Shoes for a Happy Planet

Shoes for a Happy Planet™ is Simple’s new motto.  They have developed a line of sustainable sneakers called ecoSNEAKS®.  The ecoSNEAKS® collection uses materials like recycled car tires, certified organic cotton, PET (think recycled plastic bottles), recycled bike tires, and hemp, just to name a few. So they leave a better ecological footprint than ordinary sneakers…  They’re not bad to look at either.  Check them out at http://www.simpleshoes.com/ecoSneaks/ Other eco-friendly collections by Simple are Green Toe® and Planet Walkers®.  Pretty cool.

Check out their story…

And not only is Simple determined to make sustainable, eco-friendly shoes, but they are just as dedicated to the process as they are the product.  They have Ethical Supply Chain Guidelines that all of their business partners must obey.  The following are a few of the guidelines:

• Forced Labor: Our business partners shall not use forced labor whether in the form of prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor or otherwise.

• Child Labor: Our business partners shall not employ workers below the age of 16, or, in the case of hazardous work, the age of 18. If the legal age for employment is higher than 16, then the higher age shall apply.

• Wages and Benefits: Our business partners, at a minimum, will pay employees wages and benefits that meet applicable laws for all regular hours worked. For overtime hours, employees must receive compensation at premium rates. Employment practices such as training or apprenticeship wages, pre-employment fees, deposits, or other practices that effectively lower an employee’s pay below the legal minimum wage are not permitted.

Read more on the complete list of Simple’s Ethical Supply Chain Guidelines

Corporate Social Opportunity

“CSO [Corporate Social Opportunity] is the greatest opportunity of the 21st century.  It’s an opportunity to stand for something that matters, to make a difference in the lives of others, and it’s the greatest economic opportunity in the history of the world.”

Green Business and the Triple Bottom Line

It’s time to think in three bottom lines. The TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE (people, planet, profits) will blow your present bottom line away. The “3BL Factor”: invisible to most…unthinkable to many…in another galaxy of value.

Today’s one-of-a-kind record-breaking “3BL” strategies are driven by socially-strategic thinking. If you want to know what you’re capable of, you need “3BL” value. The Triple Bottom Line vision is what REALeadership Alliance helps you create.

What’s the greatest thing you can do today? Here are 5 tips you can put into practice right now to help transform your business into a green business:

1. Turn off equipment when it’s not being used. This can reduce the energy used by 25 percent; turning off the computers at the end of the day can save an additional 50 percent.

2. Encourage communications by email, and read email messages onscreen to determine whether it’s necessary to print them. If it’s not, don’t!

3. Reduce paper waste by using paperless products like Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs and eFax which sends and receives faxes via email.  Produce double-sided documents whenever possible.  Recycle office paper.

4.  Turn off the lights when you’re leaving any room for 15 minutes or more and utilize natural light when you can.   Buy Energy Star-rated light bulbs and fixtures, which use at least two-thirds less energy than regular lighting.

5.  More TeleCommuting jobs parks more cars, reducing energy waste. Cars guzzle over 136 billion gallons of gasoline yearly.  Present full-time home business owners & telecommuters alone now save approximately 4,439 million gallons per year.
There are excellent resources to learn more ways to transform your business. Both GreenBiz.com and SustainableBusiness.com are free news & learning resources with absolute great content.

The Bulldog

I’m waiting in the parking lot of California Pizza Kitchen for the “Bulldog.”  I’ve never met him.  I’m wondering what he looks like.  He’s a strategic branding, big power guru who has worked with brands like Virgin and Nike.  But he’d also taken on smaller companies like Mama Mellace’s because they have such an amazing commitment to doing social good.  Check www.mamacares.org out and you’ll see what I mean.

The Bulldog had recently traveled to Africa to do some work for World Vision and for me, it cemented his commitment to making a big difference helping companies beat with purpose.

