Time for another SHIFT! Formerly known as “SHIFT: A Green Salon”, SHIFT is AIGA Portland’s now-biannual sustainable design event, which asks the question from the title. SHIFT 6 takes place this Thursday, April 21st, at Eco Trust in Portland, Oregon. I’m proud to announce I’ll be one of the 10 presenters.

As you know, my new venture GoodBookery helps people publish collaborative books that benefit causes. In fact, GoodBookery aims to redefine the book as a platform for community-building and social change. Collaborative books create communities of interest and make the world a better place! You can preview my slidedeck embedded below or on SlideShare, but you’d be better coming to the event and hearing me out.

Come to SHIFT and enjoy the rest of the great line up of Portland’s design enthusiasts sharing their passion for sustainable design. As always, beer is included in the admission if you bring your own glass. I look forward to seeing you there!

Better late than never. Here’s a list of books from the year’s first quarter that I recommend to help in your business. In almost no particular order:

• Keith Sawyer, “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration”, 2008 – Collaboration is the best way to innovate. Did you know improv groups and jazz ensembles (and this book) can teach you a lot how do go about it?

• Youngme Moon, “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd”, 2010 – To differentiate and stand out in the marketplace, you’d be better off if you stopped comparing yourself to the competition. There are three main ways to do that.

• Eduardo Porter, “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do”, 2011 – What things really cost.

• Sheena Iyengar, “The Art of Choosing”, 2010 – Choose to read this book to learn how you and your customers make decisions about choices.

• John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, “Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live”, 2010 – Value-based consumption, anyone? Learn more about how one aspect of sustainability has tipped.

• Lisa Gansky, “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing”,  2010, and Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, 2010 – You really should know more about the collaborative consumption trend, too, and these two volumes will collaboratively deliver the insights you need.

• Nancy Lublin, “Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business” – Take a page from nonprofits’ book and market with a minimal budget. In fact, this book may prompt you to ask, Who needs a budget?

• Scott Belsky, “Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality”, 2010 – One idea from this book has already made me more efficient than I’ve ever been. There are several other good ones in it.

• Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other”, 2011 - What being always connected is doing to us…

• William Powers, “Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age”, 2010 – …and what to do about it.

mindfulness = 1. “bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis” (Marlatt & Kristeller in “Integrating Spirituality into Treatment: Resources for Practitioners”); 2. “The first component [of mindfulness] involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.” (Bishop et al in Clinical Psychology Science and Practice)

Marketing is by definition a future-oriented practice: you act now hoping to reap a future reward.

You strategize to figure out the best way to reach your market. You build an identity that will attract your ideal customers. You develop an email campaign to promote a deal that aims to bring in new business. You tweet and post Facebook updates to build a reputation as a resource or an expert in your field.

They say it can be 18 months before a marketing program yields meaningful results.

What if there were immediate rewards from conducting your marketing program? And what if the utility of such present rewards far surpassed that of the future ones?

Tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today*

Delayed gratification is commonly hailed as a positive force in human psychology and cultural development: impulse control is a positive psychological trait of emotional intelligence and a great predictor of one’s success in life.

Delayed gratification underlies marketing. Though every marketer would prefer results now, we know we must plant and cultivate our marketing program’s seeds in order to succeed.

The major problem with acting now to achieve future goals is the focus on the future. Yes, you do need to set goals, and yes, it takes a while — and a lot of actions — to get there. With your eyes set on the distant ball of your goals, however, it’s easy to forget the now.

What’s your marketing doing for you today?

Bringing mindfulness into marketing

I’ve written about intrinsic goals before: “Intrinsic goals inject value to the current action itself and … allow you to gain control over the present moment.” According to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, writing in “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, “When experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.”

The focus on the present value of the present action (as opposed to marketing’s future value of the present action) meets intrinsic goals; valuing the present for what it is, for its own sake, rather than what it may bring is a reward in and of itself.

The focus of attention on the now, on the present moment, is mindfulness. The focus of a marketer’s attention on what she’s doing in her work now, and valuing it for its own sake instead of its “hypothetical future gain”, goes a long way toward mindful marketing. Mindful marketing justifies marketing activities now and for what they are, instead of for what they will bring tomorrow or in 18 months.

You don’t live in the future, you live now; you don’t do marketing in the future, you’re doing it now.

