By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

Charles Hayes is one of my favorite commentators. Coming from a very conservative background, he nonetheless has a very progressive slant. He first came to my attention as a client several years ago, seeking publicity help for his brilliant book on self-education and liberalism, Beyond the American Dream.

I’ve just read two of his essays posted here: “Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last.” and “Did the Cold War Condition Us to Fear Democracy?”

Like everything I’ve read by Charles, these are very thoughtful pieces. Not an easy read, but certainly within all of our grasp, and worth the effort.

Charles sees five pillars holding up society, but the liberals lean on two and conservatives on the other three, causing a great deal of friction. In typical Charles fashion–a brilliant and very well-read self-educated man–he quotes many sources, including George Lakoff (whose analysis I think is vital for an understanding of the liberal vs. the conservative mind.

And Charles’ perspective on this is especially fascinating because he was raised a southern conservative, is a veteran (Marines), and came to liberalism much later in life. Personally, I think liberals have at least as much need for community as conservatives, but they seek a *different kind* of community. And both liberals and conservatives can support caring communities; evangelical churches and fundamentalist Muslims have often been actively involved in homeless shelters, feed-the-hungry, and other social service ventures.

I’ve been having a correspondence this week with a very conservative Muslim friend who’s active on a publishing discussion list that I frequent–a retired state trooper who now runs a press that publishes American Muslim fiction, especially by women. She and I value many of the same things, but the expression of those values takes very different forms. Yet we have a great deal of respect for each other. Today, she proposed an Israel-Palestine peace idea that would make any liberal proud. And yet she repeatedly razzes on a listmate who is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, accuses him of hating America, and tells us that we have a great deal to fear from radical Muslim extremists, even though she sees them as violating key precepts of Islam.

One of the things I’ve learned to do well is to seek common ground with people who are different from me. They can hear me a lot better that way, and perhaps some part of my message of peace and social change gets through. My dialogue with this woman is an example of that, the sort of dialogue that Charles says is entirely too absent from the discourse.

And I think he’s right. We spend so much time shouting at each other and so little time listening., Yet we make big progress when we do engage, and listen, and talk.

My greatest successes as an organizer/activist always come when I’m able to help people find unity. It gave me huge satisfaction back when I did Save the Mountain (2000) to drive around the neighborhood and see our lawn signs sharing lawns with signs for Gore, Nader, *and* Bush. We had found the common ground–and we involved thousands of people and won a nearly complete victory. And I find, over and over again, for 30 years, that when we listen respectfully to each other, we not only find common ground, but we grow in our thinking a our analysis is challenged.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics: General

Note from Shel: I’ve been reading Chris’s ethics blog for a long time and he’s listed in my blogroll. i liked this enough that I asked for permission to post it here.

The Mission of Your Mission Statement vs. The Value of Your Values Statement
By Chris Bauer

A frightening number individuals and companies say they really don’t need a values statement because, after all, everything is covered by their mission statement. That’s a sure sign that either the mission statement or its application needs some serious work. Both are frequently the case.

Mission statements are intended to be a summary statement of why your organization exists and concisely let the world know what your purpose is. That is, after all, what a mission is.

A values statement, on the other hand, should equally concisely tell your employees, along with the rest of the world, the essentials of how your business runs. Among its most critical functions, a values statement needs to:

Make clear to employees the values that are to inform their job behavior all day, every day. In other words, when there isn’t a rule for something, or when there are multiple possible ways to make a decision, your values statement should effectively guide their choice regarding what to do.

Allow employees to unambiguously judge the appropriateness of every action in their working day by discerning whether or not those actions or are not aligned with your stated values. (This should simultaneously be a great tool for helping employees judge the ethics of their actions or intended actions.)

Accurately tell the public what values they can expect to see brought to life when dealing with your company.

The value of a well-written values statement is enormous. It not only creates an easily-applied guide and gauge for the appropriateness of any employee’s behavior at any time, but can equally easily be used as the foundation for building better management, leadership, and customer-service at all levels of your organization. After all, if each of these functions were to be constantly driven by your most important values, wouldn’t that necessarily assure both significant and positive changes?

Could your organization use help in developing a values statement that will drive better management, leadership, and customer service all while simultaneously helping assure ethical conduct at all levels of your business? Contact Christopher Bauer by return email or by using the electronic comment card found by clicking here. Thanks!

copyright 2007 by Christopher Bauer – all rights reserved

(Information on Bauer Ethics Seminars is available at www.bauerethicsseminars.com.)

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

As a marketing consultant and copywriter with a focus on global social/environmental change, I read a ton of books and articles on persuasion. It’s a crucial skill for me to be able to understand what our brains, hearts, and bodies really want in order to move forward–whether it’s to buy a product, pick up a free report, or take an action to change the world.

As a result, I read a lot of e-mail newsletters from marketers–one of them is Harlan Kilstein, who’s been sending a very powerful and useful series of e-mails outlining the principles in his NLP copywriting course. Today, he told a story about an incredible act of persuasion by the famous hypnotist Milton Erickson. His patient was a deeply religious Christian who had farted loudly in a very public situation (while presenting to a room full of people)–and was so convinced she had committed some absolutely unpardonable sin that she became a recluse, fleeing from all human contact and hiding behind grocery delivery service so she never had to go out.

