Direct Partners Presents the Goodified eBook “Progressive ideas for doing good.”

What is Goodified?

Goodified is our take on Conscious Capitalism, the idea that companies exist for a greater purpose than to just make profits. Companies can be successful while enhancing the quality of life. It works by building honest and altruistic relationships with all of a business’s stakeholders: its consumers, employees, investors, vendors, environment and community. By harmonizing the interests of all stakeholders, strong and authentic relationships form.

A fundamental element of this is providing value in all relationships. And that’s what we wanted to do. That is why we have created the Goodified eBook.

During the holiday season, we reached out to some of the brightest and most influential figures in a number of different industries and disciplines, seeking progressive ideas for doing good. We received a number of innovative and exciting ideas in areas ranging from business and marketing, to physics, philosophy and society as a whole. We designed and compiled these inspirational ideas into an eBook that we hope you enjoy and wish to share.

Thank you.

We want to thank all of the contributors, supporters and the Goodified team.

We wish you the very best in 2011.

The promise of devices that would be able to perform multiple tasks like music, phone, video and apps has clearly been realized, but there is another wave of convergence that is equally, if not more, exciting.

There is a (re)convergence of economics, philosophy and science. If you read what used to be considered “new age” books and then traditional business books and then books about particle physics, there are some themes that emerge across them.

The primary theme is one of intent. In new age philosophy, “intent” is the ability that we all have to put time and focus against an outcome to assist in achieving the outcome. In business, “intent” is expressed through “brand purpose” and a statement of what the business and brand stand for, why they make the products they make and/or deliver the services that they deliver and what the customer should intend to get out of the mutual relationship. In science it is in

quantum physics and observer effects.

Intention is a powerful force. It can provide the fuel for beginning a project and seeing it through to the end. It can help you and your organizations create programs that are able to be designed to promote social welfare while also being sustainable (in terms of self-funding or profitability). It’s related to the concept of free will and the fact that we can choose.

So use intent and intention in your actions this year. It’s a powerful force.

Munir Haddad is the founder of Goodified a conscious business movement. He is Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning at Direct Partners. You can find him on the Direct Partners’ Goodified Blog and @Goodified on Twitter.

Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era, we are losing the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the Internet, people and other distractions.

There’s been much discussion about the “creative pause” — “the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged or disengaged altogether.” It’s the “aha!” moment we have in the shower when our minds can wander. Despite the power and potential of these sacred spaces, they are becoming extinct, depriving us of opportunities for disconnection. Our imaginations are suffering the consequences.

Why do we give up our sacred space so easily?

Space is scary. Without distractions, we return to our

uncertainties and fears. We tune back into activity and data for reassurance.

Self-esteem is largely a product of our interactions with others. It is now possible to feel always loved and cared for, thanks to “comment walls” on Facebook. Confidence and self-esteem can be checked by the number of “followers” on Twitter.

How do we reclaim our sacred spaces?

Planes, trains, subways, even showers will soon offer the option of staying connected. We must be proactive in creating new “unplugged” spaces for ourselves. And when we have an opportunity to be disconnected, we must use it and protect it.

Here are five mindsets and solutions for consideration:

1. Rituals for unplugging

The notion of a day reserved for reflection, like the Biblical Sabbath, is important. It’s more than just refraining from work. It’s unplugging. The recent Sabbath Manifesto movement has received accolades for this concept.

2. Daily doses of deep thinking.

Since unplugging is getting harder to do, we need to develop discipline. Carve out a daily block of 1–2 hours just for pondering the big picture. I can imagine a day when homes will have a switch that shuts down wi-fi and data during dinner or at night.

3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.

There’s no better escape from our tech-charged world than meditation. Steering your mind away from constant stimulation, if only for 15 minutes, is downright liberating.

Or just try sleeping. Bestselling author Tony Schwartz takes a 20-minute nap every day — even if it’s a few hours before he presents to a packed audience.

4. Self-awareness and psychological investment.

Our basic fears and desires are soothed by connectivity and information. It’s important to recognize the power of our insecurities and acknowledge where they come from.

Researching my book, Making Ideas Happen, I was surprised how many creative leaders credited therapy as a part of their success. If you’re willing to invest in it, take the plunge. Whatever you learn will help you understand your fears and the actions you take as a result.

5. Protect the state of no-intent.

When you’re rushing to a solution, your mind jumps to the most familiar path. Stare out the window for 10 minutes, and your brain starts working creatively. It grasps ideas from unexpected places. This kind of unconscious creativity leads to great thinking.

Scott Belsky is the CEO of Behance and author of the national bestselling book Making Ideas Happen. You can follow him@scottbelsky, and read his full blog post here.

I’ve started my day on Twitter with this same tweet nearly every day for more than a year.

Morning, Friends. Who Can I Help Today?

That single line has gotten a lot of reaction. People ask me the following questions:

1. Do people really ever reply?

Yes, people respond with requests for my help all the time, pretty much every day.

2. What do they ask for?

They ask for everything from a latte to money to business advice

to content promotion to relationships, marketing, creativity advice, interviews, introductions and beyond.

Some of the requests are downright fast and easy, some are for favors that’d require serious work and some are just plain hysterical.

3. What have I done for people?

Answer, all the above. As long as:

• I have the ability to help, the ask resonates strongly with my beliefs and preferences and I can honor it in a way that adds value to all who would be impacted, and

• I have the time/resources.

Jonathan Fields

• I love lending a hand. But, even if I have the ability to help, I won’t do things like promoting a business, website or content that I either don’t agree with or wouldn’t add value to the experience of the people I have the capacity to share it with.

Want specifics of things I HAVE done?

Nope.

Why not?

• One — Many of the asks come as DMs or emails and I’d never compromise the integrity or privacy those modes of communication imply.

• Two — The most powerful gives come with the least connection to credit or acknowledgment. I’m not doing it because I want people to know what I’ve done.

Then why DO I do it? Or, put another way…

4. What’s in it for me?

Everything. I do it because I can’t really think of a better way for me to set up my mindset and my karma for the day than by offering to help someone, often someone I don’t even know, in some random way. So, while I do it to help people, truth is I think the bump to my karma and my head-space benefits me more than anyone I help.

My Challenge – What about YOU?

Since I started asking this morning question, I’ve noticed something cool happening. Some of the people who follow me have begun asking their own variations of the question to start each day.

And, it’s all got me thinking…

I wonder what might happen if this became a movement?

How cool would it be if a growing army of kindness-marauders poured onto Twitter and Facebook every morning to ask their own special-sauce variation of “What can I do for you today?”

Then committed to helping at least a single person.

So, that’s my ask of you today.

Try it on for size. Commit to starting each day this way for just the next week and see what unfolds.

Jonathan Fields creates companies, books, blogs, paintings, music, brands, experiences and the occasional human-powered vehicle to his credit. His last book, Career Renegade,was published in 2009 and his next one is out in 2011. Fields blogs about everything from entrepreneurship, to creativity, to marketing as well as about book marketing at TribalAuthor.com. Read the entire post here.

The Climate Energy Project is an example of how appealing to consumer concerns like personal thrift, the benefit to the community of promoting green jobs, and a religious appeal to “creation care” are far more effective at motivating people to pursue the societal and economic benefits of going green than facts or reports.

The project generated 5% decreases in town energy use, where 1.5% decreases had been considered the standard of “success.” They did so by drawing their messaging away from climate change data and towards these consumer concerns.

In this age of misinformation, facts can be endlessly disputed by political interests. For the individual consumer, however, the logic of decoupling our country, our businesses, our communities, and even our homes from carbon, and from oil in particular, remains incredibly strong. At the macro level it’s about national competitiveness, national security, and not relying on declining, ever-more-expensive resources. For employees, the best motivators are proven cost savings, good data, and competition. These are the types of non-political motivating forces that will promote widespread good in modern society.

When talking to consumers, the lesson seems to be to use whatever combination of these works, plus throw in some values and religious mores, if that fits the audience. A call to save mother earth for purely environmental reasons might work well in Berkeley, but in Kansas make the subtle shift to talk about creation care, or don’t go down that road at all.

So even though I titled this piece a bit sarcastically, the Kansas program works so well because it IS based in — the savings you can yield, the jobs you can attract to your town, and the connection to religious values you can feel are all real. It’s just not the reality of climate change. The end result is the same — people are saving money and energy and starting to build a new economy. And if we move down the path to a cleaner world, who really cares how?

Andrew Winston advises some of the world’s leading companies on how to profit from environmental thinking. His is the co-author of the bestseller Green to Gold and author of Green Recovery.

The term “citizen consumer” is more than a moniker. Consumers are now recognizing their power to effect positive social change through their consumption — in essence, enfranchising themselves and their communities with their pocketbooks as much as with their civic participation. The lines between business and cause are beginning to intersect, and integration of cause and business is now being seen not just as a trend, but as a foundational pillar of good business in the 21st century.

The Edelman survey found that:

• 87 percent of U.S. consumers now expect companies to balance societal interest with their own business interests.

• 63 percent of Americans expect brands to support good causes.

• Nearly 8 in 10 consumers in Brazil, India, Mexico, and China now expect brands to support a good cause.

• 84 percent of global consumers would be willing to change their consumption habits in order to make the world a better place to live.

A movement is afoot, with consumers recognizing that their purchases can improve their communities and their world. Businesses that organize their enterprises around the blind pursuit of profit without considering the equally important motive of purpose may find themselves alienating a previously stable customer base.

Auren Kaplan is Manager of Cause Integration, a Causecast blog focusing on the intersection of cause and business. He serves as Director of Social Media for The HUB LA, a social enterprise and collaborative workspace for social entrepreneurs that fosters collaboration and inspires world-changing action. He sits on the board of StartingBloc LA, an Institute for Social Innovation that empowers and galvanizes young adults towards intentional action in the social enterprise space. He is also the founder of Championic LA, a Los Angeles online publication providing hyperlocal content to Los Angelenos of all stripes.

People all over the world are demanding a sense of community and value from relationships and business transactions…people are desperate to find the true value in every product and service, right to the core. So how can we deliver?

Well, Jared and I created wurld water because we wanted to use the business skills we have to directly impact the world we live in, and to engage with people’s social conscience. It was our way of having a “little less conversation, a little more action” approach to life, and it enables us to live out the values that we want to teach our son.

“Currently 1 in 6 people in the world do not have access to clean water. We want to change that!”

We are a charitable bottled water brand that gives 100% of our profits to water projects in the developing world, our first in Samoa. And at wurld water it’s not just about the product or the global problem of lack of water — it’s about building a relationship in our local community. Wurld water and its supporters have met up and planted trees together in local community parks and organized

beach cleanups. It’s a lifestyle not just a product choice. “Wurld water offers consumers the chance to switch to a bottled water brand where the destination of profits is life changing.”

It’s all about the doing, and it doesn’t have to be in your spare time either. It can be as simple as making the right ethical choices of what brand of milk to buy, what coffee to buy, and in our case what water brand to buy! Creating wurld water is definitely the hardest work we have ever done, and sometimes we feel like giving up, but we know it’s not always about the feelings, it’s about the truth, and the truth is, it’s the best work we have ever done, and it’s helping create real change in peoples lives.

Ruth and Jared Honore launched wurld in 2009. Both come from a corporate, financial background, but after being impacted by poverty seen while traveling and seeing brands doing great things, they decided to do something similar in their home of New Zealand.

Look at any group of people who effortlessly work well together. Odds are the individuals share a lot in common with each other. They might have similar backgrounds, expertise, interests, or personalities. This is natural. Contrary to conventional wisdom, opposites do not attract. We find it easier to work with people who are like us. As a result, teams that lack diversity are the norm.

In fact, there is plenty of scientific research suggesting that homogeneous teams do indeed perform better than more heterogeneous ones for “low difficulty” tasks – those with lower levels of ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity. However, research also shows that in situations involving “high difficulty” tasks, heterogeneous groups consistently perform the best. Innovation

is, by its very nature, fraught with uncertainty and complexity. It is obviously a high-difficulty task. Although homogeneous teams are more efficient, it is the uniformity of thinking on these types of teams that limits breakthrough ideas and reduces innovation. Ensuring a range of innovation styles should be the goal in constructing such groups in order to maximize team performance.

Unfortunately, diverse teams, left to their own devices, are rarely efficient. Differences of opinion, creative tension, and infighting will naturally emerge. Individuals who think differently do not naturally communicate well with each other. Therefore, it is important that innovation teams be given the tools to “play well together.”

Putting this together, we end up with three simple principles. And these are the three key principles of Personality Poker:

1. People in your organization must “play to their strong suit.” That is, make sure that everyone understands how they contribute to and detract from the innovation process. This includes ensuring that you have the right people with the right leadership styles in your organization.

2. As an organization, you need to “play with a full deck.” Embrace a wide range of innovation styles. Instead of hiring on competency and chemistry, also hire for a diversity of innovation styles. Every step of the innovation process must be addressed with people with the right innovation styles.

3. “Deal out the work.” That is, you must divide and conquer. You can’t have everyone in your organization do everything. Instead, get

them to divvy up the work based on which style is most effective at a given task. You can’t have everyone generating ideas, or focusing on planning.

Innovation is the life-blood of your organization. It is crucial for long-term growth. Without it, your business will almost certainly become irrelevant and commoditized. Unfortunately, although it is important, it is not always easy. However, applying these three simple principles can help you create high-performing innovation teams that consistently “beat the house.”

Stephen Shapiro is the author of 24/7 Innovation, The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas, Goal-Free Living, and Personality Poker. In addition to being an advisor, speaker, and author on innovation, he serves as the Chief Innovation Evangelist for InnoCentive. Read the full post here.

I’m encouraged, excited even, about where business is headed.

Green innovation is booming. There’s a revolution taking place that even many of its participants can’t yet see. It involves the confluence of energy, information, building and vehicle technologies, and the promise of new goods and services. Some of these will be seen this decade in the emergence of the so-called smart grid, in which everything from appliances to automobiles are connected via two-way, always-on connections. These things may not be overtly marketed as “green,” but much like the iPod and iTunes, they stand to transform how we live, work, drive and play, while vastly reducing materials and energy needs. All of this will help to transform how companies think about what they do, leading to, among other things, closed-loop systems of commerce.

Companies are reinventing themselves. Largely as a result of these innovations, companies

will continue to find themselves crossing sectoral lines and entering new lines of business. Old-line companies like chemical manufacturers, auto makers, IT companies, and food processors have now found themselves in the energy business. So, too, with green building: a new wave of old-line companies (think Firestone and Sanyo) are now in that sector, too. Meanwhile, early-stage companies are getting out of the lab and off the ground, invigorated by capital flows that, while recently slowed, are beginning to rebound.

Sustainability is becoming about more than just the environment. One of the more frustrating trends of the past decade was the conflation of “green” and “sustainability.” The latter, of course, means much more than environmental responsibility, though

you wouldn’t know that listening to most corporate marketers and PR firms, which treated the two terms as one and the same. But that’s changing. The social side of sustainability — including working conditions, community impacts, human rights, product safety, access to education and health care — is beginning to be considered by some large companies. It is showing up in corporate “responsibility” reports, of course, but also in the design and delivery of products and services for the poor, both in developed and developing countries. It is showing up in corporate concerns over obesity, product safety and access to clean water. Some of the companies involved were dragged to these issues by activists, but that’s how many of today’s environmental leaders were born — companies like Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Home Depot, and others. To be sure, the social side of sustainability remains early-stage, but the trends are encouraging.

At the end of the day — and the decade — how does all of this stack up? I won’t venture to say. There are too many unknowns that could

help or hinder the shift to greener business: the vagaries of world economics, rapid technological developments, dramatic political shifts, fast-emerging impacts of climate change, roller-coaster oil prices, natural disasters and populist movements.

One thing is certain about the green decade before us: It will be at least as interesting as the one just passed. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Joel Makower is chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group, producer of GreenBiz.com and other websites, events, and business information services. He is author of more than a dozen books, including Strategies for the Green Economy. Read his full blog here.

Life can be ridiculously complicated, if you let it. I suggest we simplify. Thich Nhat Hanh’s quote, which I’ve stolen as this site’s subtitle, is the shortest guide to life you’ll ever need: “Smile, breathe, and go slowly.”

If you live your life by those five words, you’ll do pretty well. For those who need a little more guidance, I’ve distilled the lessons I’ve learned (so far) into a few guidelines, or reminders, really.

And as always, these rules are meant to be broken. Life wouldn’t be any fun if they weren’t.

less TV, more reading

less shopping, more outdoors

less clutter, more space

less rush, more slowness

less consuming, more creating

less junk, more real food

less busywork, more impact

less driving, more walking

less noise, more solitude

less focus on the future, more on the present

less work, more play

less worry, more smiles

breathe.

Leo Babauta is an author and simplicity blogger at zenhabits.net & mnmlist.com. You can follow Leo on Twitter.

Seth Kushner shoots portraits of celebrity-types for such publications The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Vogue and others. Seth’s first book, The Brooklynites, was published by powerHouse Books in 2007. His next book, Leaping Tall Buildings will be released in 2012. Currently, he co-edits GRAPHIC NYC and is working on CulturePOP, his photocomix series on ACT-I-VATE.com

Leadership is a much-used (perhaps overused) word. But for these unusually volatile times, business leadership is exactly what we need to develop radically new solutions for the world’s complex challenges.

Leaders question assumptions. Recently, I have been pleased to see more businesses wrestle with the topic of sustainable consumption, an issue whose solution requires challenging a belief that has defined business for the past half-century or more. Widely accepted statistics make clear that simply extending Western economic habits to everyone will exhaust the Earth’s resources long before prosperity spreads to all corners of the world, where it is desperately needed. This can be viewed either as a massive problem, or the essential business challenge and opportunity of our time. But taking this on requires business to question traditional economic models: How can we reorient the economy away from consumption-driven growth?

Too often, sustainable consumption has been at the margins of the sustainability debate, the veritable green elephant in the room. This is beginning to change. Companies such as Nike, Best Buy, Marks & Spencer, eBay, and Unilever are taking risks by exploring ways to

decouple the creation of value from the consumption of resources by experimenting with closed-loop manufacturing, shifting from products to services, and creating incentives for consumers who buy less. Companies like these understand that if they can inspire customers to select different products and use them wisely, consumers and businesses alike will benefit, and often save money. The most creative companies are taking risks by suggesting that consumers buy less or shift from a disposability culture, banking on the idea that they can create more value this way.

I get asked all the time: Which companies are leading the way on sustainability? I understand why people want to know, but I think it’s the wrong question. The right question is: What are the most important characteristics of leadership? Look for the companies that are taking risks by questioning assumptions and shaping the debate over economic priorities, while also delivering the goods every day.

Aron Cramer is president and CEO of BSR and co-author of the best-selling book Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World. Read the entire blog here. Follow Aron on Twitter

Magic happens in the interstitial space between silos, disciplines, organizations and sectors. The word interstitial comes from the Latin interstitium, which is derived from inter (between) and sistere (to stand). Learning, innovation, problem solving, and value creation happens when we “stand between.”

We must get more comfortable and better at standing between. Only by celebrating the interstitial space between us will we invent new disciplines and system approaches that will transform our important social systems, including education, health care, energy and entrepreneurship.

And yet we spend most of our time in silos. It is comfortable there. We know the language spoken. There are clear rules dictating our

behavior and even clearer rules if we dare to dip our toes into the space outside of well-marked boundaries. Incentives, performance reviews and job ladders all reinforce insularity. While technology screams permeability, organization infrastructure and operating norms lean against it. Standing in between anything is often considered a career-limiting move.

Most organizations aren’t 21st century ready. Industrial era structures with hierarchical relationships designed around functions will inevitably give way to networked operating models fluidly connecting capabilities both within and outside the organization. Standing between disciplines will become the norm rather than the exception.

The enabling technology is already here. We don’t need to invent anything new. It isn’t technology that is getting in our way. It is humans and the organizations we live in that are stubbornly resistant to change and hesitant to fully explore interstitial spaces. Organizations will either transform themselves to capitalize on the value in interstitial spaces or they will be disrupted in the market by others that do. And for those leaders who think they can wait it out: You can’t, the transition has already started and its pace is quickening. Just ask the youngest in your organization.

It is easy to see the potential of enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Check out any social media platform. Social media is a hotspot for random collisions. You don’t need to hang out in these virtual places long to know they are populated with very unusual suspects. Magic happens every day in these interstitial spaces. We can bring this magic into our organizations, meetings and gatherings. We just have to resist the normal tendency to hang

out with the usual suspects. Most of the conferences and meetings we go to are teeming with people who love to get together to admire the problem. Solution discussions are narrow and tend to shop around old solutions that have been discussed forever. If you want new ideas, approaches and solutions, make it a personal goal to attend gatherings where you don’t know the people or subject matter. Or better yet, go to gatherings that are designed to bring unusual suspects together and to enable random collisions.

If you want to get better faster, hang out in interstitial spaces. Don’t just dip your toes but jump in with all the passion you can ignite. Magic happens in the spaces between us.

Saul Kaplan is the Founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). Saul shares innovation musings on his blog at It’s Saul Connected and on Twitter.

One person can change the world—not by himself or herself, of course. But by mustering the right arguments, and enlisting the right allies, one person can change a company, an industry and eventually change the world. I’ve seen it happen, more than once.

Marc Gunther is a veteran journalist, speaker, writer and consultant whose focus is business and sustainability. He is both an author and co-author of four books, including Faith and Fortune: How Compassionate Capitalism Is Transforming American Business (Crown 2004).

1. Take more risks — sooner: People regret too late in life that they did not try certain things earlier in life. There’s truth in the cliché that “youth is wasted on the young.” Risks early in one’s career tend to have much more upside potential than downside risk. If one tries something of greater risk and it does not work out, there’s time to go back to a safer and more conservative path.

2. Make experience-driven choices: The New York Times recently ran a piece on how people who live their lives through experiences are happier than those that live their lives through transactions. The purchase of physical things, such as clothes, does not seem to have the same staying power and return on happiness as the consumption of experiences, such as travel or dining occasions with friends and family. Experiments have shown that we associate those experiences with a nostalgic happiness whether they were truly happy moments or not. This reinforces the hypothesis I have that happier employees are ones who have a certain baseline level of salary and extrinsic rewards but who, beyond that, are motivated more by the intrinsic rewards of a meaningful role, a fun and exciting work environment, and potential for professional growth.

3. Nurture relationships: In our professional careers, we think about relationships for their business “networking value.”

But relationships give us something much more than connections to facilitate business. They can actually be the biggest drivers of a positive and healthy lifestyle. We know that we need to eat right and exercise to stay in shape, but the probability of doing so is meaningfully increased with the right support and relationships. For all the financial incentives, technology and science — the greatest motivator of positive behavior change and, in my mind, happiness — may be the family and personal and professional peer group surrounding you.

4. Stay curious, stay learning, and stay relevant. The mind should be treated as a muscle that needs to be exercised. Intellectual curiosity and a desire to stay relevant are hallmarks of happier people. In a recent blog on what makes certain people luckier, we observed that those who have a greater level of curiosity and willingness to welcome variety and new learning in their lives tend to be luckier people.

Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball. An entrepreneur, investor, and senior advisor, Tjan has become a recognized business builder. You can read the article in full on HBR’s brilliant blog.

“Successful people ask better questions, and get better answers.” — Anthony Robbins

Your mind likes answers. So it’s important to ask yourself the right questions. Questions like: “What would X do?” X being whatever inspiring figure you want it to be. It’s a great way to shift perspective and find a more useful frame of mind. For example, the non-conformist rebel might ask: “What would Tyler Durden do?” Me, I like Winnie the Pooh.

What would Winnie the Pooh do?Let’s say I feel closed up, tense and whiny. It’s not a helpful frame of mind. Now let’s think about Winnie the Pooh. He is warm and open,

relaxed and centered. He doesn’t cling to the past or the future but is happy to live in the now. In fact, he doesn’t seem to think much at all.

Now, this might seem like a sorta stupid bear. But it’s often better to not think so much and let thoughts and actions naturally arise within you.

When I feel like a “not so good” version of myself, I often remember that I can turn things around. Like everything else, it’s just temporary. So I ask myself: “What would Winnie the Pooh do?”

That focuses my mind on all the positive things I associate with

honey-loving bear. My mind comes up with more helpful answers. I remember the “better parts” of yourself, and I snap out of my negative frame of mind. I find this question to be especially helpful in social situations.

What would Jason Bourne do?No, the Bourne frame of mind isn’t about putting your car in reverse and going off rooftops. It is about putting a stop to thinking and allowing yourself to work with what you already know. Jason Bourne does what he’s learned, letting his body and subconscious do most of the doing. A lot of thinking would only hold him back.

Now, thinking has its place. But to be wrapped up in it all the time often leads to inner doubts and little actually getting done. The thing is, you know what to do most of the time already. Don’t put up obstacles in your own way. I have been using the Jason Bourne question for years now. It’s a very good question to become focused and to focus on the how rather than whys and doubts.

What would Eckhart Tolle do?Eckhart Tolle is one of my favorite personal development writers. He is very much about living in the present moment and having an accepting frame of mind. I have found the Eckhart Tolle question is most helpful when I feel angry and frustrated, or when my mind gets stuck in past or future scenarios. Asking this question helps me to flip the perspective around to a more useful one a lot of the time. And when that doesn’t work, listening to one of Tolle’s audio books for 10 minutes usually does the trick.

Henrik Edberg is the author of The Art of Relaxed Productivity and The Power of Positivity. He writes about improving your social life, health, happiness, productivity and general awesomeness. Feel free to follow him on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

One of the popular misconceptions about honey bees is that their lives are ruled by a queen. But their colonies are remarkably complex. And every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing a new home, honey bees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. It is a democratic process that humans — especially office drones — might do well to emulate.

When a beehive becomes overpopulated, some two-thirds of the workers and the old queen, often up to 10,000 bees in total, leave home in a swarm and gather on a nearby tree branch. From there, a few hundred scout bees take off in all directions, searching for tree cavities. Each scout that discovers a promising site inspects it and

returns to the cluster to announce her find by performing a waggle dance. The dance indicates both the location and the quality of the site.

Other “follow-up” scouts observe and follow the directions to the indicated locations. If the follow-up scout agrees that the site is desirable, she too performs a waggle dance when she returns to the swarm. The better she judges the site, the longer she dances, and the more effective she is in recruiting other scouts to make their own forays to the spot. Eventually, over a day or two, enough scouts agree on the best site and induce the rest of the swarm to fly there.

Even though an individual bee is not particularly intelligent,

the collective intelligence of the group produces impressive results. Almost always the swarm chooses the best of the options it has found.

What we can learn from the hive

1. Remind the group’s members of their shared interests and foster mutual respect, so they work together productively. Scout bees know instinctually that their interests are aligned toward choosing the optimal home site, so they work together as a team.

2. Explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option. Scout bees search far and wide to discover a broad assortment of possible living quarters.

3. Aggregate the group’s knowledge through a frank debate. Scout bees rely on a turbulent debate among groups supporting different options to identify a winner. Whichever group first attracts sufficient supporters wins the debate.

4. Minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking. Scout bees have no dominating leader and so can take a broad and deep look at their options.

5. Balance interdependence (information sharing) and independence (absence of peer pressure) among the group’s members. Scout bees share freely the news of their finds, but each one makes her own, independent decision of whether or not to support a site.

These methods in running my own groups can be remarkably effective at building consensus and producing good decisions. Let the bees show you that with the right organization, democratic groups can be remarkably intelligent, even smarter than the smartest individuals in them.

Thomas Seeley is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. This excerpted material is drawn from his book Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010 by Princeton University Press.

Thomas SeeleyNeurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. This excerpted material is drawn from his book Honeybee Democracyby Princeton University Press.

Sloane Berrent is a nationally recognized speaker on community building and “cause-filled living” and writes on her blog, The Causemopolitan. She is the founder of Answer With Action and was named a top influencer at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative by Waggener Edstrom and named a“top woman to follow” on Twitter by Forbes.

Sloane Berrent

I had just finished a speech. One of the audience members came up to talk to me. He said that his group has been fortunate to get to hear a lot of speakers, but seldom does he get to meet the speaker. He ended our conversation by saying, “Because I met you and shook your hand I’ll always remember your speech. It was real.”

He said it was real. What did that mean? Now, this wasn’t about me being some type of celebrity. I’m just a business speaker. I presented the speech well and had relevant material, but what happened after the speech is what made it “real.” All I did was make myself available after the speech to answer questions and talk to anyone who wanted to. Not a big deal, but it made impact. So, I’ve been thinking about what it is to be “real.”

As I think about my friends and colleagues who are successful, I see some commonalities about them. They are approachable and available. They have a bond with their customers as well as the people they work with. They create positive impact on others. They are “real.”

The secrets to being “real” are common sense. It takes some effort. Care about what you do. Be respectful to others. Make yourself approachable and available. Always be on time, even early. Be enthusiastic about who you are and what you do. Create positive impressions that are memorable and that garner respect, admiration and build confidence.

Most of all, recognize that every interaction you have is an opportunity to make positive impact on others – an opportunity to be and make an experience “real.”

Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer (CAO) of Shepard Presentations, LLC. As a speaker and author, Shep helps companies build loyal relationships with their customers and employees by helping them deliver amazing levels of customer service. He is the author of the Wall Street Journalbest-selling book The Cult of the Customer and the creator of The Customer Focus customer service training program.

The Commands are not commandments, meant as orders from God to a population, but rather ways of taking command of any of the biases of digital media. The way to take command of digital media’s asynchronous bias, for example, is not to be “always on.”

Here are the ten from the book.

I. TIMEDo Not Be Always On

II. PLACELive in Person

III. CHOICEYou May Always Choose None of the Above

IV. COMPLEXITYYou Are Never Completely Right

V. SCALEOne Size Does Not Fit All

VI. IDENTITYBe Yourself

VII. SOCIALDo Not Sell Your Friends

VIII. FACTTell the Truth

IX. OPENNESSShare, Don’t Steal

X. PURPOSEProgram or Be Programmed

Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, writer, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. Learn more about 10 Ten Commands for a Digital Age by reading his book Program or be Programmed.

I got to where I am able to give back by working and succeeding within the principles of capitalism and free-markets. Why is it that now my hard-earned money goes into some other defined economic set of principles that don’t mirror at all what I know works in the marketplace?

If non-profits aren’t allowed to utilize the economic principles of capitalism, then they forever will only be “charities”.

Why can’t we put the principles of capitalism to work against the problems and opportunities of bettering our society with the same force and vigor as those who move our society along industrially and economically?

Is it not time that we rethink the archaic principles that keep non-profits working with less?

It is no surprise that for-profit social capital companies are on the rise and non-profits are on the decline.

If we really want to do the right thing, it’s time to level the playing field!

Rusty Rueff writes, speaks, advises, invests, and volunteers at an intersection of technology, arts & entertainment, talent management, and faith.

The world needs your help...

A growing worldwide population has created unprecedented demand for electricity, which in turn, has pushed coal consumption to all-time highs. Coal is now responsible for over one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions and is on an upward trend.

The current worldwide construction of coal-based plants ensures the widely available fuel will remain a dominant energy source for many decades to come.

The USA and China consume 60% of the world’s coal and have the technology and business practices to dramatically improve the environmental impact of using coal.

Shouldn’t the largest users be the leaders? Let’s plan on giving coal this Holiday, just a much better coal.

Albert Lin is the CEO of EmberClear, an investment company focused on clean energy technology, whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of technologies enabling dramatic improvements in the efficiency and cleanliness of fossil fuel consumption.

American science education standards are slipping at a disturbing rate, while we are becoming ever more dependent on analytical and critical thinking skills to solve many complex challenges of our time. To reverse this trend the excitement, relevance, and adventure of science need to be impressed upon young minds within the framework of a rigorous curriculum.

Dr. Armin Ellis is a mission architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has co-founded VentureKits Inc. as an education nonprofit. The mission of VentureKits is to inspire students by the hands-on application of science, and to make a positive and direct impact on U.S. education shortfalls.

I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing every day. I’ve had moments when I’ve played like the player I long to be. (And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58.) Until recently, I never believed that was possible. I always accepted the myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to excel is determined by genetics.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — that challenge that assumption. I’ve found it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity the same way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, then rest.

Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to Anders

Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has made the case that inherited talent is less important than how hard we’re willing to practice. Numerous researchers agree that 10,000 hours is the minimum for achieving expertise in any complex domain. If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. Here are the six keys to achieving excellence I’ve found most effective:

Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience and perseverance.

Do the hardest work first. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and practice in the morning.

That’s when most of us have the highest energy and the fewest distractions.

Practice intensely without interruption for periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4½ hours a day.

Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.

Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them.

I have practiced tennis deliberately over the years, but never enough to achieve a truly high level of excellence. I’ve got too many other higher priorities to give tennis that attention right now. But I find it exciting to know that I’m still capable of getting far better at tennis — or at anything else — and so are you.

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony and the Energy Project on Twitter.

Consumers are becoming increasingly cynical of big business and compassionate toward social causes. Consumers are looking for companies who wear their hearts on their packaging and in their marketing. When faced with similar brands, they will choose the brand that is linked to a personally meaningful cause. In fact, four out of five American adults make purchases of products that are linked to school fundraising products every year – even when they didn’t feel they needed the product!

It’s the perfect time for entrepreneurs to embrace social innovation to accelerate business results. Here are five steps to inspire you to put a little emotion into your business:

1. Identify those needs that are most important to you and your customers.

Make a list of the social issues that you care about. Ask your customers where their interests lie.

2. Think local and personal.

Writing one big check to a national charity will not inspire a customer as much as a check to her son’s classroom project.

3. Align the cause with your product or brand.

Make it clear how buying from your brand addresses a social need.

4. Look for partners who share your passion.

Are there other entrepreneurs with whom you could partner to strengthen your impact? Are there existing nonprofit organizations that you could support through your business’s social endeavor? You don’t have to navigate this path alone. There are plenty of worthy organizations that would love to work with your company.

5. Track your progress and share with your customers.

Let your customers know their collective impact increases goodwill.

There has never been a better time to invest in social innovation. Make a difference while driving your bottom line.

Tania Mulry is a concerned mother of three young boys turned social entrepreneur. In her role as President of EdRover, Inc., a California Public Benefit Corporation, she aims to connect businesses and families in support of U.S. schools. Its signature mobile application, edRover, drives Consumers to visit participating businesses in order to collect donations for educational programs.

Goodified DirectorMunir Haddad

ProducerMelanie Moser

Art DirectionAshley Borg & Shaun Forouzandeh

Production/Quality ControlLisa Naso Hunter

Article Designers

Convergence of IntentionMunir Haddad

Whatever Happened to Downtime?Ashley Borg

Morning Friends, Who Can I Help Today?Shaun Forouzandeh

Reality is Overrated as a MotivatorMike Lee

Citizen ConsumerAndrew Rubey

Wurld WaterCory Naso

Is Your Organization Playing With a Full Deck?Vu Dang

The Green Business Decade in ReviewAshley Borg

A Brief Guide to LifeCory Naso

Sustainability Leadership in the Face of AdversityAshley Borg

Interstitial Innovation MagicEric Wegerbauer

The Power of OneAshley Borg

EntrepreneurJames Ellis

What Would Winnie the Pooh (and Others) Do?Vu Dang

The Five Habits of Highly Effective HivesAshley Borg

The Most Dangerous Word in the English LanguageMunir Haddad

On Being “Real”Ashley Borg

10 Commands for a Digital AgeJames Ellis

Profiting SocietyVu Dang

Clean Coal RevolutionAshley Borg

Inspiration Can Lead to EducationJames Ellis

Six Keys to Being Excellent at AnythingVu Dang

Connect with What MattersJames Ellis

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