Ignore the impact of environmental concerns on the marketplace, and you’ll risk the same fate as that of the poor snowman. Consider the following:
A survey released this month by the Economist Intelligence Unit shows that sustainability strategies provide the ultimate feel-good dividend: improved share price performance by at least 50%.
But be authentic or beware: consumers are watching for greenwashing, and will hold you to account.
The good news is that new incentives are moving sustainability strategies from reputation enhancement and “sentimental shoulds” to market mandate, including:
Wal-Mart pressures suppliers to adopt sustainable practices and is looking for ways to reduce non-renewable energy sources
Taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and penalties for not using renewable energy sources may be passed in California
Consumers want to participate! Check out Carbon Hero, the new cell phone GPS system that calculates the carbon footprint of the user’s daily travel, going into open beta testing this April (in the UK).
Leave a comment and share any behaviors, practices, research or innovations that are a part of your sustainability strategy.
There’s been plenty of talk about “change” so far in the 2008 presidential election. Each candidate is pledging to bring some degree of change to government in Washington, D.C. But Americans may have their hearts broken once the winner takes office.
Futurist Cecily Sommers, president of the Push institute in Minneapolis, says Presidents and governments are better equipped to react to changes in society than to actually bring about those changes.
She talked to MPR’s host Tom Crann about why democracy and capitalism don’t necessarily make it easy to create change and why the leaders who do so don’t emerge from government.
Stuart Brown, M.D. opened PUSH 2007: SuperPower for us last year, establishing play as a central modality for people engaged in inventing the future. He’s warm and fascinating, weaving his knowledge of psychology, neurology and mythology into a case for play as essential to human development, intelligence and sociability. Stuart’s work has taken him from the research lab to the clinical practice, from working with Joseph Campbell to Jane Goodall, and finally to wrapping it all up in the creation of The National Institute for Play.
He’s an extraordinary person, and I couldn’t have been more pleased to see him hosted as a guest on public radio’s Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet following PUSH. Their conversation about Spirit, Character and Play led to an encore - and sold out - performance of the discussion at NY Public Library in January. This engagement, in turn, led to the cover story in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, “Serious Play.” Bravo!
A few of my favorite Stuart-isms:
Brown found early in his clinical practice that a lack of natural, spontaneous, free-spirited play during childhood seemed to be a common thread in the histories of “horribly violent mass murderers, really off-the-wall felony drunk drivers,” and others “on the fringes.”
Play fosters curiosity and is a major catalyst to learning.
Play is any nonstereotyped, pleasureful activity that has no clear-cut goal and that is free of anxiety. Human beings have been “designed by nature to play” — that we retain juvenile physical and behavioral characteristics long into adulthood, and that play is important in every stage of life.
There is a tremendous hunger in the culture for true play. Work is not the opposite of play, depression is.
Play needs to be prioritized into our businesses, educational and family systems.
Tesla Motors busted a brand new dance move today with their first production 100% electric vehicle, a high performance sports car, no less. It’s just in time for their promised debut at the Clean Technology and Renewables Conference in New York City, February 20.
(embed link didn’t work, so go to http://qik.com/video/22264)
It’s definitely the next “killer app” for autos. Like it? You’ll have to get in line and pay $100K, $6K less than a 2007 Porsche GT4 Coupe. Not bad at all.
“O”vercoming “O”bstacles to lead a full and “O”wesome life is the mission to which Oprah Winfrey has dedicated herself, for “O”verybody.
The Queen of Daytime TV has parlayed her ever-growing corporate influence from book sales to Broadway, from education to U.S. presidential politics, and from newsstands to Primetime TV. All in the name of changing the world.
Or, in the name of touching as many people on the planet with her light. She does indeed conduct herself as a prophet of sorts, an enormously profitable balance between being just like you and an enlightened being. However you cut it, the Oprah brand is a staggering success.
In a December, 2006 announcement of two new Reality TV shows, two exec VPs at Harpo’s (Oprah’s privately-held production company) TV development group, stated their goals very succinctly:
“We’re open for business in any area that’s within the mission statement for Harpo and the Oprah brand.”
