In a recent blog, I told you
about a trip to Walmart and how they have slashed waste in all of their stores,
saving money and the environment at the same time. The more I talk about this,
the more I realize how many companies are starting to look for “gold” and
“green” in the dumpster.
Back in the 1990s, California passed a law to divert half its waste from landfills
by 2005. As Secretary of the California EPA when the mandate came due, I was
pleased to report that we had met the target right on schedule. Now CA dares to
talk about “zero waste” in the near future and cities like San Francisco have set their own target of being “landfill-free” by
2020. I was in New Zealand recently and heard that their biggest cities are
doing the same thing.
Now GM is getting on the
bandwagon. It recently announced that by 2010, at least half of its 181
facilities world-wide will be waste free, meaning not a single thing will leave
those sites as waste.
So how is it happening and
what could this mean for companies? One example is electronic waste and another
is cooking oil. Old computers, TVs and adding machines have one thing in common
with the used grease from fast food restaurants - - until a few years ago, it
cost businesses money to have this stuff hauled away. Now companies are paying
to get their hands on it and convert it to useful products. I recently toured a
company in California, called ECS, that strips down “e-waste” to components
and commodities, including precious metals and recyclable plastics. All of that
gets put back into the making of new electronics and, the process, reduces
waste going to landfills.
The grease is being refined
into vehicle fuel and, with oil over $100 per barrel, gets more valuable every
day. E-waste and old cooking oil are just two examples of businesses looking at
their waste stream and converting liabilities to profits.
Actually, today I am in Silicon Valley. I'm at The Conversation Group's celebration of the tenth anniversary of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," and Doc Searls, one of the authors of the original manifesto is here to lead a conversation on where the manifesto stands now.
He's talking about what happens when buyer reach exceeds seller grasp, which is an unfinished question from the Manifesto. This was the Call of the Wild Customer: we are not seats or eyeballs or endusers or consuers. We are human beings, and our reach exceeds your grasp -- deal with it.
But it isn't quite true yet. Ten years later, we're still in the grasp of the vendors. No new social network is big enough to accomplish what we have to do on our own. And we can't do it individually: we have to do it with the power of the group.
And it's dependent on open source, which is a product of human nature. Its wild and free environment is the Net: Nobody owns it, everybody can use it, anybody can improve it.
There are now more than half a million open source code bases, all of which are building materials growing wild, outside of any corporate silo. The live web is branching off the static web. The branching occurs between space and time. That's why Google blog search differentiates between searching the web (static), and searching blogs (live).
On the live web, relationships between customers and vendors have to be two-way. Relationships can't occue unless both parties are equal. This means solutions have to come from customers rather than just vendors, and the two have to help each other.
Example: I should be able to express global preferences outside of anyone's silo. IF I am calling for tech support, THEN I don't want to want to hear a commercial message, AND I am willing to pay X to reach a human in <than 60 seconds.
I should be able to inquire and relate to whole markets on the fly
And I should be able to contol my own health care data.
The technology to manage my relationship with vendors is here.
I should bring my own Terms of Service to the relationship. I shouldn't have to accept the vendor's. The social contract should let me be trusted if I have money to spend, and I shouldn't have to give up so much information.
The customer is the new platform.
Markets are relationships.
The Intention Economy will grow around what we really WANT. Demand will drive supply. Personally.
You’d have to have been living on another planet not to notice that saving our planet is a pretty big trend these days and the trend for all things ‘green’ and sustainable is naturally making its impact on innovation too. In some parts of the world you now can’t move for carbon neutral holidays, low carbon cappuccinos and packaging that’s been reduced reused and recycled.However, I see a problem on the horizon and it’s called Eco-Exhaustion and it has a distant cousin called CSR Cynicism.
What am I talking about here? Simply the fact that companies (and marketing departments in particular) is falling over themselves to introduce green and environmentally friendly versions of products. Sometimes this can be really good.The Bamboo bike project (bamboobike.org) is collaboration between engineers and science types at Columbia University and the Earth Institute and the result makes me green with envy. Their idea is to make bike frames entirely out of bamboo and isn’t just sustainable it’s potentially a whole new industry in parts of Asia or Africa.Other times innovation in this area is bad. Do we, for instance, really need a bamboo laptop from Asus? Asus chose bamboo because it was “the most sustainable raw material there is” but just how green is this? Maybe Asus is doing the right thing but there are plenty of other people that aren’t.
