This month’s Positive Power Spotlight has a guest author: Cynthia Kersey, from her book, Unstoppable. This profile of Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop was written a few years ago. Roddick was given the honor of Dame by Queen Elizabeth, sold The Body Shop to L’Oréal in 2006, and died in September, 2007 at age 64.

Here’s Cynthia:

No one who has ever followed a dream has taken a direct, unobstructed path and arrived at his or her destination effortlessly and on time. Following a dream is not a direct highway but a bumpy road full of twists and turns and occasional roadblocks. The journey requires modifications and adjustments in both thought and action, not just once, but over and over.

Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, used creativity to overcome challenges that would have stopped the vast majority of new business owners. She broke just about every rule in the book when she started The Body Shop and she’s still breaking the rules today. Of course, such irreverence has its consequences. In Anita’s case, the consequences read like this: The Body Shop now has more than 1,500 stores throughout the world, is worth over $500 million, and has influenced the products and marketing of all its chief competitors. And those are just the consequences in the business arena. The Body Shop is also a powerfully effective vehicle for social and environmental awareness and change; as far as Anita is concerned, that is the most important consequence of all.

From the moment in 1976 when Anita first conceived the idea of opening a shop to sell naturally based cosmetics, she was thinking in a most unbusinesslike manner. Most entrepreneurs set out to establish a company with growth potential that will make them wealthy someday. Anita was just looking for a way to feed herself and her two children, while her husband, also a maverick, was away on a two-year adventure, riding a horse from Argentina to New York.

Her first challenge was to find a cosmetics manufacturer to produce her products. No one she approached had ever heard of jojoba oil or aloe vera gel, and they all thought that cocoa butter had something to do with chocolate. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, Anita had discovered a market just about to explode: young female consumers who would prefer their cosmetics to be produced in a cruelty-free and environmentally responsible manner. When manufacturers failed to have the same foresight, Anita found a small herbalist who could do the work she required.

Since Anita was not the typical entrepreneur, she saw no drawbacks in starting her company with almost no capital. To save money, she bottled her cosmetics in the same inexpensive plastic containers hospitals use for urine samples, encouraging her customers to bring the containers back for refills. Because Anita couldn’t afford to have labels printed, she and some friends hand printed every one. Her packaging couldn’t have turned out better if she’d planned it that way. With the improvised packaging, her product now had the same natural, earthy image as the cosmetics themselves.

Anita opened the first branch of The Body Shop in her hometown of Brighton, England. When she first opened, neighboring proprietors made bets on how long the store would last. Less amused were the owners of local funeral parlors who insisted she change the shop’s name. No one, they complained, would hire a funeral director located near a place called “The Body Shop.” She stuck to her guns and the name stayed.

The first store was only minimally successful. Nevertheless, Anita decided to move ahead with a second one. The bank questioned the wisdom of her plan and refused a loan. So she found a friend of a friend who was willing to lend her the equivalent of $6,400 in exchange for 50 percent ownership of The Body Shop. Today that person is worth $140 million. Signing over half of her business was the only real mistake Anita ever made. But it wasn’t the only decision that looked like a mistake. Here are three more:

• She has never advertised even when she opened shops in the United States. People told her it was suicide to enter a new market without massive advertising support.
• She doesn’t sell in any outlet other than The Body Shop stores. (Some of her Asian stores are the only exception and are located within department stores.)
• She resolved early on that her shops would be a catalyst for change, not just in the business world, but in the world at large.

These decisions turned out to be some of the most inspired “mistakes” in the history of retailing. Even though Anita has never paid for advertising, her unconventional ideas have inspired hundreds of articles and interviews generating tremendous publicity. Her first shop in New York was packed with customers from the day it opened. At one point, a thirty-five-year-old woman on roller skates threw up her arms and shouted, “Hallelujah! You’re here at last.” So much for advertising.

A new branch of The Body Shop opens somewhere in the world every two and a half days. Occasionally, Anita has had trouble opening stores in shopping malls. But having a past that was filled with challenges, Anita is accustomed to coming up with creative solutions. For instance, when one mall refused to lease her space, she organized every mail-order customer within a 110-mile radius to write letters to the management of that mall. Within a few months, a branch of The Body Shop was open.

Anita also had this nonconformist idea of putting ideals ahead of profit. From the start, Anita wanted not just to change the faces of her customers but to change the entire face of business. She envisioned a company that was socially responsible and compassionate. “I see the human spirit playing a big role in business. The work does not have to be drudgery, and the sole focus does not have to be on making money. It can be a human enterprise that people feel genuinely good about.”

