No Better Time To Do Good

Ashoka's been busy. In addition to partnering with Staples Foundation to host a Youth Social Entrepreneurship Competition, we also just read that they’re partnering with Nike to reward programs across the world that promote social change through women's sports. Ashoka, a nonprofit that empowers social entrepreneurs, and other similar nonprofits are creating the kind of positive change that makes people feel good in this type of business climate. And Nike and Staples are wisely taking advantage of it. It seems more and more obvious that in these tough economic times, when people are trying to find meaning in their work and their lives, that brands are becoming more socially responsible in order to help their public perception and increase their value.

Here at Topics, we've been pleased to have a busy start to 2009 and have realized that despite the tough economic conditions, organizations are following through on their social responsibility efforts and educational programs. We’ve talked to a lot of folks who are committed to continuing these efforts and we like to think this is a good sign for the economy and humanity as a whole. Some of the projects we've been working on include -

• Creating a website curriculum for Microsoft, found at MyBytes.com, that helps students better understand creative rights
• Continuing work with the Sci Fi Channel (including a presentation at TED) on its public affairs campaign, Visions For Tomorrow
• Modifying a financial education curriculum for Citi to include "green" tips that are both good for the wallet and the planet
• Creating meaningful financial resources targeting youth for GenerationEngage
• Developing a multimedia website and curriculum for the Outdoor Foundation that helps mentors feel more comfortable leading youth in outdoor activities and ultimately encourages more young people to get outside
  

So, we do know that there is a lot of good going on around the world, and with the economic crisis dominating all our media outlets, it's the perfect time to spread the word about it, just as Tonya Garcia explains in her PRWeek article "Tough Times Boost Appetite for Good News." And if you aren't doing anything good, perhaps now is a great time to consider it. Amongst the doom and gloom of the economy, it's a perfect time to stand apart and give people something to feel good about. Not only does it help our mindsets, but it impacts the quality of life of our communities and it helps the bottom line.

Great Green Lawns: The Next Backlash?

The "incredible, edible" garden at the House of Obama has been all over the news in the past week as we've heard from Alice Waters and Michael Pollen and other locavore disciples about the plethora of benefits that come from eating organic, local food.

Published today in newspapers across the country, Ellen Goodman's column, "In the Garden of Eatin'" explores a new idea (at least to me) she coins the "grass-roots anti-grass movement." As if we needed anymore, this seems like yet another substantial benefit to add to the slow food, local gardening movement.

I am not the only one who looks at lawns -- including my own -- as a populist enemy. The low grassy surface has its roots in the English aristocracy, among folks who had so much food and land they didn't have to farm it, they only had to display it.

Today lawns cover 40 million acres, making them the largest agricultural sector in America. They consume 270 billion gallons of water a week, or enough for 81 million acres of organic vegetables. They suck up $40 billion a year on seed, sod and chemicals, leading one historian to compare them to "a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs."

We mow the lawn, we fertilize it, we pesticize it, we water it, for the absurd purpose of keeping this useless patch in a deliberate state of arrested development.

She asks, "Is it possible that along with local, organic food, the First Garden can promote the thoroughly subversive idea that this symbol has seen its day?"

Seeking Young Social Entreprenuers to Change the World!

Staples Foundation for Learning, a private foundation created by Staples, Inc. and Ashoka have announced the third annual Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition. The competition rewards positive action from youth by asking those 12-24 to share stories about how they have initiated solving a social ill in their community.

Ashoka empowers men and women to solve the world’s most urgent social problems and through their Youth Venture program they "enable young people to learn early on in life that they can lead social change."

We like this partnership because there is so much to be learned from engaging in your community. Well done Staples and Ashoka! And youth, go for it, you can make a difference now (And even win $5000 in the process!).

The People Have Spoken

Winn Maddrey's post on March 3rd, "Groundwork for the Next Chapter," received a good bit of feedback, much of it delivered via email and facebook. We're posting it to the blog so everyone can see it and continue the discussion. (Names have been removed).

"I especially appreciate how you reclaim the definition of success. How awful that it has come to mean, I completely agree with you, avoiding failure. That kind of lowering the bar has permeated our entire culture, I think. In the wake of so much "unraveling" in our economic system, I am hopeful that new creativity and a true drive for success can re-emerge."