There is an arms company in the UK that is producing ‘green’ lead-free ammunition because it’s better for the environment. What’s next, tanks made from recycled plastic and bamboo? Equally there is a fur company in Canada that’s repositioned itself as producing an ethical eco-fabric Slogan: “Protecting nature while pampering yourself”. Umm. Not sure about that.No wonder then that a survey by ICM of 2000 British adults discovered that 23% were "bored with eco news". The poll also found that 18% of people had exaggerated their commitment to the environment because it was "fashionable". This is a problem because if companies keep developing simplistic, tokenistic and opportunistic innovations in this area customer will, quite rightly, become cynical and this could damage the companies that are doing the right thing.
Some people are doing it right and hats off to companies like Wal-Mart for at least attempting to turn itself (and, by default, its suppliers, staff and customers) green.Their aim includes increasing the fuel and emissions efficiency of its vehicle fleet by 25% by 2009 and doubling this by 2016. The company also plans to reduce energy use in-store by 30% and lower solid waste (for example, packaging) in its American stores by 25% by 2009. Wal-Mart is still accused of ‘green washing’ by eco-activists but what I do like about what Wal-Mart is doing is that they are not simply messing around with planting trees (a certain large soft drink company plants trees every time you buy a plastic bottle filled with water) or fiddling around with carbon neutral versions of products or packaging. All this helps but where innovation is really needed are areas like the supply chain and manufacturing. That’s somewhere where really innovative ideas could literally save the planet.
With Mother’s Day just behind us, I was particularly moved by a letter
written four decades ago by a very special mom. My friend and colleague, Joe
Lyou, a brilliant advocate and strategist for environmental justice and a
cleaner environment in his own right, shared with me the letter written by his
mother that was so prophetic and profound.
In July 1969, Mrs. Lyou wrote about the air pollution caused by vehicle
exhaust. She also warned California policy makers about the potential impacts of
global warming. I would do her simple eloquence a great injustice by trying to
paraphrase, so I urge you to read the letter for yourself at www.terrytamminen.com/assets/pdfdocs/letters/AirPollution.pdf.
The old 1950s TV show “Father Knows Best” was a sign of its time - - a
male-dominated society that assumed all wisdom flowed from dad, or at least the
one wearing pants in those days. As I read Kay Lyou’s letter, I realize that
maybe it was mother who knew best and had we followed another commonly accepted
value from the 1950s, we might not face the environmental and economic
challenges we do today from air pollution and greenhouse gases. In those days,
they used to say… “Now listen to your mother!”
Urban radio has come to highlight some of the worst music, from the worst artists lately. But many do not know how the collapse of urban radio took place. Long time scribe Eric K. Arnold illustrates the story of how that happened. Check it out, and do check back. - Adisa Banjoko
The Effects of Media Consolidation on Urban Radio
By Eric K. Arnold
May 16, 2008
Urban Radio: What It Is and Who's Down
Let's cut to the chase: urban radio sucks. You know it, artists know it, and programmers know it too. It offers little room for creative programming, tends to favor established artists at the expense of new voices, and kills any halfway-decent song that does manage to land in rotation by playing it as much as three times an hour. Most of all, urban radio sucks because it rarely meets the needs of the local community from which its listeners are drawn. Commercial stations and their advertisers are more than happy to have passive listeners who don't complain about programming decisions. But the truth of the matter is that people have a right to demand greater accountability from their neighborhood stations. Since all broadcasters use the public airwaves, they need to honor their responsibility to serve the public interest. Urban radio is no different, yet its lack of localism is even more appalling since stations often market themselves as being informed by street-derived culture.
Generally speaking, urban radio is defined as programming whose primary demographic targets people of color living in urban areas. This listenership is often broken down into three somewhat overlapping market segments based on age: "Hot Urban" (12-24); "Rhythmic AC" (18-34); and "Urban AC" (25-49). Hot Urban stations tend to spin current rap and contemporary R&B, while Urban AC stations rarely play much rap, preferring a mix of vintage soul and R&B with more recent neo-soul and R&B. Rhythmic AC stations fall somewhere in the middle: typical stations in this category program for both younger and older listeners, so playlists include contemporary artists as well as older, "heritage" acts.