Some of the raw materials for her products are harvested by groups of people in underdeveloped regions, thus generating an income for them. The Body Shop has launched campaigns to save the whales, ban animal testing in the cosmetics industry, help the homeless, and protect the rain forests. All of these campaigns have been eagerly supported by loyal customers.

Employees of The Body Shop are actively involved in these efforts. Each month, employees receive a half day off with pay to volunteer in the community. Some employees, for example, went to Romania to help rebuild orphanages. In the stores, customers are encouraged to register to vote, recycle their plastic cosmetics containers, and bring their own shopping bags to save paper and plastic. Because of all these activities, people have suggested Anita’s company should really be called “The Body and Soul Shop.” Customers emerge not only looking good but also feeling good.

“Business as usual” isn’t part of Anita Roddick’s make up. But as far as she’s concerned, doing what is not usual has made all the difference.

Action:

Anita said that what saved The Body Shop over and over was their willingness to recognize what wasn’t working and quickly identify a new way to approach a problem. This is a crucial strategy because everyone who starts a business is going to face challenges. Things never work out exactly as intended and creativity will play a key role in enabling a new business owner to conquer daily battles. If you don’t come up with alternative solutions, your dreams will die.

The first step to expanding your creativity is to clearly identify the problem you’re experiencing. Maybe you’re struggling in sponsoring people who are interested in working the business and not simply purchasing the product. Or maybe you’re having a hard time finding new prospects period. Write the numbers 1 through 10 vertically down the left side of the sheet of paper. Finally, write ten possible solutions to your problem. Make sure they are viable options, but stretch your imagination.

Remember, the solution to every problem lies within you. You may need a few minutes of quiet time to complete the exercise effectively, or you may need to brainstorm possible solutions with a friend. Feel free to do whatever you think is necessary to connect with your inner knowing. When you’ve completed the exercise, you should find that the solutions you have found will renew your sense of possibility and your commitment to your goal.

About the Author:

Cynthia Kersey is a nationally-known speaker, performance and productivity expert and the author of the bestsellers, Unstoppable, Unstoppable Women and the bestselling audio program, “The Unstoppable 30-Day Challenge!” To receive a free gift worth over $100 in value go to http://www.unstoppable.net/gifts.htm

The first words out of Lawrence “Lorenzo” Gottschamer’s mouth were “I’m a guerrilla in the eco-war. Everything we do here is to repair the planet.”

Lorenzo owns the aptly-named Valhalla, an organic macadamia farm a few miles outside of Antigua, Guatemala. In 1976, he came for a three-day visit, and never left. Now he employs about 25 people on three sites, living in a beautiful forest, harvesting nuts from the trees he planted in 1978, and removing a pound of carbon from the atmosphere with every pound of nuts he produces.

The nuts fall to the ground when ripe, and are very easy to harvest. He built a sheller out of a spinning tire and some rebar, and built an equally simple but equally effective size-sorter (it looks kind of like one of those toys where marbles roll downward through a maze) so that processing plants are willing to take his crop.

The trees themselves create hundreds of new varieties, no grafting required. And Lorenzo conducts meticulous research on the properties of the new varieties.

Lorenzo is a giving kind of guy. Visitors are welcomed with a personal tour from him or one of his co-workers (in English or Spanish, as appropriate), free samples of chocolates, nuts, and the macadamia-based cosmetics he sells to companies like Nivea, even free facials. His outdoor restaurant serves macadamia butter laced over fresh
fruit and pancakes, herbal tea, and more, all very reasonably priced.

And the proceeds go to his reforestation and sustainable economic/agricultural development work with indigenous people. He has donated over 200,000 new trees, and is involved in numerous development and reforestation projects. Much information can be found at the Valhalla website, http://www.exvalhalla.net

So many books about the need for change are nothing but doom-and-gloom. Focusing on the successes, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy by Hazel Henderson (with Simran Sethi) (Chelsea Green, 2006) is fundamentally about hope.

Mind, there’s plenty of information in these pages about the world’s problems and the consequences of doing nothing. And lots more about the way government and business collude to skew the system in favor of the traditional model (such as unsubsidized solar and wind energy having to compete against heavily subsidized oil, coal, and nuclear, and lifecycle costs such as disposal transferred from the manufacturer to the consumer). But the book profiles dozens of entrepreneurs in both the business and service sectors who have found a way to help humanity address that raft of problems. If the entire world adopted the solutions modeled and piloted by these visionaries, it would go a very long way toward reversing negative climate change (a/k/a global warming…reducing poverty…creating economic support systems that lift up not only the middle class but also the very poorest–and do so without government handouts.

