I don’t expect to be posting much for the next two weeks, as I’ll be out of the country. I do have one guest post in hand that I’ll schedule, and I’m hoping to get one or two more before I actually leave.
Let me just take a moment to say thanks for reading, and especially to those of you who post comments.
Membership in the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers will not be open to anyone who claims to be Green. To provide value in the membership, members need to pass both accomplishment-based standards (employment, education/training, and/or volunteer work) and behavioral screens. We’ll talk about accomplishments today, and screens tomorrow
Here are some I’m thinking about:Read more »
Africa (South Africa, in particular) gave us the Sullivan Principles, which outlined investment strategies to move toward ending apartheid. At the time (1977), I thought it was way too little, way too late, but I came to appreciate that for its time, it was revolutionary: perhaps the first declaration by corporate America that they had a clear role to play in improving conditions around the world. And this was not so long after the US has been involved in such disgusting maneuvers as (to ame just two among dozens of equally awful examples) overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Mossadeq in Iran (1953, in the interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), on behalf of United Fruit)—actions that have had horrific consequences down to the present day in Iran and through at least 1996 in Guatemala.
Now, Ron Robins, of Investing for the Soul, postulates that Africa is on the brink of an explosion in socially responsible investing. It’s a very interesting article, and among his points are these:
Worldwide, SRI now accounts for 1 of every 9 dollars invested. However, even though Africa was a pioneer in this field (not just with the Sullivan Principles but also the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s first-in-the-world SRI index), it has lagged—but rapid growth appears to be imminent.
Go and read it.
I was in my 20s the first time I ever saw a personal computer, and 27 before I had one of my own. That was three years before my older child was born. My kids grew up with computers. Now comes a generation that will grow up with personal devices. They may never use a mouse, a floppy disk will be something they can only dimly relate to (by analogy with USB drives, just as a kid who grew up with CDs might dimly understand that we used to play music on records).
This 5-minute video shows a two-and-a-half-year-old girl’s first encounter with an iPad. She’s highly verbal, speaking in sentences and even paragraphs. (My son was like that at that age, so I know it’s possible.) And that makes her an ideal test subject, because she can talk about what’s going on for her.
What pleasantly shocks me is the way she intuitively groks the user interface. Also, how she anticipates absent features that ought to be there, and sees some of the possibilities the technology presents. It probably would not have occurred to me to swipe my hand to the side rapidly to display another window of icons. But then again, I grew up with manual typewriters.
It must have been somewhere around 1986, in the early days of my business, that I first encountered the work of Paul and Sarah Edwards, gurus to the home-based business sector that was just beginning to take off back then. I’ve been home-based since I founded my company in 1981, so their message resonated.
I’ve been corresponding with Paul recently, and am very excited by something they’re into now: Offering the “Elm Street” economy as an alternative to both Wall Street and Main Street.
Elm Street, in most communities, is typically in a residential neighborhood. In Northampton, Massachusetts (the closest Elm Street to my house), it’s a graceful, tree-lined boulevard of large Victorian-era homes.
As Paul and Sarah Edwards describe it, an Elm Street economy is also firmly rooted in sustainability, at multiple levels:
It’s a local economy, composed of locally-owned and locally-financed enterprises, industries, and independent practitioners who are invested in bringing long-term well-being to all living there, including nature. It’s focus is on working together to create dependable, environmentally sustainable way of life that bring basic services, products, and resilience back to our local communities.
Local Economy
Be it in a city neighborhood, a suburban sub-division, a small town or rural community, the Elm Street Economy is coming to life. It may look a little different from locale to locale, with urban Elm Street communities growing food on rooftops instead of backyards, for example, but wherever they might be located, they can flourish due to values and characteristics symbolized in this logo.• Local production of food, renewable energy and goods.
• Local development of commerce, government and culture.
• Reduction of consumption while improving environmental and social
concerns.• Being an exemplary working model for other communities when the effects
of decline of the existing economy and our natural resources becomes more
intense.
