Category: language

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Branding, Consumer Issues, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

As the primary author of two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World and Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green) and a speaker at the recent Guerrilla Marketing Summit, I was very interested in how the digital marketing pioneer Hubspot views the whole Guerrilla Marketing concept and brand.

In their seven examples, I was particularly thrilled that they included UNICEF’s super-successful Dirty Water campaign.

Screenshot of a still from the Unicef "Dirty Water" video
Screenshot of a still from the UNICEF “Dirty Water” video

After all, my two Guerrilla books are the ones that extend the Guerrilla Marketing concepts to the worlds of social change of environmentalism. This was a bit of a gamble for UNICEF; there were obviously significant costs in everything from developing the branding to shipping the filthy water. I hope they’re replicating the campaign in other cities, and creating strong follow-up messaging targeted specifically to those touched by this campaign, to keep them donating into the future.

My definition of Guerrilla Marketing is a lot broader than Hubspot’s. To me, Guerrilla Marketing has three main parts:

  1. Being nimble in our thinking and actions, seizing opportunities quickly, including news tie-ins
  2. Going outside and beyond conventional thinking patterns–disrupting the mental flow to get noticed, to move people to action, but in ways that don’t feel obnoxiously intrusive
  3. Focusing not on how great your brand is (the mistake I see so many marketers make. I call it “we, we, we all the way home) but on the results: the benefits, the problems solved, the pain relieved, the wants and needs met or exceeded–whether for the individual customer or for the planet and the species that live on it.

Hubspot’s choice of the Bounty sculpture is a beautiful example.

Ideally, Guerrilla Marketing will be done at little cost, too. But, as the UNICEF and Grammy examples show, there are plenty of Guerrilla Marketing opportunities that aren’t necessarily cheap.

Let’s look at those two more closely, because they offer us very different lessons. It will take you exactly three minutes and 40 seconds to watch the two videos. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

UNICEF

This elaborate campaign involved creating a brand, bottling filthy brown water, and offering it on the streets of New York. The goal: to increase awareness that the clean, drinkable water we take for granted in most of the US (and the developed world generally) is unimaginable luxury for people at the margins in developing countries. Many have to drink filthy, disease-causing water, and many get very sick. The campaign encouraged people to use the money they currently spend on bottled water to provide clean water for those who don’t have it. Each dollar could supply a thirsty child for 40 days. The video documents the whole campaign, in a fast-paced three minutes.

I found this very effective. I love the way they were able to not just raise awareness, but funds. The negative branding is definitely a Guerrilla tactic, and the results are clearly positive. Bravo!

Grammy Ad

This was an expensive missed opportunity. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but this one really didn’t work for me. Great concept, but terrible execution. I want the protagonist be moved and touched by what he’s seeing, but he strolls through the talking posters, blithe and indifferent. He’s not even glancing at the posters! What’s going on in HIS head? We don’t even get a hint. Have  the talking portraits of Harry Potter and the constant animations of things people didn’t animate in the past made a talking poster no-longer-special? And while my wife frequently accuses me of ADD, I found that I hadn’t even processed and recognized one song before it switched after a few seconds to something else. (And OK, I confess, this was not music I’m familiar with anyway). Some of the problem was that the songs all sounded so similar and all seemed to have the exact same beat.

I also think the choice of having multiple copies of each poster was unfortunate. Yes, I recognize that’s a common way to display posters in urban environments. It has NEVER worked for me. I’ve studied some of the advertising masters like David Ogilvy, and they taught me the importance of white space: of having one central object (or person, animal, tree…) able to stand out from what’s around it, because of that empty space around it. If I were buying billboards, instead of, say, 9 medium-sized repeated pictures, I’d use the space for one much larger version of the image. I’d use that white space and not add to the clutter.

Imagine walking down the street and seeing a 20-foot billboard suddenly start to sing with its one and only mouth! Imagine hearing snippets of three or four songs that each have a clear identity, in a true medley, each sung by one giant poster of an artist you recognize instantly. Would you be as blase as the protagonist? I doubt it!