Urban Radio is a multibillion-dollar industry controlled by a handful of large media conglomerates which program the majority of the genre's stations across the country.
I'm knee-deep in the planning of the Third Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, to be held Nov. 19th in Phoenix. The conference does three things: 1) Provide high quality content about starting and growing a "gazelle" business to entrepreneurs; 2) raise money for my foundation, the Opportunity for Entrepreneurship Foundation, which trains disadvantaged populations in entrepreneurship skills; and 3) show people from outside the Valley of the Sun that we're more than golf and retirement.
Every year, although I keep a framework adopted from the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurial education programs (Stealthmode provides them in metro Phoenix), I try to make the content totally new. This means I'm constantly going outside my Rolodex, which I used for the first conference, and trying to listen to the customer and give him/her what she asks for.
This year, we are having Chris Brogan on Social Media best practices for marketing, Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures on early stage funding, Matt Mullenweg talking about youthful entrepreneurship (he started Wordpress as a mere child and a slew of local talent with success stories and pointers.
This is SUCH a big job, especially since I am a lousy manager and delegater, and seem to wind up doing everything myself except the logistics (of which I am incapable). But I truly believe that, even though social media goes a long way to connecting the world's dots, it's really fun to bring people together to share ideas and information once in a while.
For about six months, I've been happily participating in the Beauty Cred blog on Seattle-based RealSelf.com, a site on which readers and professionals talk about beauty treatments and cosmetics.
While we have great traffic to the site, we wish we could get more readers to participate. They come to read the reviews of others, perhaps to get an answer from an expert, or to find out what the aggregate of our readers thinks about certain procedures. Naturally, if the number of reviewers is higher, the percentage values become more accurate. "72% thought a treatment was worth it" is a more trustworthy assessment if a thousand people rated the procedure than if onlly 10 people did.
So we have launched a campaign with the cheerful little moniker of "WIWI," which stands for "Was It Worth It."
We did this because we want people to comment on their experience with common treatments like Invisalign, Lasik, Intense Pulsed Light skin treatments, so we can share the information with others who are thinking of having these treatments.
Senators John McCain and Hilary Clinton are among many in Congress
clamoring for a gas tax “holiday” as fuel prices rise and the summer driving
season fast approaches. Never mind that they focus entirely on poor consumers
and fail to discuss the implications to businesses trying to get goods/services
to market. Is there any benefit to either group from leaving the tax alone? Or
increasing it?
Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund wrote a great
essay in Grist on the topic (http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/13/12175/0733) including some benefits to
everyone of reigning in greenhouse gases. And there’s evidence that you can
save much more than the planet by leaving things as they are - - according to
the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), high gas prices are
contributing to a marked decline in traffic.
Traffic on some of the nation’s most congested
freeways is down as much as 24%, largely due to higher fuel prices (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-traffic12-2008may12,0,3131880.story?track=rss).
That means businesses, which can’t take a “holiday” from delivering goods and
services if they want to remain in business, have fewer delays getting from A
to B and, presumably, lower costs. In the bargain, everyone breathes cleaner
air and the planet warms a tiny bit more slowly.
Now that’s a holiday worth having, even if it
costs a few pennies more at the pump up front.
Some experts are beginning to predict that gas prices could climb as high as $10 a gallon in the next two to three years. However, all of the solutions under consideration, such as developing alternative sources of energy, will take years to have a meaningful impact and hold no guarantees.
But there is one powerful solution that leaders could implement today. It would have a guaranteed positive impact, not only on the environment but also on the people and organizations using it—work+life flexibility. Isolated efforts have started such as the UK's Work from Home Day on May 15th, Houston's Flex in the City, and the state of Georgia letting employees work from home one day a week. But to have a meaningful impact, it needs to be broader. It needs to be national.
Therefore, if I were the President of the United States, I would propose that starting June 1, 2008:
• Everyone with a job that could be done from home would coordinate with their leader and team to determine one day of the week to telecommute.
Impact: Because people are still working full-time there would be no decrease in productivity, and fewer people commuting. The group undress4success just released an interesting review of research on the estimated energy savings from telecommuting and it is truly astounding.
• Everyone who sets up a home office would be able to write off the cost on their taxes.
