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 Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In my last post, I described the demise of our radiator and engine while driving down the highway Wednesday. I had the car towed to our mechanic, who called this morning to tell us that the engine had indeed suffered a meltdown. Fortunately, the consequences are far less severe than in a nuclear power plant, but it meant we either had to spend $3000 to fix it or go car shopping in a hurry.

We’d gotten eight years out of the replacement engine we’d put in the last time this happened, and now the car was 14 years old. $3000 didn’t seem like a wise investment.

So off we went, car shopping. When we get into a riff like this, we’re like a couple of trucks. We go until we get the job done. When we bought our current house (in 1998), we viewed 16 houses in just eight days, and bought #15. And with three drivers, nowhere we can walk, and one working car, we needed to move fast. We had decided ahead that with a new teenage driver in the family, buying new didn’t make sense. The insurance would be huge, and so would the risk. So that made the decision simpler.

In two hours, we went to five different dealerships—four that only sold used vehicles, plus one local new/used .Oddly, we only saw one car that was worth test-driving: a 2005 Toyota Corolla stickshift with only 26,000 miles. (Corollas are typically good for 150,000 or more. Our current one has 165,000.) Considering that some of the other cars we saw included a $12,000 Prius with over 99,000 miles and a $17,000 Honda Civic hybrid with 36,000, we thought we’d found a pretty good deal.

Over the next three hours, we dropped the car off at our mechanic to check it out, stopped for lunch, went to the credit union and got financing through our home equity line of credit (that we had established earlier but never used), went to the library to make sure it wasn’t the kind with the runaway accelerator problem—and while we were there, we also googled the original owner, who had a distinctive name, to make sure there was no report of a major accident in the car (we discovered she’d purchased the car in April 2006, and died the following September of natural causes—and at some point later, the car was traded back to the same dealer that had sold it originally). Then back to the mechanic to pick up the car with a clean bill of health, and back to the dealer to go through the paperwork and specify the very minor repairs to be made.

Yup. In five hours flat, we chose a car, had it examined, and got it financed. That’s fast even by our standards, but we were under some time pressure, with the exchange student and some teenage friends of my son all descending on us in the coming days. By Saturday, the work will be done and we’ll have the car.

Know any Western Massachusetts takers for a 1997 Toyota that needs an engine and radiator?

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

In 2003, we were driving down the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut, on our way to pick up a high school exchange student from France at JFK Airport. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, and broken head gasket (cooked engine).

With only 71,000 miles on a six-year-old Toyota, one of the car dealers we visited advised us not to replace the car, just put in a new engine. We took his advice, especially since he actually arranged the whole thing for us.

Yesterday, I was driving that same car, now 14 years old and with 165,000 miles, on my way to a business meeting. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, probable broken head gasket.

And the craziest thing of all? Next week, assuming she’s still coming after the earthquake and tsunami, we’re scheduled to host a high school exchange student from Japan.

Hmmm. Are exchange students too expensive to host if we have to spend a few thousand dollars on fixing or replacing a vehicle? (that’s a joke.)

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

My friend Christophe Poizat sent me invitation to try the new social-media-integrated browser, RockMelt.

I immediately liked the interface. It’s a little more elegant, and seemed faster, at least initially (like Firefox, it seems to slow down the more I use it). I also like the way it displays icons of social media friends, and if I hold the cursor over any of those icons, I got my friend’s latest status update—and also can see if they’re online now.

And I LOVE the way a Google search shows up as a right-hand column of the page I’m on, so I still have that page underneath.

I also really like the ability to set up multiple autofill profiles and quickly select which one to use on a particular form. Given that I’m often switching between the e-address I use for low-priority mail and the one I actually want to be contacted at, that’s really nice.

However, and it’s a BIG however, something about the way it actually processes a form’s submit button is very problematic. I failed to logon to Twitter, Yahoogroups, and Paypal (the last being particularly frustrating  because I was responding to a one-time offer that went away). Also some pages simply don’t load, and they work fine when I copy the URl to Firefox.

