and a 5% conversion to the paid recording package. If I’d had those numbers, I would have made a profit even after paying 50% commissions to the speakers who brought in those buyers. But I was not able to motivate people to visit, sign up, and buy.

What did she do differently? First, she had a much broader-based subject appeal. There are a lot more people who want to succeed as book authors than in running a green business. Second, she had more speakers. And third, she motivated all her participants with leaderboards and contests and a general sense that things were really moving and we all would want to get on the bandwagon.

While I was expecting a revenue stream instead of a cost center, I learned enormously from this failure. Among other things, I learned not to count on your speakers promoting your event in a meaningful way. Some of the largest list owners never mailed, and thus my traffic was far lower than expected. Low enough that the sales were basically invisible.

Here are some of my other takeaways:
1. Learn when to work with off-the-shelf products and when to go custom. I could have done 90 percent of what I wanted to with an off-the-shelf software package called Instant Teleseminar. But their model involves paying every month, forever—so instead, I just hired someone to build the functionality I was looking for. That decision led to some serious cost overruns, and I still didn’t achieve all the functionality I wanted. If the summit had succeeded and I did a new one every six or 12 months, developing the in-house solution still would have been the right decision, because it would probably pay for itself around the fourth summit. But since I doubt I’ll organize another series like this one—though I might very well reuse the content I created and rerun the series at some point—I should have just bought the product.
2. Keep it simple! The website is beautiful, but it’s too hard to use. I think it scared people off. I should have really improved the usability before I let it go live.
3. Identify an audience of buyers. The woman who achieved that big telesummit success could draw from tens of millions of people who want to be successful published authors. While there are hundreds of thousands who want to run successful green businesses, maybe that isn’t a critical mass, especially since I didn’t have a direct channel to reach them.
4. Keep the content focused. I think my series split its energy between being about marketing, generally, and being about green business success. This may not have been wise. Maybe I needed to push more of the marketing experts to speak specifically about applying their techniques in the green world.

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By Posted on Posted in Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Living/Green Lifestyles

After reading this post, The Problem with Green Standard Offerings, on the Indoor Health Council’s blog, I wrote a response worth sharing with you (slightly edited for readability):

Cleaning by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

 

 

You write, “focus on the main issue, health-focused cleaning; directing energy to one and not two main goals: health or sustainability, not both, or you compromise the program.”

We need a reframing here.

The question is not whether to choose health over green practices (of course we do!). The better question is how to achieve the health outcomes while also creating positive environmental impacts.

As one very easy example, how much packaging do we really need? Does it really increase safety to wrap every component of a kit individually, place the wrapped components on a foam tray, wrap the entire inner contents, box the wrapped set, and then add another layer of shrinkwrap around the box, stick the box in a case with 11 others, shrinkwrap the case, stack cases on a pallet, and then wrap the pallet?

For that matter, could some of the components in that kit be used again? Why do we design so many products to be used once and then thrown away?

My comment ended there–but that’s only the beginning of a much larger discussion. Some other questions to raise would include:

  • When can we use nontoxic natural cleansers and disinfectants such as baking soda and peroxide—and when do we actually need something stronger?
  • Can we get our cleaning agents in eco-friendly formats such as pellets to be dissolved in water, rather than harmful ones such as aerosol cans?
  • What are the most ergonomic ways to clean that protect our hands, shoulders, and backs from injury?
  • How do we most effectively train cleaning personnel to understand health, environmental, and safety issues?

Please feel welcome to add your own questions in the comments.

 
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like

  • “You can’t fight City Hall”
  • “We’ve always done it this other way”
  • “That’s impossible”
  • “You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.

18-year-old X Gonzales gives the "Call B.S." speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigleaftropicals/40463975301, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66778488
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.

Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Consumer Issues, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Ethics: General, General Commentary, Innovation, language, Mindset, Networking, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology, Science, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Technology, travel Tagged with , , ,

I just came across a query letter I wrote in 2020. It raises a lot of questions that are still very much worth asking—and attempting to answer.