Mindfulness results in “increased recognition of mental events” and an “orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance”. All positive qualities, right? Just as mindfulness in life can provide for a richer, fuller experience, mindfulness in marketing can make for more meaningful work. And isn’t that why we’re in the business?

Before you object and bring up the need to demonstrate ROI and what not, I can (almost) guarantee that incorporating mindfulness into marketing and focusing on its own intrinsic rewards will improve your externally-measured performance as well.

Have you ever, during a run, focused on your breathing, your pace, the path, while ignoring your stopwatch, only to find out at the end you’ve beaten your best time, seemingly without even trying? Have you ever focused on a task so intently that you forgot about the outside world, only to learn the result has surpassed your (or your boss’s) expectations? “Flow” is full of examples where applying mindfulness generated superior outcomes. The same can go for your marketing: pay attention and enjoy what you’re doing now and the rest will follow.

To be sure, the shift from future outlook to mindfulness in the present will require you to rearrange your marketing priorities, mindfully. Its reward, as distant as it may seem now, will be an improved experience and better results.

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* The section title comes from a Slovak saying, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today, says every lazy person.”

(Top image credit: mag3737)

What better time than spring, the season of revival, to resume the Metrics Monday series. Here goes.

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In proclaiming that “what gets measured gets managed” measurement aficionados tend to overlook that what you measure matters as well, if not even more.

From comparative metrics to competitive herding

Recall the debate about the insufficiency of GDP as “a measure of economic health” and the need to augment the purely economic quantitative measure with more encompassing ones. What gets measured matters for what externalities it produces (the chase for GDP growth vs. environmental damage) and for what it ignores (happiness, quality of life). An examination of profit would lead to similar conclusions, which is the foundation for the triple bottom line concept.

Metrics like GDP or profit are commonly used for comparison, with past performance or, more typically in business, with competitors. You have to know where you are in the marketplace to know where to go. There’s a catch, however. In “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd”, which I heartily recommend, Youngme Moon describes the principal negative externality of comparative metrics (quote mixed and matched; emphasis mine):

“When someone shows us a graph or a chart or a spreadsheet that displays the areas in which we are lagging our business rivals, it is almost impossible for us to resist the urge to play catch-up. There is a natural inclination…to focus on eliminating those differences, rather than accentuating them.  [T]his is how well-meaning efforts to monitor your comparative position…can turn into cattle prod for homogenization. [T]he cumulative effect of this, in too many cases, is a herdlike regression toward the mean…a degree of competitive herding that can border on the nonsensical.

“Nothing generates conformity quite so organically as the existence of a comparative metric.”

In other words, comparative metrics hurt differentiation, which hurts your business. Once you start comparing your performance with your competitors, you’re a follower. Aggregate such following across your entire competitive field, and you get a herd, in which everyone goes in the same direction.

Sustainability-minded businesses have attempted to differentiate with a focus on balancing financial with social and environmental factors. Leaving aside the challenges of triple bottom line measurement, I’d argue that the competitive herding phenomenon exists there as well. In fact, the shift toward sustainability, particularly its green part, has manifested herding: it seems every company has, and loudly touts, some sort of sustainability program.

How to escape the herd

So what’s a sustainability-minded business to do with the comparative metrics conundrum? Youngme Moon outlines three approaches to differentiation, each of which is a basis for creating an idea brand:

• Reversal or subtraction entails stripping away superfluous features (Google vs. Yahoo!, IKEA vs. traditional furniture stores, In-N-Out Burger vs. every other burger chain)
• Breakaway or transformation creates an alternative category by building on and distancing itself from a traditional category (big-kid underpants vs. baby diapers for older kids, The Simpsons as an adult sitcom rather than children’s cartoon, Swatch as a Swiss watch that’s a fashion accessory)
• Hostility or division polarizes the marketplace by taking a stand against the status quo (think MINI Cooper, Benetton, or Dove Real Beauty campaign)

(She omits saying the three approaches could be conceptualized as blue ocean strategies, which “open up a new and uncontested market space”. Many triple bottom line businesses have done this.)

Building on your strengths and playing into objections will help in escaping the competitive herd. It won’t completely rid you of the instinct to use comparative metrics, however. Many idea brands Youngme Moon mentions succeeded without market research, or perhaps even thanks to not conducting any. A successful blue ocean strategy simply invents a completely new market category, and if there’s no competition, there’s no need for comparison.

The best way to avoid the trap of comparative metrics is to not use comparative metrics. Just measure what you need to measure and compare your performance to your own past performance. Don’t worry about the competition.