"Indeed we have gotten away from the level of creativity and innovation that have formed the backbone of this great nation. Part of the problem has been the desire to make outrageous salaries without doing any work of a creative or lasting nature. We are now paying for this. I hope that Americans will arise out of this recession with resolve to return to the self-determination and pioneering spirit that truly brought engagement into our nation's development. We must cease from being bystanders and get back to the work of growing and developing a nation with much potential still. "

"Expanding success to mean more than avoiding failure is an interesting platform for discussion."

"I think you are right on about the fear of failure and therefore the lack of imagination that seems to be pervasive. "

"Nice piece! I appreciated the reference to our local Erie Canal."

Groundwork for the Next Chapter

By Winn Maddrey, Executive VP, Topics Education

“There has been a crumbling of so many certainties. Now is a marvelous time for good ideas as the old rules are broken.”
- Andrés Duany, architect and new urbanist

In the past few years, I’ve been involved on a national project involving state and county government officials. For too many of them, their notion of modern ‘progressive action’ might be moving from the 19th century to the 20th. And with the challenges we all face, it is troublesome when the approach is still behind the times, rooted in “old thinking”. Perhaps I should have invited some of those officials to join me in Raleigh last month. For it is the folks with exactly these kinds of thought processes that needed to be in attendance at the Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh in February. Over the course of two days, experts, elected officials, and luminaries such as David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times; Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT); Andrés Duany, founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company; and Megan McArdle, Associate Editor of The Atlantic traded spots at the dais and provided their perspective on how we as a country are doing. Several speakers offered a similar refrain: Government and large institutions are designed to avoid failure rather than achieve success. And it is exactly this mindset that keeps us from innovating our way out of our current troubles.

It wasn’t always this way. “Where are today’s Erie Canals -- broad, bold projects which have a big impact?” asked Chris Dodd. Megan McArdle may have answered this way: “long gone.” For example, McArdle argued that the FDA basically works to keep people from dying, neglecting the type of pioneering investigations that could truly benefit the long-term health of our nation. It’s a mindset that too often creeps through every level of government: avoid failure and stay out of front-page controversy. Unfortunately for taxpayers, this vision is myopic, backwards-looking, and rarely uses money to invest in the future.

Changing directions but not changing topics, David Brooks’ presentation took us along a path that pointed out our history of excess. Our desire to move out of the the city and get more space (which he called elephantitis) created a 30% net growth of homes. That’s definitely not failure, but it’s not smart, progressive growth either. He noted the overall loss of connection as a consequence of sprawl and cited both Robert Putnam and Joel Kotkin, and their calls for new forms of urban/suburban zones that naturally encourage community.

We are in a time where so many fundamental "truths" have been undermined or at least called into question. We’ve seen a kind of unraveling many of us have never witnessed in our lifetimes -- from national issues to local non-profit infrastructure problems that have turned everything we thought we knew upside down. I have tried to discover the root cause of this unraveling. The answer isn’t obvious. But it appears to be a combination of blind hope, unrestrained optimism, and unfounded assumptions. These might include, “Home prices will always go up, and home values will always appreciate,” or “The banks will always be a safe place for growth, in the stock market, and in the country.” We now know those theories to be unfounded and find ourselves in a place where, as Andrés Duany stated, “There has been a crumbling of so many certainties. Now is a marvelous time for good ideas as the old rules are broken.”

It is an uphill, unnatural battle for many to operate in a way that is more than simply avoiding failure. But now is the time when we must make ourselves a little uncomfortable. Achieving success this time around must be more than not failing. Our success will come from looking forward rather than backward. Our success will come from trying new ideas – and embracing and learning from our failed ones as they lead us toward better solutions. We must let go of our assumptions, forget what we know to be true, overhaul existing models, reorganize our thought processes, and seek out new and better ideas. We need new content to feed the story for the next chapter of this great nation, not simply a re-write of our past.

Bitten By the TED Bug

By Bruce Nofsinger, Principal, Topics Education

Since returning from the TED Conference, I’ve told a lot of people about my experience there — stopping just short of corralling strangers and describing how cool it was. Some have heard of it, and some have not. For those who haven’t, I usually begin by mentioning the Bill Gates’ moment that garnered much of the media’s attention — you know, the mosquitoes thing.

