Category: Abundance and Prosperity

Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

Visionary futurist Amory Lovins recently spoke at the Virtual Energy Forum about how to make cars, planes, buildings, power transmission, etc. so much more efficient that we can actually lower carbon impact and reverse climate change. His delivery is not exciting–but his material is life-changing. (You probably have to register to watch it.)

A lot of this is stuff that is feasible to do RIGHT NOW. We could save 3/4 of US electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt, and building new power plants can’t touch that cost. He has 1000 ways to do it.

If the presentation is too technical or dry, or you have trouble accessing it, I profiled Lovins and some of his ideas several years ago, here. Of course, his thinking has advanced since then.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

Scott Cooney writes on Triple Pundit about ecopsychology…the correlation between sustainable lifestyle choices and happiness (which seem to focus, in this particular article, on how much happier Germans are than Americans, even though Americans earn and consume so much more. But Germans have a lot more time off work, and presumably spend some of that time getting close to nature.

While he doesn’t exactly connect the dots–in fact, relying on the reader to make some rather big leaps in assumptions–there is a key takeaway here: that beyond the feel-good aspect of doing what’s right for the earth, sustainable lifestyles also offer inherent psychological benefits, because being outside in a clean and well-functioning environment reduces stress, increases feel-good hormones, etc.

And the implication for marketers–and this, I think, is extremely important–is that when marketing a Green product, you should have some hooks not only about saving the world, but about the better mental state that results in doing what’s right for your soul and your psyche, as well as the earth. I bet some very powerful campaigns could be shaped around this message.

For more on marketing Green,I recommend my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. It includes profiles of people like Amory Lovins and some unique, holistic ways of looking at Green issues in the marketing world.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Triple Pundit’s been getting lots of comments on a post questioning whether nuclear power plant decommissioning schemes can work in today’s economic climate, and stating that this is a reason NOT to build more nukes.

It’s shocking to see how many nuclear defenders have commented. Back in 1979, I wrote my first book about why nuclear power was a terrible idea, and I remain convinced that it is a terrible path. Decommissioning is only one of dozens of serious problems. Just to name a few:

  • Waste disposal that requires secure storage for a quarter of a million years
  • Enormous consequences in event of accident, and insurance coverage that won’t even begin to cover claims (thanks to a very dubious US law called the Price-
    Anderson Act, which both subsidizes the insurance premium and sets wildly unrealistic caps on liability    )
  • Poor safety record to date
  • Net power loss over the entire fuel cycle from mining through waste disposal (and transmission to end-users)
  • Susceptibility to terrorist attacks all along the fuel cycle (not just the heavily protected plants themselves)
  • Loss of liberty due to centralization of police-state force to protect the plants
  • Thermal pollution
  • Radiation leakage
  • Health effects…

    To those who say nonpolluting renewables are just as if not more expensive… 1. Take a look at the work of people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who demonstrates over and over again that when you take a whole-systems approach to locally-grown solar and wind power, economies show up that conventional design and engineering miss completely–like the ability to eliminate a furnace. 2. Count the true costs of nuclear, without all the subsidies and hiding costs by moving them into other budget streams, and the picture is different.

    I put solar hot water on the roof of my 260-year-old farmhouse in cloudy Massachusetts and the system paid for itself in about five years. I admit that the pv system we put in a couple of years later has not performed as well, but I suspect some poor siting choices have much to do with that.

    But even so, solar is widely applicable, environmentally inoffensive, and, coupled with an aggressive program of conservation, could remove the “need” for many nuclear and coal plants. The days of centralized power generation and remote transmission to user sites are probably coming to a close; far too much energy is wasted in transmission.

    On the conservation side, I happen to have written a short, inexpensive ($9.95) e-book called Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle: – this is stuff you can put into practice immediately, and most of the tips cost nothing or almost nothing.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Ethics-International, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Social and Economic Justice

    Answer: I just read provocative articles on BNET on these two topics.

    First, Stacy Blackman, while supporting cause marketing, notes that these products are often more expensive, because the company has to cover the cost of the donation. However, I commented that a successful campaign would bring in enough extra sales volume that this shouldn’t be an issue.

    Second, Jeffrey Pfeffer makes a fascinating case for lowering healthcare costs by improving US workplace conditions and decreasing job stress caused by anticipated layoffs and other factors. He notes lower stress levels AND better working conditions for many European businesses.

    Plenty of footnotes for those who want to check his sources and assumptions.

    Of course, there are many other factors–not the least of which is that most other industrialized countries have shifted healthcare from a privilege of the wealthy to a right for all, using a single-payer system that in many cases pays doctors on salary rather than fee-for-service. HR 676 in the US would bring this sensible system to our shores as well, and by some estimates slash health costs around 30 percent.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

    When are sustainability measures real, and when are they a counterproductive waste of time and money?

    That was one of a several very interesting questions posed by Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans and award-winning author of Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee (Chelsea Green, 2007).