I’m still waiting…

Ah…finally I see a fit looking, dark linen dress shirt, tail out, cool sunglasses, scruff bearded dude walking for the front door. More later…

I got out of my car and walked to the front door of CPK.  As I opened the door I hollered, “Bulldog!!!”  He turned to face me and smiled through his scruff.

For the next hour I shared my plan on how we could change the world by changing the way leaders think about the purpose of enterprise.  I laid out my 5-point plan as best I could and couldn’t figure out from the look on his face if he thought I was a crack-pot dreamer or a practical revolutionary…

I was in a bit of a hurry as I had to pick up my wife, and catch a plane to Nashville.

Bulldog promised to look at the website and the small pile of plans I gave him and get back to me by Friday.  I hope the Bulldog joins the quest.  I could use his bark.

Our McFuture

“We need leaders who have a vision of re-enthroning a productive economy based on invention, innovation and excellence rather than a future economy based on Wal-Mart and McDonald’s employees selling junk to each other.”

Spielberg’s Hair is on Fire

I sat there in a morning meeting of local non-profit leaders, foundation heads and business leaders listening to a vice president from Cone Marketing tell us that the entire world of consumers and employees are insisting that non-profits be more effective and businesses more responsible.  “This is hardly breaking news,” I think.  It’s ironic that the decades of me-first-and-only capitalism have led us to a financial collapse.  But then again that’s what unrestrained greed will do for you.  As I look across my table I see Spielberg’s (a nickname I immediately gave him upon entering the meeting), a promoter of save-the-world social documentaries, hair catch fire.  He’s mouthing words to me, words like “duh”, and then he drums his fingers with impatience.  His eyes look at me like a laser guided missile and mouths, “We need to talk!”  I nod slightly, trying to douse his fire before he tips something over.  When the meeting ends with a sincere and rousing challenge to get all of us to work together to radically improve San Diego, Spielberg leaps up and pulls me out in the hall and begins, “This is a presentation of the past.”  Words are flowing now like a waterfall dumping a million gallons of melting snow.

The problem,” he says, “is not that business doesn’t contribute enough money to non-profits…it’s that non-profits are bureaucracies that exist to perpetuate themselves.”  He was rolling now.  “They love to offer relief to the suffering but don’t do enough to stop the cause of suffering.

Then he goes on to describe a future where non-profit and for-profit distinctions end into a new world of social enterprise that makes money by solving the root causes of suffering, pollution, violence, poor education…his opportunity list was pretty long.

I must say I love Spielberg’s passion.  I told him to keep pushing the envelope.  After all, microfinance is now a half-trillion dollar industry of loaning money to super-sub prime borrowers with a 96% repayment rate.  (When people aren’t greedy they can make some real money.)  So I say, “Spielberg, maybe we need both.  We need non-profits to relieve suffering now, and we need new social enterprises to radically change the way business serves humanity.  Let’s form a working group to promote your radical brand of social enterprise within our Forum.”  He smiled.

I’m off to my next meeting with a Bulldog.  It seems there’s a Bulldog who wants to save the world.

Tired but Can’t Sleep

When someone suggested I write a daily diary blog about my quest to change the world’s mind about the direction of our future, I thought it sounded a little weird.  After all, we’re all on a quest and mine is no different in significance than yours.  It’s just mine.  I cannot escape it.  It’s a calling that sometimes has me by the lapels and screams in my face to get moving and other times whispers in my ear not to give up.  So here I am at 4:30 in the morning—can’t sleep.  I just wrote a blog for the American Dream Project about what we might do to avoid an economic catastrophe (financial bailout) besides give the people who brought it to us a trillion dollars.  Does the world seem insane or is it just me?