So maybe the commercial would need a full minute instead of 39 seconds. That’s OK. In print copywriting, it’s perfectly OK to take as much time as you need to tell the story; I’ve seen emails with links to 40-page sales letters. Even in broadcast, even though airtime is expensive, we’ve seen many successful commercials that ran an hour (they’re called infomercials and they run on shopping channels). The UNICEF video was three entire minutes and I watched without multitasking, because I was interested both in their message and how they promoted it. If you can’t get it done in less than a minute, either buy more airtime, or script a commercial that CAN get it done in the time you bought.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Branding, Diversity, Ethics: General, General Commentary, language, localism/locavore, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

When an American father-to-be asked Dear Abby for advice because his Indian wife wanted to use an ethnic-heritage name and he didn’t, she responded:

…Not only can foreign names be difficult to pronounce and spell, but they can also cause a child to be teased unmercifully…Why saddle a kid with a name he or she will have to explain or correct…from childhood into adulthood?

Seeing this as a social justice issue, I could not let her answer go unchallenged. Here’s what I wrote:

Abby, I’ve been reading your column since 1981, but your answer to “Making Life Easy” made me cringe! Part of what makes the US great is our habit of celebrating our cultural diversity, with festivals, ethnic cooking, and yes, our children’s names.

First, every culture will have names that are hard to pronounce and spell–but also easier ones. My own children’s names, Alana and Rafael, are both derived from Hebrew and celebrate their Jewish heritage. Honoring that culture felt all the more important because we live in a community where Jewish is exotic. We rejected names that were too hard to pronounce, like Chanoch; Recognizing that most Americans can’t pronounce the ch, I didn’t want my son to be “Hano.” “Making Life Easy”‘ and his wife will have hundreds of beautiful, pronounceable Indian names to choose from, such as Priya or Krishna.

This beautful anti-bullying poster came from the US military's health site, health.mil
This beautiful anti-bullying poster came from the US military’s health site, health.mil

Second, the argument about teasing is weak. Bullies will find a reason to tease. If the kids have ordinary names, bullies will pick on them for their skin color or ethnic background, for their good grades or their bad grades, for whatever point of difference they find. And bullies also tease kids about Western names (growing up as Sheldon, I speak from personal, painful experience; names like Sheldon and Norman were often chosen by American Jewish families that wanted to seem more assimilated). The way around this is not to remove any possible fuel for their bad actions–impossible anyhow–but to create a culture in the home and school that teaches respect for and acceptance of difference. This responsibility falls on both parents and educators. My own kids attended a school with zero tolerance around bullying, a school that created a welcoming and accepting culture for all types of children–and we reinforced this in the home, as my mother reinforced it for me when I was growing up.

I believe the self-acceptance I developed as the parent of self-accepting kids proud of their heritage and happy to celebrate the heritage of others helped me find my way to the work I do: working with businesses to identify/create/market profitable offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. I could not have thought so big if I hadn’t learned to feel pride in who I am and my power to make a difference.

Not ashamed to sign my real name.

Shel Horowitz, Hadley, MA

PS: whether or not you publish this letter, please share it with “Making Life Easy.” Ignoring his wife’s wishes could cause both marital discord and shame in the child’s culture of origin.

<End of my letter>.

What do you think? Please add your comment, below. And BTW, I found this list of 100 recommended but unusual boy names, which features ethnic choices such as Arian, Bodhi, Camilo, Cortez, Dimitri, Dangelo, and Enoch–in just the A through E part of the list, and just one gender.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Consumer Issues, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, poverty, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Let’s just pretend for a moment that the climate deniers are right and nearly the entire scientific community is wrong. We spend a lot of time and effort so humans can continue living on this planet of ours–and it turns out we didn’t need to do all that. Let’s say all that happens is we switch to clean energy and super-efficient design, improve  our air and water quality, dramatically reduce pollution-related illness, free up more spending power among people who are no longer buying fossil fuels, create hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs, and so on–but it doesn’t affect the climate, or the climate continues to be just fine for humans. Let’s say that ending our reliance on fossil fuels changes our foreign policy away from resource-based wars and toward peace, quality-of-life improvements around the world, and international cooperation.

A storm-damaged pier. Courtesy freeimages.com
A storm-damaged pier. Courtesy freeimages.com

You know what? I’d be pretty happy with those outcomes. It would be worth making that effort even if climate change were not an issue.