The first project, “Oprah’s Big Give” begins airing on March 2, 2008.
Watch the drama and emotion unfold in this unprecedented competition as determined contestants from all walks of life transform the lives of others. Millions of dollars are given away in this intense cross-country adventure that twists and turns in ways that test the nerve, passion and stamina of each contestant. Each week, a mystery challenge is unveiled, and in order to win, contestants must out-give one another. Big-name stars join “Oprah’s Big Give”™ as the stakes get higher and the emotions intensify in every episode. The judges continue to make the tough call of who will go home before the final episode, when the Biggest Giver is named and the surprise ending is revealed.
And for devotees who hang on Oprah’s every move, a countdown clock is posted on the ABC site as well.
Oprah’s terrific intelligence, hard work, talent, and her own personal “Hero’s Journey” story met the culture with exquisite timing. A convenient convergence of factors breda zeitgeist to which she is particularly matched, including a message that taps into the always-powerful American creed of “Yes, We (you, I) Can!”; the enormous wealth and be-your-own-mogul ethos granted by the 1990s Internet Rush; infiltration of ubiquitous media and messaging; and a secular-cum-spiritual movement all conspired to bring on the age of Celebredom with full force. And Oprah was there to catch it.
She caught it, and then leveraged it like crazy. Oprah’s business savvy - one of the few things she keeps private - packaged her identity into a brand that could be parlayed into any number of brand extensions, increasing audience and advertisers at every turn. She’s built a commercial pulpit from which she sermonizes, extoles the virtues of “her favorite things (product endorsements) and conducts shows as if they were revival meetings.
Oprah shields her enterprising mojo from public view, a calculated reinforcement of a kind of spiritual populism she sells. Pay attention to the last verb - sell; Oprah’s true dominion is her muscular advertising and PR machine, which is engineered for power. I’d digest her self-help diet better if she was more transparent about this, and included it in her “teachings.”
Though I’m clearly “O”ver Oprah’s smug “I’m just like you (only better)” attitude, I’m sure I’ll tune into a few episodes of her new show. Afterall, I’m a sucker for tales of transformation too.
In this election year, the contest seems to be over which presidential candidate best captures the meaning of “Leadership” and “Change.” Given the short-sighted power plays that dominate the political process, the real issue is whether elected officials, in fact, can lead change. From tax to economic, foreign, trade or environmental policies, leaders too often favor short-term wins over the disciplined management of long-term goals. This vote-now-pay later bias among both politicians and voters begs a few important questions: Is short-sightedness simply baked into the design of the political process? Is “political leadership” an oxymoron? Do think tanks, beholden to no one but their funders, become the de facto directors of long-range planning and policy construction? Is change directed by politicians or by social movements? Is community leadership - from neighborhoods to nations – fixed or fluid, and can it be shared, shifted or stolen?
Shortly after I wrote this blurb for the segment on politics we’re hosting at PUSH 2008: The Fertile Delta, “Leaders in Reverse: Playing Short-Term Gains Against Long-Term Needs,” Senator Clinton made her unpopular remarks attributing the ultimate success of the Civil Rights Act not to Martin Luther King, Jr., but to President Johnson. The fracas that followed illustrated just how thorny the argument over “Leadership” and “Change” can be.
(For reference, if you haven’t heard Clinton’s exact words, you can replay them here)
Oh, how the pundits pounced! They were quick say her claim that it “took a president to get it (Civil Rights Act) done” carried racist undertones. Not so; that was just the most sensational way to play a more subtle debate about leadership that Clinton probably intended.
So let’s follow her lead and look more closely at how the partnership between a visionary activist and a committed president converted the goals of the Civil Rights movements into the law of the land.
Like all societal shifts, there were many years and influences that led to the final tipping point of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (reviewed here). As told by Bill Moyers, who served in the Johnson administration, the story is that in meetings with Dr. King, President Johnson told him that certain players in Congress were determined to prevent any measures supporting equal rights between Whites and Blacks from becoming law. He encouraged Dr. King to go back to the streets and keep marching. By keeping the issue of equality in the streets and in the media, the movement would grow, pressure would mount and Congress would have no choice but to sign on.