Yes, as Bill Gates was in the midst of describing his foundation’s emphasis on combating malaria, he brought out some captured mosquitoes and released them out into the audience, briefly pretending that his visual aids carried malaria (watch video clip here). I thought it was funny, but I didn’t anticipate that it would be the headline coming out of TED.

That story doesn’t really give you a good sense of what TED is all about (other than indicating some of the heavy hitters who present there). But in a weird way, I’ve realized that it does provide some good context. There’s such an air of unpredictability and excitement there, yet it occurs within an extremely structured format and with well-defined high expectations.

Granted, I was a TED newbie, but I suspect that even the veteran TEDsters love that seemingly dichotomous nature of TED. My take is that we can learn a lot from TED’s success and apply it to education. There’s comfort in structure and high expectations, but there’s also plenty of room for creativity — creativity that we should encourage and reward.

TED is about ideas worth spreading. And this year in particular, the economic crisis served as a backdrop to that theme — that these ideas will help propel us out of the dire situations that confront us.

Our work at TED with the SCI FI Channel fit in perfectly. TED provided the stage for SCI FI to showcase the work of seven Young Visionaries, as part of its pro-social initiative called Visions for Tomorrow. Not only do the Young Visionaries embody TED, they also promise to propel us toward a more positive future by working toward their own visions for tomorrow. A common theme among all of their accomplishments is creativity — creative problem solving, in particular.

Though there are young visionaries beyond those seven, we need as many as we can get. I’m firmly convinced that our education systems must reflect the TED approach that combines structure and high expectations, while encouraging and rewarding creativity. Only then will education successfully meet the needs of this time and place.

Top Five: Our Favorite Most Overused Consultant-Speak Terms

As lifelong writers and humanities students, we are sticklers when it comes to grammar and word choice. Naturally, we’ve found ourselves keying into the overuse of so called consultant-speak terms, so much so that we have a whiteboard hidden in the corner of our office with a running list of the words. Yet, as consultants ourselves, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t guilty of including one or two of these in a proposal or meeting.

1. At the End of the Day
2. Bandwidth
3. Robust
4. Shovel-Ready
5. Circle Back

We couldn’t get away with an overused consultant terms list without including these obvious choices. So for our honorable mentions:

6. Synergies – Perhaps the original most overused and mocked consultant term and thus impossible not to include on our list.
7. Leverage – We challenge you to get through a meeting steering clear of this word!

And now, for our ultimate consultant sentence, full of our favorite terms:

Circle back when you find the bandwidth in your schedule and we’ll discuss the synergies that can leverage our shovel-ready plan, because at the end of the day, it’s all about creating robust solutions and making things happen.

It’s your turn: Post your own sentences in our comments. We’ll pick our favorite one and acknowledge you in our next issue …

More from The Emerging Issues Forum

By Winn Maddrey
I discussed my experience at the Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh, NC below and now that a couple of weeks have passed, I'd like to share thoughts from some of the speakers that have stayed with me:

• “Where are today’s Erie Canals, broad, bold projects which have a big impact?” Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT)

• The car is the reason for the current economic malaise. The driving lifestyle, promulgated by cheap oil has allowed the middle class to live farther out, to drive past one restaurant to reach another. It’s why the US has 15x the retail of the UK. -Andres Duany, planner and architect

• Code, zoning and even the finance structure for strip centers have been constructed to meet the needs of corporate finance’s desire for template approach – 45,000 parking places, xx amount of square feet, xy% restaurants, etc. - A. Duany

• We need a metro policy for a metro nation, i.e. political boundaries are different that the way we live and the way to solve issues. - Bruce Katz of The Brookings Institution

• Many government incentives are designed to avoid failure vs. achieve success. An example is the FDA does not want anyone to die, yet is reluctant to aim for anything pioneering. Megan McArdle, The Atlantic

• Innovation is an overused & misused word. Innovation equals verbs or muscles, which need to be exercised as part of a strategy. Metrics are nouns and should follow, not lead, “don’t sit on your assets.” Dr. John Kao, author of Innovation Nation

There were many nuggets and many ideas, which combined, offered, to me, a perspective on how government, business, and community can begin to address the growth wave that is coming, that is unavoidable, and if harnessed can allow us to reach a place of sustainable growth.