BUT…what if the climate scientists are right? What if our future is full of massive flooding, wildfires, severe storms, food riots, and all the rest of it? I’m not actually worried that much about the planet. The planet has survived climate upheaval many times before, and it will again. So will the cockroaches. But I AM worried about our planet’s capacity to sustain human and mammal life, and the plants that we all rely on for our survival. The planet is indifferent to whether humans survive and thrive. It looks to me that the planet has begun to fight back over the past ten or twenty years; “global weirding” has become a thing, around the world. The climate we’ve been used to for a couple of centuries is not the one we have anymore. If we continue blindly down the path of climate denial and inaction, explorers from other planets will land here to discover that the cockroaches are in charge, and humans are either extinct or a tiny remnant living lives of deprivation in scattered little bands.

Don’t take my word about those consequences. Follow these links and listen to the real experts: scientists.

  1. First, a quick general-audience overview of why climate change matters
  2. A more scientific but still relatively readable report from NASA
  3. And finally, a more technical piece from the Union of Concerned Scientists (a group I’ve been paying attention to for about 40 years and for whom I have a great deal of respect) outlining why humans need to own the responsibility for climate change

Are natural causes also contributing to climate change? Sure. Volcanoes, earthquakes, massive forest fires and floods…all of those have an effect on climate. But it’s important to keep four things in mind about natural disasters:

As an example of that last point, consider the accident at Fukushima in 2011. Seismic activity caused a tsunami, which flooded one of the largest concentrations of nuclear power plants in the world (6 plants at the Fukushima Daiichi site and another 4 at Fukushima Daini, just 7 miles away), which led to explosions in at least four of the Daiichi plants, which led to a meltdown, which contaminated a wide swath and forced thousands to evacuate.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is another example. Around the world, numerous oil rigs, nuclear plants, chemical refineries, etc. sit on earthquake faults or next to large bodies of water. And this is simply nuts!

We’ve had 200 years to watch this crisis coming. We have plenty of technology to reduce our need for energy AND to generate clean, safe energy to power our world. If we’d started to get serious about dealing with climate change even as recently as 50 years ago, by now, we could have easily moved to 100% renewables, and if we had any sense, we would have. The good news: we could still convert to 100% renewables by 2050, or perhaps even sooner. The bad news: we may not have the luxury of 30+ years to figure this out, and at the moment, the US at least has a federal government that is actively hostile to climate science and puts dollars in the pockets of big business ahead of the health, safety, and livability of people and planet.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, General Commentary, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1 of this post, I shared a video of a dolphin rescuing a dog, asked whether you thought it was real or fake, and then told you my answer, with seven reasons why. If you missed it, please click on this paragraph to read it.

Why This Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper

Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?

Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.

Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging, One category for this post is psychology; click on that category to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)

And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the left and right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.

My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:

Subject: Breaking: Trump ordered tanks in D.C.

From this subject line, you’d expect some horror story about peaceful protestors facing American military might. It could happen. It has happened in the past–for example, the 1970 Kent State massacre that left four Vietnam War protesters dead and nine more injured by Ohio National Guard  soldiers’ bullets. (The shootings at Jackson State College in Mississippi 11 days later were committed by police, not soldiers.) And protestors in countries with totalitarian governments have often faced tanks; if you want to see courage, watch the video of a man stopping tanks with only a flag, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989–WOW!)

An unarmed man with a small flag stops four Chinese tanks in Tiannanmen Square, Beijing,
An unarmed man with a small flag stops four Chinese tanks in Tiannanmen Square, Beijing,

It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.

Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:

Shel —

Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.

This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.

But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.

Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.

More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.

The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting this post) in about ten seconds of searching.

And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.

As a country, we are better than this..

How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering

Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real.And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.

The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:

  • Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.
  • Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.
  • Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?
  • Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?
  • And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view ? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.

I could go on but you get the idea. Please share your reactions in the comments.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, General Commentary, language, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,
Parkland HS activists including David Hogg, left, and Emma Gonzales, in tank top
Parkland HS activists including David Hogg, left, and Emma Gonzales, in tank top. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Editor’s note: This was written back in February. I don’t know why I never hit Publish. Unfortunately, even the Parkland activists—as amazing and powerful as they are—even the mass rallies they organized, even the wide public outcry—has not ended the violence even at schools yet, though they’ve already made more progress than anyone has ever done on this issue. In Arizona alone, there were 17 shooting threats (not actual shootings) just between Valentine’s Day and March 10th. I hope their activism sparks a massive rejection in November of guns-uber-alles politicians. 