Which is what happened.
Dr. King’s dream stirred the conscience of a nation to do the right thing. He showed us that accepting human rights abuses as cultural custom was a direct affront to the American creed of equality. He not only called us to be our best selves, but showed us how to do it.
MLK was an extraordinary leader in every respect, not least of which was in his commitment to create change through collaboration. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a result of his partnership with Johnson; MLK led the people, and LBJ led the politicians.
When JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” he may have simply been greasing the wheels of government to do what it was intended to do: respond to the will of the people.
If this is how the political process is designed to function, then perhaps our expectations for political leadership need to be recalibrated (The implication, of course, is that people need to be able to rely on truthful information to decide when, how, and why to ask for change. But that’s an issue for another time…).
How we regard the answer will likely be what leads in November.
If you’ve already gone to xobni.com, you may have noticed that the beta version is now available only to those who have an invitation. I have 5 invitations that I can share with any 5 individuals who’re interested in using it. Let me know: csommers [at] pushthefuture [dot] org. Once they’re used up, I’ll remove my address from this post.
I was born a Mac user.
From my first experience with an Apple II in the late 1980s until my first PC two years ago, I used Macintosh computers with love and appreciation for their intuitive interface, solid performance and great design.
Macs are a pleasure to use, and every new release of hardware, operating system or software inspires lust and longing, as well as mourning for a certain sexiness that my tech life now lacks. But it was an ongoing frustration with being locked out of innovative 3rd party software, difficulties with or lack of access to online services, and discontinued editions or support for Mac versions of programs such as QuickBooks, that finally convinced me to cross-over to what Mac users have long regarded as the dark side: Windows.
While the latest operating system released from Apple, Leopard, and the ingenious MacBook Air are absolutely drool-worthy, I’m now finally comfortable living my life in a Microsoft world. And here’s why:
I’ve discovered fabulous tools for managing the massive amount of data and communication related to a wide variety of projects that can be integrated with one another. I want systems that capture and activate random ideas in an organized fashion, with the ability to connect them to documents, contacts, delegated tasks, communications, actions, reminders and all the behaviors that it takes to get a view of the big picture and make smart decisions for the range of commitments I manage.
There are a ton of tools out there, both Mac and PC, that claim to make productivity masters out of all us overloaded workers, and I’ve tried a lot of of them. Here are my faves:
I LOVE this program. I use it to plan projects, speeches, writing, meetings, strategy, marketing, trips, dinner parties, even to organize errands on those full week-end marathons. In short, I use it anytime I need to collect my thoughts and think something through.
The sweetest thing about it is that it links to Office. While I’m creating the map, I can insert tasks into Outlook, as well as email, contacts and calendar items; documents from Word, Excel, PPT, image files, web links and references. Maps can also be exported into Word documents and outlines, or into PPT. With the exception of a collaboration function, it’s a terrific project, time, self management tool (available for Mac).
If you’ve gone to their site, you’ve already learned that Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards. For every email that comes into Outlook (sorry, it’s only for Windows), you can see the history of communication, stats, contact info for that person, and threaded conversations all in a simple, attractive interface.
Too often Outlook is no better than a bucket of data you have to search through to find anything. It’s long needed something like Xobni to bring useful information to the surface, right when you’re using it.
Clear Context also helps bring relevant data to the fore in Outlook, bringing focus to the priorities and activities of the day. Again, the problem with Outlook is that it holds all the critical information I need to manage my world, but it has a deadening effect if I have to look at all of my responsibilities at the same time. That’s been my experience with my to-do list, anyway, it’s just so long and overwhelming that it zaps motivation - the opposite of what I want it to do. But Clear Context helps cut through all of that, shifting focus to “projects not emails.” - love that.
The President of ActiveWords is my friend Buzz Bruggeman. Obviously, Buzz is sold on the value of ActiveWords, a great little utility that quickly scripts commands and text substitution to keep your fingers flying on the keyboard, rather than hunting and scrolling for files, programs, passwords, and more. Buzz tried to convince me to use it for years, but since it wasn’t compatible with Macs, I was doomed to use the mouse/trackpad and dock until I started using a PC.
