Category: Demographics/Psychographics

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , ,

Relax and take some deep breaths. Get time in nature and in physical exercise. And think about these truths:

  1. Just forget about the polls. They self-acknowledge that when an election is as they all seem to think it is, the margin of error is greater than the projected margin of victory. In other words, each state they forecast could go either way.
  2. Judge more by both the magnitude and demographics of early voting. 76 million people have voted ahead, even though society has recovered from the pandemic that created a huge wave of early voting four years ago. Women and youth are very prominent in these early returns, and that bodes well for the Democrats.
  3. Remember that we will probably not know the results Tuesday night and maybe not for a few days, because all these early votes have to be added into the tabulating machines and some states don’t allow that until after the polls close—and because really close races will trigger recounts (by hand, in some places). The only exception would be if the votes are so overwhelmingly in one direction that adding in the early votes won’t change the results. And that’s not likely in the seven swing states that will determine the winner. So don’t get anxious because the result can’t be called yet. That’s normal.
  4. As the campaign has progressed, so has enthusiasm for Harris, including endorsements from not just A-list celebrities with enormous followings but also many former Trump staffers. Meanwhile, facing diminishing crowds, lots of empty seats, and people leaving early, Trump continues to deliberately alienate large sectors of the electorate with his hatreds, vindictiveness, name calling—and rambling narratives that simply don’t make any sense. And not only is Trump’s mental acuity seemingly on a rapid decline, so is his vaunted physical strength. He had trouble opening the door of that garbage truck that he rode (he was in the passenger seat, so no, he didn’t drive it) around the airport tarmac).

So those are some of the reasons why you shouldn’t waste energy fretting about the result until we know the result. And by then, I’m hoping we’ll have something to celebrate. Last month, I blogged ten reasons why I think Harris will win. My analysis has gotten validation from a number of sources, among them Michael Moore and Rachel Bitecofer. One day before the election, and after spending four weekend afternoons knocking on doors in a swing state, I remain calm and optimistic.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, language, localism/locavore, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Networking, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I just came across a 20-something marketing genius who is not in the business of business. He’s the Democratic Party Chair for Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte and environs). His job is to make sure Democrats vote on or before November 5, 2024.

Regardless of your politics, you can learn a lot from Drew Kromer in this 22-minute interview with Substack pundits Robert Hubbell and Jessica Craven. A few of my takeaways:

  • Understand your market, deeply. Kromer knows that his market is the roughly 500,000 registered Democrats in his county–and especially the huge subset that doesn’t tend to vote.
  • Craft your messaging as a win-win. To get his army of 5000 volunteers(!!!), Kromer didn’t say, “please come out and canvas, work your butt off in all sorts of weather, get doors slammed in your face” or even “come out and canvas, for the future of the country and to protect democracy.” I’ve canvassed for candidates and ballot initiatives, and I’ve experienced both of those His pitch was, ‘Hey, we’re having a party and it’s really close to where you live, come on out, have a good time, and meet neighbors who share your values’ (single quote marks because I’m paraphrasing).
  • Deploy resources where they do the most good. Kromer’s fundraising went into staff on the ground, a far more effective allocation than TV ads, which will not reach the typical unmotivated Gen Z voter who doesn’t consume much if any broadcast TV. A good ground game, where people are listening and talking and interacting with potential voters, is far more effective.
  • Keep the bigger vision in mind. Kromer says that if Democrats win his county, they win North Carolina. And if they win NC, they win the race. He shared his vision of a commentator on Election Night, having the results come in, saying on-air “What the hell happened in Mecklenburg,” and calling both the state and the nation for the Dems.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of my regular readers messaged me Sunday night to ask if I planned to blog about Biden’s withdrawal. I said yes, but only once I’d figured out which angle to focus on. There are quite a few.

