Melodies in Marketing

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 8min]

CreativeCitizen.com is a community for sharing tips and best practices on lighter living, that translate into quantified savings in electricity, water usage, and additional metrics. In this interview, Co-Founder and CEO Scott Badenoch discusses the mission of the community in promoting actionable means of improving people’s lives (health, productivity, pocketbook) and the environment, in addition to pointing out vendors that can best fulfill a specific need or area.

Scott also discusses the importance of promoting positivity and hope in today’s society. Only this line of thinking will inspire and motivate people to action. Whether it be small steps or big ones, everyone can do their part to not only improve our collective living impact on the environment, but also in leading healthier and happier lives for ourselves and our families.

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Gary Hamel in late May 2008, gathered together 36 prominent leaders in business and academia to attend Management Lab’s inaugural conference: Inventing the Future of Management. It was structured to address 4 questions and through exercises and interviews, and compile a list of 25 challenges for management in the 21st century.

Four Questions

1. What are the impediments or design flaws preventing organizations to:
   - Adapt to change without trauma
   - Innovate and daily mobilize everyone’s imagination
   - Engage by creating environments conducive to extraordinary contributions
2. Given these systemic impediments and organizational demands in coming years, how should management innovators set the agenda? What big challenges must be addressed?
3. What are some potential solutions to these challenges? Are there exercises, activities, or experiments that would help?
4. What limitations are currently hindering management innovation, and how might they be overcome?

Attendees & Interviews

• Attendees (official list) included Eric Schmidt (Google), Henry Mintzberg (McGill Univ.), James Surowiecki (The New Yorker), Jeffrey Hollender (Seventh Generation), Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford Univ.), John Mackey (Whole Foods Market), Peter Senge (Society for Organizational Learning), Kevin Kelly (Wired), and Tim Brown (IDEO) among many others.
• Pre-Conference interviews (compiled document), highlights everyone’s preliminary answer to the four questions in the following format: Flaws, Fixes, and Other.
• Video Interviews with all Attendees (Quicktime format)

Management “Moonshots”

These are the highlighted challenges and solutions as compiled by Hamel and his team, following the interviews and team exercises. For a detailed look (highly recommended), please see the document at the bottom of this (link) page, which gives the master challenges (as numbered list); broad challenges (Blue headings, as extracted from pre-conference interviews); the big challenges (Red headings, as identified from conference team exercises); and the corresponding points to each (black text).

Gary kindly notes that while many of these aren’t ‘new’, they’re important nonetheless. Here they are:

1. Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management
2. Fully operationalize the ideas of community and citizenship
3. Seek orientation in a higher and broader purpose
4. Distribute (share) the work of creating direction and strategy
5. Develop holistic performance measures
6. Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives
7. Increase trust, reduce fear
8. Create a democracy of information
9. Expand and exploit intellectual variety
10. Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past
11. Enlarge and empower the pro-change constituency
12. Expand the freedom for autonomous action
13. Create more space for emergent strategies
14. Create an internal market for ideas, talent and resources
15. De-structure and dis-aggregate the formal organization
16. Dramatically diminish the influence of (formal) hierarchy
17. Reinvent the work of executive leadership
18. De-politicize decision-making
19. Reinvent the means of “control”
20. Transcend the efficiency vs. innovation trade-off
21. (Further) Unleash human imagination
22. Enable communities of passion
23. Create (more) open organizations
24. Rethink management thinking
25. Humanize (the language of) business

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 8min]

Natural Source Printing is a green printing company in Orange County, California. In this interview, I ask President Mary Loyer how she helps clients both be more eco-friendly in their marketing communications, in addition to her thoughts on what green printing is all about.

Additional Resources:

• FiberStone paper
• Article, Food Production Daily: Tree-free, waterproof wine label made from stone

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This milk product packaging produced by GreenBottle Ltd., has been introduced into an ASDA supermarket this week in Suffolk, United Kingdom. The outer packaging is made from white office waste paper, which can be recycled alongside magazines and newspapers. The inner bag is made from corn starch, and is biodegradable.

ASDA hopes to further distribute these milk bottles over coming six months should customer demand prove viable. The UK Telegraph newspaper reports:

“Britons drink around 180 million pints of milk every week, of which around two-thirds is bought in plastic bottles. More than 100,000 tons end up in landfill each year - equal to 260 jumbo jets. They take 500 years to decompose…An independent analysis calculated that its overall carbon footprint, including delivery, was 48 per cent lower than the standard plastic bottle.”

NOTE: ASDA is owned by Wal-Mart. It should be interesting to note if they take special interest in its American milk producers to produce alternative packaging solutions.

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[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 22min]

John from Lunar Design interviews individuals involved in sustainable design at the Digging Deeper seminar on July 22nd, hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America.

You’ll see perspectives from designers, researchers, innovation consultants, and materials vendors in this 22min video.

Helpful Resources:

• Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability by Lunar (Version 1.0)
• SMaRT Sustainable Products Standard (Video Series)
• Icon-O-Cast Blog with John and the great folks at Lunar
• EcoLect Materials
• Designers Accord

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I really love Wal-Mart’s leadership on this. My only concern is how those products are communicated and marketed. With the top 250 suppliers having until August 18th to submit proposals for Spring 09, I’m sure we’ll see an nice mixture of offerings. Some will use certifications of sorts, some will use house-designed labels and graphics. Particularly interesting is the retailer push for “stories” in the marcom. At least I hope they make ‘green’ an element of every product category, not just a larger category to be managed on its own.

This article from Arkansas Morning News explains it all

What do YOU think?

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A few months ago, I saw a gentleman at an outdoor function who was standing alone and decided to pick up a conversation. Turns out he was the U.S. Brand Manager for Aquafina, the bottled water division of Pepsi. Being that this was a conference about sustainability, he mentioned his feeling of not particularly wanting to be noticed and chastised. I understood his plight but had to laugh a little. After all, this is a touchy subject nowadays with everyone having their own story.

Our discussion came down to the following agreed upon points:

• Bottled water is convenient and great, but it does need to consumed responsibly. While it is better than soda, drinking it in large numbers is bad for the environment because of the large volume of plastic being produced, often not being recycled at end-of-life.
• Imported bottled water is now completely unsustainable. It doesn’t matter if Fiji, Evian, or other companies use carbon offsets or not.
• Private label bottlers and retail incentives like free cases with $20 purchases, or selling it at a loss to drive additional cross-category sales, is what’s driving a large portion of the problem.
• Larger bottles like one liter, are better than smaller ones because the value is better and the likelihood of being shared and reused is greater.

What do YOU think?

P.S. - Aquafina will be using 50% less plastic in their bottles by next year

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