Why do we continue to let ourselves get bound up in thinking that we can’t do anything about the biggest challenges of our time?
I say in my “Impossible is a Dare” talks that we have enough abundance for all, but big kinks in the distribution—which we can fix. Hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change are all resource issues. And when we see them that way, they are all fixable.
Hunger and poverty about not having enough to cover basic necessities; the resource issues are obvious
Wars usually start because of a chain of events that begins with one country’s perception that a different country is taking something that belongs to the first country: land, water, energy sources, minerals, labor ,shipping access, etc. Even religious and ethnic wars trace back to resource conflicts, if we go deep enough.
Catastrophic climate change is a bit different, but it’s still about resources. Instead of being about one country having too much or too little, it’s about using the wrong kinds of resources, or using them in environmentally destructive, socially harmful ways.
In fact, climate solutions require solutions based in abundance. We have to shift from finite, expensive, polluting energy sources such as petroleum products and uranium—whose extraction and refining as well as burning for fuel cause environmental destruction—to infinite, inexpensive, and clean sources such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, magnetic, geothermal, and designing for conservation, deployed at or near the point of use. When we allow ourselves to think abundantly, problems have a way of turning into solutions. Turn loose the socially conscious, environmentally aware engineers!
When companies start thinking about solutions based in abundance, they have even greater incentive to solve these problems—because they can see the profit in it. But too often, we “should” them with guilt and shame—very ineffective tools. Instead of nagging them about how the world is suffering because of their actions, let’s show them how acting differently can address these problems not out of guilt and shame but in creating and marketing profitable products and services.
The creativity of business can create markets where none existed, using technologies we’ve never harvested. Think about how a small-space indoor vertical garden can provide fresh veggies in urban food deserts…how green lighting options such as solar-powered LEDs that replace toxic and flammable kerosene can better the environment, health, safety, and the local economy all at once…how studying nature’s amazing engineering—”biomimimcry”—can create new products like adhesives modeled after gecko feet or a fuel-sipping plane designed to mimic the most aerodynamic birds.
Does your work fulfill you? (And I mean, really fulfill you?)
Do you go to bed smiling each day because you know you’ve made the impact you were put on this planet to make…and wake up excited and ready to do it again?
If you just answered, “No,” you’re not alone. In fact, a staggering 90% of the global working population is unsatisfied with the work they do, according to a Gallup study.
What if I told you that you CAN identify – and monetise [yes, we’re using Aussie spellings today, because our summit host is Australian] – your passion…so you live a life you love, making the impact you were born to make?
You can!
My friend Rita Joyan has been exactly where you are, if you resonate with the above. She’s cracked the code on monetising your passion (by doing it for herself!). Now, she’s bringing together top experts from around the world (including me) to share our best secrets and tips for doing exactly that, in a brand new virtual event: Monetise Your Passion, beginning 13th February, 2017.
Speakers at Rita Joyan’s Monetise Your Passion Summit
When you go to the link above and sign up to join us for this powerful, complimentary interview series, you’ll hear personal, real-life stories of total transformation from experts who have all found and monetised their passion.
We’re living each and every day around our passion – which means we’re also living highly-fulfilled, complete and joyful lives!
Now, we want to help you do the same.
Join us, and:
Discover your passion, and how to get past the blocks that may keep you from monetising it.
Learn the #1 mistake most people make that keeps them stuck — struggling to make money with their passion — while others (in the same business) make consistent money doing what they love.
Find out how to crack the code when it comes to monetisingyourpassion, so you can spend more time with your family, be your own boss, and make an impact.
Get proven methods to stop being ‘busy,’ and start being productive, so you can make big strides toward earning a living with your passion.
And more!
Plus, you’ll receive amazing gifts and resources designed to assist you on this incredible journey toward making money with your passion!
Click the link below and take the first step, by reserving your spot – GRATIS – for Monetise Your Passion here, now:
I want you to know, I believe in this message (I’m a living example of it) and Rita’s library of training, and I highly recommend this interview series. Rita practises what she teaches (including escaping a miserable 9–5 in order to create a life and business that allows her to give back and make money at the same time), and it’s now her mission to support other existing and aspiring entrepreneurs in doing the same.