Monday morning, at 5:25 a.m., I had the lightning-bolt insight that I didn’t have to pick just one angle. This is a complex issue with many parts, and I can explore as many of those parts as I want to! So after an unsuccessful attempt to get a bit more sleep, I first sat down at the keyboard at 5:45 a.m., on five hours of sleep, and finally finished the first draft at 9:05 p.m. Then my wife suggested I break it into two pieces. In the clear light of morning, I followed her advice 😉.

Here are the first four:

 

  1. It’s Not About His Age!

There’s nothing magic about passing 80 that makes you suddenly lose all your ability. Pablo Casals was still making beautiful music into his 90s. Pete Seeger was still writing great songs, though he couldn’t sing them very well anymore. Grandma Moses (who didn’t even start painting until her late 70s) and Picasso were still making art. My activist friend, Arky Markham, used her public 100th birthday party to raise funds for her charity, while three years later her friend and mine, Frances Crowe, used HER public 100th birthday party to organize a demonstration for social justice. Her vision was “100 people with 100 signs for 100 causes;” she got 300. Strom Thurmond still displayed his reactionary politics as a US Senator into his 90s and served beyond his hundredth birthday. Though his Wikipedia bio notes that he wasn’t very competent for his last decade, that still means he was an effective senator long past the age Biden would have been at the end of his second term.

 

  1. But Biden’s Decline is Real—And So Is Trump’s

And yet, aging is real. We all age differently. Biden has been increasingly erratic. I believe George Clooney’s statement that the Biden he saw at a June fundraiser was not the strong, competent leader of the State of the Union Address or his more recent speech to NATO but “was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” In an op-ed published in The New York Times on July 17, Clooney writes the Biden he was with last month “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010” or “even the Joe Biden of 2020.”

I was also deeply concerned that Biden himself told a meeting of governors that he doesn’t want to schedule events past 8 p.m. because he needs to get more sleep. Unfortunately for Biden, being president doesn’t get you a lot of sleep. You’re going to be woken up frequently to deal with crises, and your schedule will demand late-night meetings. At least the president doesn’t have to deal with senior night-driving issues and drive there, as some of us do.

Even though his withdrawal was reluctant and belated, Biden has been deservedly lauded for putting his country ahead of his own ambition—something his recent opponent has proven over and over again that he is incapable of doing. Although you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage since the debate, Trump’s mental acuity (never his strongest suit) has also plunged. His speeches have been incoherent for months. As far back as April, Newsweek highlighted a prominent psychologist’s analysis on the David Pakman show that Trump was “faltering.” But for some reason, this story didn’t make many waves in the rest of the media, or in the public consciousness. Trump’s use of violent rhetoric, including plagiarizing Hitler not just once but on numerous occasions, got slightly more attention, but the media didn’t focus on it the way they did on Biden’s debate failure. I’ll go into more detail in Angle #5, in Part II.

 

  1. Deceiving the Populace Did Nobody Any Favors

The campaign should have been open and honest that Biden was declining. And Biden himself should have declared truthfully that even with just one term, he had one of the greatest records of accomplishment of any president in history—getting more done in one term than many presidents accomplish in two, despite never having control over both houses of Congress—and  it was time for him to relax, step back, and let a younger person get a turn to be the knight in shining armor. The ~14 million who voted for Biden in the primary should have been made aware that these flaws were showing up often enough to be worrisome—and they should have been presented with other choices. Challengers should have been given room to ramp up ahead of the primaries so that those 14 million voters would have been involved in choosing his successor.

And Biden’s record really is remarkable. Beyond the obvious big deals like bringing the economy back from the brink, hastening the end of the pandemic through science-based policy, passing infrastructure and recovery acts with a lot of good green stuff, walking his talk on supporting people of color and LGBTQ folks, and being the most labor-friendly president ever, here are 30 accomplishments you may not have heard about that harnessed the administrative power of the federal government to make huge progress on issues ranging from keeping our records private to shifting farming and energy to far greener paths to building stronger relations between countries that are historic enemies (such as Japan and South Korea).

 

  1. Biden Gained Office While Hinting that He Would Only Serve One Term

Recognizing that his age was an issue even in 2020, Biden signaled that he wouldn’t be likely to run again in 2024. While he didn’t come out and promise not to run again, private messaging was leaked to the public back then that strongly implied he would not seek a second term.