In short, very much aligned with the values I’ve been espousing for years, in this blog, in my books, in my speeches, and elsewhere.
The Edwards’ vision of the Elm Street economy, and their analysis, go far deeper than what I’ve quoted here. Go and read it.
1. Have you heard about the barbaric, fascistic anti-homosexuality law in Uganda? Yes, they’re calling for the death penalty for consensual sex. Read CNN’s article. Here’s the group to oppose it, please join.
2. Especially if you’re in Western Mass, but even if you’re not: a Facebook support group has sprung up for the Northampton, Massachusetts victims of arson. My old neighborhood in Northampton got hit with dozens of fires in a one-hour period Sunday night. Two people died, and two families including some friends of ours were left homeless. Several lost their cars or sustained severe damage.
Please distribute this message widely.
Woke up this morning to the startling news that US President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Price–and a perceptive entry on Huffington Post wondering why.
After all, he has initiated a slow and limited timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, pretty much continuing the “progress” of his predecessor–and has made very clear his intent to expand the war in Afghanistan.
Now it’s true that these were wars he inherited, and that he’s had a very full plate even by presidential standards. It’s also true that he has moved us forward on climate change and the environment, on labor, and on the idea that foreign affairs should be primarily addressed through diplomacy And that last bit has certainly help the slow process of rebuilding the U.S.’s stature in the world, after eight years of a rogue coup d’etat regime that left the world negatively astounded and quite terrified. His speech in Cairo was a terrific example.
But the Nobel award does seem a bit, ummm, premature. I’d have rather they waited until he successfully extricated us from the Bush wars, or until he made a speech like this:
Ladies and gentlemen, both my fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world–in the 21st century, war simply has no place in the arsenal of foreign policy. The last significant example of a war achieving policy ends was World War II, when the world responded to a series of power-mad totalitarian regimes with equal force, stopped the aggressors at a great cost in human lives, and installed democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. That was 64 years ago, and took six bloody, difficult years to achieve. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a failure, and both Iraq and Afghanistan are succeeding only in giving strength and comfort and eager recruits to the enemies of freedom. Therefore, I have ordered the immediate drawdown of troops. Over the next three months, all US military personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be coming home, along with the private US military contractors that participate. In their place, we will devote significant resources toward hunger relief, education, rebuilding of bombed infrastructure, and eliminating corruption in those countries. There will be a small security presence whose mission is to protect the workers for social and economic justice that we will send over, but there will be no military mission beyond that. We can learn from the powerful example of countries like South Africa, Poland, and Northern Ireland, where peace and democracy were not imposed through the barrels of guns, but by the powerful leadership of indigenous residents who organized together to say, ‘enough of this.’ It’s long past time, in the words of John Lennon, to Give Peace a Chance.
The Nobel committee has made strange choices before (can you say Henry Kissinger?). I can only hope that they’re following the philosophy of rewarding the behavior they want to see in the hopes that the behavior will rise to meet the treatment. This is a great strategy in parenting, in conflict resolution between individuals, in customer service desks (I even write about it in my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First). It would be great if it turns out to work in international politics too.
Oh, and President Obama, I give you free and full permission to use the above speech in full or in part, at any time—including your Nobel acceptance speech in Sweden!
If you search on Google for the word Google plus the exact phrase “Don’t Be Evil”, you get 366,000 hits. The company’s motto has been used at least since 2001, according to Wikipedia.
As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.Read more »
Remember that old bumper sticker, “Trees are America’s Renewable Resource”? It’s true. You can regenerate a harvestable forest in 20 years or so: a nanosecond compared to the millions of years necessary to create fossil fuels.
However, and it’s a BIG however—biofuels such as timber or scrap wood, or for that matter, corn-based ethanol, are for the most part not sustainable. They are far from carbon-neutral, and in fact generate large amounts of carbon and other pollutants. Think about it: coal and oil are fossilized carbon that originated from plants and animals; wood and corn haven’t fossilized the carbon, but they are very much carbon-based life forms, and we add a lot of carbon back into the air when we burn them.