I can’t wait for you to join us 😉
Warmly,
P.S. Sign up now and start creating a new, happier, more fulfilled life for yourself! You can’t imagine how EVERYTHING changes, when you live and monetise your passion. Plus, this virtual event (which has the potential to change your life!) is completely FREE! Why wait another moment? Reserve your spot by clicking the link in the next line:
This is an excerpt from Chris Brogan‘s email newsletter this morning—used with his permission. I’ve been reading Chris’s stuff for at least a decade; it’s one of the few newsletters I make a point of reading regularly. You can subscribe at the link in his name.
Chris Brogan, author and thought leader
He managed to boil down the whole planning process into just three questions. I think that’s awesome, and am pleased to share it with you. The three bullets are Chris’s writing (and then I pick up again afterward):
What’s the story? – What are the elements I need to be thinking about in this moment, including the big and small picture, the players, the interactions at hand.
How do I play? – What are the rules and mechanics that guide me? This is important because this is where you subtract all the “extra” stuff. How you play often has simple rules in any situation.
How do I win? – This is strategy and approach. What will fit your time available? Where are you strongest? What’s the fastest thing you can do to accomplish the goal?
Is business success really that simple? Well, let’s just say you could spend quite a bit of time answering those three questions and then analyzing your answers. I’d see it’s at least a might good jumpstart.
In this profile in Ethical Corporation magazine—which calls him “CSR’s leading thinker”—Elkington restates his view that regenerative business models could create at least $12 trillion in opportunity and add up to 380 million jobs by 2030.
John Elkington, CSR thought leader
Elkington has some very cogent things to say about the shocking changes in geopolitics last year, from the Brexit vote to today’s change of US president.
But maybe the most intriguing thing is this little snippet:
…He is travelling to Germany to meet with Covestro, a spin-out from the German chemicals giant Bayer, which has just opened a plant using CO2 in place of polymers in mattresses and upholstered furniture.
So why not turn carbon dioxide into a salable product?
Insatiable curiosity about the world has always powered my writing and speaking. I wanted to know more about this. A few seconds of searching led me to Covestro’s page about this technological and environmental breakthrough. While the writing shows distinct signs of a non-nartive-speaking author, the information is quite cool.
As someone who is decidedly NOT a fan of the annual Black Friday shopping orgy—and who participates instead in celebrating Buy Nothing Day (like Black Friday, always on the day after US Thanksgiving), I just love this!
Patagonia had pledged to donate all of its worldwide online and offline revenues on Black Friday to environmental causes.
The outdoor clothing maker previously announced it would donate 100 percent of its global retail and online sales on Black Friday. It says it expected to reach $2 million in sales, but instead generated five times more. Patagonia says the fundraiser “attracted thousands who have never purchased anything from Patagonia before.”
Mind you, that’s not the profits from its $10 million in sales. It’s the whole amount, the gross revenue. Nothing set aside for product costs, operating costs, or anything else. I hope this generates many loyal new customers and lifelong fans. May the company’s generosity be a source of continued abundance, and maybe next year they can repeat and do even better.
All I can say is BRAVO and WOW!
Personally, I’ve been a fan of Patagonia for decades. I even profile the company in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I didn’t happen to hear about this ahead, but might have actually moved from participating in Buy Nothing Day to making an online Black Friday purchase to support the environment. That would not have felt like the crass commercialism that seems to fill every moment of airspace in November and December, and feels especially extreme on Black Friday.
If you don’t think customer service is part of marketing—and maybe the most important part—this post is must reading for you.
Old movie theater marquee. Photo by Marcus Buckner.
Great Service Builds a Business
Great customer service builds long-term customers, relationships, and ambassadors for your brand! Just ask Nordstrom. They surely don’t compete on price.