Impact: Shifting costs from the individual and employer to the government would provide a strong incentive to get the proper equipment for telecommuting.
• For those who don’t have jobs that can be done remotely or who would prefer not to work from home (believe it or not there are many people for whom this is the case), set up three staggered shifts. This would reduce the number of people commuting at the same time. These shifts could run from 5:00 am to 1:00 pm, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm; and then 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm. As I have written before, there is no longer any reason we all need to commute at the same time (here).
Impact: Reduces energy consumed sitting in traffic; increases the efficient use of roads and public transportation by spreading it more evenly throughout the day; provides more global coverage across time zones for businesses, and allows people to work when they are at their best, e.g. morning people in the earliest shift, and night owls in the later shift.
But June 1st? How could organizations possibly implement this strategy in two weeks? They could if they had to as evidenced by what I observed on 9/11. At the time my husband worked for a large company whose headquarters were across the street from the World Trade Center. On 9/11, their building sustained so much damage that no one could return for over a year. I watched as within two or three days, everyone that my husband worked with began working full-time from home. It was amazing to see how people just stepped up to the plate and figured out how to get the job done.
So why don’t our leaders take advantage of workplace flexibility to begin solving our energy problems today rather than waiting until gas reaches $10 a gallon? I’m not sure, but I have a couple of thoughts:
1) It’s generational. I have blogged before about how our leaders in Washington, most of whom are over 45 years old, don’t even have the language to describe workplace flexibility, much less the understanding or mindset necessary to promote it as a solution. It’s just not on their radar screen. From their perspective, you have an energy crisis, you find more energy. That’s how we always responded. But this challenge requires new thinking.
2) Special interests. As noted in the posting I did about New York City’s double-taxation of telecommuters, there are powerful special interests who don’t want telecommuting to gain meaningful traction. They include commercial property owners and merchants in cities to which people commute.
So what do you think? Why doesn’t the government promote wide-scale workplace flexibility as a way of addressing the energy and environmental crisis we are facing? Do they not get it? Or has the pain not gotten severe enough that people are forced to think outside of the box? Maybe $10 for a gallon of gas will finally do it.
My daily online missive may be called "Cool News" but sometimes the stories I write about are anything but cool. In fact, every once in a while the news is the opposite of cool.
That was certainly true of a news item I picked up from the May 5th edition of the New York Times. The story was about how the number of supermarkets in New York City is declining even though the need for supermarkets there is growing, specifically in low-income neighborhoods.
That may not sound like the stuff of tragedy to you, but it is a real hardship for Della Dorset, who is in a wheelchair. Della used to be able to scoot across the street to get her groceries. But that store has now been demolished, to make way for a housing development and other types of retail.
So, now, as David Gonzales reports in the Times, Della has to navigate her electric wheelchair "several blocks uphill ... returning home with plastic bags dangling from the handles and nestled between her feet." I mean, can you imagine?
But the issue here is not limited to just Della. Supermarkets are disappearing from low-income neighborhoods because their margins are thin, the rents are going up, and price competition from big-box stores is intensifying.
In many cases, as David Gonzales writes, the supermarkets are replaced by discount stores and pharmacies where the food is processed and the beverages are sugared. No fresh anything in sight. The result, according to Amanda Burden, the city's planning director, is "a health crisis in the city."
At this point I could start to rant about the lack of corporate social responsibility in the supermarket business. But there's no news, cool or otherwise, in that.
Instead, I'll point to another story I found a couple of days later, also in the New York Times, this one by Tracie McMillan, about how some inner-city folks who do not have access to fresh fruit and vegetables in supermarkets are growing their own -- organically.
Among them is Karen Washington, who grew up in Harlem and lives in the South Bronx but dreamed of being a farmer since she was a little girl. She's been realizing that dream since 1985, not only growing her own organic crops in a nearby vacant lot, but in such abundance that she sells her excess at a local farm stand she helped establish.
"It's not about making money," says Karen. "We're selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There's no Whole Foods in my neighborhood." To put it mildly.
As unlikely as Karen's story sounds, it is far from unique: "This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce, and available, undeveloped land."
Karen is now working on starting a full-blown farmer's market as well as an urban farm school, where she says she hopes kids will learn that tomatoes don't originate from supermarkets.