I’ve only scratched the surface with ActiveWords, but already enjoy accessing the files, documents and programs I use on a regular basis with just a few strokes of my fingers.
I was first introduced to MindManager by Buzz too, and started using it shortly after I “switched teams,” (because it, too, wasn’t made for Macs at the time, though it is now). And it was through ActiveWords that I found ClearContext, one of their partners.
One of the smartest functions of ActiveWords is that it recognizes what you use most often, and offers to capture it for you. Again, it’s that kind of real-time connection that makes all the difference - one less thing to remember.
The Push Institute is a small non-profit that includes a number of discrete communities, from board to committees and volunteers, to speakers and contributors, as well as internal staff. The need to share information, documents, calendars in a central place is critical to our function, but enterprise solutions clearly won’t work for us.
AirSet is a beautifully designed online group communication and collaboration tool. And it’s free.
It syncs contacts and calendars with Outlook and cellphones, so again, it’s a tool that integrates - not replicate - your information. Each group has its own calendar and members, as does each member. Select what information of yours - including files of all types - you want to share, and poof, the people/groups are granted access according to your command and their need. Planning and delegation are a snap, as is tracking activity across groups.
There are a lot of features baked into AirSet, including photo sharing, blog and playlists. I haven’t used many of them, though am glad they’re there should the need arise.
My only complaint with AirSet is that it doesn’t sync Tasks with Outlook. If it did, it’d be a mighty complete solution.
SnagIt is a first class image capture and edit program. For non-designers, it has a super easy interface that gives users Photoshop-like options that are out of reach of most people. It also integrates seamlessly with all parts of the Office Suite, which I particularly like when I’m using PowerPoint. Only for Windows.
David Allen has been called the “Guru of Personal Productivity,” and he’s certainly been mine. I first read his best selling book, Getting Things Done, and implemented his systems sometime around 1995. What I responded to most in David’s approach was that his prescriptions aren’t to adopt rigid behaviors, rather he offers systems that respond to the chaos that is life’s basic nature.
The fundamentals are simple: first, establish file systems - physical and electronic - that have a clear, logical categories (i.e. instead of having a file for all your manuals, create distinct files for each one, labeled “Manual - Vacuum Cleaner” or “Manual - Bicycle”). Next, process the piles of mail, emails, papers, etc. by determining whether you can Delete, Do (within 2 minutes or less), or Defer each piece of data.
These are the only disciplines required: create a system, and decide what to do with each piece of information on a weekly basis, if possible. What I like about this way of managing my life is that, even if I go through a super-duper demanding time (as I do fairly regularly), and can’t stay on top of things, I always know what to do to “get back up on the horse.”
I’ve used David’s work with clients and in seminars, and ask staff to read the book. I’m not alone in my praise of GTD; David’s work and thinking is used widely in major organizations throughout the world. We were lucky enough to have him participate at PUSH 2006: A New Life, where he linked vision to everyday behaviors, in support of our motto, “if you’re not busy creating the future, you’re just busy!”
David and his Getting Things Done community of practitioners also use many of the tools outlined above, and no doubt will devise more.
Mac users have fabulous tools too, many of which accomplish some of the same things. The .Mac accounts are great, the only problem is that they have limited use for a large group of people who are Windows users.
The one thing I haven’t been able to find a good substitute for is a smart password utility like Keychain. All the password tools I’ve found for PCs stink, lacking the intuitive integration that Keychain has. I miss it.
There are a number of features on Macs that seem obvious, and it’s beyond me why no one on the PC side hasn’t done a better job of copying what Apple does so well.
There’s green grass on both sides of the divide, you just have to decide what suits your needs better. For me, tools like those above have made the sacrifice of Apple’s advanced design worth the shift.
Any productivity tools you can’t do without?
This year’s PUSH conference will be opening (Sunday afternoon, June 15) with a Productivity Boot Camp featuring most of these players, so stay tuned!