Ask Southwest Airlines, which made its original reputation on low prices but now is known for exemplary service in an industry that generally treats its customers like crap. Many times, I’ve actually paid a bit more to fly Southwest, because I know I can check bags for free and—more importantly—change my ticket if there’s an issue.
Southwest earned my loyalty by saving an expensive cruise vacation that was about to go up in smoke when our airport closed for a snowstorm and we weren’t going to make our connection to the cruise ship. Southwest cheerfully if perplexedly let us shift to the following day in a different city, so we could board at the ship’s first port-of-call.
These days, I go to the Southwest website first, and only check discount travel sites if I can’t get a good flight there. Have I told people they should fly Southwest? You betcha. I just told you and a few thousand others, in fact.
Crappy Service Kills a Brand
Yet no amount of (expensive) marketing will undo bad customer service. This is something I talk about in many of my books, including the most recent, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
I have boycotted a number of businesses that treated me shabbily—including the movie theater in the New York City neighborhood I grew up in that sold my 12-year-old self a full-price adult ticket and made me sit in the children’s section. I have not been back in the 47 years since—because I felt wronged and discriminated against.
But the worst was our local Toyota dealership. We had a long and extended bad interaction with them that culminated in a phone call, “you have 24 hours to get your car out of our lot—and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk.”
Not only did I write a five-page complaint letter with full documentation to the VP of customer relations for Toyota USA (which gave a too-little-too-late form-letter make-good offer a full year later), not only did I never buy as much as a tube of touch-up paint from that dealer for the rest of their career and was not sorry when they closed—but the next time I went car shopping, I didn’t even seriously consider Toyota and bought a competing brand. That was the first time I bought a car not built or designed by Toyota since 1981; they threw away decades of strong brand loyalty. Over the 30 years or so that likely remained in my car-buying lifetime at that moment, they probably cost themselves well into the six figures.
And no amount of expensive advertising will counter the disconnect if you don’t walk your talk, even if it’s not a customer service issue. If you have a sign posted in your store noting that you’ve empowered your employees to solve customer issues, as the late Blockbuster Video did, that should actually be the policy. It wasn’t for Blockbuster, in my personal experience. And they’re gone.
And these days, a frustrated customer doesn’t just tell ten friends. I just read recently that Dave Carroll’s video, “United Breaks Guitars”—seen by nearly 17 million people—actually lowered the airline’s stock price. The video also garnered tons of mainstream media coverage (including CBS and CNN), many new fans for Carroll and his band, the Sons of Maxwell, and even a book contract (the book—big surprise—is called United Breaks Guitars. And think about all those “companysucks.com” websites out there damaging brands.
In Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, I cite an auto-industry study that only 40 percent repurchase. So it’s up to you to turn satisfaction first into delighted amazement, and then into loyalty, and finally into ambassadorship for your brand?
Timothy Keiningham and Terry Varva, authors ofThe Customer Delight Principle: Exceeding Customers’ Expectations for Bottom-Line Success, point out that marketing’s primary role is to communicate “the wants, needs, and expectations of current and potential customers,” [emphasis mine] so the business can “create and distribute products or services that more closely address and answer these inherent needs.” If meeting the needs of current customers doesn’t encompass customer service, you’re in trouble.
Please share your customer service successes and disasters (either as a vendor or a s a customer) in the comments section, below.
I have noticed that many successful startups are advertising that they donate x% of their profit to someone in need or they help someone have a better life,etc. What do you think is the importance of such messages to gain initial traction and how does it help grow the company?
By the time I saw the post, several other people had jumped in to tell him that social entrepreneurship isn’t just a marketing trick. It must be genuine.
How some people view the world—Opportunity for businesses that genuinely care
I agree, but there’s more. Here’s what I wrote:
Yes, social giving has to be genuine–motivated not by marketing but by sincerely helping the world–but if you’re doing that, you gain huge marketing advantage if you handle it right.