Globe showing various crises around the world
How some people view the world—Opportunity for businesses that genuinely care



In many ways, these questions were easier to answer back then. Unfortunately, as a society, we missed the window to create those kinds of sweeping changes when the active threat of Covid made them easier—but we can still make the effort. We can still transform society, our relationship with other beings, and the planet in our own lifetime. It’ll just take more effort.

Here’s the relevant section of what I wrote back then (I’ve removed a long paragraph with my credentials, as well as my closing.)—and I’d love to get your comments:

Hi, there, 

As an experienced journalist and award-winning, best-selling ten-book author with several books on social enterprise as a profit center, I propose an article, Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Long-Term Post-Pandemic Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. Probably in the 1500-2500 word range.

The premise: For decades, activists have been told we can’t fix the crushing problems of our time, like hunger, poverty, racism, war, catastrophic climate change, etc. Yet, starting in early 2020, the entire world pivoted and everything changed. As education, many types of business, and even cultural events shifted online or reinvented themselves, we learned how resilient, adaptable, and creative we are. And that process created opportunities that could never have happened in the pre-pandemic world. 

These massive global, national, regional, and local shifts prove we can reinvent the world as the place we really want to live in–and we can replicate the shift in other areas. As a society, we have to do this pivot strategically, and it has to involve many sectors: government, nonprofits, activists, community organizations, academia—and the business community. 

Just look at how the massive expansion of the racial justice movement since May has changed perceptions around the US and around the world. And that’s one small piece of a big multi-issue cauldron of solution-driven thinking and activism; a lot of good work is going into solving those big crises, as well as protecting our fragile democracy. 
The question is: pivot to what?

Could health care coverage be shifted away from employers so the next time an emergency shuts hundreds of thousands of businesses, their laid-off employees don’t lose their safety net? Could this be the US’s chance to adopt the single-payer model most of the rest of the world uses? And to shift from treating the sick’s symptoms to maintaining wellness across the population so fewer people get sick in the first place? Can this be the moment to finally get away from fossil and nuclear, to combine clean renewable energy with massive systemic conservation so we’re no longer squandering our children’s heritage polluting and carbonizing our planet while depleting scarce resources? Is it time for decent affordable housing to be seen as a right? What are the best ways to create more housing that also protect the environment, create pleasant yet affordable neighborhoods, and avoid negative consequences like urban sprawl?

We can ask similar questions in every sector: criminal justice, job creation, transportation and shipping (moving both people and things), replacing armed conflict with peaceful conflict resolution, ensuring a pluralistic society that honors both its majorities and minorities, etc.

After four years of Trump and a year of COVID, it won’t be enough to go back to the “normal” of 2019, or even of 2015. But with the pandemic comes the luxury and responsibility of critically examining every aspect of society. We need to figure out what the goal of every institution is–and how to achieve or surpass that goal as we rebuild. Just as many developing countries skipped landlines and clunky desktop computers and went straight to smartphones, we need to ask questions like:

  • What are we *really* trying to accomplish?
  • Is this the best way to meet that goal?
  • How could we improve it?
  • How could we make it more inclusive?