In sort, from my point of view, the jury is still out.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

It seems we’ve escaped complete catastrophe at the six failed reactors in Japan damaged in the earthquake and tsunami—for the moment, But it was (and may still be) pretty dicey.

Two of the reactors had to be cooled with seawater, in a last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Those reactors probably can’t be used to generate electricity ever again. And the chance that the other four will return to service is probably pretty low, considering the extensive damage, high levels of radiation, etc., not to mention the risk of further damage in future quakes.

Thank goodness this happened in Japan, the country with probably the best earthquake-related building codes in the world (imagine what would have happened if a nuke had been sitting on earthquake fault during last year’s quake in Haiti—shudder!)

But here’s my question: WHY in the name of creation are we still hopelessly, haplessly, playing with nuclear fire? Did we learn nothing from the Chernobyl disaster? Or the barely-contained accidents at Three Mile Island, Browns Ferry (Alabama), Enrco Fermi (Michigan) and other near-calamities at nuke plants not only in the US but around the world? The nuclear industry’s safety record is horrible, and as Chernobyl proved, we don’t always get lucky with containing the damage—and when we don’t, large areas are rendered uninhabitable for decades.

Back in 1979-80, I had a monthly column about the dangers of nuclear power. I devoted two of my columns to the possibility of accidents resulting from earthquakes, and that information was taken form commonly available sources (even in the pre-Google era). More than 30 years later, we appear to have learned nothing. And earthquakes are only one of a dozen or more very compelling reasons NOT to use nuclear power. Some of the others include terrorist threat, waste disposal issues that need to be addressed for a longer timespan than human history, the problem (with US nukes of sharply limited liability in the event of an accident), diversion for bomb-making…and perhaps most shocking, the lifecycle analysis that shows that by the time you count the energy and fossil footprint of mining, milling, processing, transporting, running the reactors, reprocessing, waste storage and transportation, etc., you don’t actually create very much energy. One study I saw even claimed it was a negative number! (And another study showed that renewable energy is two to seven times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases.)  For this very dubious benefit, we’re putting our own and every future generation at enormous risk???

Here’s my call to action:

  1. IMMEDIATE world-wide shutdown of any nuclear power plant within 100 miles of an active earthquake fault and entombment in the most solid possible barrier
  2. Phased shutdown of remaining N-plants over perhaps six months
  3. A world-wide Marshall Plan-style initiative toward the high-gain, relatively renewable low-cost energy solutions of the sort promoted by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute in their “Winning the Oil End Game”: a plan to rapidly exit from fossil fuels without needing nuclear.
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” —Archimedes, 230 BC.

All of a sudden, it seems like the universe is dropping a lot of opportunities in my lap. The last few weeks have brought me these and other possibilities (all tentative):

  • A chance to speak in a country I’ve always wanted to visit
  • Working partnership with a startup that could very quickly scale up to be a major force in the environmental movement
  • Several big potential clients, including one who was recommended to me by someone who heard me speak and bought my book at the Sustainable Foods Summit in January, and whose CEO is an actual rock star
  • A remote, long-shot possibility to travel throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, making a movie and a book on sustainability (the longest of long shots, but I’m hoping!)
  • Agreement in principle from a new magazine in Asia to start running one of my new columns; that will make the third continent where a media outlet is running it.
  • An ongoing partnership with someone who has bought a quantity of one of my books in the past, and who wants not only to buy a few hundred of guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, but also to work with me on some ongoing speaking opportunities (for which he gets a nice commission, and therefore is likely to make it happen)

    • As you might gather, it’s been a pretty exciting few weeks.

    So…if you believe in Law of Attraction (LOA) stuff, you might be asking what I’ve done to create this torrent of abundance. I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts.

    I’ve made two big shifts in the last few months, and have another one pending.