Keep in mind: charitable give-backs are NOT the only model. I’m rather a fan of creating products, services, and business cultures that directly *and profitably* turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. In fact, in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World–which is focused on this aspect–charity givebacks account for part of one chapter out of 22 chapters. In my speaking and consulting, I help companies actually develop these kinds of approaches. You can get a very quick early-stage introduction by spending 15 minutes with my TEDx talk, “Impossible is a Dare” https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 (click on “event videos”)–but recognize that this was 2 years ago and the work has evolved a lot since then.
All other things (such as price, quality, convenience) being comparable, consumers “vote with their feet” to support ethical, green, socially conscious companies. So you, as a startup, have the chance to look at the skills, interests, and wider goals within your company…create products and services that match these skills, interests, and goals with wider goals like the Big Four I mentioned at the beginning…and market them effectively to both green and nongreen markets (which has to be done differently, as I discuss in the book). But please, do it with good intentions! (I can help, BTW.)
Someone asked me today what advice I’d give to someone just starting out. If someone had given me these four bits of advice in 1981 when I was just starting out, I’d have been on the success track a lot faster.
Be green and ethical—and willing to proclaim this to the world
Delegate early, especially those things you’re not good at–but keep checks and balances in place
Don’t reinvent the wheel. An off-the-shelf solution may be better and cheaper than reverse-engineering something
Recognize the REAL opportunities that provide first-mover advantage–and walk away from those that aren’t there yet
Muhammad Ai probably wore boxing gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
He was also a man of deep principle, foregoing his career for three years after refusing to fight in Vietnam.
This is what he said about that choice:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Agree or disagree with him , you knew where he stood.
Ali was also a humanitarian and philanthropist, using his fortune—a fortune amassed not through inherited wealth and speculative business ventures, but by coming up out of poverty and putting himself in the ring to be slugged again and again by some of the strongest people in the world—for social good.
Of course, it helps that he inherited a fortune from his father, a large-scale NYC landlord whose racist policies were so bad that Woody Guthrie (his tenant, briefly) wrote scathing songs about him. Trump’s own record includes lots of failure—including four bankruptcies. It’s hard to imagine him getting rich if he hadn’t had the springboard of his father’s wealth. And he brags about using bankruptcy as a tool to screw the public to further his personal fortune. This quote is on the same 2011 ABC news report on the bankruptcies:
I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.
Results for search for “trump university scam” from Washington Post, CNN, Wikipedia, and National Review
This is the continuation of a long history of unethical business dealings, as this story in US News and World Report notes.
As it happens, I’ve heard both Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump speak in person—Ali at an Aretha Franklin concert in Harlem, in 1971, and Trump delivering the keynote for a conference where I was also speaking, in 2004. Ali’s speech left me feeling empowered. Trump’s left me feeling I’d been slimed by an exhibitionist in a public place.
This bullying, thin-skinned, name-calling racist and sexist who brags about how he gets rich on the backs of others has no grasp of the issues, and apparently no ethics. He doesn’t belong in the White House.
Through the 26 dynasties that made up its history until 1911, China developed a unique culture, strongly rooted in a visual aesthetic and a behavior code rooted in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
The 20th Century saw several massive shifts. The Qing Dynasty fell and the Republic of China was formed under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Led by Mao Tzedung, Communists forced out Sun’s successor, Chaing Kai-Shek. Mao’s 1960s-70s Cultural Revolution deliberately abandoned (and criminalized) both Chinese and Western traditions. After Mao’s death, new leaders starting with Deng Xao Ping began to embrace western-style capitalism, both by encouraging Chinese entrepreneurs and by inviting western companies in.
One of the many pieces of public art in the Beijing subway system. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Today, in Shanghai, it’s hard to find the old China. The wide boulevards are lined with stores like H&M, Apple, and Starbucks (we were told the coffee chain has over 180 locations in the city). Billboards advertising glitzy western luxury goods—and using about 15 western models for every image of a Chinese. Recent construction waves favor enormously tall highrise apartment buildings going out for miles from the city center (and we were told that most have only two elevators). If the residential areas are not 60-storey megatowers, they’re either Soviet-style cheap apartment buildings of 20 storeys or so, or six-storey walk-ups—both constructed in massive numbers following the Communist takeover. Bicycles have been largely pushed out by electric mopeds, and cars are crowding those off the road. Highways are layered up to four deep at some complex intersections, with crazy systems of ramps spiraling from level to level.