    Dean’s Beans uses only organic fair-trade coffee and cocoa, typically pays farmers well above the fair-trade minimum while still keeping consumer prices very affordable, and reinvests substantial profits into locally governed sustainability/economic development projects in the communities that supply his coffee. He’s also perhaps the business person with the highest integrity that I’ve ever encountered.

    Not surprisingly, his revenues and profits have grown every year, despite the recession.

    In a speech to small business owners in Massachusetts, Cycon described how he had decided not to invest thousands of dollars in a more eco-friendly liner for disposable coffee cups, that in a year would keep about a basketball’s worth of plastic out of the landfill on a year’s volume of 100,000 cups. It didn’t make either economic or environmental sense, he said.

    On the flip side, Cycon was asked to be the organic coffee supplier when Keurig introduced its wildly popular single-serve coffee makers. He looked at the machine, was disturbed by the large amount of plastic that would be consumed, and suggested to the engineers that they redesign it more sustainably, replacing the disposable plastic containers with biodegradable ones made of the same thick paper used to make egg cartons. When the company declined, he refused to supply the coffee, a decision that cost him millions of dollars, but which still feels like the right decision to him. He’s actually looking to develop a competing model that would be more eco-friendly.

    Cycon has also been an agent of change within the coffee industry, challenging companies like Starbucks and Green Mountain to up their percentage of fair-trade sources, and to make much larger donations to village sustainability programs in the coffee lands: $10 million to his $10,000, in one case.
    On the fair trade issue, he points out that if a large coffee roaster sources four percent from fair-trade co-ops, that could mean 96 out of every 100 farmers are not making a living wage.

    His challenge to business in general? Bring CSR and sustainability “deeply into your business” as an integral part of decision-making, and don’t just tack it on at the end. With that attitude, Cycon believes companies can influence their vendors, their customers, and other stakeholders to take many more sustainability steps: from convincing UPS to use biodiesel trucks in the fleet to biodegradable paper from their label supplier.

    Award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and seven other books, Shel Horowitz writes and speaks on driving success through environmental sustainability, business ethics, cooperation (even with competitors), attitude, and extreme service. He is the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

    For many years, I’ve been writing about the Abundance Principle: a corollary to the Law of Attraction that I’ve been espousing long before I ever heard of Law of Attraction. Basically it’s the idea that the universe is abundant; there’s enough good stuff for all, despite kinks in distribution. And that if you focus on this abundance, the world shows itself as an abundant place. This is one of the key principles in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

    Well, today, I’ve just been swimming in the lovely waters of the Abundance Principle. If any one of these things happened in one day, I’d post a Tweet. With all of them happening on the same day, I’d be monopolizing people’s Twitter streams, which would be rude. So I’ll post here instead.

  • After about two months of silence, my negotiating partner in Africa came back with dates and cities for a three-country speaking tour this summer
  • Today, my co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, gave me the first feedback on the just-completed manuscript of my eighth book (and something like his 70th), Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, which will be out in about a year from Wiley–and he’s delighted with it. Yesterday, I finished the edit, and today, I got through all the permissions letters I had to send.
  • A major new sustainability site hired me for an ongoing paying weekly blog. The pay is low, but after over four years of blogging, I can now call myself a professional blogger. And it’s really good visibility, especially with the new book coming out next year.
  • After a week of rain, we finally got a nice day–and Dina and I managed not only our daily dog-hike but also a short bike ride.
  • When I went to the doctor, he said I don’t have an eye infection after all–just allergies
  • Got offered comp tickets for a local theater production in one of my favorite venues
  • Getting some extra exposure on a speaking gig next week
  • Also got comped (ok, so that was last night) on a hotshot marketing conference where I’m going to get to meet some people who’ve been very important to me
  • Potential intern coming tomorrow who’s actually read most of my books; I will have lots to keep her busy!
  • My daughter, still in Spain, seems completely recovered from her illness

    • I have a feeling I’m leaving some things out, but anyway, it’s been a very good day. It’s great when principles I stand for get to play out so positively in real life.

    I wish you similar abundance in your life!

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Okay, we all know the usual places to put money are performing pretty badly right now. But get this: the Empire State Building is embarking on a massive energy retrofit that will return nearly 28 percent a year! The project will cost $13.2 million, not exactly chump change–but will slash energy consumption by 35 to 40 percent, and save $3.8 million a year (considerably more, if energy costs spike back up again). After the third year, that’s nearly $4 million going directly to the bottom line. If the improvements have even a 20-year lifespan, that $13.2 million investment would return $176 million, and that’s with stable energy prices. The number is much, much higher if you factor in average energy cost increases of 5 percent a year. (I’m not going to do the math here, because I don’t know all the factors we’d need to compute–but it’s sure to be at least $200 million, maybe much more).

    Too bad we can’t put our Roth IRAs into renewable-energy retrofits .