Then we brainstorm with these ends in mind, using a seven-step process that opens up new thinking and lets us implement new solutions.
To make this concrete, think about spending millions of R&D dollars to create a pen that can write in zero-gravity. But the real goal isn’t to have a pen that can write in space—that’s a means to an end. The real goal is to be able to write in space. And suddenly, with that framing, the solution is obvious: use pencils—or computers! Maybe you create a pencil lead that can make a darker, easier to read impression, create a Velcro mount for your device so it doesn’t go flying across the cabin, or make other little tweaks—but you’ve accomplished the basic goal, with resources you already have.
Business has a vested interest in reinventing itself, as dozens of industries were rendered obsolete, as supply chain issues showed up unexpectedly, and as those sectors that strengthened and grew had to adapt. Small businesses can survive and even thrive, but not as it was in 2019. Whether a manufacturer switches from making luxury goods to PPE or a retailer learns how to blend online and (protected) in-person approaches, pretty much everyone has to pivot. Why not seize the opportunity to have that reinvention foster racial, gender, and class equity…green the planet while creating jobs…match product introduction and production not to advertising-created materialism but to solving real needs and getting paid for it?
In the activist world, meetings that might have had 10 local people in a room can now draw 500 from around the world—and provide digital tools to mobilize action, such as Spoke, a texting platform that can allow volunteers to send 1000 or more text messages an hour and respond individually and personally when someone replies.
 In my own professional development this year, from the comfort of my own home, I’ve attended dozens of far-away events. Some had hundreds or thousands of attendees from dozens of countries (among them a worldwide UN conference, multiple 50th-anniversary celebrations of Earth Day, and gatherings on more niched topics such as the special situation of Jews of color). I could not have afforded the time and money to go to so many conferences, and several times, they’ve overlapped. But I was able to participate in more than one at a time, or listen to what I’d missed on replay. I’ve also participated in some thinking and brainstorming calls from widely scattered groups of thinkers and researchers working on global solutions to these and other problems. As somewhat more exciting examples, local cultural performers with no previous broader following are finding global audiences—and the sound technicians who can replace awful-sounding Zoom calls with concert-quality production are keeping busy.

Even on the personal side, some of the restrictions can be reframed as empowerment—just as we can think of a wheelchair user not as “confined to a wheelchair,” but “liberated with a wheelchair,” because it allows that user to go places that would otherwise be off-limits. My wife and I hosted a Passover Seder with family and friends from three generations and 9 different states from Massachusetts to California–most of whom would never have come in person.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Politics, Sexuality and Gender, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,
Purity illustration: Jesus Baptism by Waiting for the World. Licensed through Creative Commons.
Purity illustration: Jesus Baptism by Waiting for the World. Licensed through Creative Commons.

When I was a kid, Proctor and Gamble was still running TV ads claiming Ivory Soap was “99 and 44/00 percent pure.” (Digression: Here’s a link to a quick, fun article on the origins of this marketing slogan, which dates back to 1881.) Even back then, I found this absurd–because I  already understood that even just over half a percentage point of impurity meant it wasn’t pure at all. It was actually pretty contaminated. After all, sewage is 99 percent water–and I don’t know anyone who would want a glass of that.

In daily living, 100% purity is a rare thing indeed. In science and in business, we’re often very appropriately guided by the slogan, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

A typical process would be:

  1. Design.
  2. Test.
  3. Debug.
  4. Redesign.
  5. Ship.
  6. Receive user feedback and debug, then iterate again.

That process works far better than holding out for an illusory perfection that can’t even exist until real-world conditions show us the flaw. So why do we demand it in our politics? I read a New York Times article this morning about a controversy over naming one of its telescopes for 50s-60s-era NASA head James Webb because he may or may not have been homophobic. The article makes it abundantly clear that whether he was or not is a matter of debate–but he was clearly antiracist at a time when that was far from popular, and provided many career opportunities for people of color. It also reminds us that homophobia was the official policy of the US government at that time.

We humans are an evolving species. The LGBT movement as it existed in that era was mostly quiet, clandestine, and not in the mainstream consciousness. The Stonewall Riots, considered the birth of the modern LGBT movement, didn’t take place until 1969. I was very active in that movement from 1973 through 1986 and remain supportive of its goals. But I dont think we should fault Mr. Webb for not being an out-front visionary advocate of LGBT liberation at a time when gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people were ridiculed or assaulted if they entered the mainstream consciousness at all. Rather we should take pride that as a society, we’ve grown to accept that LGBT folks are entitled to civil rights, to choose their families, and even to marry. When I attended my first same-sex weddings in the late 1970s, I never imagined that legal same-sex marriage would be achieved in my lifetime, let alone in less than 40 years–less than 30 in my own state of Massachusetts.