So the effect of these fuels on climate change is negative: they push us more in the direction we DON’T want to go.
Add to that such effects as habitat destruction from clear-cutting, food shortages resulting from diversion of protein crops into energy that powers machines instead of humans and animals, and toxicity from burning chemically treated wood scraps, and it’s pretty clear that this path isn’t sustainable.
Are there biofuel technologies that actually are sustainable? Maybe. The Q microbe certainly seems to have promise. As a non-scientist, I leave that answer to those who know more than me.
In the meantime, let’s focus on those technologies that clearly ARE sustainable. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that we could easily save 70 to 80 percent of our energy by simply designing for maximum energy utilization and eliminating the considerable waste of our present systems. Beyond that, truly sustainable technologies such as small-scale solar, wind, and hydro generated at or very near the point of use hold out a lot more promise than either biomass plants or centralized coal, oil, and nuclear.
Inspired by a Tweet from Susan Harrow, I’ve decided to post my Twitter policy every once in a while.
Some of this may sound harsh. Please keep in mind that as a somewhat public figure, I am absolutely bombarded with messages not only on Twitter but through many other channels. I have to cope with about 300 emails on a typical day, plus a three-inch stack of postal mail, plus the 1454 people I’m following on Twitter. 2390 are following me, and I recognize the disparity—but I also do have a business to run, a family to be with, and a physical need to be off the computer for half an hour or so after I’ve been on for about an hour.
I did seven Tweets outlining my policy, and I think they’re worth repeating here (slightly modified with the benefit of “but I MEANT to say” hindsight and spelling out the contractions/not needing to cram it into 140 characters):
1. I don’t follow you just because you follow me (on Facebook and LInkedIn, BTW, I pretty much do). I check out a few each profiles from new followers day (somewhat randomly, but if your follow notice includes a keyword I pay attention to—see #5, below—it ups the odds substantially). If your feeds interest me, I follow. I don’t unfollow you for not following back, since I followed you in the first place because I found your profile interesting and not because I expected reciprocity. And I don’t track whether or not you unfollowed me; it doesn’t matter in the way I sue Twitter unless you’re someone I have an actual friendship with.
2. You can drastically increase odds that I follow back by sending me an @ (NOT a spam), naming me in #followfriday, or Retweeting me; this will get me to look at your profile .
3. Having watched with horror as spammers killed e-mail, I zealously protect Twitter as useful tool. Spam me and I make it public/block/report. (I will tolerate a clueless auto-DM when I follow, unless it links to something scummy. If your auto DM or an @ message sends me to a game-the-twitter-system-get-more-followers site, porn, dating or gambling site, I’m gone. If you did it as other than an auto-DM on follow, I report and block you too.
4. The first time your account gets hijacked and you involuntarily spam me with “join my mafia family,” I cut you slack and tell you I’m not interested. If it happens again, I assume you’re not smart enough to change your password and that spammers will bother me through you. At that point, I block you.
5. I tend to follow: Green/eco/ethical, soft-sell marketers, book publishers and authors, social media people, folks into progressive social change, quoters, people who post interesting links, people who tweet leads from reporters looking for sources. If you fall into one of these categories and you @ me telling me so, I’ll certainly click on over for a look.
6. I always like to say that I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything, but don’t forget the almost part. If you have a great profile about stuff that I’m simply not interseted in, now matter how good it is, I won’t follow. A few subjects I find uninteresting: online gaming, hard-sell interruption marketing, get-rich-quick stuff, football, super-techie computer coding…and schemes to get more followers you haven’t earned.
7. I tend to follow people who offer a mix of glimpses into their personal lives, interesting tidbids they find online, dialogue with the community, and no more than 20% blatant promotion. And I try to keep my own Tweets in this pattern. I try to be helpful, friendly, useful in my Tweets. Follow me because you like my posts, not to game the system with one more well-connected follower.