Alternatively, you can also use metrics that make sense only for your business. Just as the Human Development Index is used as an alternative to GDP to reflect broader realities, you can use metrics that go beyond profit to reflect your impact. Can you measure your success by the success of your clients? By the success of nonprofits you support? By the success of your employees? You get the picture.

What’s your experience with comparative metrics? Have you managed to escape competitive herding? How?

(Image credit: andyzeo)

As the new GoodBookery chapter unfolds in my business life, I look for ways to make the most out of the transition. Beginning something new typically entails taking stock of what preceded it. Since I love books — witness the many reviews on this very blog and since my new venture centers around books, the best way to celebrate the change would be with a book collecting the best of my Sustainable Marketing Blog writings.* I plan to self-publish the book by the end of the second quarter and share my experience with creating it as I go along. I’m in the middle of the formatting and editing process. What have I learned so far?

Creating a book out of a blog: The process

While tools like Anthologize, BlogBooker, or BookSmart specialize in turning your blog into book form, I decided to forgo automation. Not every blog post or word I’ve written — 389 posts totaling 152,617 words – is suitable for publishing, no matter how I wish it to be so. Blog form is also very different from book form, so I expected to have to make additional adjustments to the book.

First, I simply went all the way back to the first post I published here (“So what is sustainable marketing anyway?”, September 21st, 2008), and worked my way forward through the calendar. I copied the posts I deemed book-worthy into a template I had downloaded from Lulu for my previous book project, “The Portland Bottom Line”. In making the selections, I looked for timelessness and relevance — I only chose posts that have remained (and will continue to be) applicable and that also capture the essence of sustainable marketing as I understand it. The count as it stands now is 113 blog posts (now book chapters) totaling 51,863 words – about a third of all I’ve written here over 2.5 years.**

Next, I quickly realized I couldn’t just dump the posts into a book in chronological order. I needed a way to organize the chapters into meaningful sections. Five groupings emerged:

• Definition of sustainable marketing: Posts capturing my ongoing effort to define and outline sustainable marketing
• Profit/prosperity: Posts about the elements of marketing that aim to benefit your financial bottom line.
• People: Posts about socially beneficial marketing strategies and tactics.
• Planet: Posts about making marketing more environmentally responsible.
• Writing elsewhere: Guest posts I’ve written for other blogs and contributions to crowdsourced books

As I format and edit the chapters, I see the need for further refinement of this structure. Even in this structure, however, it made sense to lists the chapters in the order published, not displayed, on the blog. With blogs, the most recent, the now, matters the most; books prefer linear progression.

Finally, I have to edit the chapters to fit the book format. Hyperlinks are out, as are questions aiming to spur discussion in comments and irrelevant time-specific references. At the same time, I try to preserve the blog voice as much as possible.

All in all, putting a blog book together has underlined the differences between the formats for me. Blogs and books both serve their own purpose and come with their own set of affordances (possibilities and limitations). The existence or enjoyment of one doesn’t preclude that of the other; blogs and books can coexist. Blogs and books each fulfill a different function, neither is superior.

Blog to book: It’s what’s inside that counts

The manual approach to putting my blog book together also allowed me to revisit what I’ve written in a more introspective and instructive way. Selecting posts to be included in the book by scanning or reading them in the order of publication revealed the evolution of my thinking. Curation can be beneficial to the curator himself!

I also (re)discovered that what I’ve written offers less advice on implementing sustainable marketing strategies and tactics and more thoughts on what sustainable marketing is, its basic principles, and its purpose and philosophy. At first, the discovery surprised me; as a “sustainable marketing department for organizations without one” I consider myself a practitioner, a doer. To see the absence of instruction bothered me until I remembered that marketing advice, case studies, or tutorials are not only abundant both on the web and in print (every marketer has an opinion), they’re useful only in creating followers. It’s tough to stand out if you conform to best practices. Youngme Moon offered final validation in the Introduction to her “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd”:

“The reason I find how-tos discomfiting is that there is always the slim chance that people may actually take them on faith. What businesspeople need today is a fresh set of insights, not a fresh set of instructions.”

I look forward to updating you on my progress.

* I also have to give credit to Todd Sattersten who told me about his experience collecting and sharing his writings in “Everything I Know About Business Books (So Far)”.

** Which post or posts do you think must be in the book?

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Image credits: Andrea K. and  Rupert Jetson