Later this week, I’ll post Part II, with more angles to examine, including a big surprise about the Democratic Party. As soon as it goes live, I’ll post a link here. If you post a comment, I’ll tag you when it’s ready.

 

Lifelong activist, author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker Shel Horowitz helps businesses succeed by building in environmental healing and social justice. His award-winning 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Find him at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environmenl, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, media-general, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Along with every other decent human being, I deplore political violence. And as much as I despise his politics AND his character, I wish Donald Trump a speedy recovery from the wound inflicted by a would-be assassin with an assault rifle.

BUT that doesn’t mean we need to stop campaigning. It doesn’t mean we should fail to make the most of the opportunity that this criminal’s attack on another criminal creates. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should slink off with our tails between our legs because the MAGAs tell us “this is not the time!” It’s never the time, according to them.

And it absolutely doesn’t mean we should roll over play dead, and abandon hope just because Biden had a bad night in the recent debate or just because Trump may get sympathy votes for getting shot. Trump (who is only 3-1/2 years younger, by the way) had a bad night too, if you filter against fact-checking. He spewed blustery nonsense for 90 minutes, nearly all of it either blatantly false or totalitarian fantasy.

Here’s what we should be saying at every possible chance:

It’s time for the United States of America to stand behind the value of not getting shot by a random psycho at a school, a movie theater, a supermarket, a religious service, a concert, or anywhere else. And Trump cannot lead that effort. After all, he:

By contrast, President Biden issued a powerful Executive Order promoting gun safety and managed against the odds to gain passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he calls “the most significant bipartisan gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.  The Act provides communities with new tools to combat gun violence, including enhanced gun background checks for individuals under age 21, funding for extreme risk protection orders and other crisis interventions, and increased mental health resources to help children impacted by gun violence heal from the resulting grief and trauma.” If Biden chooses to step down, the Democrat who will challenge Trump in November is also likely to favor sensible gun laws. The Democratic Party as a whole has been advocating common-sense gun safety for many years.

Finally, let’s remember three very important things:

First, just because the MAGA crazies have taken over the Republican Party doesn’t mean they’ve taken over the minds of mainstream Republicans. We see this in the typical 20 percent that Nikki Haley continued to draw even after she suspended her campaign! And I’ve also seen it in my conversations with many Republicans who tell me they don’t like Trump’s character, his lack of understanding of the issues, his massive narcissism, his open racism, his lack of a moral compass, etc. His support is weak even in his own party, in other words. Many could easily defect—as more than 100 prominent Republican have publicly pledged—to RFK, Jr., to the Democrats, to a Republican write-in, to to the Libertarians, or simply leave that space blank on their ballots.

Second, the Republican positions on many issues are wildly out of step with mainstream views. They oppose women’s reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, immigration (even legal immigration), voting rights, rights to protest against repressive governments, environmental protection, labor rights, and more. Both the Republican platform and the truly sinister Project 2025 (written largely by people who worked in Trump’s administration) embrace these extremist proposals—as do, apparently, a majority of the Supreme Court, which recently gutted environmental protection, declared Trump immune from prosecution for “official” acts, and of course, a year ago, overturned Rowe v. Wade—becoming the first Supreme Court to remove a constitutional right. And if that weren’t enough, Trump himself has alienated and insulted many large constituencies—veterans, people with disabilities, women, Palestinians, Muslims, Latin Americans, to name a few—and, starting January 6, 2021, thrown even some of his most loyal supporters like former Attorney General William Barr and former Vice President Mike Pence under the bus.

And third, Trump is not an attractive candidate to swing voters. He is now a 34-count convicted criminal and was found in civil court to have committed sex crimes. His rambling, off-topic speeches and compulsive lying could be evidence of serious mental decline. And of course, both men have a track record. Trump got little done besides his economy-crushing tax cut, while Biden, for all his flaws, has made huge progress on the economy, on recovering from the pandemic, on the environment, and on the US’s position as a world leader. On every issue where Biden has been bad (especially Gaza), Trump is demonstrably worse for progressives.