And for the most part I don’t fault our politicians when they compromise on other issues to get some good things passed into law, as long as they come away with significant progress. (I do get tired of the Democrats’ frequent and problematic tendency to negotiate away far more than they have to to try to get bipartisan support that is usually not forthcoming–but once that fails, they don’t go back to the original stronger versions. This is what Obama did with the ACA, and whatBiden has done on issues like immigration and climate.)

When we pass a week or insufficient law, we have to recognize that we will have the next iteration and the one after that–and we can work to strengthen our hand. Change is more often gradual than sweeping. Even the loathsome Bill Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military was a huge improvement over the dishonorable discharges and possible prison terms that were official policy before that change–though I’m very glad to see it go away, and to see the Respect for Marriage Act become law just six days ago. (Another digression: here’s an academic essay from the quite recent past–2021–arguing that don’t ask, don’t tell” should be overturned. Warning: it looks like it might be a term paper mill site.) 

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, Innovation, language, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Screenshot: Opening lines of the poem, "Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl": Sometimes the hero stumbles/ and falls right off the page./Sometimes the princess…
Opening lines of the poem, “Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl”

Recently, I posted this poem on Facebook:

A cynical friend responded, “Sometimes…none of this is true.” And I replied,

But all of it is, sometimes. Sometimes is the anchor word here, that allows us to play with our perceptions. All of it is true once in a while, but all of it is not true often enough that the inability to go there feels normative to you. As someone who has spent some big chunks of my life on the margins for various reasons, I can assure you that the narrow, normative, conformist version of reality isn’t real for a big percentage of the population—but who’s in and who’s out might vary over time.

My “margins” experience is both direct and indirect. Directly, I’ve been treated as marginal—”othered”—for living in poverty in my younger years…for not being into sports, hypermasculinity, or TV celebrity culture…for being Jewish…for being bisexual…for being a Northerner in Georgia and an Easterner in Southwest Ohio…And I’ve confronted ageism against both the young and the old—which started when I was very young and has continued now that people are beginning to think of me as old.

But I’ve also worked with a lot of groups that were marginalized in ways outside of my own direct experience of it. In college in the 1970s—long before same-sex couples were socially acceptable—I ran the campus Gay Center and started two more in cities where I had college co-op jobs and went to my first same-sex wedding in 1978 or ’79. I did community organizing around the environment and safe energy all the way back to 1971, when I was a 14-year-old high school junior—and that consciousness didn’t really become mainstream until THIS century.  I worked as a paid organizer for an elders’ rights organization at 22 and 23. I had my consciousness raised about a whole bunch of disability rights and minority rights issues during the six years in the 1990s when I served on my city’s official disability access committee (helping public spaces like theaters and restaurants meet accessibility codes) and simultaneously on the District Attorney’s Civil Rights Advisory Board (sensitizing lawyers, cops, and criminal justice workers to the needs of marginalized communities). I worked for 15 years in that city and 24 years in the neighboring small town where I live now on opening up the electoral process and city/town government to disenfranchised voices. And for more than three years, I’ve been deeply involved with immigration/refugee justice work, including an extended visit to the US-Mexico border where we visited a huge refugee camp daily and heard the stories of some of the most marginalized people in the world. 

This diversity of experience may seem very random—but certain common threads hold it all together into a larger whole that feels coherent and meaningful to me. A few examples:

  • All of this work is about empowering people who have felt powerless
  • All of it embraces the same construct that the poet presents: that just because something is a certain way doesn’t at all mean it’s impossible to change it (I even did a TEDx talk on this called “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare” (it’s 15 minutes long, riffs on a quote by Muhammad Ali that I misattributed at the time, and discusses how socially and environmentally conscious businesses can change the world—to watch, click the link and then click again on “event videos”)
  • All of it works on the theory that change happens faster and more fully when it becomes a movement—while acknowledging that acting alone can still make a significant difference. (I’m very proud of my one-person, three-day demonstration against the US bombing of Libya that drew middle fingers and jeers on the first day, but supportive honks and waves on the third day, as well as many individual conversations with people who thought differently, sometimes reaching common ground and always de-demonizing each other—but I’m even prouder of the broad-based movement I founded that saved an endangered local mountain.)
  • It all recognizes that change happens both internally, inside your own heart and brain, and externally, as the actions of one person or a movement ripple out into the wider world–and as these movements find common ground and begin to work together, discovering their intersectionality: their common struggle.
  • As these movements begin to combine like an amoeba merging with its neighbor, it becomes easier to achieve drastic restructuring of society as people begin to look at solutions to our biggest problems as interrelated, holistic, and systemic.

