Tapped

Capitalism sucks, right? Well …

Causecast is a group that is using the engine of capitalism to drive social change. (RED) is a cause-driven marketing campaign that has raised millions of dollars, using capitalism to divert corporate marketing budgets to address HIV health issues in Africa. Creative Visions Foundation supports creative activists worldwide. LivingHomes uses a for-profit capitalist business model to build healthy, green sustainable houses. The people who founded or manage these companies were on a panel this week called Changing the World IS My Business hosted by The Writers Junction, Smarty, and Causecast.

The message was simple. You can do well by doing good. Making money is okay.

(RED), for example, is a for-profit business that hired a talented marketer named Julie Cordua. She signed brands like Apple, Gap, Converse, Dell, Starbucks and Nike and got them to buy into the idea (literally – the corporations pay license fees to participate) that a shopper’s purchase would benefit The Global Fund.

Causecast informs you about causes and encourages you to help. Its founder, Ryan Scott, created “opt-in” email marketing and made a bundle, so he knows about capitalism. Capitalism, as everyone on the panel pointed out, is a huge social driver. Why not use it to drive social change? Ryan cited a study that showed that corporate values matter to buyers. According to the Cone 2007 Cause Evolution Study, 83 percent of Americans say that companies have a responsibility to support causes and 92 percent say they have a more positive image of a company that supports a cause they care about.

It’s good for business if a company’s values include supporting a worthy cause.

It’s good for your company if you filter your actions through a clearly-defined set of values. So what’s up with Planet Green? Spurred on by Stephanie Soechtig, the director/producer of Tapped, people are friending Planet Green’s Facebook page to tell them to act, um, a little more green. Facebook — an engine of social change? Another Cone research study has it that 62% of Americans believe they can influence corporations by sounding off on social media platforms.

Big companies may act like infants sometimes, grabbing at an advertiser’s money at the expense of their stated values. Do we really have to be the parent here? Yes, we do, when it comes to helping corporations remain true to their stated vision. Online voices like this one keep corporations real.

Ignorance is power.

In 2000, an investment magazine held a stock picking contest.  More than 10,000 people submitted portfolios, some of them professionals with access to loads of data. One portfolio in the contest stood out:  it was based on collective ignorance. Researchers asked fifty people to pick stocks based solely on whether they recognized the name of the company. What happened? The stocks picked by people who knew little gained in value by 2.5 percent.  The stocks picked by the editor in chief of the magazine, who knew a lot, lost 18.5 percent.

Experts like Jim Cramer are ready to help you become a market expert.  Will you make any money?  Well, too much information (and too much Jim Cramer) can be a bad thing.

“There’s a limit to the information a human mind can digest, a limit that often corresponds to the magical number seven, plus or minus two, the capacity of short term memory.” — Gut Feelings, by Gerd Gigerenzer

Your short term memory is good for about seven things. You’ve experienced this in Whole Foods if you attempt to shop without a shopping list.  You wind up standing in front of the cheese display trying to remember the eighth thing you meant to buy.

If you go with intuition, on the other hand, you tap into something much deeper. Many believe that intuition comes from higher powers. If you listen to it, you will be guided by God, by a universal energy source, or if you are trying to pick stocks, by Warren Buffett.

That may be true, but scientists are learning that intuition accesses the unconscious mind, and that part of the mind is really smart.

A research study has suggested that gamblers who trust their gut instincts are more likely to pick up subtle visual cues from the dealer and other players. To make winning decisions they let the unconscious drive for a while.  Less information turns out to be more – especially when things turn unpredictable.

When you are working with an unstable system, like the stock market or a gun battle or both (“How was work today, honey?”) having too much on your mind will slow you down. The noise between your ears blocks the wisdom of the subconscious.

This was explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. If a police officer in jeopardy has to think too much, the bad guy shoots him first. If a baseball player performs differential equations in his head to calculate the trajectory and velocity of an incoming fly ball, he’d never catch it.  (I think this is the Mets’ problem.)

“Woman’s intuition, as everyone knows, is a true faculty that most women possess in a form far more highly developed than anything the random male ever acquires.”

Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women

Women are good at intuition and men are bad at it. You think so?  Not so.

In another study, Dr. Richard Wiseman showed 50,000 people photographs of a person smiling. Only one was of a real smile. The other was of a fake smile. Using their intuition, men were able to guess which smile was real 72 percent of the time. The women guessed right 71 percent of the time.

I’m going to sell some stock soon, but I think I’ll wait until Warren Buffett is smiling.

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I went to yoga the other night. The room was filled with so many acolytes their yoga mats were about a micron apart. It was like boarding the subway in NYC during rush hour and getting an intimate view of your neighbor’s armpit. Only in yoga it’s more exciting because the people are half naked and their sweat flies on you when they flail. That class lasted about 45 seconds for me. I had to leave. I don’t do flailing.