So let’s get out there and mobilize people to vote Democratic—including spreading the word about the huge negative impact of Trump’s proposals to people who don’t always vote for Democrats. Despite its problems, we still have a democracy worth saving!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I finally got around to watching Jon Stewart’s return monologue. Yuck! I was a fan of Jon Stewart but this is ageist crap! Yes, Biden is old. So is Trump, as Stewart admits. While I have plenty of bones to pick with Biden (and I’ve been in the streets protesting some of his policies, especially around immigration and the Gaza war), we don’t have ranked choice voting in US presidential elections. And that means that absent some deep and unpredicted shift in the political landscape, either Biden or Trump will be elected in November.

There are many reasons to vote for Biden over Trump. While flawed (as we all are), he’s a basically decent person who has mostly used his time in office to better the lives of ordinary USArians and to improve the condition of the world. And despite a completely dysfunctional Congress, he has still managed to:

Now, about his opponent:

 

Bias Against Biden

Biden is not an existential threat to democracy. Biden was handed a government in complete chaos that had burned bridges with many of its allies and built back a functional government that honors its promises. Biden is about the good of the country, while Trump appears to be mostly concerned with leveraging his position for profit and inflating his already overweight ego. And Biden’s record of accomplishment after three years in office far outstrips Trump’s four years. 

So please tell me why the media is constantly dissing Biden because of his age and a perceived lack of mental acuity that by any reasonable standard is in better shape than Trump’s. How is it, for example, that the Washington Post (a liberal newspaper that prides itself on good journalism) actually ran a chart comparing how old Biden would be at the END of a second term with Trump’s age at the BEGINNING of a second term. 

I have that chart in an email dated February 9, 2024 entitled “The 5-Minute Fix: How should Democrats address Biden’s unpopularity?”; I can’t find it on washingtonpost.com and therefore can’t link to it. Because it’s copyrighted material, I can’t reproduce it here, but I’d be glad to forward that newsletter to anyone who requests it through the contact form. I can also link to the February 10th Today’s Edition Substack  newsletter by Robert Hubbell that mentions this chart along with five front-page New York Times stories about Biden’s age. And these are the liberals! WTF?

 

Proof that Age Doesn’t Matter

Finally, let’s look at five among thousands of models for aging with power:

  • Grandma Moses had a 25-year career as a painter, BEGINNING AT AGE 76
  • Pete Seeger was still writing and recording songs well into his 90s
  • Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa at age 76
  • My friends Frances Crowe and Arky Markham were both still activists on their 100th birthdays
  • Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn and sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer were working on the sexuality of old people into their 80s (disclosure: I was a VISTA organizer for the Gray Panthers in 1979-80 and met Maggie once when she was 75)

You are never too old—or too young—to make a difference. Jon Stewart should know better, and so should we. Work to get ranked-choice voting and other reforms such as those outlined at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-time-to-talk-about-electoral-reform/ (scroll down to the section entitled “A range of possible electoral reforms”).

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics-International, Green Business, Innovation, localism/locavore, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

A lot of people wonder how to get started with creating a social enterprise: a business that from the beginning is designed to improve lives.

Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit
Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit

[This post was written a few years ago but left unpublished. I’ve decided it’s still worth sharing because it shows one possible model for starting a new social-benefit company from nothing. I’ve tweaked and updated a few things, but left the chronology and my corespondent’s writing as they were. While I got permission to quote the correspondence, I don’t feel comfortable identifying him or the company.]

Some time back, a Facebook friend in the Philippines asked me for advice on a set of amazing goals. I got his permission to share the relevant parts of our conversation. Since English is not his first language, please cut him some slack on the grammar issues:

I’ve been finished trying to change politics for about 5 years. Focused on poverty and the environment here since then. My company is focused on 3 things right now: 1. Disaster relief during calamities. We earmark 10% to that. 2. Trying to raise a new high school within 5 years. There are two towns nearby that have no high school. Those kids stop their education at grade six and enter poverty. We will need to increase our revenue stream in coming years to do that. 3. Making the entire town solar powered. Not only for the environment, but for the people. You see, the electric bill is actually higher than rent here. For instance, my office manager pays 900 pesos per month for rent and 1600 pesos for electricity. If we could convert much of the country to solar, we could change the entire economy, freeing up much more disposable income for the people. Those are my 3 main focuses. Any ideas to help or partner are always appreciated Shel.

I responded:

Wow, wonderfully ambitious and very people-centered. 

First of all, the key to spreading solar is to eliminate the capital expense up front for those with limited resources. So, just as an example (your numbers might vary), you charge 75% of the customer’s current monthly electric bill, allocate 50% of that 75% toward paying off the solar system, and split the other 50% of the 75% into a school fund and a disaster relief fund, both administered by a trusted outside charity that is scrupulously honest and can’t be believably accused of corruption. Since the Philippines is very sunny, it should be easy to convince business people and homeowners to sign up.  Renters might be harder, since they would be improving someone else’s building and they’d also need permission from the landlord, but if the economic incentive is sufficient, it should still work out ok. To cover the up-front capital costs, you could look to the utility company, private foundations (including those based outside the Philippines but working in-country), and possibly government funding. And remember that solar isn’t just electricity. Solar hot water has a much faster payback and can  be done really cheaply.

Don’t forget that building the buildings is not enough; you also have to fund teachers and staff, textbooks, and other operating costs. Of course, you’ll build green net-zero-energy buildings that are clean and energy self-sufficient—or better still, net-positive energy that feed surplus power back into the system).

Second, I would have better ideas for you if you tell me more about what your company does and give me the URL. If it’s in Tagalog, Google will probably translate, but an English-language page would be better as Google does a very poor job.

And received this reply:

Our company is called <name>. We did obtain our url at <address> but we just have a holding page now under construction. Our company manufactures products that I have designed here in the Philippines. I outsourced the factories…and they will sell mainly as exports to the US.

Im planning on funding the solar equip with company money and writing it all off, so no expenditure to the people. About the High School…yes it must be staffed etc. Luckily, my first cousin is a High School Principal already here. She is ready to take the reins on that project when we become ready.

We are launching our first products now Shel. Mostly through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog company. Some are launching in October, and others in April 2018. We have some pretty unique, one of a kind products. Our first you can see is a one off, the Recreational Tube in the images. The second phase is a line of innovative wood products…and our 3rd phase comes in 2019. It is a line of coolers and food storage containers that will require capital generated in 2018 for injection molds.

What can you take away from this? Here are five lessons I see—and I bet you can spot a few others:

    1. Think systemically. My friend understood the holistic connection between converting to solar and alleviating poverty–a very important connection when you’re marketing to people at the bottom of the pyramid, in economic terms.
    2. It helps to be very specific when describing a dream. Make it tangible for yourself and others.
    3. Know what key pieces you need to have in place before starting, and which you can fill in later.
    4. Be clear on how to keep capital costs down, especially at first. If you would have to spend huge sums to set up in-house manufacturing, start by contracting it out and avoiding all those capital expenses. Even if you’re a one-person business, there are lots of ways to cut costs. I saw a lot of my competitors in my one-person service business spend lavishly on fancy offices and furniture. I started my business working from home in 1981, and I’m still working from home in 2023–which enabled me to start being profitable at a much lower revenue point.
    5. Think like your target market—and if your market has little or no disposable income, think about ways to make it affordable to them.

What would you add to this list?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Ethics-International, Innovation, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Check out this TEDx talk by nonviolence researcher Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth was originally quite hostile to nonviolent social change movements–until her own statistical analyses showed them (and us) that nonviolent resistance was far more effective than violent insurrection. Those who used it were more likely to achieve their goals, even “impossible” goals like unseating a government. AND they were more likely to achieve lasting change that didn’t just swing back with the next change in government. In fact, successful nonviolent revolutions were 15 percent more likely to avoid relapsing into civil war.