    First, I’ve launched my two columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical—and set a specific monetary goal and a timetable to achieve it that would convert these columns to the primary revenue stream in my business. It has been a dream since my teen years to be a syndicated columnist, and I’ve made a couple of rounds over the years pitching the big syndicates. I decided that the most likely way it would finally happen would be if, rather than waiting for a big syndicate to pick me up, I did it myself. And I’m doing it!

    And second, I’ve set myself a time management regime and have been pretty good at sticking to it.

    Thirdly, I am moving forward on a new way of structuring my business that will free up significant time for me to focus on the parts of my business I most want to build (writing and speaking).

    And while I’m far from an LOA junkie, I do believe that the things we choose to focus on tend to dominate our lives. I’ve been focusing on these deep goals and I think the universe is responding by showing me enough opportunities to convince me I’m on the right track.

    And I also have a Great Big Goal: making a lasting and significant impact on the world and helping to shift planetary consciousness to create a healthy, just, and peaceful planet. Yes, I’ve learned to think big. I have seen big ripples from the little things I’ve done, and I want the columns to provide me a big enough platform that I could, like Archimedes with his giant lever, move the world.

    It’s going to be a wild ride…and I’m ready!

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , ,

    What idiots in the GOP leadership decided to get their cafeteria out of the Greening the Capitol program, get rid of the biodegradables, stop composting, and switch to Styrofoam? Eeeeew!

    The “party of no” reaches a new low–whose ONLY justification is say “nyah, nyah, nyah to the Democrats. This is not just childish, it’s downright stupid. So much for budget constraints, too—their path, if I could call it that, is going to be a lot more expensive, long-term, than reusable dishes going through a Hobart, composting the wastes, etc.

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

    Guest post by Cynthia Kocialski

    It seems as though green is here, there and everywhere these days. Everyday customers encounter companies that are green. Preschools are now advertising themselves as green schools. Dry cleaners are marketing themselves are being green. Landscape and maid services are green too.
    When every company, small or large, jumps on a trend, what happens? People ignore it. It becomes a common business practice. It is simply expected in the minds of the customers, and is no longer a competitive or marketing advantage.
    But wait … perhaps there is still a way to use your company’s green and clean efforts to your advantage – an indirect way. Marketing is about creating demand and every business person knows that it’s important to be different. Every business wants to be top of mind for their customer. It doesn’t matter how they remember your business just that they do remember it.
    Why not use your green efforts to promote your company? News and information organizations are all faced with the same problem each and every day. Their audience needs to read, hear, or view something tomorrow, but what? And along comes your company comes with a story about its green efforts – a hot topic these days.
    Green is touted everywhere. Companies label themselves as “Green”. But what does it really mean? What is a green preschool? What does a green dry cleaner mean? Even an Internet security software company claimed they would be a ‘green’ company in their start-up business plan.
    Public relations is most effective when it introduces audiences to your company and your product without trying to sell them. People want information. They like to be educated, rather than “sold.”
    Take the opportunity to educate and inform your customers about the specifics of your green-ness. Engage in a little shameless self-promotion.
    1) Contact the media about doing an article or an interview.
    2) Offer to speak at a meeting, conference or tradeshow.
    3) Write a guest post for a business or green or environmental blog.
    4) Offer a limited time promotion on Earth Day or environment celebrations.
    Many small businesses can benefit from the clean and green technology revolutions going on right now, even if your company does not directly use or offer products that are environmental-friendly.

    About the Author
    Cynthia Kocialski founded three tech companies and has been involved with dozens of other startups. She has written a book about her experiences in start-ups companies, “Startup from the Ground Up, Practical Insights for Transforming an Idea into a Business”. She also writes the popular Start-up Entrepreneurs’ Blog (www.cynthiakocialski.com) and has written many articles on emerging technologies. Cynthia can be reached at cynthia@cynthiakocialski.com

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

    Back in January, when I started my new time management regime, I promised you an update at the end of February.

