3p Contributor: Ryan Mickle
Recent Articles
Warrior Film-making: The Story of Free Range Studios
Jonah Sachs and Louis Fox at Free Range Studios in Berkeley, CA
I recently visited Free Range Studios to meet with its talented co-founder Jonah Sachs in Berkeley, California, to talk about his startup story. Free Range began 10 years ago as two guys, one laptop, one apartment, and enough creativity and change-the-world-or-bust aspirations to eventually challenge agribusiness, and our consumer lifestyle, with The Story of Stuff, The Meatrix, and countless other films and stories. If you haven’t see these incredible web videos, which have won countless awards, I genuinely suggest taking the time to so.
From Childhood Collaboration to Warrior Film-making
After graduating with a degree in journalism, Jonah moved to Washington D.C., where he interned for NPR, then did graphic design work for a local studio for a meager 8 bucks an hour. He didn’t last long. After getting offers for freelance work for $50 an hour, he was on his own before 6 months had passed.
Jeffrey Sachs: US Policy-Making Is a Bipartisan Failure, Failing to Even Acknowledge Environmental Challenges
Jeffrey Sachs, the influential economist at Columbia University shared a sobering perspective as part of an impressive lineup of speakers at Tuesday’s World Business Forum. In his speech, he pulled a fire alarm on the optimism on leadership in business and opportunities abroad with his perspectives on the bipartisan failure of US policy making and the world’s near-certain risk of ecological bankruptcy.
The saddening part is that the message may have fallen on deaf ears, with Wall Street Journal running what was only a side comment from Sachs, and little of the message making it out of Radio City Music Hall unscathed. This was due, perhaps in part, to the audience’s composition and the slightly morbid tone of his presentation. Sometimes bad news is just bad news.
Bipartisan political failure in the US
Sachs began with a quick overview of the essence of our current crisis, which is, he argued, financially based. “Beneath the rubble, lay complete lack of proper regulation in lending, which was the direct cause.” We broke down walls between investment and consumer banks, he explained, and created derivatives that could be sold to those who had no idea what they were really buying, and all of this occurred outside of regulation.
Then, as bailouts were handed out to Wall Street’s banks, the underlying and critical problem with our political system became clear as the financial sector spent $3.7 billion lobbying for its interests. Yesterday, Nobel prize-winning economist and World Business Forum speaker Paul Krugman, reiterated this, noting that we may have bailed out banks too fast, restoring them back into full control only so that they can lobby against any regulation that may be in the sector’s best interests.
Sachs described the current state of policy-making as something that happens behind closed doors and by parties focused on their own interests. Guess which sector is the second largest spender in lobbying? Healthcare.
Thanks to Triple Pundit’s Sponsors
We’re lucky to have some really great sponsors here at 3p. In the case of the many organizations and companies we work with, we’d choose to support regardless of the nature of our relationship. By sponsoring, these organizations invest in our ability to continue to publish great content and continue to build the 3p movement.
The Environmental Defense Fund Innovation Exchange is continuing to evolve into an invaluable resource for businesses. You’d swear that there was a catch, since you rarely expect great resources like the Innovation Exchange without someone trying to sell you something, right? But the EDF partners with businesses, doesn’t take a dime in return, then open-sources the IP for all to share. You’ll also notice that the content on the Innovation Exchange is Creative Commons licensed, so share it all you want, as long as you share the credit with them. Check out the EDF Innovation Exchange Blog and their Twitter for more. Thanks EDF!
Give Something Back Business Products is an 18 year old business products company that is a veteran in the world of businesses created to make things better. Founders Mike Hannigan and Sean Marx literally copied the Newman’s Own model… sell products we all need and use frequently, like office chairs and recycled copier paper, and invest more than half of their profits back into the community (they’re a Bay Area company, so many of their clients request that they donate to Bay Area organizations like the San Francisco Food Bank). And the kicker is that their prices are competitive with the rest. They’re a founding B Corporation and their client list includes most of the companies you likely know and love. Thanks Give Something Back!
Thanks for being part of our community in support of business done better. If your business could benefit from becoming a more visible part of the 3p community, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Age of Stupid: Environmentalism Is Alive and Well
Director and Producer Franny and Lizzie arrive by boat at the NY premier of their documentary, the Age of Stupid.
Editor’s Note: This post was published on the Huffington Post earlier today.
On Monday night, I participated in the world’s largest movie premier, for a documentary. The film, called the Age of Stupid has been hailed as the future of film, and criticized by 3p’s own Nick Aster for its depressing take on the state of our planet’s climate. I believe, however, that the film was revolutionary for slightly different reasons. Age of Stupid reveals that environmentalism is alive, well, and going mainstream. Even more, the film shows that our current consumer lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible with the reality of our climate situation. Either we convince our governments to intervene and take control, or prepare for the worst, as we waste time celebrating recycling our plastic water bottles.
Thank You Readers, Environmental Defense Fund, and Greener World Media
As you likely noticed, the 3p team has been hard at work to provide the people who have made what started as a little side project the conversation-starting site that it is today. We’d like to thank you, our readers for being part of the movement in support of integrating people, planet, and profit in business. Thanks for the thoughtful comments, your time, and all of the nice things you say about us (at least when we are within earshot).
As an independent business media company, we depend on the support of like-minded companies and organizations. You’ll notice in the recent redesign of this site that we have begun featuring the logos of sponsors, as part of our vision for deeper, long-term partnerships that will create value for our prized readers. Please join us in thanking our friends at the EDF Innovation Exchange and Greener World Media this month for their support.
Should In-N-Out Burger Dump Its Trash Cans?
I find absolutely no shame in admitting that I love In-N-Out Burger. And I should add that I’m on my second year as a vegetarian… I get the grilled cheese, one of many off menu options.
The 60 year old, privately owned In-N-Out has long celebrated its freezer-less approach to serving its food fresher than the competition. The company has also always paid its employees significantly more than state and federally-mandated minimum wage guidelines, and you can tell by the moods of their employees. In-N-Out has even quietly eliminated some of the trash it serves, with the replacement of those cardboard boxes served on plastic trays with reusable plastic trays, shaped like the old cardboard boxes.
But for a company that has believed in fresher food (and even received one of few accolades in the book, Fast Food Nation), positive work environments, and fairly compensated work, In-N-Out hasn’t yet taken what seems to be any easy opportunity to lead by eliminating trash entirely from its more than 140 locations. You don’t have to be the McDonald’s center of attention to lead.
My idea is this. Replace cups, lids, straws, burger wrappers, french fry trays and tray liners with compostable alternatives. The compact menu actually makes the transition straight forward. With one call to the owners of Mixt Greens, another great California business, I am sure they would be lead in the right direction and that the suppliers would be happy to put those secret bible verses on their wares, to get the business.
So I posted this idea on the quietly relaunched, all new dotherightthing.com, where you can show your support and help the idea grow into reality. With enough support, the business case will be clear and their marketing will have been done for In-N-Out Corporate. And of course, if you have ideas for In-N-Out or another company, you can post them to the site as well.
Triple Pundit Acquires News Corporation
In a surprise but carefully planned move, Triple Pundit LLC has acquired News Corporation in a deal backed personally by Warren Buffett. News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, is comprised of Fox News, 20th Century Fox, MySpace, and the recently acquired Wall Street Journal.
According to 3p Founder, Nick Aster, who met the Oracle of Omaha during his most recent backpacking trip through Argentina, “3p got into the business to change everything in business and media. Yet, we hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d be doing it this literally.”
Sources within News Corporation state that the hostile takeover battle was effectively won when Triple Pundit writers and followers stormed the Avenue of the Americas New York Headquarters with Super Soakers, far outmatching the McCain-Palin 2008 stress balls possessed by News Corporation staffers. Triple Pundit engaged in a fierce bidding war for News Corp with the Onion, backed by actor Robin Williams, but Warren Buffett’s financial position and negotiation tactics (Buffett himself carefully planned the Super Soaker-armed takeover) proved insurmountable.
Triple Pundit plans to make drastic changes, detailed below, to the media empire built by Rupert Murdoch, the major shareholder and Chairman of News Corporation. Murdoch did not make himself available for comment, but is rumored to be planning a face-saving comeback on next season’s Dancing with the Stars.
Twitter for T-shirts: Procter & Gamble Tests Social Media with Tide Loads of Hope
Consumer brands heavyweight Procter & Gamble is done sitting on the social media sidelines. Recent rumors have revealed the company has determined that social media is the future of marketing. This isn’t surprising, with the great success and evangelism-charged growth of smaller, values-driven companies such as Seventh Generation. Fast-growing Seventh Generation is now also distributing to Wal-Mart and maintains a deep, authentic connection with its community via its popular newsletter, blog, CEO Jeffrey Hollender’s blog, community, and even Twitter. As a bonfire brand, it practically markets itself. Yet P&G has yet to put any serious effort in social media until right now.
P&G’s social media experiment is a campaign called Loads of Hope, in promotion of its Tide brand and benefiting Feeding America. The company flew over a hundred social media experts to Cincinnati headquarters to meet with brand managers, divided them into four teams and kicked off a fund raising competition via Twitter, blogs, social networks, etc., to drive traffic to one of the four tracking sites (tide1.com, tide2.com, etc.). The goal: raise $100k toward disaster relief and prove the value of social media. Of course, the bloggers and twitterers involved have plenty to gain by winning. By impressing the brand managers of the largest consumer brands company, they will improve their chances at winning a piece of the company’s over $6.7 billion annual advertising budget, as it tests the waters for a better way to market its products.
Sustainable Brands International Streaming Live from Miami
Nick and I are currently in Miami attending the Sustainable Brands International conference. Check it out via live streaming video below, the next best thing to actually being here in the just-opened, uber swanky, W Hotel on steroids, Fontainebleau Resort Miami Beach.
Check out the schedule for Wednesday and Thursday and join the discussions online, even if your company slashed its travel and conferences budgets.
Join 3p in Miami for the Sustainable Brands International Conference, Exclusive Group Buy
If you are interested in how companies are leveraging sustainability to build their brands, there is a good chance you are familiar with the Sustainable Brands conference, which was hosted in Monterey, California this year. Triple Pundit is a sponsor of their newest production, the Sustainable Brands International conference, which will be held in Miami on December 9th to the 11th. Both Nick Aster, 3p’s founder, and myself will be there to conspire with thought and brand leaders and to speak about how companies can share stories about their achievements and plans in sustainability using new media (a.k.a. Web 2.0), a topic I’ve covered before here on 3p. If you attended Sustainable Brands ‘08, you likely saw Nick on the main stage talking new media and how it is turning corporate communication into conversations.
As part of our sponsorship, and a little arm twisting, we were able to wrangle a really great deal for 3p readers who want to attend the conference and hang out with some of the people behind Triple Pundit live in Miami. It’s last minute and you’ll have to act fast (by 11/28), but an exceptional deal. If you want to join the group buy, email me at ryan at triplepundit.com and I’ll give you the details.
A note: 3p doesn’t get anything for sharing this deal with its readers, just the opportunity to (hopefully) see more of you there.
Only One $25,000 Green X PRIZE Contest Finalist Addresses Climate Change
The X PRIZE Foundation, well known for its $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for building and launching a spacecraft to push the limits of space travel, is aiming to take on energy and the environment next through it’s “Crazy Green Idea” Contest. Rather than designing the contest in a vacuum, the foundation has decided to unleash the wisdom of the crowds by offering $25,000 to submitter of the best idea via YouTube video.
Unfortunately, the crowd wasn’t so wise, due to the limited publicity received by the contest. X PRIZE received and considered a mere 133 videos, from which it selected 3 finalists. Believe it or not, only one idea, proposed by a team of MIT graduate students, addresses climate change directly. One finalist’s idea is a ridiculous suggestion to replace the grid power system with “off the grid” independent power generation systems for homes, powered by solar, wind, geothermal, and “a motor.” Another focuses on environmentally friendly batteries, or “ultra capacitors.” Finally, only one idea addresses climate change with the suggestion that the next X PRIZE be devoted to drastically reducing home energy consumption.
Watch all three videos below and vote on best idea for the Energy and Environment X PRIZE:
Reduce Home Energy Usage
This is the only idea that addresses the pressing issue of climate change, as Governor Schwarzenegger issues his executive orders to prepare California for rising seas. The team suggests that the competition reward the community that can most drastically reduce its energy consumption. The brilliance in the idea is that while it could have attacked energy consumption-reducing technology, it focuses on consumer behavior, which indirectly impacts technology through demand.
Sun Puts the Social in Social Responsibility
Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve long criticized corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Despite the stakeholders’ seemingly insatiable thirst for information about the social and environmental impacts of companies, CSR reports read like infomercials, report outdated data, and no one is reading. This is a topic that I’ve learned perhaps too much about through my experience in launching dotherightthing.com, and the advising, research, and speaking I’ve done since.
In its 2008 CSR Report, Sun Microsystems has done something that I have never seen before in stakeholder engagement. Following the trend led by blogs in creating a deeper and more authentic experience for readers, Sun has enabled comments on its most recently release of its CSR report. Therefore, the report is now a conversation, no longer limited by its original authors’ text.
By enabling comments, readers can now submit publicly-visible questions (and statements) about the content and receive answers (and comments) directly from Sun, a company already known for its efforts in transparency. (Sun has over 7800 employee bloggers, an approach similar to that of Dell and Microsoft to effectively “open source” the voice of the company.) By enabling a direct feedback system, Sun will benefit from crowd-sourced fact checking (for better or worse), as is common in blogging when readers will elaborate or clarify where the original author may have less expertise or been mistaken. And its okay to be wrong; many high profile bloggers believe that it is the imperfect nature of the blog format, and the typos that do make their way to their posts, make the format more personal, since we are all human after all.
Follow the Sold Out Social Capital Markets 2008 Conference in Real Time
We sent a handful of 3p’s best (yes, they’re all the best) to cram themselves in the underventilated, far above capacity rooms that are home to the first annual Social Capital Markets 2008 Conference. This way, you get to pretend you’re there without leaving your office (or pajamas, if that is how you roll).
As writers Bill Shutkin, Jim Whitkin, Steve Tiell, Napoleon Wallace, and I interview conference attendees and weave together the stories for which you are so patiently waiting, you can following the conference live on Twitter. Check it out here:
search.twitter.com/search?q=SoCap08
Schwarzenegger on Global Warming: “Washington is Asleep at the Wheel”
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took the stage today in San Francisco at a Commonwealth Club event to celebrate the state’s success in its global warming fighting leadership. If it wasn’t obvious that the bodybuilder-turned-superstar actor-turned-governor wasn’t the typical politician, it was as he was received with a standing ovation as a Republican in one of the most progressive cities in the world, during a particularly heated election season.
In his usual self-deprecating style, Schwarzenegger compared cutting the state’s carbon footprint to the approach one might take to losing a few pounds through dieting–something the former Mr. Universe and 7-time Mr. Olympia might know a thing about–by stepping on the scale, setting a goal, and making changes in one’s lifestyle. The California (pronounced Cal-ee-for-KNEE-a, since Schwarzenegger took office in 2003) legislation that he signed into law 2 years ago commits the state to cutting emissions to 1990 levels, a 25% reduction, by 2020, and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, sidestepping Washington’s rejection of Kyoto.
Global Warming and Man on the Moon
While the implementation of such dramatic cuts in carbon emissions is easier talked about than done, Schwarzenegger drew parallels to Kennedy’s commitment to transport man to the moon, leading with vision, inspiration, and support, rather than R&D that should have been left to NASA. Kennedy was leading a movement and Arnold has clearly demonstrated his interest in playing a leading role in fighting global warming. He also appealed to the typical Californian who can cut her footprint by 25% immediately by making small changes in her life that add up, such as driving less, washing clothes in cold water, considering solar power, turning lights off, etc.
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