Category: Ethics: General

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics: General, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

I got a call tonight from a survey company asking me questions about my views on various candidates for Massachusetts Governor, and then about various energy alternatives, and then the obvious real purpose: questions about my views on the large-scale wood-burning biomass projects proposed around the state (including three locations fairly close to me: Russell, Greenfield, and even densely populated Springfield), and a proposed bill to count only solar, wind and hydro as Green projects, excluding nukes and biofuels.

I think this gets an “award” for the most biased survey I’ve ever taken. First, the questioner determined that I was strongly opposed to the biomass plants—which are very bad on carbon footprint, not only from the burning of wood but also the massive deforestation and the huge amount of truck traffic they will generate. Wood is, indeed, a renewable resource. But it sure isn’t a clean one!

Then he asked questions like

  • Would it change your vote if you knew that although the Sierra Club and [I think] the Massachusetts Medical Society support the bill, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, and AFL-CIO oppose this bill? [Very clever of them to throw in the environmental groups on the other side; my suspicions were not yet aroused. Later, I Googled and could find no such endorsement from UCS, although their research is cited by another group, here]
  • Would it change your vote if you knew that wood-biofuel plants are carbon neutral? [absolutely NOT true!]
  • Would it change your vote if you knew that Massachusetts has more forested land now than it did 100 years ago?

    • After these three biased questions that were clearly tilted toward counting me as an opponent of the bill, I stopped the guy and said I thought this was a survey, and not a blatant attempt to feed misinformation to me in an attempt to change my opinion. He said, “hey, I’m just reading the questions!” I said I understood that, but I didn’t appreciate being manipulated like this, and I ended the interview. My caller ID told me he had a 609 area code (New Jersey), incidentally.

    I am totally sure this so-called survey will be used to trumpet the citizens of Massachusetts’ supposed stance in favor of biofuels and against the proposed law. While the law’s definitions could be sharpened, I actually feel that eliminating nuclear power and large-scale wood-burning biomass plants from being counted in the progress toward a Green economy is a GOOD thing. And I’ll be directing my friends who are active in the anti-biofuel campaigns to this blog, so they can see exactly what their opponents are up to—sleazy and easily discredited “surveys” like this.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General Tagged with , , , ,

    I wanted to share my response in a LinkedIn discussion around ethics (I don’t know if that link will work if you’re not a member of the group). It started when someone asked participants to list a few ethics books they’d found helpful. I posted several titles, culled from the archives of my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter, where I review one book per month on ethics, Green business, or service (scroll down).

    One of the group members, Professor Allan Elder, wrote back with a long comment; here’s a piece of it:

    The concern I have with all the books you recommend is they espouse a certain set of behaviors without explaining the reasoning behind them. For the casual reader (which is nearly all), this leads to prescription without understanding.

    This is my response:

    It’s true that my list focuses heavily on books that talk more about the behavior than the philosophy behind them. A book like The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is based on a simple economic construct: there is money to be made helping the world’s poorest improve their lives. Yet several of the authors I mention would, I’m quite sure, be very comfortable showing their roots in Kant and John Stuart Mill.

    I don’t see this as a problem; I actually see it as a strength. Self-interest can motivate positive changes in behavior, and thus in society, that more abstract thinking cannot. Those who would never voluntarily expose themselves to deep philosophical thinking start to create changes in the culture–and those who find their curiosity engaged will go deeper.

    A practical example from my own life: as a teenager, I got involved with food co-ops, not because I had any particular consciousness at that time about the problems caused by our society’s choices in food policy, but because I was a starving student and it was a way to get good cheap food. But from that beginning based purely in narrow self-interest, I grew to understand some of the very complex web of policy, philosophy, and culture that have caused our food system to be the way it is. Thirty-five years later, I can talk about food issues on a much deeper level–but I still recruit people to eat better by engaging in their own self-interest: better health, better taste, etc. If they seem open to it, I start bringing in issues like the positive impact of supporting the local economy (which can then, in turn, open the door to a larger discussion of ethics issues).

    In short, I think the literature has ample place for books rooted in either the philosophical or the practical, because different people will be drawn to the different schemes, and either one is a starting point for understanding the other 🙂

    Of course philosophers pay attention to practical matters first, only they use a fancy word: “Praxis.” I didn’t mention that in my response.

    What do YOU think?

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics: General, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

    Here’s a depressing article that says today’s teens think they have to lie and cheat their way to success.