Meanwhile, just in the past week, we’ve seen a merchant of hatred, the always-despicable Milo Yiannopoulos, call for “vigilantes” to attack journalists. Yiannopoulos was forced to backpedal, but this is getting even uglier. The crazies will take this stuff seriously. We’ve also seen consistent, repeated attacks against the press by the current occupant of the Oval Office. And we’ve seen a mass shooting inside a newspaper newsroom in Maryland. Everything Kropotkin says below about people who make death threats against child activists is true of those who attack journalists, too, and thus this post is more relevant than ever. Remember: when dictators take over, they start restricting the press.

Guest Post By Pyotr Kropotkin

In the wake of the horrible (and so could-have-been-avoided) shooting at  Marjory  Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, several of the surviving students have spoken out. In this short time, they’ve shown themselves as articulate spokespeople for common sense, and they are changing the conversation around the right to own any type of weapon versus the right to personal and public safety.

But despite the incredible trauma they’ve been through, quite a few people don’t think they should be speaking out. Some are even making death threats against these kids!

If you are making death threats against people just because you disagree with them, here are some of the things we know about you:

  1. Somewhere along the way, you lost your compassion, lost your heart
  2. You don’t understand the difference between freedom to and freedom from—that your freedom to shoot an assault rifle ends when it impinges on others’ freedom from attack
  3. You are mentally or emotionally unbalanced and should not have access to firearms, because you’ve made a death threat against an innocent child who has done you no harm
  4. You should be the subject of immediate criminal investigation, for threatening the life of another
  5. You don’t love the Constitution—the 2nd Amendment is fine for you, but not the 1st Amendment, which protects the rights of free speech, free assembly, worship, and petitioning the government to redress grievances
  6. You probably believe that an armed presence is a deterrent to violence—even though an armed deputy was outside Stoneman High, and even though the majority of people at Fort Hood the day of that massacre were armed
  7. You might also believe that there’s some crazy government conspiracy to take away your guns so they can take away the rest of your freedom—even though even an assault rifle is no protection against tanks and howitzers
  8. You like to feel powerful, and you think your assault rifles and your threats make you powerful (they don’t—they make you the equivalent of a two-year-old at playtime)
  9. You’re a bully who thinks the way to succeed is by throwing your weight around and scaring other people
  10. You probably have not experienced enough love in your life—and I feel sorry for you.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, language, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,
Marchers at a rally for racial justice and immigrant rights, Holyoke, MA. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Marchers at a rally for racial justice and immigrant rights, Holyoke, MA. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

For more than a year and a half, the current administration has been mired in constant scandals of corruption/self-dealing, incompetence, vindictiveness, attacks on his opponents and on minorities, attacks on the environment, bullying, broken promises, well more than 2000 lies from the man himself, and even broken treaties…the list, unfortunately, goes on and on and on. The sorry chronicle started well before his inauguration and continues through the present.

Perhaps you didn’t think it could get worse But in the past six weeks, this vile administration has reached a new low. The decision to wrench 1995 helpless children from the arms of their loving parents and put them in cages is not only inexcusable on moral and humanitarian grounds, it’s also a long-term disaster for the safety and security of the United States. Yes, it puts every American at risk.

Here’s a quick description of the legal issues and a good list of organizations fighting this outrage that need our help.

Let’s look at both the moral and practical reasons why this must stop.

 

The Moral Issues

Many figures in this administration have been long-time champions of self-described “family values.” In other words, they say they are in favor of keeping families together, as long as those families are heterosexual. They talk earnestly about the importance of having a child grow up in a home with both parents. Yet, when mothers take their children and flee gang violence, domestic abuse, and other genuine evils, the US incarcerates them at the border and takes their children away. The parents treated like violent criminals. Their children put in cages.

Attorney General Sessions quotes one verse in the Bible to justify this barbarism: a verse that was used in the 19th century to justify the worst aspects of slavery.

Last I checked, the Attorney General is one of the people charged to protect the separation of church and state (as well as freedom of speech AND assembly) enshrined in the First Amendment. But even granting that the Bible can be a moral compass for a sitting Attorney General, Mr. Sessions’s interpretation is highly selective. Consider a few of the other things the Bible says. I’ve posted a whole bunch of them at the end of this blog post—but first, let’s talk about the practical impact.