    The goals, you may recall:
    * Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
    * Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
    * Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
    * Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

    I’ve fine-tuned it a bit since then. I started tracking a few new things: how much time I spend on reaching out to reporters who might interview me, and meeting planners who might hire me to speak. I’m also tracking how much time I actually spend being interviewed, and also a category of “mitigations”: reasons why on a particular day, my goals are unrealistic because I’m out of the office for several hours.

    For instance, if it’s a day I have to drive my mother to one of her medical appointments in New Haven, that’s three hours of driving and up to two hours of sitting there, and there’s no way I’m going to make all my goals for that day. But if I see that I was out of the office for four or five hours, I don’t expect the impossible from myself.

    On the days where I am around, I sometimes skew pretty far. But by keeping track, I can adjust on a different day. For instance, last week, I had two days in a row where I really focused on some urgent client projects. My goal is two hours per day. Last Wednesday, I did almost three–but then Thursday, when those deadlines had passed, I only did about half an hour for clients, and I did more on some other things.

    Where I have utterly failed to adjust is e-mail. Keeping e-mail down to two hours a day is an admirable goal, and has caused me to streamline my inbox a lot. I think I’ve unsubbed from at least 60 newsletters since the first of the year.I’ve had exactly two days where I spent less than the quota, and entirely too many where e-mail has consumed three or four hours.

    Yes, I could probably find another 20 publications to unsub from, but ultimately, in order to grow my business, I need to have someone else processing the routine e-mail. And because I’m tracking this, I’m able to quantify what had been a gut feeling (e-mail is taking too much time) and plan some ways of moving forward.

    At the same time, once I started tracking it, I was able to bring social media down to something much more reasonable, and still have a good presence. Desiring to keep it to no more than 30 minutes a day has made me much more efficient. Yet my Twitter stream is still very active, I’m participating actively on a few LinkedIn groups, and I show up on Facebook enough to matter (usually feeding in from Twitter).

    Yesterday was a day with no mitigations. Here’s what I did:
    Client work: 99 minutes (a little under)
    My personal work: 73 minutes
    E-mail: 178 minutes (a hair under 3 hours)
    Social media: 20 minutes (right on target)
    Paying bills: 90 minutes (our once or twice a month big effort, an hour over the preferred average, but making up for many days where there was little or nothing)
    Professional reading: 15 minutes (I’ll do some extra today, as there’s a book review I need to move forward)
    Exercise: 35 minutes (would have been longer, but it was too icy to take much of a dog walk, and at night I was literally falling asleep on the exercise bike and had to stop early; thanks to the dog, I’ve managed to stay on track most days)
    I spent only 20 minutes on tidying the office yesterday, but it is emerging from the chaos and feeling a bit less urgent, thanks to putting it on the daily schedule (though I have some goals for what happens when I’m all dug out—like going through my filing cabinets).
    I spent 25 minutes querying reporters and meeting planners yesterday, something for which I haven’t set a goal but have been tracking as of February 15 (it depends entirely on who is looking for what kinds of sources and speakers)—it’s ranged from 20 to 65 minutes per day: sorting and responding to reporters looking for sources on HARO and its competitors, checking out and responding to speaking leads from Google alerts.

    This whole thing is not an exact science. Sometimes I forget to start or stop a tracking category (or I think I’ve hit the button and it doesn’t register), sometimes I get interrupted by a phone call and let a few minutes chip into the category, and of course, sometimes one activity leads right into another, such as responding to e-mails that bring me to social media. But it’s a good approximation of how I’m spending my time. I don’t beat myself up when I’m off-goal, but I do try to compensate for it in other ways.

    It’s also not perfect in that just because I’m spending a block of time on something doesn’t mean I’m experiencing high productivity. Yesterday, for instance, a full hour of my client time was chewed up researching something that should have been very easy to find. Sometimes, I’m not hugely efficient with a task even if I’m clocking it. But other times, I can power up and do a 1000-word article in 30 or 40 minutes (this one. 957 words, took 43 minutes), write a client project, and go go go.

    On the whole, I’ve had a very productive and focused two months, and I’d call the experiment a big success. One that will continue until I have a reason to stop.

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