So yes, we have the power to change ourselves and the world. As the poem says in its final lines,

just because it’s what we’ve been told
doesn’t make it true.

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By Posted on Posted in Consumer Issues, Ethics: General, Innovation, Marketing Trends/News, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

On November 30, without much fanfare in my world, a new Artificial Intelligence tool called ChatGPT was released that could be as disruptive as Google or smartphones or affordable green energy. Less than a week later, on December 3, my programmer son-in-law blew our socks off with a demo. He showed us how he kept building more and more complex prompts to a query that in its final form compared the philosophies of Descartes, Nietzsche, and Bugs Bunny (who the software even correctly identified as fictional). The written response was cogent and fairly convincing–and went a lot deeper than, say, Wikipedia. And in its basic form, it apparently doesn’t even crawl the Internet!

Just one day later, Chris Brogan raved about the tool and gave another example in his newsletter; he asked ChatGPT to write a newsletter article about itself. While it didn’t produce work that I would turn in to a client, it’s better than at least 50 percent of the business writing that crosses my desk. He also used another tool, DALL-E, to create shockingly realistic graphics of things that don’t exist. Chris doesn’t have a public archive of his newsletters, so, unfortunately, I can’t link to his article and examples.

One day after Chris, the New York Times jumped in. One of its examples gives instructions for removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR (I hope the sandwich isn’t as old as the VCR!). Here are the first five sentences:

King James Version VCR cleaning tip written by ChatGPT
King James Version VCR cleaning tip written by ChatGPT

And today, one week after Chris wrote about it, Seth Godin devoted his daily column to preaching that the existence of ChatGPT, which can generate adequate (if mediocre) copy in seconds, means that we should pride ourselves on our artisanship–on creating work that is significantly better than a machine can do. (I like that approach!).

Oh, yeah, and the tool’s developer, Open AI, has a nice little flowchart of how it works (that I suspect ChatGPT helped prepare).

While news and opinions about ChatGPT seem to be popping up everywhere, you might shrug your shoulders and think, “so what?”

That would be a dangerous mistake! Dozens if not hundreds of industries could face fundamental shifts. Writing of all kinds (commercial, academic, literary, philosophical, instructional, etc.), obviously. But also design, fine art, computer programming, marketing, teaching, office administration, human resources, engineering…it would be a long list. It raises issues around ethics, staffing, training, research, library science, intellectual property–and perhaps most crucially, a future where bots and AI engines make decisions independent of their human creators.

In other words, this might be how we get to HAL, the infamous AI computer that went rogue in the 1968 movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Why am I going on about this? Because I want you to be forewarned and prepared.

Before deciding if my advice is worth paying attention to, you may find it helpful to consider my history with technology trends:

Although I’m not a professional trendspotter, I do pay attention. I’m a sponge for news and keep notes that sometimes find their way into books, blog posts, or speeches. I may not personally use some of these technologies, but knowing that they’re out there and what they can do influences my consulting recommendations.

I tend to wait for new technologies to be reasonably affordable and user-friendly, so I’m rarely in the very first wave, but it’s not unusual for me to be well ahead of others. I got my first computer (an original Mac) in 1984 because the learning curve was far less than for PCs of that era, my first laser printer in 1985–and that combination allowed me to disrupt and dominate my local resume industry by offering low-cost while-you-wait service. I got my very underpowered first laptop in 1986, which gave my travel and interview journalism and book writing a huge jumpstart. I made my first Skype video call, to New Zealand, in 1998 and had been on Zoom for about three years before the pandemic made it popular.