 

The Practical Case

As taxpayers and citizens, we should be deeply concerned about what’s being done in our names. The consequences to the US could be deep, severe, and very negative. A few examples:

This policy creates an entire class of enemies—creates potential terrorists

Deliberately adding trauma creates maladjusted human beings: PTSD and other diseases. Any child ripped away from his or her family and put in a cage is going to be hostile to the government that did this. Family members will also be hostile. Taken to the extreme, you create something that looks entirely too much like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where hurts lead to rage, rage leads to violence, and violence leads to even more abrogation of rights. Once this cycle of violence gets established, it’s really hard to break (though, of course, lots of people are trying, including my colleague Andrea Ayvazian. Do we really want to create a whole new class of enemies who will feel justified in attacking US-related sites around the world? Hasn’t the US been fighting terrorism as its major foreign policy stance since 2001? This policy could create a whole new generation of terrorists.

Also, do we really want to attempt to repair avoidable psychological damage that prevents people from functioning effectively and finding gainful employment? Many of these folks will end up in the US eventually. By making it harder to function, we turn them into social burdens. Our tax dollars will have to cover the survival mechanisms for those not resilient enough to recover on their own.

It’s fiscally unsound and wrecking the economy

Jailing immigrants seeking asylum is expensive, with taxpayer costs of up to $585 per family per night. It is far cheaper to provide humane living conditions, assist in finding job and housing, and create a new and grateful productive class of future citizens.

Also, the many industries that rely on immigrant labor are at risk. Agriculture has been particularly hard hit, with crops rotting in the fields because workers are not available to harvest them. If we want food to eat, we have to stop terrorizing immigrant farmworkers.

It puts the US in violation of international law as well as our own constitution

The path the US is taking is in gross violation of various human rights charters, UN regulations, and our own constitutional requirements for due process. Imagine the consequences to business, for instance, if organizations in other firms because the US is guilty of crimes against humanity. It has happened to other countries and it could happen to us. There should be a massive outcry from business about the risks of this policy.

It positions the US as an unworthy partner for joint projects with other governments and businesses

The US has become a rogue state, blowing away trust on a host of issues, from the Paris Accord to the G7 Agreement. Now, other governments may face pressure from their own constituents not to do business with abusive governments, just as economically and organizationally isolating South Africa forced that country to get rid of apartheid.

A Few More Bible Quotes Mr. Sessions May Want to Study

On the importance of family:

8 Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
—1 Timothy 5:8
3 Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from him. 
4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. 
5 Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.
—Psalm 127:3-5
15 She gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants. 
16 She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. 
17 She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks.
—Proverbs 31:15-17

On immigrants’ place in society

21 “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
—Exodus 22:21
35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,
—Matthew 25:35
32 but no stranger had to spend the night in the street, for my door was always open to the traveler
—Job 31:32
35 “ ‘If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you.
—Leviticus 25:35

On justice in the face of oppression

Numerous quotes—see https://www.biblestudytools.com/search/?s=bibles&q=oppressed&t=niv&c=all and https://www.biblestudytools.com/search/?s=bibles&q=justice%2C+justice&t=niv&c=all

On human dignity

Numerous quotes at https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_dignity

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Democracy, General Commentary, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

Guest post by Tamsen Webster

M&Ms, with blue ones
M&Ms, with blue ones

Back in 1995, I cast a vote that had long-lasting consequences. We all did.

I’m speaking, of course, of the vote to add the color blue to M&Ms. Looking back, I realize now that it was the Brexit of candy votes.

But let me back up. For most of my childhood, M&Ms were as colorfully bland and reassuring as a 1970s kitchen.

Just dark brown, tan, orange, yellow and green. No red. Those caused cancer.

But by the time the 90s rolled around, America was in full 70s rejection mode, and M&Ms decided it was time to add a new color to the fabled mix.

And we got to vote on what it would be: pink, purple, or blue.

It wasn’t much of a decision, really: pink or purple clearly didn’t “go” with the rest of that harvest goal palette. I mean, really.

And so blue won in a landslide.

But the day they made that announcement, they told us something they hadn’t told us before: this “new color” was going to… replace… TAN.

And all of a sudden, this silly little vote had real consequences (as far as candy colors go, at least). And I didn’t like those consequences.

And I really didn’t like that I didn’t know about this whole “sacrificial tan” thing ahead of time.

I have no idea what the real reason was for M&M’s leadership to sacrifice tan. But whatever the reason, apparently it was a decision they made BEFORE they announced the results of the vote… and likely before they even decided to have a vote at all… because they had already decided to get rid of tan.

