Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life

A newsletter editor asked for favorite business books. And having created the list for him, I decided to share it with you. Listing my own two most recent books first is not a matter of ego; I actually do believe they’re the best out there in their respective subject areas (note that my other four books don’t make the list)–in part because my research and writing incorporated much of the best wisdom I found elsewhere (and I’m a voracious reader). I’ve written longer reviews of several of these (and others), one per issue in my monthly newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit. Archives are posted at https://www.principledprofits.com/subscribe-positive-power.html (scroll down about two screens)

1. Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First
By Shel Horowitz
Numerous examples of the crucial importance of real, meaningful customer service–the dollar impact of doing it right–or wrong. Much practical advice.

2. Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World
By Shel Horowitz
One-volume course in every aspect of low-cost, high-impact marketing: copywriting, media relations, Internet, personal banding, and more.

3. Love Is the Killer App : How to Win Business and Influence Friends
by Tim Sanders

Helping others–embracing the abundance principle–is a powerful way to grow your own brand–by a (young) senior Yahoo exec

4. Hug Your Customers : The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results
by Jack Mitchell (Hardcover)

A business owner who’ll do anything for his customers–even fly across the world to deliver a suit! He turns clothing shopping from commodity to magical experience–and he is very well-compensated.

5. The Soul in the Computer: The Story of a Corporate Revolutionary
by Barbara Waugh, Margot Silk Forrest

Barbara Waugh kept standing up for what’s right in her job at HP–and kept getting promoted! Shows how to be very ethical *and * make a difference in the world from within a major corporation.

6. Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul : A Woman’s Guide to Promoting Herself, Her Business, Her Product, or Her Cause with Integrity and Spirit
by Susan Harrow

Excellent practical advice for dealing with the media without falling in any snakepits

7. Winning Without Intimidation : How to Master the Art of Positive Persuasion in Today’s Real World in Order to Get What You Want, When You Want It
by Bob Burg, Bob Berg

A gazillion awesome strategies for de-escalating and turning conflict into agreement. Bob Burg has changed my life!

8. The Book of Agreement: 10 Essential Elements for Getting the Results You Want
by Stewart Levine

A very successful lawyer explains why collaboration is better than confrontation in the legal system

9. Co-Opetition: A Revolution Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation : The Game Theory Strategy That’s Changing the Game of Business
by Adam M. Brandenburger, Barry J. Nalebuff

The paradigm that the same businesses are sometimes competitors, sometimes co-operators, sometimes suppliers/customers, and sometimes complementors is extremely helpful in crafting an ethical approach to business.

10. Cash Copy: How to Offer Your Products and Services So Your Prospects Buy Them
By Jeffrey Lant

Not necessarily the definitive book on copywriting, but the first I happened to read that explained why most copywriting fails, and how to create copy that works. (I’ve since read many others, including excellent ones by Joe Vitale, Ted Nicholas, Claude Hopkins, John Caples, David Ogilvy, and many more, but this one completely changed the way I approach client work. I read it about 15 years ago, and without it, I doubt I’d have a copywriting business today.)

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life

Last summer, I launched an international grassroots campaign to prevent future Enron scandals by creating a mass movement toward ethical business practices. My goal: 25,000 business leaders signing an ethics pledge, and each agreeing to contact at least 100 others. (Bless their hearts, some signers have e-mail lists of many thousand, and have run notices about the campaign.) Together, we could create the “tipping point” to make business slime as socially unacceptable as slavery. Knowing that it took the Quakers 100 years from the time they began their campaign against slavery until slavery was eliminated in the US–and they had very little training in community organizing and, of course, no access to modern communication tools–I set myself a timeframe of ten years. As a volunteer, I’m doing this on essentially zero budget, other than paying for occasional bits of my assistant’s time to set up web pages, and a few dollars here and there for press release distribution. But then again, I’ve been writing about (and practicing) low-cost marketing for over 20 years, so that oughtn’t to be difficult, right?

I knew this would be good for the world. And I also knew it would be good for the people signing, who could use the Pledge in their own marketing.

What’s been pleasantly surprising is how in just these first few months, it’s already started changing the shape of my own business, and not in ways I’d have predicted.

I did think the pledge would make it easier to get speaking engagements; so far, that hasn’t been true.

But…

* I’m in dialog with a very prestigious magazine in the ethical business sphere, which has contracted for an article. If they like my work, they’ll have me do that department every issue. While I won’t be writing about the pledge, my blurb will identify me as the author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and the founder of the Business Ethics Pledge movement.

* Several new clients and prospects have approached me, specifically citing my stand on ethics, and usually telling me they found me through a link about the campaign. At least two of these will be long-term clients who will generate substantial revenue in copywriting and strategic marketing planning projects.

* I got an inquiry all the way from the Philippines about buying 500 copies of my book. Once again, the ethics campaign was a factor.

So apparently, it really is true: follow your dreams, your loves, your passions–and our abundant universe provides for you.

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By Posted on Posted in Events, Shel's Personal Life

In some ways, it’s an even bigger thrill to open a package and find copies of your book from another country than to get the finished books from the printer in the first place.

It’s happened to me twice: several years ago, when I received five Korean copies of Marketing Without Megabucks: How to Sell Anything on a Shoestring–and the other day, when I got two copies of “Ethics in Marketing”–which is what Jaico, the publisher in Mumbai, India, decided to call its version of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. In a spify, hardcover edition, no less. The only other book of mine ever to be published in hardcover was my very first one, published in 1980 and long out of print: a book on why nuclear power is a horrible way to generate electricity.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t that happy with the production *inside* the Indian version. Still, it means a great deal to a writer to be taken seriously halfway around the world, to have my ideas deemed worthy of widespread distribution.