Henderson, whose many websites include EthicalMarkets.com, has been taking a leadership role in the environmental/activist/ethical investor sector for decades (I have a book of hers that was published in 1978; this book is based on a PBS TV series she produced.

The ultimate message is that we, not only as consumers but as citizens (yes, there is a difference!) can impact the world of business and shape it away from the rigid single-bottom-line, profit-at-all-costs model popularized by economists like Milton Friedman, in favor of a more humanistic triple-bottom-line approach that is shaped to benefit all stakeholders, not just those who happen to own stock.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, socially responsible companies tend to perform better. As I discuss in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and as Henderson points out over and over again, these companies are better managed, they’re not embroiled in costly lawsuits, and they’ve made strides to reduce their own environmental footprint in ways that actually lower costs.

And Henderson tracks probably hundreds of ways that this attitude has filtered from the hippie pioneers of the 60s and 70s into the mainstream business world–not only through the successes of companies that were built from their founding on social and environmental responsibility (e.g., Greyston Bakery, Grameen Bank), but also in how this ethic is slowly spreading into even the largest of traditional businesses, even to the likes of auto companies, oil companies, General Electric, Wal-Mart, and so forth.

The book is wide-ranging, with chapters covering not only the obvious (energy, environmental impact, fair trade) but also the pervasive areas of society that need to–and are starting to–shift (health and wellness, joy at work, investing). Henderson identifies four pillars of socially responsible investing (a field where she has had major influence through her work with Calvert and other organizations): social and environmental screens, community investing, shareholder activism, and socially responsible venture capital. She also wants us to place economic value on “the love economy” (work done for free, in the home or as volunteers).

In short, despite the mess we’re in, many, many trends are positive. She even finds support in the writings of those two writers whose works have often been used to justify the worst aspects of the corporate oligarchy: Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations, and Charles Darwin, 19th-century author of The Origin of Species.
A few specific examples of positive change among the many she cites:

• Socially responsible investments in the U.S. and worldwide now total $2.3 and $5 trillion, respectively
• Socially screened companies outperform the S&P 500 and similar indices around the world–and that may have something to do with why socially responsible mutual funds grew 156% in five years (to $32 billion) while that market as a whole grew only 22%

• In Brazil, about 1/3 of the nation’s GDP is accounted for by companies that have joined an ethical-principles umbrella organization–and the country’s celulosic (i.e., not from diverted food sources such as corn) ethanol production has made it energy self-sufficient
• Fair-trade coffee consumption in the UK multiplied 400% from 1998 to 2005
• Green venture capital is growing at 36% per year; wind power is growing at 29% per year; solar grew by 63% from 2004 to 2005, and countries such as China are becoming major players (very hopeful for those of us who worry about the environmental disaster that would happen if China adopted traditional, polluting, resource-hogging technologies to achieve Western living standards)
• At least some clothing companies have rejected sweatshops in favor of production that is certified under the Social Accountability 8000 standard (mentioned in a profile of one of those companies, Eileen Fisher)
• Technology exists to supply all the power California currently generates with traditional powerplants, just by switching four percent of the state’s vehicles to fuel cell power
• Shareholder activists have achieved numerous victories, from switching McDonald’s off polystyrene containers to getting Home Depot to carry sustainably-forested wood

Despite the sharp upsurge in gas prices–and, by the way, the U.S. still has some of the lowest gas prices by far–a driving vacation is still usually a lot cheaper than flying, and has lower carbon impact as well. Here are a few ways to keep it affordable:

1. If you have a gas hog, swap. Find someone with a car that gets 30 MPG or better, who isn’t going to be doing much driving. Pay that person $100 or so, and trade cars for a couple of weeks.
2. Lower the cost of lodging: join a homestay organization such as Servas (real, in-depth visits, http://www.usservas.org in the U.S., or http://www.servas.org elsewhere) and/or Couchsurfing.com (crash space), and spend some of your nights with members of these organizations. Plus you’ll meet great people!
3. Lower the cost of lodging again, by camping. All you really need is a decent tent that’s easy to assemble and stores in a small space, and a good sleeping bag (get the zip-together kind) and foam pad for each person. For two people, even if you have to buy all of that new, you’d make up the cost by the fourth night, if not sooner–and you’ll have this stuff for years to come.
4. Drive efficiently. Keep tires properly inflated, change the oil regularly, fill your tank in the early mornings when the gas hasn’t expanded, back off on the accelerator when you’re going to need to slow down for an exit or stoplight or tollbooth, avoid jackrabbit starts. Set cruise control for 55 miles an hour; it’s a lot more gas-efficient than 65 or faster, and you won’t have to worry about the very expensive speeding tickets and the even more expensive insurance surcharges they bring. Plus, you’ll actually get to see the scenery.
5. Put a sunshade across the windshield when you park, so you’ll need less air conditioning when you get back on the road.
6. Once you get to your destination area, get around by bike and/or public transit and leave the car where you’re staying.
7. Limit yourself to one restaurant meal a day, and picnic for the rest.
8. Use member discounts on attractions: AAA, AARP, your union…or take advantage of the numerous free or discounted choices you’ll find in every area, if you know where to look.
9. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need, just to have a souvenir. Take digital photos instead.
10. For a whole $8.50, buy a copy of my e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live
    Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook. It includes specific techniques for many of these tips, as well as a great deal more. For instance you’ll learn several ways to locate free or cheap attractions and entertainment, slash the cost of dining out, find cheaper places to stay, and much more.
    280 pages of great frugal fun advice! Learn about the book at http://www.frugalfun.com/pphtoc.html, and buy it at http://www.frugalmarketing.com/shop.shtml.

1. Read Mark Joyner’s New Book For Free–A Year Before Publication

Mark Joyner continues to amaze me! I’ve been following him for about ten years, long before we became friends. Not only is he one of the smartest people in marketing, but he also has a strong sense of social justice.

Anyway, on the smart side of things, he’s written a new e-book on Integration Marketing. If you’ve read my own my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, some of the concepts will be familiar to you (though I don’t use that term in the book).

In this book, Mark actually demonstrates a complex mathematical formula to determine if a Joint Venture is worth your time. I haven’t seen anyone else do anything remotely like this, except that I’ve seen Bob Bly’s evaluation of whether it’s worth it for him to do an e-mail blast for your product. But Mark goes much deeper. You can use Mark’s tool to evaluate absolutely any JV proposal, far more than e-blasts. And use his creative and visionary thinking to open many doors to growing your business massively, spending little or even no money to do it.

Oh yes, and Mark’s concluding chapter ties in ecology and peace themes in a way that will strike a chord with all of you who see business as more than making money, but also a social good. Yes, he’s ReMarkAble (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Mark Joyner has a contract to publish this book, but it won’t be out for a year. I imagine that will be a greatly expanded version. But meanwhile, go ahead and blow your mind with the e-book version. It’s only 49 pages and it’s easy to digest. And with a price of zero, what are you waiting for? Get it here.

2. Train in Person with Jay Conrad Levinson, Founder of Guerrilla Marketing, for three days at the Guerrilla Marketing Business University from August 27-29th in Orlando. Not cheap–but the level of value he expects to deliver is so high that he makes this guarantee: If you aren’t blown away at the end of the first day, simply turn in your materials, and receive a refund for whatever you have paid.

You’ll come away with your own custom 1-year Guerrilla marketing plan for your own business, as well as an introduction to “200 crucial and innovative weapons in marketing today. More than 100 of them are completely free!”

Visit http://snipurl.com/3b392 to register

3. Funny how so many people are terrified of speaking, and then they do their worst to sabotage their own presentation, so the next time an opportunity presents itself, they’re even more afraid and do even worse. Me? I love to speak in front of groups. It amazes me that people pay me, and pay me well, to essentially do my own marketing while imparting useful information. Master speaking coach and media trainer TJ Walker is doing another program to train you as a professional speaker. His office writes,

At the Presentation Training Workshop you will learn:

1. Look your best in front of groups
2. Speak in a way that doesn’t put people to sleep
3. Techniques for reducing nervousness
4. Speak so people remember what you say, act on it, and pass the information along to others.

Most importantly, you’ll learn the techniques that can keep you looking calm, collected, and in control.

Click to see an introductory video about TJ’s training process.

4. Your Chance to be in the Movies

The Choosing America Project is calling for dramatic
anecdotes from immigrants who chose to live in America.

“We are looking for those special moments, encounters, surprises, experiences, disappointments, which vividly convey what it’s like

to be an immigrant in America. The good, the bad, the sad, the miraculous, the joyful–every anecdote is welcome as long as it’s authentic and well told.”

They hope to turn some of these stories into short films that will be shown in the movies and broadcast on TV.

For more details go to: http://www.choosingamerica.com

Disclosure: some of the links are affiliate links and earn me a commission. I believe in the affiliate model as long as I have vetted the product or know that a speaker/trainer delivers value.

Just back from my annual trip to Book Expo America, and one of the things I noticed was a definite shift toward sustainability–not just in the books being published, but also in attention to industry practices.