    Sorry—I’m not buying it! Call me naive, but I’m the parent of both a teenage boy and a bit-past-teenaged girl. Among their friends, I see a delightfully high awareness about the importance of an ethical, socially conscious lifestyle, and about the importance of leaving the world better than they found it. And I think that kids raised in the era brought about by the transparency inherent in social media will be more likely, not less, to follow an ethical path.

    The study is from a respected ethics organization, the Josephson Ethics Institute. While I’ve long known their work, and respect it, I can only hope they’re wrong this time. Faith in human goodness is part of what keeps me going.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship, Ethics: General, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

    While visiting Minneapolis, I took in the opening day of the new Ben Franklin exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in downtown Saint Paul. I’ve long ben a Franklin fan. To me, his far-reaching curiosity, big-picture viewpoint, multiple interests, creativity, willingness to question authority and even make fun of it, media and persuasion skills, dedication to the public good, and rise from poverty to a comfortable (even hedonistic) lifestyle are all traits that today’s entrepreneurs can learn from.

    No one can question that he made many important contributions in science (adding vastly to our knowledge of electricity, inventing a safer and more fuel-efficient wood stove), diplomacy/statesmanship (bringing France in as a powerful and game-changing ally against the British during the Revolution, oldest member of the Constitutional Convention), literature and communication (best-selling author/journalist/printer/publisher who was successful enough to retire from printing at 42, and propagandist for causes and philosophies he believed in), entrepreneurship (training and funding printers for a multistate network to print and distribute his works, anticipating the Internet by about 200 years and the modern franchise system by at least a century), as well as civic good (co-founding a public library, public hospital, fire department, fire insurance company, postal system, philosophical society).

    But what struck me were some of the contradictions—there are many others, but these two in particular need a second look:
    Slavery
    Franklin became convinced late in life that slavery was evil, and served as president of an anti-slavery society. Yet he not only owned slaves for over 40 years, but often published ads from slave-hunters in his periodicals, and refused to put his name on much of his earliest anti-slavery writing.

    Integrity
    Franklin is well-known for his moralizing, his aphorisms, and his commitment to honesty and integrity. Yet he broke his apprenticeship to his brother, ran away to Philadelphia before it was completed, and started as a printer without the papers necessary to show he qualified as a journeyman.

    While none of us are perfect, it does seem that these areas of Franklin’s life, among others, need careful examination, with more detail than was provided by this traveling exhibit (which seemed to be aimed largely at children).

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Here’s an odd thought: Could viral videos actually change the culture? What are the implications, long-term, for our culture in the widespread visibility of cross-species animal friendship, animals figuring out difficulties and solving a way around them, animals responding to music—or even playing music—, etc.?

    When you see “enemy” animals forming friendships, what does it say about humans who can’t figure out any better way to resolve differences than to go to war?

    When a herd of buffalo join forces to chase off the large group of lions that attacked their calf, what does it say about the power of cooperation in humans?

    When a bird is so familiar with a piece of music that its dance moves actually anticipate the song occasionally, what does that say about animal intelligence and memory?

    Over time, these windows into animal capabilities may cause shifts in our global consciousness. It wouldn’t shock me if vegetarianism became much more common; could you really eat animals after seeing how smart and caring they can be? Perhaps cruelty toward animals will be reduced. And perhaps more of us will find ways to listen when the animals in our lives try to talk to us.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General Tagged with , , , ,

    Exactly how did Bernie Madoff steal his billions? Why are Halliburton’s hands so dirty? What happened with corruption cases in the rebuilding of Iraq? Following a link from EthicsWorld’s e-newsletter, I came to a single URL that has multiple stories on corruption: https://www.ethicsworld.org/publicsectorgovernance/corruptioninvestigations.php#sec.

    This is what we’re up against, those of us who believe in ethics.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

    Perry Marshall has a really good article about online privacy concerns, the Google experience yay and nay, and Google’s first real competitor in general search–Bing. It’s getting a lot of comments, including this one from me. I discuss not only transparency vs. secrecy, but also the Google user experience, talk about the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) I think Google might operate under, and point out the business opportunity that grows out of our society’s lack of privacy.

    One point I didn’t make is that in dystopian-totalitarian novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, the very tools that provide information and entertainment also eliminate our privacy. While at least in the US, this information gathering has been used primarily for commerce rather than social control, the potential is very real.