This validates what people like Stephen Zunes, George Lakey, Barbara Deming, MLK, Gandhi (also not a pacifist in principle, but totally committed on the strategy, BTW), my late friends Dave Dellinger and Wally and Juanita Nelson, Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy, and many others have said for decades.

I think I can shed some light on why this is true:
1) You can’t outgun the state. They have tanks, WMDs, and lots of person-power. Engaging in violence is letting them choose the battlefield and the tools. You probably can’t outgun the Oath Keepers either, unless you ARE the state.

2) When the state attacks unarmed civilians, it has a jiu-jitsu effect of creating sympathy for those who are attacked (as is happening in Ukraine right now, and happened so dramatically in the US South in the 1950s and 60s). But when armed radicals attack the state, it creates support for the government, who can then marginalize and isolate the opposition as “terrorists”–and have an excuse to clamp down further on civil liberties.

3) When a government falls by force of arms, the conquerors want to make sure they aren’t taken out next. Thus, the pressure to become more dictatorial, which erodes popular support. I am old enough to remember when the Sandinistas,  thugs like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, and even the Iranian mullahs were welcomed as heroes by the local population, until they turned out to be just as vile as their predecessors, if not more. Some of my older mentors in my youth had watched the same pattern in the USSR, first under Lenin and then under the even crueler thumb of Stalin.

4) But when instead of fissioning society apart, a government seeks to actively unite people across the spectrum and build a better society for all, they can create new institutions that are nearly universally seen as working for the people, rather than the power structure. Such government initiatives typically draw their inspiration from long-term organizing by nonviolent people’s movements. I just returned from South Africa, and one of the people I met there had been a white soldier defending apartheid. Like everyone else I met, black or white, he had enormous respect and admiration for Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the healing/unifying process after nearly 50 years of official apartheid (1948-94) and ingrained racism that dated back decades earlier. If this man, who carried a gun to protect white privilege, can embrace unity oriented black-majority governments, there is hope for all of us.

5) Nonviolent resistance is a shape-shifter. The forces of reaction can never fully predict how it will play out: what tactics and strategies will be invented, deployed, reinvented, and redeployed. It is extremely adaptable to circumstances. Decades ago, Gene Sharp codified a list of 198 nonviolent tactics. That was before the pandemic, and even before the Internet came into common use. A more recent list compiled by the King Center that continues the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. raises the number to 250. From the Old Testament refusal of the midwives Shifrah and Puah to carry out Pharaoh’s command to kill Hebrew baby boys–the first recorded act of civil disobedience that I’m aware of–to the creative use of vehicle caravans (often with only one or two occupants) as a way of demonstrating power and taking up space in the early days of the pandemic when it was unsafe to gather closely in the streets, nonviolent practitioners are natural tactical re-inventors.

Chenoweth points out one more thing: when open protest becomes too risky because of repression, concentration tactics like mass demonstrations may be augmented or replaced by dispersive tactics of quiet resistance (such as Ukrainians replacing road navigation signs with signage urging the Russian invaders to f themselves) that allow even elders, children, and people with disabilities to subvert the authoritarians.

And I personally have experienced the power of creative nonviolence over and over again, taking dozens of forms in movements or actions I participated in (and sometimes helped organize) and in moments of private personal action, including my mom castigating our landlord in front of 9-year-old me because she felt he was unwilling to rent to Blacks, my own one-person witness after the US bombed Libya. Some of these put me at personal risk, including standing with a small group of protestors in front of a much larger group that was hostile to us and probably included a number of people carrying firearms; in others, I took comfort in the strength of numbers. In all of them, I was convinced that nonviolence is more effective than violence in shaking up the power structure, and I’ve been part of winning campaigns (including, among others, the 1977 Seabrook Occupation and the 1999-2000 Save the Mountain campaign) often enough to see that truth validated.

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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 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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