And yes, one of the truths of leadership is that sometimes there are these binary either/or choices we have to make in order to make a successful change. Opening a new office here means not opening one there. Hiring this person means not hiring that one.

But binary choices aren’t the problem. The real problem is when a binary choice isn’t presented as one. When we don’t give people full information about the change they’re about to make.

Why? Because we — all of us — are not rational decision makers, we are rationalizing decision makers.

We make decisions based on how we feel in the moment… and then we go back and think about them.

Which means, no matter how good you may make a decision feel in the moment, once people start really thinking about it, those once-happy, once-accepting people… aren’t.

Because they’ll feel manipulated, not led. And every time they do, they’ll be just a little less willing to trust the next change you put in front of them.

Do it enough? And you’ve lost your ability to lead change entirely.

So what can we do?

In the case of M&Ms, one single line might have made the difference between me happily eating blue M&Ms and my carrying the torch for tan all these years…

Here it is: “We’ve decided it’s time to replace tan…but, now you can help us decide what color we add next.” It’s a small addition, but a critical one, because it shows both sides of the choice. And we can only fully embrace change when we fully understand it.

So, if you’re a leader or manager, don’t shy away from the truth. Tell it. And where possible, give people real options to choose from. I know the “real options” part isn’t always possible — that’s back to the hard truths of leadership.

But even telling people that helps them better understand a change, because they’ll better understand where you’re coming from. Either way, the change will be more successful as a result.

So do it for that. Or do it for them.

Or just do it for tan.

#teamtan

 

Tamsen Webber is Founder and Chief Idea Whisperer, Find the Red Thread
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, General Commentary, language, media-general, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

My mom told me often that I taught myself to read at age 3 by sounding out stuff on cereal boxes, mayonnaise jars, etc. And to this day, I read packaging, ads, tracts…whatever is lying around. She also told me that I was extremely frustrated that I couldn’t get a New York Public Library (NYPL) card until I could write my name, which took another two years after I learned to read. She had to take books out for me on her card. I have no memory of either of these things. But I do remember that I was reading fluently by the beginning of first grade. At age 60, I’m still grateful to my first grade teacher, who sat me in the back of the room with a 4th grade geography textbook while she inflicted Sally, Dick, and Jane on the rest of the class (and I still love geography).

A child reading. Photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert, freeimages.com
A child reading. Photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert, freeimages.com

Much later, I met my wife, novelist and poet D. Dina Friedman, at a poetry reading in Greenwich Village

I was skeptical of Mom’s claims about me until we discovered when my son was 2 and some months that he could tell words like wax, fax, and max apart, visually, because my daughter had sat him down and taught him. He was not an early reader but obviously could have been if it had been a priority. He was (and still is at 25) focused on music. We started reading to our kids when they were infants. My daughter, gluten-free/vegetarian gourmet food blogger Alana Horowitz Friedman and her husband are both avid readers, too.

Mom was like that too. Once they lifted the old limit of eight books at a time, she would go to the local NYPL branch every two weeks with a SHOPPING CART, fill it with books, and wheel it the mile back to our house. She had a long commute to Manhattan via express bus and that’s where she did much of her reading.

I’m still a voracious reader. Books have opened up my mind to such incredible richness of thought and emotion. Much of my thinking on everything from nonviolent social change to green business success comes from processing and extrapolating on what I read to come up with something new. The world is a much more interesting place to me because of writers like Dave Dellinger, Gandhi, and Gene Sharp’s writings about nonviolence, and Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and William McDonough on the green business side.

But a few years ago, I realized that while I made time in my busy life for nonfiction, I didn’t do enough pleasure reading. I started making sure I read at least five minutes a day of a book that had nothing to do with work.

Of course, five minutes was nowhere near enough if I was into a good book. I found all sorts of nooks and crannies in my day to read. And then I decided to get a lot more exercise. Much of that is on an indoor stationary bicycle: a perfect place to read! Typically, I start my first shift of the day with a poem, then ten minutes of nonfiction and ten minutes of fiction or memoir. If I’m biking 20 minutes, that’s my whole shift. If (more typically) I’m doing 30 minutes, I often spend the remaining 10 checking Facebook from my phone, because I have to make time in my life for social media, too.

With most of it on the exercise bike, I’m actually reading more than 80 books a year!