    The rest of this post is what I posted to Perry’s site:

    You write, “Google has done a glorious job of doing what I encourage all my customers to do: Create offers that are so sensationally irresistible that you can’t help but use their search engine. They’ve beat all comers fair and square.”

    This is sooo true. If ever there was an example of a huge USP, it would be Google’s. I don’t know how they phrase it, but it may as well be “we let you actually FIND what you’re looking for…in nanoseconds.”

    And because they honor and deliver this USP, and because they were smart enough to make ads user-friendly, they have a vast revenue stream. But remember that search was there before ads, a couple of years before, in fact.

    As pointed out above, we haven’t had privacy for decades anyway.

    –>I feel the lack of privacy is actually an *opportunity* for entrepreneurs. Since we have no privacy anyway, why not run your business with a high degree of transparency and turn it into a marketing advantage? Why not do the right thing and be thoroughly ethical, and then demonstrate this to the world so they beat a path to your door? (This is something I advocate heavily in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First )

    Back to Google: my concern is not *privacy*, but *piracy.* Google’s respect for others’ copyrights is often in conflict with its desire to index the world’s knowledge. As someone who creates a lot of intellectual property (including eight books), it concerns me deeply that Google assumes the right to index first and ask permission later. I could definitely see circumstances where work created (say, for a high-paying corporate client) should not be placed in the public stream. Google claims to be and for the most part acts as a highly ethical company, but on the issue of intellectual property control, I disagree with their approach.

    Still, I’ve been an avid Google user, because it does deliver that USP, and that’s something I need.

    I wasn’t familiar with Bing prior to reading this article. Did a search for “shel horowitz” and saw very different results than Google. 1,100,000 hits versus about 23,400 on Google (a number that shifts daily between 14,000 and 54,000). Bing’s results heavily skewed toward big portal sites like Facebook (very first result) and Amazon Subsequent pages (I looked through page 3) include a lot of the blogosphere/podcast interviews I’ve done for others, and some of my major media hits. Only three of the top ten were my own sites. Google’s results skew heavily toward my own sites. I love the popup feature on Bing, and expect that Google will implement something similar; this may be Google’s first real competitor for generalized search. (For specialized search, I’ve often turned to Clusty, Ask, and portal-specific search tools.)

    By contrast, on Google, I have 7 of the 12 results on page 1. Google itself has positions 4 (Google book search) and 12, and my twitter and Facebook profiles, along with a book review on an outside blog that was published this week, fill out the page.

    GMail is still the best web-based e-mail client I’ve used, but that ain’t saying much. I vastly prefer download-based email such as Eudora. Surprisingly, my biggest gripe with GMail is that its search function is just plain horrible. Something you’d think they of all companies could have figured out better. My other gripe is that you can’t do much in the way of batch processing, and dealing with one e-mail at a time, especially over the web, for anything except delete is frustratingly slow.

    Shel Horowitz, ethical/effective marketing specialist
    https://shelhorowitz.com

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, language Tagged with ,

    Call me old-fashioned, but I reject the transition of “pimp” form a negative noun–a man who rents out the bodies of women he controls (and a verb to describe that action)–to a positive verb, to make something look classy and flashy by adding gizmos and gewgaws and bling.

    I don’t like it. Pimping is not a “virtue” I choose to support. I’m a wordsmith for a living–so let me propose some alternatives. We’ve got great nouns like swank or swanky, chic, glitzy, snazzy–can we turn them into verbs?
    Swankify? (awkward-sounding). Chicken? (um, no, that’s taken). Snazz (I like that!). Sparkle? (already a verb, sure, why not). Glitter? Glisten? (ditto)

    Let’s use our rich, rich language and banish “pimp” as a “good” verb. It’ll take some work. The phrase “pimp my” brings 10,900,000 search results, and I’m guessing almost all of them from the last two years. I’m not a language purist, believe me, but let’s put this one back in the bottle.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, language, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

    Bad enough that Arkansas State Senator Kim Hendren called Chuck Schumer ‘that Jew’–but even worse is the anti-Semitic trash talk from so many readers of the New York Daily News story about it.

    Eeeew! In 2009, we should be better than that! In fact, that kind of racist crap should have been unacceptable in 1809. No matter what ethnic or racial group is being denigrated, the message needs to go out that this is unacceptable. I’m not blaming the Daily News for having an open comments page, but I wonder about these narrow-minded bigots who are posting.

    Mind you, I’m one Jew who does NOT believe in “Israel right or wrong.” But I do believe in treating every person civilly, and in condemning racist behavior.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail