Do The Green Thing Do Nothing

The team at Do the Green Thing produce wonderful web articles and activities that encourage people to Do the Green Thing. Their best one to date, in support of the annual Buy Nothing Day, is their best to date. I liked it even more when, in response to buying one of their nothings, for nothing, I received this

Dear Andy Middleton,

I regret to inform you there has been a problem with your order (Reference: TH1NA1R-N4DA).

A disgruntled former employee of Nothing Ventures, Nothing Gains Ltd snuck into our Nada-nadaland factory last week and tampered with the seals on all our Nothings.

We take non-product safety extremely seriously, and so have issued a worldwide product recall of Nothing effective immediately.

We're afraid nobody will be getting Nothing for the immediate future.

Please bear with us at this difficult time - we will send Nothing to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding.

Yours sincerely,

Jack Schitt

Junior Deputy Vice-manager-in-chief, Non-Product Safety Division, Nothing Ventures, Nothing Gains Ltd

Effective Lobbying

Julian Rosser – Campaigns Manager, Oxfam Cymru gave a useful quick insight into tips and techniques for effective lobbying as part of an energetic and well received Community Climate Change event organised by the Welsh Assembly Government in Aberystwyth, mid Wales, earlier today. Here are Julian’s tips:

Step 1

Get very clear about what it is that you are trying to achieve.

E.g. objective – getting the ‘Size of Wales Rainforest Project’ up to speed.  Success could involve getting the Welsh Assembly Government to spend a big proportion of their Wales for Africa funding on tree planting. An alternative goal for this could be to get Ed Miliband to oppose the planting oil palm plantations as ‘tree subsitututes”.

E.g. Build an ‘Ely Trail’ to serve the same cycling purpose at the Taff Trail. Who would I need to talk to about potential compulsory purchase of land to enable a path to be built?

Working on the cycle path example: Let’s pick Cardiff City Council as a target, and identify one person who has something to benefit from it who has power and money. In lobbying you need to know who has the power – let’s assume in this case that it’s the Head of Transportation. Work out who or what is going to influence this person?  Councillors? WAG? Money? Pressure from other local people? Things that in that mgrs’ Key Performance Targets? His or her career prospects? How far they from retirement? Are they a cyclist or not? Personal prejudices?

Next stage is to identify allies and adversaries for the particular project. In this case, allies could be local climate campaigners, Sustrans, local health groups, ROSPA, image-conscious politicians, other departments in council, heart charities, NHS, taxi drivers, consulting group. Think at the start about all of the people you could want in. Adversaries here though, could be: landowners, people whose money is being poached by others, tax payers, maintenance budgets, old school hacks, the other village’s cycle group?

Work through the strengths and opportunities for allies, and ways around the negatives / adversaries. One approach is to have enough people jumping up and down shouting about campaigns – the anti-road user charging petition on the Number 10 website had something like 2 million people signed up in 48 hours. One of the more entertaining campaigns that Julian was involved with was the anti GM crop campaign – it only took 9 months to get a unanimous decision against GM through the assembly – work was involved afterwards in finding out what was possible from a legal perspective. Getting  the Farmer’s Union of Wales and Women’s Institute on board early made a lot of difference – the assembly may not listen to Friends of the Earth, but they will listen to Farmers and the WI

Clarity of goals, influence and understanding how to maximise leverage are key.

 

Feedback on tidal current power generation

Anyone who has kayaked, sailed or navigated the tide races that run off the west coast of Wales will know the immense power of tidal current at full flood or ebb. Few, if any companies have built on this better than Bristol - based Marine Current Turbines, a case study in engineering and business excellence who have turned a good idea into 350MWH of electricity delivered into the Northern Ireland grid from the Sea Gen turbine installed at Strangford Narrows.

A couple of years back, I had the pleasure of consulting for MCT as they built their team and business, readying for high performance. It's a joy to see hard work, vision, perseverence and good leadership pay off. In the words of Peter Fraenkel, the company's softly spoken Technical Director, it's wonderful to see good projects come true:

"We are delighted with SeaGen’s performance. It is running reliably and delivering more energy than originally expected in an extremely aggressive environment. It should be remembered it is being driven by a wall of water 27m deep, similar to the height of the Tower of London, that surges back and forth with every tide through the Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour. We are getting more energy than expected mainly because the resource is more energetic than originally predicted during earlier surveys”

With two companies starting out exploration, design and development of potential turbine installation at Ramsey Sound, on the coast west of St.Davids, this is excellent to see - they have the capability to provide the energy for every house within 15 miles of here.

10 tips for finding your voice

Fellow doer, co Do organiser and elegant writer David Hieatt blogged this on the Do Lectures today. Magical, if you want to stand up, and out, for more.

10 tips for finding your voice

1, Be Clear

Define the purpose of your company. Do this alone. Do not consult anyone but yourself. One sentence should do it. Write it on a paper napkin and pin it to the wall. Once decided upon, you cannot change it. Make sure that you are excited by it. Make sure you are willing to spend the rest of your life working towards it. Make sure it is your real purpose and not just what other people want to hear. Make sure it lives in your head and, as importantly, in your heart.