In Beijing, the situation is similar, but many old hutongs—close-knit neighborhoods in one- and two-storey buildings—still flourish. Of course, the majority have been torn down for new construction, but the remaining ones are easy to spot. Also, many important historic sites and temples remain open in and around Beijing.
But in Shanghai, the extremely toursity neighborhood of Old Shanghai—with 500-year-old buildings hosting a lot of western quick service restaurants—is almost the only respite we saw from new construction except the Bund, whose riverside prerevolutionary hotels and trade edifices are mostly about a century old. The entire Pudong (eastern) side of the city is new, with some 8000 skyscrapers constructed on former farmland since about 1990, and the population doubling from 12 to 25 million.
We saw surprisingly few industrial areas (of course, we weren’t in factory cities like Guangzhou or Wuhu). And we also saw remarkably little evidence of China’s role as a world leader in solar. While most buildings have visible solar hot water systems, we saw almost no photovoltaic. Given China’s major air pollution problems and its heavy reliance on dirty fuel (especially coal), it’s surprising to me that more solar hasn’t been installed where it’s suitable (and there are plenty of them).
One of the West’s more obvious exports to China is status consciousness. Although places to live are expensive and hard to find, motor vehicle registration plates cost up to $15,000 in Shanghai, and imported luxury goods are taxed at 300 percent even if they’re made in China in the first place, all four cities we visited include a significant population that buys expensive clothes and expensive cars. In Shanghai, I saw a Ferrari, three Porsches, numerous Audis and Mercedes, a few Range Rovers, and several other luxury/sports cars I couldn’t identify. Of course, there were plenty of cheaper cars. In the business districts, the streets are full of fashionistas—not to the extent of Milan or Barcelona, but far more than, say, Boston. Chinese women with lots of disposable income shop at Prada and Sephora, while those with fewer resources go to the many bargain stores. Two of our guides made the same joke about getting to work by BMW: Bus/Metro/Walking. One of them also told us that single Chinese women in their thirties (who can be pretty choosy, because men outnumber them significantly) look for men with “five cs:” Condominium, Cash, Career, Car—and Cute (in that order).
We heard that people who go abroad bring back as much as they can and share it with their friends, to save on that 300 percent tax.
In some ways, the country is modernizing and westernizing rapidly. A lot of people drink western-style soft drinks as well as coffee, and the cities are full of large hotels now.—many of them connected with an american or European brand. Public bathrooms in many tourist attractions and better restaurants include at least one western-style toilet.
Yet at the same time, the average wage for people outside the capitalist sector is quite low, and those who were not into fashion were often somewhat shabbily dressed.
And while the subways are fully bilingual, it was shocking how few people even in high-tourist-contact jobs had any English at all. The hucksters knew how to name prices and negotiate them, but even staff at airlines and hotels often had no English. I don’t go around the world expecting English to always be available. I was not shocked that our innkeeper in remote Goreme, Turkey or a store manager in a small town in the mountains of the Czech Republic spoke no English—but I do expect that the cabin crew on a flight from Shanghai to New York will have basic conversational English. This was apparently unrealistic. Over and over again, we encountered people who simply did not have the language to answer even very simple questions. However, even ordinary folks in non-tourist neighborhoods were skilled at communicating despite the language barrier. Talking at us nonstop and gesticulating, they usually got their point across. And those few we encountered who do speak English had excellent fluency; we didn’t encounter any half-baked attempts of people with just enough English to confuse.
Although China recognizes more than 40 ethnic groups, Han Chinese make up 92 percent of the country. Considering that some areas, like Tibet or the Muslim Uigur area bordering Central Asia, are majority non-Han, that means the cities I visited are almost monoethnic. As white westerners, we were constantly gawked at and asked to pose for selfies, especially by Chinese tourists from far-away regions. A young blonde in our group got it far more often than the rest of us.
Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.