Rather than trying to beat her head against the metaphorical wall trying to convince the patient that this was crazy, Erickson went right into her core belief and used it to leverage change:

He opened up an anatomy book and told her no human engineer could make a valve that let out air but contained liquid and solids, and air.

He told her she needed to respect God’s creation.

Wow!

Wow, indeed! That is about the most powerful harnessing and flipping of a core belief I’ve ever come across–and if it had been up to me, even though I’ve studied persuasion for years, I don’t think I could have ever taped into that powerful belief in a way that completely turned this woman’s life around.

Erickson went on in the therapy to actually train her to fart–all because he structured it in such a way that she totally had to accept
the truth of his statement, within her own belief system, even though it contradicted all her behavior since the farting incident.

Wow, wow, and wow, again!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International

No matter what your position on the Iraq war, I thought we could all agree that…

  • It’s a good idea to keep weapons out of the hands of insurgents
  • Fraud and corruption that costs taxpayers millions of dollars should be stamped out

    • Well, apparently the federal government doesn’t agree. A shocking AP article (as reprinted in the Santa Barbara News-Press) details severe repression against several whistleblowers who reported just such things in Iraq–ranging from demotion and harassment to 97 days in prison outside Baghdad!

    For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

    There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

    He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers – all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

    Shameful, absolutely shameful.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics

    Knowing that any entry in a Wiki can be changed by any reader, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of what I read on Wikipedia. Still, I find that Google often points me to Wikipedia articles, and most of the time, they seem pretty authoritative and accurate (if I’m at all suspicious, I verify with other sources, and it usually checks out).

    Now it turns out I was right to be suspicious. Virgil Griffith, a grad student at CalTech, invented a system to track the IP addresses of people who change Wikipedia entries–and the results are scary. While the majority of changes are innocuous–correcting typos and that sort of thing, a number of well-known entities have deliberately distorted facts. A few among many examples:

    According to the Wired article (one of several from mainstream news sources, including BBC and ABC),

    Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

    The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.

    So who’s been playing fast and loose with the truth?

  • The CIA edited entries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad
  • Diebold, the voting machine company, removed incriminating material about its machines and faulty election results
  • Someone at a Democratic Party computer edited the entry about Rush Limbaugh to call him Limbaugh “idiotic,” “racist”, and a “bigot”–and about his audience, “Most of them are legally retarded.”
  • Microsoft listed its MSN as a “major competitor” to Google, whle adding deprecating material to Apple’s entry
  • Wal-Mart toned down criticism of its labor policies
  • Even the Vatican removed passages about Sinn Fein’s Gerry Addams that linked him to a 1971 murder.

    • Needless to say, this raises a lot of ethical questions. As a start, it would seem logical that Wikipedia should keep a running, public list of any IP addresses that altered a particular entry–right on that page. And also, perhaps, each page could display its history, so that previous versions would be visible and readers could draw their own conclusions.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

    I’ve had the good fortune to meet many people over the years who’ve truly made a difference in the world. I met another one today, in a nursing home in Bellingham, Washington.

    Bob Luitweiler is 87 and ill with cancer–but he still talks about the alternative school he’d like to start. He demands a lot from his visitors: hearty, probing conversation that goes deep about personal lives and about the state of the world, punctuated by references to various books and magazines that surround his sickbed. He sprinkles his conversation with several snippets of other languages, and we have a long talk about whether to be optimistic that people will come out of their self-centered cocoons in time to avert the coming environmental crisis (I’m more optimistic than he is)–and about life in the post-Word War II, pre-NATO Denmark of alternative folk schools, peace, community, and an excellent safety net.

    Bob is the founder of Servas, an international traveler/host network that fosters peace through international communication. As a member of this organization since 1983, I have enjoyed fabulous times both as a traveler and a host–and when our host offered to bring us over, I was delighted. It has made traveling not only much more affordable, but also much more of an experience of abundance (I strongly recommend this organization–here’s an article I wrote about the basic concept, and another describing ten of my favorite homestay moments–scroll down past the response to 9/11 article). Servas was started as a peace organization after Bob (who has been to 53 countries and speaks something like seven languages) experienced that remarkable culture of Denmark in the days following World War II, and now offers no-cost homestays in over 140 countries. We’ve enjoyed this very special way of travel in four different continents so far, including stays in Paris, London, Prague, Athens, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and numerous small towns, backwoods cabins, and more.

    Knowing that he was ill, I expected we’d visit for 20 or 30 minutes–but Bob didn’t want to let us go. He seemed thrilled to have a deep conversation, and when we finally excused ourselves after an hour and a half, he was deeply disappointed. He said he wanted to know us better and asked if we could come back another time before we leave the area. (Postscript: he called the following morning to tell us that our visit had been “the greatest gift of the last six months.”)