2, Be Focused

Define your product and it’s purpose. And stick to it. Stop making product that is not consistent with your definition of where you sit in this world. Even if it makes money, stop making it. Do not dilute the company focus. There is more money to be made from being focused than from trying to be everything to everybody. Narrow the focus. Google achieved more by offering less than its competitor. Rather than closing down opportunities, going narrower opens them up. Those who spend their days trying to be all things to all people rarely have time to change the world.

3, Be You

Don’t try to be like others. Don’t follow or mimic. Don’t pretend. You can tell when someone doesn’t mean something just by how they say it.  A voice doesn’t come from a meeting or a committee. Or from the latest trend or for that matter the latest piece of research. It comes from one man. It comes from the books he has read. The conversations he has had, the experiences he has endured, and the family he has been raised by. There is no manual to read. The voice is fragile in the wrong hands. Be careful whom you give the task to. The strength of Nike was that Dan Wieden got inside the head of Phil Knight. He understood that he was a super competitive sports nut who wanted to crush the competition. And he kept relaying that to his customers. Year after year. Come rain. Come shine.

4, Be Emotional

You have to make your customers feel something. Understand what is in their hearts. Logic is a blunt tool in this regard, my friend. It makes perfect sense, it ticks all the boxes, but it changes very little. And guess what, intelligence is no better; it is overrated in its ability to either change things or behaviour. You need a different set of tools. Those tools will comprise of music, pictures, words that when shaken up by your author and put back in the right order will leave your customers inspired, stirred, awoken. Oh, by the way, this is not easy to do. Give them meaning by all means, but don’t give them ads. Bare your soul. Tell your struggle. Tell your pain. Tell your lows. A corporation finds it hard to show its soul as it rarely has one. Be vulnerable. Be honest. But most of all, be you.

5, Be Instinctive.

Research nothing. Listen to what you feel. If you are in doubt, ask your wife. If you are still in doubt, ask your kids. Go no further than the circle that you trust. Ever.

6, Be Useful.

Make products for a purpose. Be useful. Make products that chase a function and not a fashion. Invent for a need. Focus on your customers needs. Small needs can become big business. If you suddenly become fashionable, it is because you have chased being useful. Don’t build your business around being fashionable; it will go away as quickly as it came. Customers can decode real from fake in a blink of an eye. If you try to be of a moment, you will die in the moment, once it has had its time. Instead, carry on making products that have a use. Be authentic. If you can say that, you are on solid ground. Don’t get sidetracked by chasing fashion.

7, Be the Change.

To support your purpose, you need more than just words. You have to change your industry; you have to show another way. And you have to communicate that change in the most inspiring way that a human can imagine. Look at how well Apple communicates change. Every revolution needs an enemy. Challenge design, challenge pollution, challenge landfill, challenge peoples ‘buy and throw culture’. Now that you can make anything, what does your company want to make? And what does it want to change?

8, Be Consistent

A worthwhile business has to be built over time. A company’s product, its purpose and how it speaks to the world needs to be consistent if it wants to be all things that it hopes to be. Do not blow with the wind. Do not chase a bandwagon. Stay true. Patience is required in a world that doesn’t always understand the value of it. It is easy to make small little changes in a busy day and think they do not matter. But there is a big-ness to small decisions. The financial world fully understands the concept of compound interest and how a small change can make a big difference. Similarly, a small tweak here, a small compromise there, can accumulate over time to change the very soul of a business. The rule of consistent product and service is easy to get. But the same rule needs to be applied to a company’s voice. Nike has talked with the same voice for a couple of decades now. A signature seems to run through it. And because it is so consistent, each communication seems to build on top of the last one. They have gained compound interest of voice thanks to their consistency of voice.

9, Be Relevant

Understand your customer. And make product that is relevant to their lives. Remember, the worse thing you can do for the environment is to make something that no one wants to buy. Speak to them in a way that connects with them and makes them feel something. The trick to this is give something of yourself. If you feel something, the chances are so will they. This is not rocket science. It’s just gut instinct. It’s knowing what they are into because you are into it too.

10, Be Positive

If you want change to happen, you will have to inspire people. A fire needs wood to burn. It also needs a flame to start it. You need to be the flame. A business needs to do the numbers but it also needs a purpose to give it its passion. If we listened to just our intellect, no one would fall in love. If we did not listen to our soul, no poetry would ever be written. To stir someone, you have find emotional ways to touch them. But first you have open up and let go of the worry about talking in more emotional terms. Only then will you start to connect with people. You have to stir yourself to stir others. Then you have to find the flame that inspires them. And be positive. Be the hope. The cynic changes little or nothing. But the optimist can and will. So spread wonder. Spread optimism. It’s contagious.

1000 days

“If we are to limit global temperature rise to no more than 2-2.4 degrees C global emissions must peak no later than 2015 and start declining thereafter. The faster the decline the greater the possibility of our avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change"

Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

For global emissions to peak no later than 2015, western countries must have taken a lead and started to reduce emissions no later than the end of 2012. The end of 2012 is less than 1000 work days away from today. Show me the plan.