    Meanwhile, we can all learn from the creative thinking at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is doing the heavy lifting on this project–for example, remanufacturing the windows on-site to reduce trucking costs in fuel and money. For years, RMI has been generating this kind of holistic, big-picture energy planning that saves many times the cost, and quickly. I profile RMI founder Amory Lovins in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

    Unbelievably stupid quote from the agrochemical trade group Mid America Croplife Association, whose members include the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and other manufacturers of farm chemicals (oh, and can you spot the two grammar errors in those three sentences?):

    Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

    This quote was in an e-mail to the group’s supporters, enclosing a classic-PR letter to Michelle Obama (or “Mrs. Barack Obama,” as the letter calls her–and for which one blogger took the authors to task), apparently authored by Bonnie McCarvel, Executive Director. You can see both MACA’s letter to Michelle Obama and the cover note here.

    As a long-time believer in organic agriculture/sustainability and as someone who eats out of my family’s organic garden and a local organic CSA farm all summer and fall, I was all set to do a rant on the idiocy of this statement. But before jumping in, I Googled around, and decided to focus on some other lessons; that one’s been done about 24,000 times on the blogosphere already.

    Lesson 1: Never say or write anything that will come back to haunt you. As MACA found out, you can’t assume an internal memo will stay internal. so say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to back up your assertions.

    Lesson 2: Backlash is quick and can be humiliating. Numerous petition campaigns have sprung up supporting Michelle’s desire to grow organic, and the already-shaky credibility of the pesticide industry might take a big hit.

    Lesson 3: Old-school PR is no longer enough in a world where journalists no longer stand as intermediaries and gatekeepers between press releases and the public. From a technical PR standpoint, the letter MACA sent to Michelle Obama is quite good: full of reassuring language, on-the-surface well-reasoned arguments about the importance of agriculture, etc. But in a busy, harried world, it doesn’t get to the point; without the controversy, the recipient might not have even figured out (on the quick 30-second scan) that the letter was advocating chemical agriculture. Which hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from picking apart every nuance.

    Lesson 4: Controversy and stupidity are just as sexy to the blogosphere as to traditional media. For all the carefully worded letter to Michelle Obama, what stands out (and is getting most of the attention) is the dumb quote in the supporter cover letter about organic gardening making them shudder.

    Lesson 5: If the mainstream media wants to stay relevant, it needs to be visible. On three different Google searches on this story, including one for the exact quote from the cover letter, I did not see a single mainstream media result in the top three pages. The closest was a non-journalist’s blog quoted (apparently by a content-scraping robot) on the Wall Street Journal site, which was #28. Blogs and newsletters about gardening, sustainability, and progressive politics were all over this story, but the voice of traditional journalism was not being heard. I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole thing was an urban legend, until I finally tracked down the actual letter, on a local-foods blog. As newspapers are folding every week, as electronic news organizations are laying off staff, people will be asking why we need these trained and theoretically unbiased filters, if they’re AWOL on important stories (or if not AWOL, hidden deep under a rock). This will be a critical question. I’m of the strong opinion that we still need journalists to keep politicians and corporations honest, but journalism’s lack of presence on this and other stories makes that a much tougher argument.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

    Someone on LinkedIn asked, “Is there an opportunity for a startup online business to become a successful brand when there are so many established players?” I think my answer is worth sharing here.

    Think back to 1997. Where did you go for search? Probably Yahoo or AltaVista. Google came in and blew them out of the water *because the user experience was so much better.*

    Think about Facebook jumping from academia to mainstream in the last couple of years, right after Rupert Murdoch spent an enormous fortune to buy MySpace–and made MySpace much less relevant.

    Think about Amazon developing the affiliate model, so that any mom-and-pop website could add a bookstore with no work involved–and how that fueled explosive growth.

    So the answer is clearly yes, if you have an attractive user experience that’s better than what else is out there.

    I’d recommend reading the partnering strategies sections in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, https://www.principledprofit.com – it’s far easier to go where there’s already an existing audience than to create your own from scratch.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s in incredibly bad taste to give out 7-figure bonuses to the execs who drove your company (and the whole economy) to ruin while holding your hand out to collect billions in government bailouts. Worse than the auto CEOs flying separate corporate jets to go begging in Washington, at about $20K a pop. This is simply an outrage. Bonuses are supposed to reward performance. This performance is not worth rewarding, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding these bonuses.

    President Obama ordered Secretary Geithner to use “every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.” I totally support his call. And I look forward to seeing these thieving and clueless pretenders to the throne of economic wisdom grovel before Congress tomorrow.

    Of course, if the execs are smart, they’ll donate their huge bonuses to the recovery effort. And if they’re not, it wouldn’t surprise me if they find themselves the victims of physical attacks on their homes or their persons. I don’t condone that kind of violence (in fact, I don’t condone violence at all), but it would be a predictable result of this kind of class warfare mentality, and they should not be shocked to see angry mobs at their gated communities. People have lost their homes, lost their jobs, because of the incompetence of these executives and the companies they operate. To take home bonuses several times the size of the typical American paycheck under these circumstances has no positive benefit, it only serves to incite.

    This is OUR money these companies are squandering, after all.

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