GoHuman Blog

The dot.com meltdowns and unfortunate events that occurred in the early 2000’s created an amazing opportunity for businesses in Silicon Valley. It allowed them to regroup and build cultivating work environments. Given the complications our economy has endured over the past several years, people (most) are much more apt to be part of a team now more than ever. When people work collectively as teams rather than as individuals who are just there to collect a paycheck, productivity increases, morale is heightened and loyalty exists everywhere. All of which are among the top qualities necessary for boosting customer acquisition and retaining and growing the existing customer base.

People crave to be a part of something and want desperately to feel as though they’re contributing to the overall good of something; however, the fear factor is what permeates organizations, these days. That fear can be so overwhelming that it debilitates people’s willingness and ability to create and produce. Ironically, “people” are what keep a business, any business operating successfully. People are every organizations’ number one resource to achieving any goal, hitting a milestone or meeting any objective set. When companies provide ongoing opportunities for people to stretch their minds, enhance their skills towards their own aspirations, they’ll grow like a flower does with the sun and water. What’s more, they’ll end up creating huge competitive advantages for their company, every time.

Service minded individuals are always quick to recognize obstacles within an organization and are even quicker at wanting to remove those obstacles, to ensure they perform at the highest level of productivity as possible. Their intent is to make sure both internal and external customer satisfaction is met.

So exactly how do service oriented people identify and breakthrough the barriers that lie in the way of goal achievement? They build one-on-one relationships by connecting with others at a very basic level of communication and human interaction. They get to know people by asking a lot of questions and listening with intent. They ask others for their feedback on ideas. They ask for their involvement in identifying what’s working, what’s not working and most importantly, what they can do as a team, to improve matters that will allow them and the organization to continue moving forward. Through this type of ongoing communication; trust, respect and integrity are fostered.

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have cross the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept of “People, Planet, Profit“ demands that a company’s responsibility be to the people who are influenced in any way by the actions of the firm rather than the people who own it.

TBL is typically discussed in a big business context for two reasons: One, big businesses are by nature the farthest out of human touch with sustainability. Two, if you have to choose one business to make sustainable, a bigger business will have a bigger impact.

But what if we could create an integrated network of small local businesses and independent professionals with an eye on the ecological, economic, and social concepts expressed by the Triple Bottom Line related to their communities?

What if people all over the planet quietly frustrated with the status quo could find the voices of power they’ve lost in the wake of unprecedented corporate growth over the past century?

GoHuman’s vision is a world where these ideals are not afterthoughts, but rather integral and essential elements connecting every community and every business within those communities. We cannot afford for these to be abstract thoughts or luxuries. They are a necessary part of the emerging global consciousness and we need to integrate them into our personal and professional lives by igniting our tribal instincts.

In the United States and other parts of the world, the motivation to adopt this sustainable lifestyle is neither handed down by the government nor encouraged by our existing capitalist economic model. An intricate web of subsidies and loopholes has all but extinguished the basic humanity enjoyed in simpler times in favor of the almighty profit margin.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There is hope. We believe in a better way. It’s the passion that fuels GoHuman and the real people behind it — people just like you with the vision and gumption to do something about it.

It starts simply. It starts with an equitable marketplace that promotes balance amongst the people who use it by rewarding those who provide value with something equitable in return.

It starts with you.

We’ve been honoring two important themes in April – Earth Month and Autism Awareness Month. Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and we want to help you find ways to create a more sustainable business. We’re also continuing support of our MicroCause for Sunshine supporting autism.

Green is a long-standing buzzword, but what does it mean for your business and community? It’s different for every business and can be difficult to know where to begin. While there is no silver bullet for going green, many great resources are available to help you achieve sustainability.

GoHuman has partnered with Green Globe, providing the premier global certification for sustainability since 1993. Green Globe pioneers what it means to be sustainable and has developed several programs to help businesses achieve sustainability across the planet. They provide independent verification that your business is operating sustainably and in line with Green Globe certified businesses around the world.

Respond today to receive a 10% discount off your Green Globe membership and enjoy these benefits:

• GoHuman Local Marketing Consultant support – we’ll register your business and provide 6 months free at our $5 monthly subscription level.
• Immediate access to the Green Globe Certification System
• The Green Globe benchmarking tool: Green Globe Index
• The Green Globe Environmental Trainings Program
• Listings as “Green Globe Member” on all Green Globe websites
• Access to accredited Green Globe Consultants and Auditors to pursue certification
• Marketing Services provided by Green Globe Marketing
• 10% membership discount applies each year you renew

GoHuman is a marketplace devoted to helping local communities achieve sustainability. Local energy and ideas serve as the foundation for the site’s growth and allow for mutual prosperity. Read more from CEO Wade Fransson about why green energy matters.

What does green mean to you as a business owner or consumer? It’s certainly a buzzword that gets a lot of attention, especially this month as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

In 40 years have we accomplished as much as we could to sustain a sustainable ecosystem for our planet? Probably not, but it’s human nature to move incrementally until disaster strikes.

GoHuman is a marketplace devoted to helping local communities achieve sustainability. Local energy and ideas serve as the foundation for the site’s growth, and allow for mutual prosperity. Local means:

• Fewer resources to transport goods and services is better for the environment
• Money spent by the community stays in the community
• Services tailored specifically to the needs and challenges of the community
• Reduced costs due to lower overhead of the individual provider
• Greater flexibility for better quality of life
• Bringing back the unique downtown communities this country has lost
• Helping the economy-at-large by feeding it at the smallest level
• Taking the current crisis into your own hands rather than waiting for someone else to fix it

If you are a green-certified service provider, you’re one of us. So why not join us? I welcome you to post your services to GoHuman and join a growing community of like-minded businesses and community members. Together we can help local communities and the environment.

Thank you for making a difference in your community and ours. Read on for ideas on marketing a green business.

I’ve been cooking up this blog since I lived in Germany in the early 90s.  I read “Food 2000″, a coffee-table book, touting “food miracles” – scientists solving world hunger and such.  It was sponsored propaganda against Alliance 90/The Greens.  I was horrified by what I saw.

I was just beginning to recover from an “incurable” auto-immune-related condition little understood by Medical Science, using dietary and other natural methods.  I told myself I would help change the system of systems.

Now Agribusiness is moving from propaganda to sinister control.  Scientific American, explains how Bio-engineering companies own articles published about their seed. Cropchoice.com explains how farmers using seed infected by patented seed are guilty of stealing.  Food Inc. is eating up the conscience of consumers.  Watch it, and take a symbolic stand, however small.

Yesterday Forbes arrived, with Monsanto on the cover as Company of the year.  Forbes’ arrogance since the economic meltdown has shocked this longtime reader.  The Frankenstein monster of business is  running rampant.  Our food supply is controlled by companies bio-engineered for greed.

Greg Brown sings “I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall and I cried out in a song: if we could do all that in thirty years, then please tell me you all – why does good change take so long?”  Join us and speed up change.

Why GoHuman.com? reason #6?  Local Food

Fight for your right to control your own food!

Reason #1; Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5;

Next Time #7: All Hail Snopes! Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

I recently blogged about how the top 20 Global Companies dramatically highlight the unbelievably unsustainable nature of the current global economy.  I’m following up with an online article about #43 on the list.

End of the world predictions are usually the domain of fanatics and fringers, but this global powerhouse is advising its clients how to prepare for global collapse.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

#2 of 19 random reasons Why GoHuman.com? is that a strong, connected, local community is an essential insurance policy if the worst of doomsday predictions were to come true. And investing in a local economy is by its nature more sustainable, not to mention the marketplace we are creating.

We hope you’ll catch the vision and spread the word. We can make a difference. We can change the way the world works.

Reason #1;

Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

There are certain occasions which are imprinted on our memories so strongly that we never forget where we were when they happened. For me, some of the dates which stand out are when Pope John Paul II was shot, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and the date Concorde came down in Paris. 9/11 goes without saying! There are good times too of course, such as the breaking through of the Berlin Wall, and that evening when I first met my wife-to-be (which can’t go without saying).

Today takes me back to December 3, 1984, driving my 1972 Chevy Nova back from seeing the governor of California at the cinema in the film Terminator. I turned on the radio to hear the news that at 10:00 AM California time, midnight in Bhopal, India, a pesticide production plant owned by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical), suffered a release of large amounts of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. To avoid too much detail here about a horrible tragedy, I will just summarize with some facts. More than 500,000 people were exposed. The death toll from hospital records is put at around 20,000 – and that’s not even considering the destroyed families, lives, resultant diseases and birth-defects.

The court cases continue to this day, as does the suffering. Go and do a simple search for yourselves. Put the one word “Bhopal” in a search engine. I have purposely not provided a link to any article here because it is impossible for one link I might choose to properly convey the price paid by the victims. They aren’t the only ones who have paid of course – Union Carbide has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, and no doubt their shareholders have felt that pain very severely.

It is somewhat stomach-churning that we can use the words “paid” and “pain” to describe both what the shareholders felt, as well as what the local population felt – and continues to feel.

I don’t know all the facts of course, and I’m not in a position to properly decide specific blame and compensation. But it is obvious even to the most casual observer what the main problem is.

Why would anyone build a pesticide plant in a developing country, in a highly-populated, poverty-ridden area?

I think we all know the answer. The main price of progress is always paid by those too poor and powerless to stand up for their interests. The rich and powerful pretty much do what they want, when they want, and use Jeremy Bentham’s argument of the Utilitarian economists (“the largest benefit for the largest number”) as their excuse.

And there we have it. Large institutions pursuing the financial bottom-line, assigning some complex financial calculation to lives and health – in which the lives and interests of the poor and powerless are assigned a very low value indeed.

Here at GoHuman, we believe a life, or someone’s health, cannot be assigned a price. We recognize the sad fact that the human aspect of business tends to decline as the size of a business grows. That is why we promote our services to support smaller businesses. Businesses where a relationship with customers and community are critical success factors. Businesses where reputation is placed above immediate profit.  Businesses that GoHuman because they are human.  Businesses like yours.

Have a look at GoHuman.com. We think you’ll like what you see!

Speaking of gargantuan corporations, Fortune’s Global 500 proves our planet’s economy is completely unsustainable.

Seven oil companies: Holland (1) UK (4) France (6) China (9) and the U.S. (2, 5 & 7) are in the top 10.  These giants exploit nonrenewable resources.  #3 is big-box retailer Wal-Mart, under siege by environmental and local activists.  Dutch financial services titan, ING (see #1) is #8.  The world’s largest car company, from tiny Japan – which could be car-free, is #10.

By 20 we get 4 more oil/energy companies and 3 more car manufacturers.  If you are horrified, or at least care, watch the award winning documentary The End of Suburbia. Even if you don’t buy the logic of “peak oil production” (which I don’t) or Who Killed the Electric Car (which I do), it’s a revelation.

Sustainability is #1 in a series of 19 Blogs, in no particular order, of answers to “Why GoHuman.com?”.  A shocking recommendation by company #43 is next.

Picture of Crude Awakening – a Burning Man Event

Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

Money and Markets features “The unbiased market commentary you won’t get from Wall Street”. The truth is, in the human sphere there is no such thing as a lack of bias. This is why the “Free Market” is a myth. The markets are guided, if not controlled, by powerful parties and biases. But I like the newsletter from moneyandmarkets because they do give you clear opinions of great value that you won’t get elsewhere. That’s why I subscribe to Martin D. Weiss’ newsletter. And the title of this blog is the headline of today’s featured article by Mike Larson. It’s definitely worth a read.

And, you can do something about it, even if you’re not in a position to take investment positions. All you need to do is click on share to spread the blog about our launch contest on Labor Day. GoHuman.com provides a means to get our economy moving again – by connecting real people with real people who have what each other needs, and get them busy working with each other in the local community, from within a Marketplace that is both integrated and sustainable.

This is different from the large, global institutions designed to aggregate value at the top, to be siphoned off by a few, while disenfranchising those at the bottom. Every so often this unbalanced, unsustainable approach, fueled by outsized greed and lust for power, results in an implosion. Sometimes such implosions result in the extinction of a species.

Think of the dinosaurs – and the T. Rex with monstrous jaws and tiny, useless arms. They devour, but they can not create value. Some of us are more like the Lemmings, who reproduce so quickly they create unsustainable communities that plummet to near extinction, or produce the famous cliff-jumping scenes.

The unbiased truth about this Labor Day is that there’s no lack of work that needs done – but today’s structures and systems are not sustainable, so companies are not opening up new positions. There are lots of openings in the GoHuman.com marketplace. Hang out your shingle and get to work

We hope you’ll join us – you CAN change the way your world works. Click share and help us spread the word!

They’re not yet extinct

If you haven’t seen this yet, check out Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff. An insightful animation tells the story of the global supply chain.