After suffering from downward dog withdrawal and getting a $61 parking ticket (“And things were going so well!”) I had plenty of time to reflect on the valuable lessons learned. This is kind of a game we play, trying to extract a valuable life lesson from every event no matter how annoying. (“A bee stung me on the ass. What valuable lesson can be extracted from that?”)

Why was I annoyed enough to bail out of that class? Well, for one thing, I have issues with sweaty strangers violating my personal space. But I also don’t like cults of personality.

Some people actually come to a yoga class for the yoga, but a male teacher can become popular and female students will don the appropriate Lululemon yoga gear and crowd into his classes, never admitting out loud that they have a crush on him. Movie stars get people to buy tickets, usually not directors or scripts. Cults of personality. Charisma is king. But Arnold Schwarzenegger’s charisma isn’t enough to run this state, and charismatic people like Tony Robbins or Suze Orman can seem to me to be style over substance.

Let’s face it, though, charisma is a powerful force – maybe even a hit of life force. It can draw people in, pay the bills, get your message across and your cause followed.

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
–Groucho Marx

Groucho aside, most people want to be members of something. They like leaders to help them join the tribe. Yoga people are their own tribe, and Vegas gamblers, and Michael Jackson fans. In Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, he describes how connecting with others is a powerful tool for shaping consumer desire and even changing the world. He and others have pointed out that your tribe has nothing to do with geography, your religion or blood type. It can be fellow Facebook users, Syrah lovers, devotees of Nike running shoes or iPods. In a fragmented world we look to tribal leaders. Charismatic leaders, like Steve Jobs of Apple, can really drive a consumer brand into becoming a movement. There’s that word again: charisma. Maybe it’s the mojo in leadership. Maybe, despite myself, I’m going to extract a lesson out of that crowded subway car of a yoga class.

Thing is, there’s more yoga being done because of charismatic teachers. Apple has inspired a generation of designs that matter. Charismatic social entrepreneurs like Jacqueline Novogratz fund the businesses of the poor by first listening and then building supportive communities around local entrepreneurs. Charisma, backed up with a plan, can really change the world. Ok, I get it. Just stay out of my space in yoga class.

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500 Words on Thursday by Lee Schneider

Bookmark this because it has the solution to the banking crisis. I’ve just found out that fish can count and monkeys can subtract.

People are worried about the exodus of Wall Street talent, but we can hurry up and hire the best fish and monkeys to fill those fat cat positions. Fish are honest and those who can count eat mosquito larvae– no eight-figure bonuses required. Monkeys are a little excitable but they get around just by swinging from tree to tree instead of using limos and corporate jets – a smaller carbon footprint! Both species seem to be more honest and socially aware than our current crop of bankers.

I make that bold, pro-fish, pro-simian statement because I watched Jon Stewart last night. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, told us what’s happened to at least half of the TARP funds bestowed on bankers by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

The deal was that for every dollar we taxpayers gave the banks, the banks would give us a dollar’s worth of stock and warrants. Fair enough. But the bankers, according to Warren, only gave us 66 cents on the dollar, and the value of those stocks and warrants has dropped even more since the trade.

Well, this would never happen if fish were in key banking positions because fish know how to count. Mosquitofish, a North and Central American freshwater species, successfully counted geometric shapes in a study conducted by psychologists at the University of Padova in Italy.

The fish were taught to associate a door in their tank with a certain number of shapes. They recognized the right number even though researchers varied the size, brightness and distance of the shapes counted. Since Mosquitofish are social animals, scientists believe that being able to count might help them seek safety in numbers.

On Jon Stewart’s show, Elizabeth Warren also mentioned that she doesn’t quite know how much of the TARP funds have actually been distributed.

If monkeys were in charge of that distribution there wouldn’t be a problem, because monkeys know how to subtract. In a test of their subtraction skills at Duke University, Rhesus macaques were able to solve a simple subtraction problem on a touch screen. They didn’t need to count, they just relied on their sense of missing shapes.

The qualities present in fish and monkeys, being social and caring about their fellows, have gone missing in some bankers. While fish seek companionship and protect each other in schools, bankers enjoy purchasing multiple homes while their customers lose the only homes they’ve got. Monkeys and even ravens have been shown to care for their communities.

Maybe it’s not just the bankers who are bonkers, maybe it’s clawing to the top of the food chain that has messed with the human mind. Masters of the Universe, we eat anything that moves, screw over weaker species, profit whenever possible. I lust after profit as much as anyone else (if you want to send me money, please do) but I certainly don’t want to be bettered by a bunch of animals who can count, subtract and are more socially aware than some of the bankers who watch over my money.

Something to consider as we monkey around, fishing for answers.