I knew about the online world in 1984. But it was too hard to use back then. I tried it for the first time in 1987 (and even dipped my toe into social media as it existed in that era), using Compuserve. But I didn’t like the primitive and buggy interface, hated trying to keep track of user names that consisted of long series of numbers with a random period in the middle, and was constantly frustrated by the balky connection that kept tossing me off–and left after a few months. I waited until 1994 and AOL’s easy interface before going back. And within a year, I had my first of many overseas marketing clients: a vitamin company in the UK.

In the green world, I follow innovations fairly closely. I put solar on the roof of my then-258-year-old farmhouse in 2001, LED lighting throughout the house around 2013-14, and a green heating system somewhere around 2015. I’ve been telling people for years about powerful innovations like a Frisbee-sized hydroelectric power generator that doesn’t require a dam, wind turbines made of old 55-gallon drums that spin on a vertical axis and can generate power at a far larger wind speed range, and the disruptive power of 3D printing.

But sometimes I wait, even if I’m recommending certain tools to others. I didn’t get a smartphone, digital camera, 3-in-1 printer, or color monitor until the bugs were worked out and the prices were slashed. Now, I wonder how I ever managed without those tools. And I still don’t have an electric car or a color printer.

So with this background, I will call ChatGPT a very big deal indeed.

It’s likely that I’d see the potential impact anyway, but it’s especially obvious because I’m reading a book called The Anticipatory Organization by Daniel Burris, which focuses on the need to focus on disruptive trends and the benefit of being the disruptor rather than the disrupted. (I’ll be reviewing it in my January Clean and Green Club newsletter; if you don’t subscribe yet, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com, scroll to “Get your monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter at no cost,” and fill out the simple form. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too :-).

Once I get a chance to play with ChatGPT directly, I will probably have more to say about it. Unfortunately, with all this buzz, there’s now a waiting list, so I’ll have to delay that particular experience.

 
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Gratitude, Innovation, language, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Science, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,
Abundance Tree by Anvar Saifutdinov: Painting of a green-colored male lion sitting under a large tree bearing many kinds of fruits and vegetables.
Abundance Tree by Anvar Saifutdinov, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In the coverage of President Biden’s November 1, 2022 speech about the chaos the enemies of democracy want, something else important was missed: Biden is a rare politician who understands the Abundance Principle:

At our best, America’s not a zero-sum society or for you to succeed, someone else has to fail. A promise in America is big enough, is big enough, for everyone to succeed. Every generation opening the door of opportunity just a little bit wider. Every generation including those who’ve been excluded before.

We believe we should leave no one behind, because each one of us is a child of God, and every person, every person is sacred. If that’s true, then every person’s rights must be sacred as well. Individual dignity, individual worth, individual determination, that’s America, that’s democracy and that’s what we have to defend.

These powerful words embrace what I’ve been talking about for years: that we have enough to go around, but have to address kinks in the distribution and a lack of political will that leave some clinging by a thread while others amass far more than they need or even can use. These truths are amplified in powerful books like The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Business Solution to Poverty, and my own Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

We don’t need to live in a world crippled by dire hunger and poverty–cutting off who knows how many amazing new discoveries because the people who would have made them are too busy struggling for basic survival. We don’t have to accept war as a consequence of limited resources, because the abundance mindset understands that a particular resource is only one path to a goal, and there are others. We especially don’t need to go to war over petroleum (which has incited so many wars, including US-conducted wars in places like Iraq and Vietnam)–because we are already using different energy resources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal, which are already edging out fossil and nuclear in both financial and environmental benefits.

And we can absolutely reject the outdated concept that if one person or group wins, some other has to lose. The abundance mindset is collaborative: we win by joining forces for common goals. This powerful frame can apply to material goods, and also to intangibles like love–as Malvina Reynolds made clear decades ago in her charming song, “Magic Penny.”

How are you using abundance to create a better world? Please  respond in the comments (which are moderated, so don’t bother filling it with junk).

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