Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.
Mycelium mushrooms reclaiming oil spills, sequestering carbon, fighting disease, hunger, and pests, more. One of the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. A must-view.
He even makes a claim that the Internet is essentially humanized mushroom technology.
After the Madoff scandal, the collapse of the stock market, and all the rest, we need recession-busters and we need a business culture of ethics and sustainability. Here are three simple steps that could make it happen:
1. Sign the Business Ethics Pledge–demonstrate your understanding that ethical businesses work better, and your commitment (which your customers will love) to conduct your business ethically.
2. Tell at least 100 others (you’ll get a resource guide offering a dozen easy ways to do this, once you sign). better yet, tell a few thousand.
3. Take advantage of the option you have as a Pledge signer to get my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, at a very deep discount ($9.95 instead of $17.50).
4. Read a chapter a week and put at least one idea into practice.
By around May, you’ll have finished the book–and chances are good that your business will be thriving as you implement these life-changing strategies and demonstrate to the world–and your own financial team–that these ways actually work.
Why not give it a try?
The news is terrible again: Dreadful violence in Gaza and Iraq, charities bankrupted by the Madoff scam, military forces massing on the India-Pakistan border, an open homophobe giving the invocation at the Obama inauguration, tough times for industries from publishing to retail to manufacturing, rampant poverty around the world (of material goods, housing, medical care, educational opportunity, and more) and a finance and foreign policy team that sure doesn’t seem a lot like the “change” mantra we were promised before the election.
And yet, this lyric from “Tommy” keeps playing in my head: “I have no reason to be overoptimistic…but somehow when you smile, I can brave bad weather!”
Yes, I know–the next part of the Tomm7 story is no cause for optimism. Neither is the world around us today.
But as 2008 draws to a close, I am still optimistic. I think the generation that is living now will fix the climate change problem. I’m hoping the generation of my future grandchildren might be able to do something about war and poverty.
I think the potential exists to transform the world we live in into something beautiful and powerful, to stake the claim on the rightful heritage of all people. But it will take all of us working together.
Decades ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that all of us deserve four freedoms:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
It’s still a pretty good list. Freedom from want and fear includes freedom from environmental catastrophe, hunger/poverty, or war. What can each of us do to help the world achieve this?
Your holiday spending can support sustainability goals. It’s not that hard. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Plenty more eco-friendly gift and living ideas at https://www.frugalfun.com/ – look for the back issues of Monthly Frugal Fun Tips as well as Frugal & Fashionable Living magazine.
Shel Horowitz has been combining frugality and sustainability for over 20 years, including his e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook.
Back in March, I got the kind of call that every writer dreams about. An editor at a major publisher telling me she loved the proposal, and could we talk? The last time I got a call like that from a major publisher was back in 1991.
Of course we could talk! We talked and talked and talked. The first contract they sent me arrived in June, and was unacceptable. I flagged over a dozen areas that I wanted changed. And we kept talking, although there were periods of several weeks when they seemed to disappear and didn’t return my calls. But then, just when I would start to think they’d changed their minds, they’d be back in my inbox and on my voicemail, ready to move forward. And usually, right about when they showed up again was when my co-author’s literary agent would go incommunicado for another few weeks.
In mid-September, another draft of the contract arrived. It didn’t give me anywhere near everything that I’d asked for, but it was a huge improvement. I was almost ready to sign, but two “deal-breaker” clauses had to be changed. One of them was the original due date of October 1, 2008, to submit the manuscript, and the other had to do with my existing intellectual property. And the co-author also had one clause to change.
Just this week, the third draft arrived. And this time, it’s something that we can all sign. Yippee!
It’s been a long process, but I’m not sorry.
As you can imagine, the temptation was strong to go flying off the handle, accuse people, or otherwise engage in behavior that might have felt good at the moment but would have done nothing except to dig myself into a deep hole. I resisted the temptation. I stayed positive and confident, even while pressing my demands in a friendly but firm way.
No matter how many times I called and got voicemail, I never left a negative message. No matter how many weeks went by with no communication, I always approached each new call without recrimination. I listened politely to the editor complain about the agent, and on other calls, the agent complain about the editor. But when I needed to complain I vented to someone who had no involvement in the deal.
And now, finally, we have a deal that all four parties–I, my co-author, his agent, and the editor at the publishing house–are all happy with.
This has been a long, drawn-out exercise in the principles I discuss in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First: of being truly people-centered, of getting what you want by being nice, and of thinking long-term.
In fact, those principles got me the contract in the first place. There’s a well-known author who originally came to me as a customer; he ordered my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit through my website. We began a relationship, I sent him an essay (unpaid) for one of his books, he did an appearance on my radio show…and he asked me, out of the blue, after over a year of corresponding, if I’d like the contact information for his editor at this publishing house.
In other words, this stuff works.
And I started work on the new book yesterday. I think it’s gong to be the best and most important book I’ve done, and I’m fully expecting that it’ll be a best-seller.
It’s an exciting journey. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.
By Shel Horowitz
This post is in three parts:
7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.
My Personal Poverty Story
Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.
When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.
I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.
Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.
Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.
What’s Wrong Right Now
But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.
And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?
Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.
Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.
Prescription to End Poverty
But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.
So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!
While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.
Guest Blog By Lauren Bloom
[Note from Shel: Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement and forgiveness, starts tonight, and I’m pleased to post this timely commentary on the economy, forgiveness, and Yom Kippur from my new friend Lauren Bloom]
This week marks the observance of Yom Kippur, or the “Day of Atonement,” the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur offers practicing Jews the opportunity to request and receive forgiveness for their mistakes and broken promises throughout the year. It’s a lovely tradition, and one that recognizes a fundamental fact about each and every one of us: We all make mistakes and, when we do, we need to apologize for them.
Just this week, we’ve seen what colossal damage corporate greed and dishonesty can do. As Shel Horowitz observed in this blog less than a month ago, the financial crisis gripping America could have been avoided if Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other investment banks had followed common sense ethical principles. But because they let avarice overcome their good sense, American taxpayers are out $700 billion that may never be recovered, thousands of people have lost their jobs, retirees have watched their pension assets dwindle, the credit markets have dried up, homeowners across the country are facing foreclosure, and there’s no end to the crisis in sight. Somebody – the greedy financiers who created this disaster, the regulators who let them get away with it, the corporate Boards who failed to ask tough questions -– owes the rest of us a huge apology.
When a mistake is this enormous it can be tempting to say that an apology wouldn’t do any good, but nothing could be further from the truth. The bigger the mistake, the more an apology becomes a necessary first step toward healing. This week of Yom Kippur offers a wonderful opportunity for everyone who contributed to the financial crisis, regardless of their religious affiliation, to step forward and ask the American people for forgiveness.
Thank you, Shel, for the opportunity to guest on The Good Business Blog.
Lauren Bloom is an attorney who speaks and consults on business ethics and the author of The Art of the Apology – How to Apologize Effectively to Practically Anyone. Visit Lauren online at www.businessethicsspeaker.com and www.artoftheapology.com.
Michael Moore’s 10-point bailout plan is better than anything I’ve seen from an economist. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it far, far better than anything being talked about in the halls of Congress (except by people like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Dennis Kucinich)? I certainly think so.
Here’s a piece I especially like:
4. IF YOUR BANK OR COMPANY GETS ANY OF OUR MONEY IN A “BAILOUT,” THEN WE OWN
YOU. Sorry, that’s how it’s done. If the bank gives me money so I can buy a
house, the bank “owns” that house until I pay it all back — with interest.
Same deal for Wall Street. Whatever money you need to stay afloat, if our
government considers you a safe risk — and necessary for the good of the
country — then you can get a loan, but we will own you. If you default, we
will sell you. This is how the Swedish government did it and it worked
Yikes! Seven hundred billion of our tax dollars to bail out Wall Street–and that’s on top of what’s already been spent on Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.
That’s $700,000,000,000. Now, I might support a bailout if we got our money’s worth out of it–but not this bailout–not only doesn’t it give us what we want, it includes one of the most dangerous and far-reaching clauses ever included in any legislation in this country:
“Decisions by the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
That’s worse than a mere blank check. It’s complete and total immunity from oversight.
What on earth is the rush to pass such a bill? No one should have that kind of power.
Then let’s look at the rest of the bill. As I understand it, it…
In short, this is a free gift: break our economy and bring home a prize. Can you say, “corporate welfare”? And rather than paying for it out of general revenues, forcing those who never benefited to cough up the dough, let’s look at the bailout funding plan proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, taking the revnue from a surtax on those who made their killing and now want to get off with no consequences–yeah, it was OUR economy that they killed.
If it were up to me, I’d say the public should gain equity in the rescued companies, and any CEO compensation package should not exceed a percentage of the net profits to the company, and layoffs or bankruptcies mean automatic forfeiture of all bonuses. And salary, as opposed to bonuses, could be set at something realistic, say, $200,000-$500,000 (or as a reasonable multiple, say, 10-20x, of the lowest-paid full-time worker’s income). That’s still far more than most Americans have to live on. Bonuses beyond that should be based on performance: creating profitable companies, jobs, investments in renewable energy, etc. This system of rewarding the worst behavior and the worst performance is just plain crazy.
I’ve already told my Congressional representatives. Have you?
I can’t help wondering–would Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and other fallen giants be in such trouble if they’d followed common-sense ethical principles?
My award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, suggests a number of reasons to say no to a sale, focused on core ideas of honesty, integrity, and quality. In other words, successful businesses have standards both for how they behave and for whom they choose to do business with.
So many of the loans coming apart in the subprime crisis didn’t meet the basic criteria of quality–there was no assurance that the borrowers had enough resources to pay back the loans.
Yes, these loans provided a path to home ownership for many Americans who could not have otherwise afforded them–a worthy goal. But those ownerships turned out to be temporary, and those forced from their homes are now in worse shape. Perhaps if proper lending criteria had been applied, the market would have responded by lowering inflated home prices–and those who got burned would have had a safer and more secure path to real home ownership, and the financial titans wouldn’t be fighting for air.
Oh, and one more question: Why was Bear Stearns considered worthy of a bailout (something I wasn’t at all sure was a good idea) but not these latest casualties?