I am tired for sure, but cannot sleep.  Yesterday my wife and I drove up to L. A. where I gave a 2.5 hour leadership workshop to an executive team that is hungry to do better.  Helping people grow is always a jolt for me.  Then we drove to Palm Springs where I gave a talk to a Society of Human Resource Management executives.  HR executives can play a key role in engaging employees in genuine social responsibility.  It was an interesting afternoon.  It seemed to go over quite well, but I kept getting teared up.  No audience likes to look at an ugly crying face, but I couldn’t help it.  But I hate it when it happens.  Whenever I asked, “Is this the best we can do?” or told a story of a successful single employee who changed the way a company does business by creating value through doing good, people got teary-eyed. And so as soon as I saw that mist form, I’m thinking, “No, don’t you dare lose it you old sentimental windbag.”  So there I was trying to choke through another amazing story of personal purpose and trying to smile through my throat seizing up.  Damn, it’s hard to be a 58 year-old Italian man when people are crying trying not to weep a little too.  But I guess we’re all extra emotional.  We live in rough and tough times.  We’re all looking for more.  Looking to fill the hole in our soul caused by neglecting the hero within.  It seems we’re tired of selling out to chasing cheap success or just paying the bills.  It seems that everywhere I speak people are hungry for more.  Hungry to make their difference.  It would be great if it didn’t make me cry.

Today’s my wedding anniversary.  We’re going to lunch on the beach and then are going to watch the USC football game.  My wife rocks.

Financial Bailout? We Don’t Need the Crooks to Save Us!

September 25, 2008. As posted on the American Dream Project

The people that got us into this financial mess are telling us the only way to get out of it is to bail out the same crooks who caused it.  But is that really the only alternative?  Is that really the best we can do?

What if we let the institutions that took big risk just fail?  Poof.  Supposedly it would constipate the credit markets and none of us could get car loans or credit cards and the economy would stop…Hmmm.  I wonder.  I’ve been thinking of other ways to use $700 billion.

1. What if we reward regional and community banks and credit unions who didn’t play in the high risk mortgage market with a large pool of low rate money they could loan to credit worthy businesses and customers?  And what if we published the list of those banks and credit unions so we would all know where to get the capital we need to make our economy grow and our lives work?  Maybe we really don’t need the big banks that seem to psychologically headquartered in Las Vegas.
2. What if instead of expanding unemployment benefits we spend a few $100 billion on rebuilding our public infrastructure like repair bridges, roads, and water and sewage systems and put all those people who recently lost construction jobs back to work building our future?
3. We must let the real estate market find its true floor.  Its values were outrageously inflated.  If we don’t allow for a true price correction in real estate values will remain flat for 10 years or more.  So what if we start a national Real Estate Trust that buys foreclosed homes at their real value instead of some pre-negotiated-good o’ boy-bail-out value allowing the banks that made the inflated loans to eat their losses or fail.  Then suppose we put the homes in a huge rent-to-own pool where people who can pay a market rent for 2 years or more earn the right to buy the home they’re renting.  The supply of homes for sale would reduce and prices would stabilize.  The trust would make money, Americans could live in the homes we built and people would take pride in the homes they are earning the right to buy.

The point is if we’re really interested in building our future based on principles that reward good judgment and maintain the honest value of free enterprise there are a lot of things we can do besides bail out the hand-wringing corrupt financiers of our Congress and administration.

New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson said taxpayers deserve better than what we are getting.  They need to earn back some trust and provide us with information about the financial bailout.

Gretchen Morgenson talks about the financial bailout stating,

“Such is our lot today: They break it. We own it.Taxpayers deserve better than this, of course. But we have no lobbyists, so we get skinned. If federal regulators and political leaders want to earn back some trust, they could do two things. First, they could provide us with some transparency about whom precisely we are backing in the recent bailouts.”

With financial markets in flux and a massive government rescue package in the works, financial reporter and New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson looks into what’s involved in the nearly $700 billion deal. In an interview, she calls the financial bailout a conflict of interest.

What’s the best thing we can do?  Email your Congressmen and Senator today (Write Your Representative or Congress.org), forward this email if you want to. Tell your friends to as well.  Make some noise, America.  We went to war because we were lied to about the immediate danger of WMD’s.  Doesn’t it seem like we’re being whipped into the same kind of frenzy?  Let’s not fall for it!

To visit American Dream Project’s home page, click here.