    Clearly, this man who has accomplished so much has a lot more he’d like to do before his time is up.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Shel's Personal Life

    Cruise for Free as a Speaker/Entertainer
    Go get your free report at https://www.frugalfun.com/cruise.html

    For my wife’s 50th birthday, her parents sent us on a cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage–a magnificent trip.

    But it got me thinking–surely there are more eco-friendly ways to run a cruise ship. There ae astounding issues of waste aboard ship, and with so many ships plying these waters, the impact on fragile ecologies in these beautiful locations we all want to visit can be quite significant–and quite negative. And then I found out that on top of issues like food waste, ship sewage gets dumped into the water! There’s got to be a better way.

    So, while still on the ship, I started working on a business plan for an eco-friendly cruise line that would serve as a lab for (and be funded initially by) the traditional cruise lines, developing new Green practices and technologies that the whole fleet could adopt. And maybe the land-based hotel industry could get in on it as well.

    Making this a reality is a bigger task than I could take on on my own but if any one has ideas as to how to make this a reality, I’m very willing to listen, and to share my thinking. E-mail me through my contact form on https://www.frugalmarketing.com.

    And hey, I’d love to be Marketing Director if such a line ever launches . Let’s reinvent this industry together.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Ethics: General, General Commentary, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

    A

    Very refreshing article in the New York Times about foundations not only not burying their mistakes, but actually looking at how they happened, what went wrong, and what to do better the next time around.

    Just a few years ago, it would have been astonishing for a foundation, particularly one as traditional as Carnegie, to publicize a failure. Today, though, many of the nation’s largest foundations regard disclosing and analyzing their failures as bordering on a moral obligation.

    “There’s an increasing recognition among foundation leaders that not to be public about failures is essentially indefensible,” said Phil Buchanan, the executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which advises foundations. “If something didn’t work, it is incumbent upon you to make sure others don’t make the same mistake.

    I see this as a welcome trend, and one that businesses can learn from. Failure is not something to be ashamed of. I had a number of failures in business before I started the one I’m in now, back in 1981–and even then, it had to change with the times. It has reinvented itself several times, and I feel another reinvention percolating (don’t know how it will shape up yet).

    Entrepreneurs almost always have failures to “brag” about. otherwise, we wouldn’t be entrepreneurs, because in order of succeed, you have to take risks.

    When asked about has many failed attempts to develop a light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have
    successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” (Quoted in The
    World Bank. 1994. World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for
    Development. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press and cited here.)

    I’ll tell you about a few of my failures over the years, within my current, successful business:

  • Around 20 years ago, I tried to start a state trade association for resume writers, without having any idea of how much work would be involved or how much direct mail I’d have to do to get a viable membership. I actually got a phenomenal response to my first mailing (somewhere around 8 percent, I think), but that left me with something like seven members.
  • I’ve been unable to find a publisher for a research-intensive book I’d like to do that requires a big publisher who can pay a big advance. Even though I’ve done one book with Simon & Schuster and two others with respected smaller commercial publishers, and even though I speak and write and am very visible on the Internet, agents think I don’t have enough of a platform to take on this project. Since coming up with this idea, though, I’ve done two more self-published books, to critical acclaim.
  • A few years back, I stepped into a catfight on one of the discussion lists I participate in–and watched the client referrals from that list shrivel up to a tiny fraction of what they’d been.
  • I set a goal some time back of doing a certain number of speeches at a certain rate of compensation, by a certain date. Years later, I still haven’t reached that goal.

    • I won’t bore you with the whole long list. But I do think it’s important to take stock, to reflect on the mistakes/failures as well as the brilliant successes. I’ve learned, I’ve channeled my energy into becoming not only more successful financially, but a better person. And it’s showing results.

    I urge you to admit and discuss your setbacks as well as your successes.

    Maybe I should add admitting setbacks to the Business Ethics Pledge.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

    Bill Becker, a former US Department of Energy official, published a very cogent article in the Denver Post, opposing nuclear power on the grounds that…

    Those who say it will reduce global warming ignore the huge carbon cost of mining, milling, and transporting the fuel and of building the plant in the first place.
    Many scientists say we only have a window of about a decade to turn our energy patterns around, if we’re to avoid catastrophic climate change. Nukes take many years to approve and build.

    He also notes some of the more familiar arguments, e.g., terrorist target, weapons proliferation, and waste storage issues–although he only mentions these and does not elaborate.

    So let me elaborate at least on waste storage. We’re looking at isolating extremely deadly and volatile compounds for longer than the span of civilization–a devil’s bargain if there ever was one.

    This is an issue I know something about. I started researching issues around nuclear power in 1974, and my first book, published in 1980, was on why nuclear is a really stupid way to generate electricity, and I’ve seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

    Want to know more? I still don’t know a better book on the subject than No Nukes, published way back in 1978 and apparently still in print.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

    Audio interview on a year of eating only local foods, many of them from her garden.

    https://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_6208.cfm

    I confess–while I try to eat local and organic as much as possible, I’m not to the point where I can completely give up cocoa, olive oil, and tropical fruit, among other pleasures. But nothing beats a perfect-tasting tomato or raspberry from our own planting and harvesting.

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