Some vast number of people never read another book after college. They’re cheating themselves. Make time in your own life for this great pleasure!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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

Too often, businesses think of sustainability as a “have to” instead of a “delighted to.” Let’s change that attitude! Here are three among many reasons why business leaders should be thrilled to embrace deep sustainability:

  1. The powerful business case. More and more stakeholders are demanding that the companies they patronize address wider environmental and social issues; those who fail to do this are starting to lose market share. Not only that, but going green the RIGHT way can substantially lower costs of energy, raw materials, and other goods while building in customer loyalty and tolerance for higher prices. To say it another way, greening your company can significantly up profitability! Companies in the Fortune 500 figured this out some years ago. Pretty much all of them have sustainability departments (under various names) and have made huge progress in the past decade. Of course, we still have a long way to go. But many smaller companies are resistant. Because they see expenses, not income streams, they dig in with their old, inefficient ways. But certainly, the low-hanging fruit–taking the steps with quick payback–increases profitability directly, by raising income and lowering costs.
  2. The ability to market sustainable goods, services, and processes to three different types of consumer: the Deep Green, who makes purchasing decisions contingent on social responsibility; the Lazy Green, who will do the right thing if it’s convenient; and the Nongreen, who is indifferent or even hostile to a sustainability agenda, but who will happily buy green products and services if they are positioned as superior (more comfortable, more durable, less toxic, etc.). Of course, these three kinds of customers need three different sets of marketing messages–something many green companies don’t understand, and thus leave a lot of money on the table.
  3. The power of business to go beyond sustainability—to regenerativity. To actually make things better: identify/create/market *profitable* offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. Lifting people out of poverty (and creating new markets), ending war, solving climate change as ways to make money: how cool is that?

I’ve spent the last several years studying this trend and have written an award-winning book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that shows how in detail. It’s been endorsed by over 50 business and environmental leaders, including Seth Godin and Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield. You can learn more at the Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World page at GoingBeyondSustainability.com (I think it’s by far the best of my 10 books, several of which have won awards or been translated and republished in other countries).

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, language, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

When gallery owner Richard Michelson asked Jules Feiffer if he wanted a retrospective for his 89th birthday, the brilliant artist replied, “I am doing the best work I’ve ever done and want this exhibit to be new and explosive, with figures sprawling and flying everywhere, and focused on dance…It only took 89 years to figure out how to do this stuff!”

Jules Feiffer, 89, at Michelson Gallery, April 13, 2018
Jules Feiffer, 89, at Michelson Gallery, April 13, 2018

That wonderful and extensive show is now on display at R. Michelson Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts. We went in to peruse it, and Rich’s wife Jennifer told us that Feiffer was about to do a Q&A. Of course we went upstairs, chatted a bit with Jules and his Phantom Tollbooth collaborator Norton Juster (who lives locally), and settled in to listen.

Jules has a quick and acerbic wit and a strong sense of social justice. Someone asked him what the best response was to the current situation in national politics and he instantly responded with a primal scream. I asked him how he was able to capture the 3-dimensional, flowing art of dance so well in static two-dimensional pictures and he talked about capturing the illusion, that everything was an illusion.

His new work is indeed brilliant. While it descends directly from his famous Village Voice cartoons of he 1960s and 70s, it really is what he told Rich. It has so much vibrancy, often very sophisticated and detailed captioning, and the figures really come alive—especially those using colored inks, which he’s begun to use here and there (though most of the show was black-and-white).

Jules is the latest in a long line of inspirational role models for growing older. I’ve profiled some of them here: Arky Markham, centenarian and activist; Bob Luitweiler, founder of the international homestay organization Servas, for instance I’ve been fortunate to know many others, including Pete Seeger and Chicago Seven/Eight defendant Dave Dellinger—with whom I became friends as a teenaged college student when he was 60, and whom I consider one of my personal mentors—as well as Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn; I met her when I was working for the Gray Panthers as a VISTA Volunteer, at the group’s national conference.

These are the kinds of people I want to emulate as I (hopefully) reach well past my current age of 61. When I was a teen activist, I often heard that I was too young to change the world. Now, I’m beginning to hear people tell me I’m too old to do the work I do. But I remind them that Grandma Moses started painting in her 70s and enjoyed a 20-plus-year run as a painter. Today, for example, I’m going networking at a sustainability fair, then attending a peace and tax fairness rally, then hiking a mountain, and probably going out to hear some live music or theater in the evening. You’re only as old as you feel.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail