A month off but not really

A splendid way to spend a Thursday evening

I took a month off from this blog but I’ve been busy and just couldn’t seem to keep it altogether. But I’ve got some great news!! I have an internship with a sustainability company here in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a startup; the founders and other members of the team have a tremendous amount of experience and I am excited to be working with such a talented group. I’m already getting stuck into some projects and am thrilled.

So, yes, I’ve neglected this blog but in the meantime, I’ve been guest writing for the CORE blog, gotten an internship, contributed an occasional post to 303cycling and been helping out with this year’s TEDxBoulder.(If you’re interested in volunteering for this year’s event, drop me a line @rideboulderco)

Friday Rant: Social Media, Experts and the Military-Industrial Complex

I’ve been keeping up to date on my social media analytics/technology reading and I have noticed a recurring trend. It seems the social media glitterarti is taking offense to self-designated gurus and experts. Now, to be fair, those who are voicing their issue with these labels are often quick to say “they are not experts”. And I expect they are just trying to keep their audience informed of individual, who may misrepresent their skills and/or achievements. I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other as my only true claim to fame is an amazing ability to stand on one leg, with my eyes shut and my hands clasped above my head.

However, I do have strong feelings about word choice, so I can get on board with their issue with the label ‘expert’. If I were to add to the list of things to write a rant about (that aren’t really life-threatening ) it would probably be about the need to explain purely business/technology-related topics as if they are the major military operation.

Maybe I’m overly-sensitive? Perhaps, I’m spoiling for a fight. Either way I am over describing work in terms of a military operations. I don’t operate out of a command center, nor rummage around in my purse for an arsenal with which to lob against my competitor in a fight to the death. I don’t know if this is unique to IT, start-ups, engineering, etc or if this may reveal a gender predilection for explaining office work in terms of a highly militarized, aggressive and armed offensive.

Here are some recent examples:

• Metrics–The Secret Weapon Of Sales Managers??
• Need bigger CRM guns? Add marketing automation to your CRM arsenal
• App Engine: Google’s Cloud-Computing Weapon
• TSA’s new secret weapon: politeness

Why do we use this type of imagery to describe the work we do? When metaphors to military and weapons are used it applies a veneer of life and death significance to business decisions.  Working at a desk in an office does not conjure up images of combat and espionage for me. I wonder if that reveals a lack of imagination on my part or maybe I see what I do through the prism of the contribution I make: blog post frequency, web conversion indicators, content development, etc.

Or does this theme reveal some insecurities about what we do with our lives. The intensity, camaraderie, and higher purpose that people work towards and develop in settings like the military,  fire department or other service-related job may be something we all envy sitting in front of a laptop.

An Update on my Homegrown MBA in Sustainability

I think it’s been a couple of months since my last update on my homegrown MBA in Sustainability.  I was trying to think where to start and thought it might be more honest to start with where the wheels have come off and then end on a high note.

Wheels Off

• GRI Test Case. I haven’t been able to find a willing participant in a GRI project. Granted, I’ve only reached out to a couple of places and both were small companies but I think that may show that (a) it’s a serious undertaking to begin the GRI process (b) it sounds good in theory but the practical implication are a bit fuzzy, like what’s the return on their time, investment etc. I’ve heard more than once that implementing GRI reporting is no small task and that often the first year is often spent just identifying indicators to track and assembling the appropriate records. Perhaps, a prep-GRI phase needs to be defined, so that undertaking a methodology like this is more manageable and efficiencies can be realized at various points in the process. Or maybe GRI needs to be folded into existing business processes so it’s not yet another methodology to introduce to the organization with much initial support and fanfare only to peter out with time.
• Stats. I’ve taken both books down, quickly scanned them and then found something, anything, else to do.
• Networking. I took a bit of a break from the grin and grip circuit. I firmly believe that sometimes you need a bit of down time to come up with new material or your just rehashing the same anecdotes to the same audience. Who’s going to pay for that?
• Victory Garden. (this doesn’t really have anything to do with sustainability directly but it’s another flop) My victory garden looks disheveled and pitiful. I planted them during a severely fluctuating spring in Boulder, where 84 degree temps have seared their tender leaves or watch their yellowed leaves float atop rain puddles. And then the final injustice was watching my big galuf of a cattle dog, Tex, stomp on them as he ran inside to avoid getting wet in the rain.

Wheels ON

• Books. I’m still reading tons. I picked up Getting Green Done by Auden Schendler. I heard him speak most recently at the Sustainablity Opportunities Summit in Denver. I’m about half-way through and so far I like the pragmatic perspective of the book.
• Volunteering. I’m going to begin writing blog posts for CORE (Connected Organizations for a Responsible Economy) and becoming more involved with that organization, helping them to promote the good work they are doing.
• Technology. I’ve actually been doing some social media/seo/web metrics analysis work of the online presence of a couple of sustainability companies. This has been a great experience and I have learned a lot about the challenges facing sustainability companies as they begin to adopt some of these tools.

Technology is the key to Sustainability

I feel very fortunate to be working the social media analytics field at the moment because I very much believe that the tools and technology that are allowing us to share our opinions on Levi’s and Survivor will one day be used to share vital information on water usage and sustainable business practices. The real goal will be making sustainability topics as interesting and as captivating to share and discuss as Levi’s or Survivor. I think this may be the bigger obstacle, creating engaging content that is less about drowning polar bears and more about recognizing the value of our natural environment and using technology to celebrate and protect it. Cuz if the alarmist-type of marketing really worked, we would have solved climate change a long time ago. I’m not claiming to know how to change our perception of sustainability as less ascetic and more about bounty but I’m certain we can all come up with something.

What’s Next – My Sustainability Journey

Now what? I feel a little like I am spinning my wheels: one step on the banana peel forward and an uncontrolled slide back. But I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and I do feel like I’m learning something with every interaction or project.  I’ve got some ideas that are percolating in my head but have not quite brewed yet. And I have a few more books on my list to read: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Ray C. Anderson and
Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs.
So, that’s the update. Thanks for reading!

Writing furiously or furiously writing – either way it’s not funny

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’ve been contributing a couple of articles to 303cycling. One was about this amazing courier in Boulder, named Nan, who has her own Twitter following.  The other, and more recent article, was about the Thursday cruiser rides. If you make any plans this summer, make sure one of them is to join the ‘Happy Thursday‘ ride, which starts off from Green Guru Gear and 303Vodka near Valmont park. So, it’s been hard to keep the posts up over here.

I’ve also committed to writing a 1000 words an evening. I’ve always been a closet writer, scribbling in notebooks, and making more than a few false starts on writing something more substantial than a single page in a journal. The problem is that my stories end up sad, which is not how I feel at all. I love to laugh and occasionally make us others laugh but my stories, sheesh, end up sombre and depressing.  Take my most recent failed attempt – The Welsh Matador – the title starts off with potential but in my hands the poor lad nearly ends up getting gored. I’m not sure how or why this u-turn happens but it is happening enough for me to stop and reflect and wonder why I can be relatively amusing in-person and yet damn depressing in print. Advice welcomed.

Trends & Observations on Social Media

As I have mentioned before I work for a social media company but these thoughts are my own because who else would want to own them.

I have two observations and maybe one predictions about social media.

Here’s my first observation.

Social Media & Existing Ties

This is probably not new to anyone but me.  I have noticed by peeking in at some of the feeds of followers I have on Twitter or Facebook or some of the other smaller social media platforms that 1) there’s a lot chat between people who know each other and I would suspect have met in-person 2) it seems individuals set up the same network on each platform. So, while there may be some variance in the types of followers an individual has on Twitter vs. Scribd vs. Facebook, I think there is probably a core group, a family if you will,  that exists in some form or another on each platform.

So, this makes me think. If we are following, connecting and sharing with a very similar group of people from platform to platform are we really as open, and engaging and as inspired to share as this whole social media trend implies? Or are we simply reinforcing and nurturing our existing relationships, or when we do invite others in are they very similar in style and taste to our existing network of friends?

I have noticed in my own little social network the overlap of interests between individuals I follow. I’ve also noticed  from within my social network that the  relationships I have with people I have met in-person are strengthened when I reach out using social media. Now, the question for me becomes how quickly or often will a weak tie convert to a stronger tie and does the platform on which the relationship began make a difference?

Social Media & News

I’m a news junkie. Love reading the New York Times (when it was free), the Economist, bbc and I used to read cnn (but it was driving me crazy). When the revolutions began spreading in the Middle East, I found I was getting more and more of my news from Twitter, specifically from Andy Carvin (@acarvin), who is a a senior strategist for NPR. I felt like I could trust his observations because he was vetted in a way because of his work with NPR. From him, I began following other sources (including Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish) and soon I had quite the news feed on Libya, Syria, and most recently Japan. Sometimes additional links were provided and once I had checked out the original tweet, I could guess at the reliability of the content,

And it felt like I was getting real news. Not fake news that cnn churns out. I could almost guess what the CNN headlines were during the nuclear reactor issues Japan was experiencing after their horrific earthquake & tsunami.

• How safe are our U.S nuclear reactors? Experts expect at least one catastrophic failure in the next 100 years.
• What are the chances you were poisoned by radiation walking through the nudie scanners at the airport?
• You may be poisoned by radiation simply be driving through Commerce City, CO

And I am just not interested in their alarm-bells ringing, amped-up, scare the hell out of everyone-type of news. Unless there is really something worthy of an alarm bell. So, my prediction is this I think more and more people will begin to curate their own content to create their own news. This may do a few things like ensure we only read news that conforms and reinforces our world view or the quality of the information we are curating is of such a higher value it gives us a richer appreciation and understanding of world events.

Social Media & Relationships

This topic brings out more crazies than any thing else in social media, unless you bring up Social CRM, which is the technical term for relationship. So, I guess I’ll add my crazy rant but in honor of the royal wedding I’ll conduct my rant in a splendid hat.

I think one of the problems with organizations establishing a relationship with consumers using social media is one of timing.  Like a hormonally-driven teenager, companies are jumping the gun on the level of engagement, wanting to be exclusive when I have only just unwrapped, unpacked or rolled out the service, product or experience I just purchased. Sometimes I’m not sure I want to be on speaking terms until I am certain that the product I’ve purchased lasts, did what the fine print said it could do and didn’t make me look fat in the bathroom mirror (oops! that one slipped in).

For example, a few years ago I bought a Rivendell Quickbeam. I took a huge chance on the bike as I had never ridden a Rivendell before, I purchased it online, which means I had to assemble it myself,  and it was single speed. After about 4 years, I have to say I love that bike, I love the type of company they are trying to create and the types of products they promote, in addition to their bikes. If I ever buy another bike, it will be from them but it took me about a year to really appreciate the company, sign up for their newsletter, earn a discount on their wool tops. But their pacing was right, so the relationship developed at an appropriate speed. There have been times when I have made a purchase and before I have even had the opportunity to spill coffee down the front of said purchase, I’ve already got three notifications for sales, an offer if I go to Facebook, etc. It’s too much, too fast.

Does sustainability mean moving to the city?

View of an amazing city!

I’m headed to NYC to visit fam in the next few weeks and am so excited!! I love visiting Manhattan, there’s so much to see, eat, do and watch that by the time I leave I am utterly spent, have grit in my eyes, and am wired on sensory overload. It’s a great place but I often wonder about an common line of thinking that suggest we all need to move to cities, live more densely and therefore use less. But I don’t know that having everyone live in one of these big cities is the answer to our fuel, consumption and sustainability issues. After visiting New York city a couple of times, I wonder if they have the resources to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate a whole slew of new people. Does their infrastructure serve their current residents?

Sometimes, it seems like we are looking for a silver bullet to our

I'd eat my own head

environmental issues. If we just all move to the city and turn our roof tops into gardens, we’ll curb CO2. If we can just launch some sort of weird hook into the atmosphere we can begin collecting CO2.

Instead of trying to solve the whole nasty hair ball, why can’t we consider addressing specific issues at a time, like where people live? Why can’t the amazing technologies available to us today be used to enable people to work remotely, from wherever they want, whenever they need to. The potential of technologies like skype, twitter, jive, etc. etc has to be beyond simply marketing more stuff, right? It seems like cities might save money from not having to care for as many traffic accidents, manage the run-off from vehicles, not to mention the amazing loss of productivity and time sitting in traffic all day.

So, I love New York but not sure how much more high-density it could really be.

Sustainability Opportunity Summit – Denver’s Green Scene

Monday morning early, very early, saw me on the road with a friend driving down to the Denver Marriott for the Sustainability Opportunity Summit. I had never been to the Summit before and I certainly hadn’t been on Hwy 36 that early in a long time. Unfortunately, driving away from Boulder you don’t get the inspiring view of the Flatirons to ease your morning wake-up. Instead,  you see  the big boxes looming large, then whizzing by:  Cosco, Whole Foods, Oracle, Wings and the Flatirons mall.

We arrived at the Marriott Denver City Center, a pretty nice hotel that for some reason has created a subterranean environment for its conference rooms that only a relation of Gollum could truly love. You took two sets of stairs to descend into the conference area, which was wide open and forked to a couple of sets of conference rooms, where the different talks were presented and lunch was served.

The introduction and welcome talk were given by Pete Dignan and Paul Jerde. The keynote given by Auden Schendler was entertaining and introduced some real successes and failures in implementing sustainability projects. Most of the speakers had books they were promoting, including the lunchtime speaker Hunter Lovins.

The meat of the conference – the breakout sessions – were actually quite good. Each one had a panel of experts speaking to a common theme; there was time for introduction and the rest was devoted to Q&A.

In the morning, I attended:
Going Deeper. Panelists from successful large corporations along the Front Range discussed their business cases for sustainability and what it has meant to each company.

and

Riding the Sustainability Life Cycle – Winning the Yellow Jersey. Tools Track 3: Life Cycle Tools – Their Variety and Use. Starting with an overview of tools available in the market today, this session will focus on the “tools of the trade” used by Life Cycle practitioners and deliver an understanding of their strengths and limitations, how they fit into the overall scope of supply chain management, and when to apply them.

and

BREAKOUT SESSION 4: Business + Sustainability – When 1+1 = 3 Strategy Track 4: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Integrate Sustainability. More than simply looking at discrete processes, such as energy efficiency or water conservation, in this session you will hear first-hand stories from diverse industries about how they embed sustainability in the culture and context for doing good business. These companies are, in their own unique ways, a bit further along in the sustainability journey than most.

There was ample time to visit the Expo center, where there were some great companies showcasing their sustainability products and efforts. And it was refreshing to wander around a bit, taking a break from the “Grin and Grip” circuit if only for a few minutes.

What were the key ideas I learned:

• The sustainability group (at least in Denver/Boulder) is large enough for new ideas and people to feel welcome but small enough that you could quickly learn who people were.
• Implementing sustainable business practices is still relatively new, so there’s lots to learn and there’s no single path.
• Sustainability is still angling a bit for legitimacy and validity in the business world; we’re still using burning landscapes and drowning polar bears to advance the conversation. (This doesn’t work because if it did we probably wouldn’t be in this position. ).
• There’s less talk about us vs them and the single-minded focus on only using renewables; there was candid discussion around coal and nuclear power.
• Lots of talk about standards: GRI, ISOS, EPA, etc I like this. You need a baseline, no matter how flawed, to know where you are and where you are going.
• I understood the Sustainability and Summit parts of the title but not the Opportunity, which may be a character flaw on my part.

On the whole, I enjoyed the conference. It might be interesting to one day attend a conference where you take a current issue and allows the attendees to apply some of the methodologies and tools discussed. I’m not suggesting they’ll solve the problem but what an interesting concept to have a group like that look at transportation issues or clean water availability.

Toughest Hard Time – A Book Review and a Knock Upside the Head

I’ve had to take some time off from this blog because I’ve been recovering from the Boulder Lurgy. This has been a humdinger of a cold, which saddled me with both a congested head and chest. I really thought I was walking around with cement in my head and lungs and although my voice still sounds like I smoke a pack-a-day followed by a chaser of whiskey in the evening I am feeling better. Marginally. At least until I try and complete one of the work-outs at CrossFit Roots then it all goes to hell.

But my hard time pales, quivers and becomes transparent when placed next to the events described in “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl“. It’s hard to read this story and come to terms with the fact that these events happened relatively recently, that there are still areas of the Plains states where the earth has not yet recovered and that the severity and level of destruction was man-made. I don’t know how someone could finish this type of book and not accept that humans can change the environment irrevocably. I find it harder to believe that politicians from states with this history could be so resistant to the ideas and impact of climate change. The effects of human behavior on the land still leaves a mark in some areas of the High Plains; the land has never recovered.

A couple of ideas stayed with me:

• A huge percentage of Oklahoma’s residents were on some sort of social welfare program during the height of the depression because the land was so scarred it could no longer provide subsistence living to those that farmed it.
• The topsoil found in the Plains states had taken 1000s of years to develop and we removed 80 million tons of it in two decades.
• Each state’s soil had a unique color as it blew all over the country.
• Dust traveled from the High Plains to the East Coast and 200 miles off-shore to coat a naval ship with fine silt.
• Removing the native grasses plus aggressive farming destroyed the soil and the land. The High Plains were never meant for farming; grazing of animals but not farming.
• Elderly and children suffered the most, many dying of dust pneumonia.

Can you imagine having so much dust in your lungs you basically are drowning in silt? I walked around congested, breathing in relatively healthy air, and found the going rough. The dust blew in from every crevice of a house; it was everywhere, covered everything and people breathed it in all day and all night.

The book folds in stories of real families desperately trying to survive, and the descriptions of what a dust storm looked like and how they destroyed homes, crops and killed entire communities. Amazing and poignant read, which had me thinking, but hoping to the contrary, that we were headed in a very similar direction.

Hand-Made: All I have is the experience

These boots will do some walking

I don’t really make anything. I don’t know how to use a table saw; although, I did take wood working, at one time. I can paint walls and tighten lug nuts but I wouldn’t say I’m a builder. Maybe, what I am trying to say is I’m not a craftsmen.

What I do make is not really tangible. I’ve been working in the IT industry for some time now but I also spend hours reading blogs, playing with beta versions of new tools and tinkering with wordpress. But what I create using these tools is not something you can touch, and admire tactically.  When I look at the types of sites I visit, they all seem to share a common theme: someone is creating something tangible that can be touched, smelled, in some cases tasted and it’s something that I very much admire and appreciate.

Recently, I had a pair of boots made at a small cowboy boot shop in San Antonio, called Little Boots. I’m not a horse-riding cowgirl, who lives on a farm, but the occasion was significant because the father of the guy, who made my boots, made my dad’s. So, I got the total experience: my foot traced out, leather/color selected and style chosen. The color/style were reminiscent of the pair my dad had made in the 60′s but it would have been very easy to be seduced by some of the amazing styles they had on display. The workmanship that went into these boots was simply amazing and it gave me a renewed appreciation for things that are made well and made to last.

And this brings me back to the original idea of craftsmanship and what I produce each day. I am probably attaching a romantic notion to a scene of someone bent over leather or wood, working it until its function becomes real. I suspect, at some point, making another bookshelf or pair of children’s shoes may feel like writing yet another blog post or technical document. But for me there is something strangely nostalgic and romantic about building something by hand. Maybe, I’ll try and build a deck this year.

Here are some sites/videos that I think capture the spirit of what I am trying to say :

• Mast Brother Chocolate
• Billykirk Wallets
• Stanley & Sons

Sick, Tired but Headed out on Vakay

Guess Where?