Some of these were aimed at publishers and printers, and some at consumers. One of the latter–which I learned about not at BEA but in a personal note from one of the founders–is EcoLibris.com, whose slogan is “Every book you read was once a tree. Now you can plant a tree for every book you read.”

Like carbon offset programs, this attempts to let consumers make restitution for the environmental effects of their reading habits. Starting at a dollar per tree and going down slightly with quantity purchases, the group funds reforestation projects in developing countries. It’s a for-profit business, and does retain a percentage of the donations. But it also includes all sorts of interesting environmental information on the site.

One of the pages I like best is the Collaborations page, which lists joint efforts with publishers, authors, bookstores, etc.–who are of course encouraged to spread the word and who receive customer kudos for being Green.

And while I think offset programs are only a temporary solution to reduction of pollution, greenhouse gases, etc., when I think of that convention center filled with literally millions of books and imagine a forest sprouting up with a tree for each book, it’s a vision that has a lot of appeal.

Read Shel Horowitz’s award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, for more on Green and ethical companies succeeding.

The younger generation may not believe this–but even as recently as 20 years ago, most Americans
drank tap water. Unfiltered. Unbottled. Straight out of the faucet and into a glass. In fact, Americans are blessed with extremely high water quality compared with developing countries–as are Canada and many parts of Europe. However, not all tap water tastes good, and some municipalities do have quality issues. Thus, the rapid and remarkable rise of bottled water.

Bottled water is a way to convert a free or nearly-free public utility into a commodity that has to be bought. and the water may or may not be better than your tap water. In fact, if you see the abbreviation “pws” on a water label, it stands for Public Water Supply. In other words, the bottler is collecting tap water, filtering it, and selling it back to you at 1000 times the cost.

And then there are the environmental issues.

• Those thin plastic bottles are a major consumer of petroleum and energy (not to mention the water contaminated in the bottling process and rendered unusable), and add heavily to solid waste problems
• Concerns have been raised about whether the plastic leaches into the water
• Water bottlers sometimes draw down the source aquifer to the point where the local population doesn’t have enough anymore

So, to save money, reduce solid waste, and leave more water for the residents of ares with bottling companies, consider switching to filtered tap water. There’s even beginning to be a movement to recycle the plastic parts in pitcher-type (e.g., Brita, Pur) water filters to further minimize the environmental impact.

Yes, there are times it will still make sense to have water in a bottle, such as on a hike or a long hot bus ride. But you can cut down your use drastically, even refill those bottles, and do something good both for your wallet and the earth.

Oh, and by the way, water is much, much healthier than soda, and may even be healthier than seltzer (there are rumors of calcium depletion from carbonated beverages). As for those pretty-colored “vitamin waters?” Much of the vitamin content appears to be derived from sugar, and these waters are even more expensive. Take a vitamin pill and wash it down with good old filtered tap.

Resources:

• Corporate Accountability International: “Think Outside the Bottle”
• Is America;s $8 Billion Bottled Water Industry a Fraud?
• Activist Julia Butterfly Hill on water bottles and paper cups

How Green is my web host? If you host with Affordable Internet
Services Online, of California, a/k/a AISO.net, the answer appears to be very green indeed. For starters, the company claims to be 100% solar powered–including the servers, the office, and tools like its shopping cart, mailing list manager, and calendar, all provided to hosting clients. The company has also switched to mercury-free (and very low-consumption) LED lighting, which is far more ecological than compact fluorescents (to say nothing of regular lighting)..

From AISO’s home page:

We have made a strong commitment to help fight
pollution and preserving our natural resources. Solar panels
run our data center and office, not energy credits.
Solar tubes bring in natural light from the outside providing
light during the day. AMD Opteron powered servers use sixty
percent less energy and generate fifty percent less heat.

And here’s the information their solar vendor gave them:

Our 120 solar panel system will eliminate the production of
- 19,890 lbs of Carbon Dioxide (CO2/GHG) per year
- 5.9 lbs of Nitrous Oxide (NOX/smog) per year
- 0.45 lbs of Sulfur Dioxide (SO4/acid rain) per year
This is the equivalent of planting 3.5 acres of trees per year

Proof that Green is good business: Client list includes the Indianapolis Zoo, the Oceanic Society, the Himalayan Institute, and Live Earth, among others. They’ve also earned a listing as a Webhost Magazine Editors Choice and membership on the Inc Green 50 and in Co-op America. Pretty cool!

Thanks to Kristen Lems of the Peoples Music Network for telling me about these folks.