The book is also supposed to be published in a Spanish-language edition out of Mexico City–but I never count unhatched chickens, especially since Chinese deals for two of my books fell through late in the process.

India seems quite interested in PrinProfit. I had the book exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and received six inquiries–every one of them from India. I personally think this book should do very well in Japan and Germany, among other places.

Oh yes, and it’s really cool to be able to show off the Korean version of MWM. I can’t read the text at all, but they used the English-language samples I’d included.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Shel's Personal Life

Can one self-employed guy working from a farmhouse in Massachusetts actually have an impact on the way business is conducted in our modern world?

Some people seem to think the whole Business Ethics Pledge campaign is misguided, or at best tilting at windmills. I can tell you this: It’s gotten incredibly positive feedback. The last project for which I’ve gotten so many thank-yous was saving our local mountain from a very poorly-conceived housing development, a campaign I started that involved several thousand people (I still get thanked for it, five years after the campaign started and four years after we won). That campaign confirmed the idea that one person can indeed make a difference, and that difference is most easily achieved if the lone individual joins with others into an organized force.

I wrote my book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, to help change the world’s attitude about business. And when I realized that the book by itself wouldn’t reach enough people to create the social change I want, the Pledge was a logical next step.

The Ethics Pledge campaign doesn’t resonate with everyone. But it is deeply meaningful to some sectors of the business world, and at this point I feel an obligation to continue pushing the Pledge and everything it represents, both to attempt to actually accomplish its (admittedly ambitious) goal, and because I feel an obligation to continue offering support to those who’ve placed their trust in this campaign and who have helped spread the word about it.

Since the 1950s, the concept of the “hundredth monkey” has been used to describe a paradigm shift that happens when a certain very small percentage of individuals shift their actions or beliefs–and then, like a wave, the new behavior or attitude spreads rapidly through society. Malcolm Gladwell calls that point of critical mass “the tipping point.” Usually, a movement starts small, builds for some time while nobody’s noticing (often in another culture), and then explodes into the public consciousness. We’ve seen it over and over again, in every sphere of our lives: politics, art & culture, and yes, business:
# The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott created the tipping point in national consciousness to begin the end of segregation, after 50 years of quiet behind-the-scenes activism in small groups.
# The original Earth Day, in 1970, moved the consciousness of
American society so that we began to pay attention to our society’s effect on the environment. But remember–Rachel Carson’s Silent Springwas published back in 1962; the nuclear test ban movement was even earlier.
# The collapse of European Communism in 1989-90 probably wouldn’t have been possible without Prague Spring and the brave resistance to the Soviet invasion, two decades earlier.
# Business innovations like Kaizen (continuous improvement) were based on the writings of Western business thinkers but pretty much ignored here at first. Bbut they were adopted widely in Japan, and brought back successfully to the US only after the Japanese automakers started cleaning the clocks of the American giants.

Will the Pledge campaign actually succeed? I don’t know. 25,000 each influencing at least 100 may or may not be enough to create the “tipping point”; there’s really no way to find out other than to do it. And if it turns out that this relatively small group is in fact enough to change the business culture, and I had abandoned the quest before reaching that point, how would I live with myself? Just because it’s Quixotic, doesn’t mean it won’t necessarily work. I believe it will work, but I won’t know until the campaign is complete–not for quite a few years, at the current rate of signing. At the least, the campaign will be part of the necessary groundwork so that when the second wave arrives, the consciousness is ready to shift. At best, the first wave is already laying the groundwork, and the pledge will be a catalyst for that rapid change throughout society.

After all, I’ve been involved in “impossible” movements my whole life. When I started in social change, segregation was a very recent memory, the war in Vietnam was raging, and Nixon was calling for 1000 nuclear power plants. Segregation, the Vietnam war, and the (extremely dangerous) nuclear power industry were all brought to a halt by the power of ordinary human beings working together. Some of them had greatness thrust upon them–but they were ordinary people nonetheless.

I’m an ordinary person who happens to have a combination of organizing skills and marketing skills, and I’m willing to tilt at this particular windmill to see if in fact I can move it around on its axis. When the housing development on the mountain was announced, the experts all said “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” It was actually that powerless response, rather than the project itself, that inspired me to form Save the Mountain–I knew I could prove them wrong. I fully expected that campaign to take five years; we defeated the project completely in just 13 months.

Too few social change agents have a long-term view, IMO. But let’s remember that it took 100 years from the time the Quakers set a goal of ending slavery in this country. They had no mass communication and rather poor organizing skills; with better tools, Lech Walesa toppled the Polish communist government in a matter of months. Ending segregation and the Vietnam war each took about a decade of large-scale public organizing, and quite a bit of small-group stuff in the decades leading up.

Copywriter, marketing consultant, and speaker Shel Horowitz is the author of six books and publisher of five websites, five webzines and three ezines. His two most recent, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World have both won awards. He’s currently engaged in a campaign to get 25,000 people to sign–and spread–the Business Ethics Pledge:

This article is copyright 2004 by Shel Horowitz. Permission is granted to reprint it in full and unchanged, including the bio and reprint permission, in any Internet, print, or e-mail medium for which no fee is charged. If you wish to use this article and charge for it, or if you’d like to make changes other than minor grammatical tweaks, please contact shel AT principledprofits.com

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