What’s Next for #tsomu —-Applying What We Learned from Stakeholder Engagement

April 18, 2011 at 5:11 pm · Filed under Aman Singh, Capacity Building, Christina Carvahlo Pinto, CSRWireTalkback, DaveWann, Economy, EthicalMarkets.com, Joe Sibilia, Lavinia Weissman, Mercado Etico, New Normal Consumer, Rosalinda Sanquiche, SustainableMarketLeaders, Workforce

April 2011, Letter from the Publisher

Lavinia Weissman

Boston, MA

@wecarehealth

In 8 weeks time our readers have come to thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com to view our articles over 2,000 times.

The articles have shaped into reports on meaningful adoption of thought and practice leadership that is empowering a new generation of people to shape the way they work and live into a sustainable marketplace.  While so many of the thought and practice leaders have been at work leading this change into meaningful adoption now going on almost 50 years, we still need to think of this cycle of formation as a phase of early adoption.

The numbers of people who have consciously chosen to work wisely to live well to sustain a life of health for the environment, economy, people and planet are increasing in population, but running interference with a minority of people obstructing this change financially and politically.

Stakeholders of thstoryofmeaningfuluse.com  have conducted or identified economic and  scientifically sound  related research that dates as far back as 1986. This repeated pattern of research demonstrates a growing pattern of economic downturn is a result of declining methods of workforce education.

While Social Responsible Investing has grown into a $26.5 Trillion global portfolio of investments, globally only 80,000 companies file annual sustainability reports that meet the Global Reporting Initiative requirements.

Millions of other companies and institutions continue to manage with emphasis on the bottom line and accumulating total cash reserves of $1.3 Trillion as a practice that obstructs investment in innovation.  Downsizing strategies continue to be a pervasive way to control shareholder return on investment.

Such studies have drawn on the observations of numerous business leaders today who formulated a values strategy to lead companies to form sustainable market value, e.g.  John Pepper,  CEO of Disney and former CEO of Procter& Gamble,  Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric , Sustainable Entreprenuers, e.g. Joe Sibilia and Jeffrey Hollender, or John Sexton, President of New York University who is leading a transformation in education.

No leader has addressed these issues perfectly and perhaps what best defined them as leaders is the maps they drew of a future and strategy from which to learn and act.

Aman Singh, Global Advisory Board member to the thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com, just recently authored a report in Forbes Magazine, Waiting for Superman, Do We Need to Educate Business First?

The only remedy to a down turn economy is to assure ongoing education of the workforce.  However companies and communities that assure education to its workforce are few and far between. As Aman  Singh’s editorial points out, the greatest obstacle to educating the workforce (future and current) is that business needs to educate itself first and all that this implies.

One might ask the question, why is this research finding not getting the response it deserves, if the research and its findings have surfaced over repeated cycles of economic downturn tracing back to the 1960s?

Once can trace a movement of change that was initiated back to 1963 by Dr. Hazel Henderson.

Dr. Henderson, through her publication of 9 books and articles published in 200 newspapers and 250 journals  in 27 languages, used her knowledge to from the leading global web-based publication educating people to social responsible investments and the greening of the economy.

Henderson has been described by Hunter Lovins as a leading thinker of the Ethical Market movement as illuminating as Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, David Brower and Dana Meadows. She was invited to represent the Club of Rome www.clubofrome.org as part of a group of international thinkers who recently convened in Brussels to form a thought leadership to move economics beyond the limitations of how the GDP is measured and to foster a ecological economic thought structure that impacts and can measure change in society as much as foster economic growth for business, countries and people.

In light of the hub of education, speculation and intelligence that Hazel Henderson has fostered, an intelligent person who values sustainability one might ask,

“Why has this movement of change not impacted a more mainstream form of change that has lasting impact for every global citizen that assures an end to the growing poverty, harm of global warming, decline in human health and much more?”

Movements of change are fostered by heroes and heroines, who can not fund the level of  accelerated change we need that relies on schemes of learning that require state of the art technology and a leadership commitment of values and ethics that assures accessibility and response to complex issues of diversity to foster quality of education for the current and incoming workforce.

The United States, once a leader in education, now ranks no. 9 in assuring college education for young people entering the workforce.   Furthermore, as proven by the last few months of political debate, the US political system has failed to organize its own economic priorities to serve the education and health of its citizens.

Is change possible? And what is implied by thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com.

 

Summary Analysis of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com 8 week beta  –

Our growing audience has spoken back to us!  They have let us know what they are passionate about over the past 8 weeks through the articles they have viewed.

We can describe this in a sentence:

Thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com reader is seeking a new normal based that impacts health.  They have an intention to learn how to live locally in a global economy – engage with the people they work with in community to build initiatives for an economy that is based on sustainable value. They define health as much more than health care. Our readers know that the condition of the environment, economy, planet and people all factor into creating a society today where people can work wisely to live well to organize their lives to sustain in health.

We concluded this observation based on top 5 ranked articles read of the 35+ articles posted over the last 2 months:

Rank	Author	Title
1	Wann	THE NEW NORMAL: An Agenda for Responsible Living
2	Wann	Judy Wicks, a Philadelphia Restauranter, Redefining the Global Economy Locally
3	Weissman	The Economy of Health – Will it Ever Become Sustainable?
4	Weissman	Sustainable Value versus Accountability
5	Page	The Benefits of Sustainability Employee Engagement

The trial offering for thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com brought us 2000= viewers, comments, testimonies and feedback.

The greatest reward for us came in looking through our data to see what articles people paid the most attention too!  Our audience’s own the bottom line that education is primary to embedding sustainability as part of our culture, society and the way we work.

We have developed a new program focused on the idea that in part we want to make an offer based on how people (our readers) are paying attention and also an offering that will “make a difference.”

The learning derived from this analysis is helping us create a new stage of offer for our readership and audience, which is building us an audience we are enjoying getting to know and creating referrals for our sustainability education programs.

While some articles have only been posted for a few weeks and showing similar popularity, the value of our review has helped us to define and improve our publishing and format plan.

We have established a goal to provide you a routine of 6-7 free sharing articles on a regular cycle as we begin to construct a center for paid content that will be designed to organize our growing research base of knowledge on sustainable value business and community practices.

This content can be organized for communities and employers as customized educational centers to make working groups and communities more effective at responding to the challenging problems we face globally and locally in redirecting the global economy to be sustainable for all.

This all developed after considerable thought and discussions with members of #tsomu  Editorial Advisory Board that include Frederic Page, Sustainability Practitioner, Sarah Peyok, CSRWire.com, Christina Carvahlo Pinto (Mercado Etico), Rosalinda Sanquiche, EthicalMarkets.com Aman Singh, Vault.com and Dave Wann, Author and Journalist.

As publisher, Lavinia is leading into practice a hub of learning and custom content publishing firm into devising a new format that we will be publishing a new format of free sharing articles into  6-8 week publishing cycle.

Over a two month period, our readers will  find on thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com articles based on

1.   A  periodic  update from the Publisher (like this news release);

2.   A report on how Corporations Impacting Health;

3.   News reports on  Community Success Stories;

4.   Building Blocks for Sustainability;

5.   A Column on Cures and Treatment Innovations for Health;

6.   Lessons from the Field.

Beginning in June we will be creating an archive of our content based on these categories which will be available to companies as custom research and briefing packages or content that we will draw on for development of sustainability initiatives for clients.

High on our list of priorities is to

1. launch a bookstore where you can purchase the thought leadership that we draw from in preparation of our articles.

2. publish the bios of our global advisory board and editorial associates.

3. build the necessary partnerships to fund and accelerate our activity.

Plans are now in the works to produce

1.    formulate and build a custom educational content program; we are seeking 5 companies or educational programs for which we can beta this product/service and leverage our first income;

2.   an annual meeting activity of leaders to form an inquiry that will grow into a stakeholder engagement for all our activity. We are assessing the possibility of locating this inquiry and annual meeting at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, since we believe the best education practice forms out of practices that sustain personal health;

3.   build a certification program of educational sensemakers that can facilitate community and business education programs of applied learning that combine the knowledge practice of social media with the value for developing applied learning centers that adopt use of social media to accelerate applied learning;

4. identify 4 custom content project beta’s from which we can devise our structure and service for custom content.

Our statistics and comments from our readers has shown us that Dave Wann’s popularity based on what he writes represents a talent pool of people who work in or want to work in companies that commit to embed sustainability in all they do.

As a result, Dave Wann and I plan to create based on our combined research of The New Normal, Simple Prosperity and Foundations of Portfolio Work an introductory curriculum for all forms of audience (community, corporate, leadership) to introduce people to the way in which today’s workforce lives their lives and integrate their work to insure they can live wisely to live well.

And of course, we will from time to time be posting short snippets of our opinion and findings with our global partners CSRwire talkback, EthicalMarkets.com and MercadoEtico.com.

With much appreciation

1.   to all of you who have helped build our following for thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com over the last seven weeks;

2.   and to the leaders of the sustainability movement who have formed a social network of support for this long cycle startup —-Dave Wann, Rosalinda Sanquiche, Jan Morgan, Sarah Peyok, Christina Carvalho Pinto, Aman Singh, Dave Meyer, John Friedman, Elaine Cohen, Bernie Kelly, Hazel Henderson, Art Kleiner, Asok Kumar Basu, Frederic Page, Whit Tice, Kathryn Canney, Juan Villamayor and many others in my social network.

3.   And most important my daughter, Katherine —who shared the struggle of an inhumane and unforgiving downturn economy no single mother with a daughter should have to survive; it is through the many years and cycles of this lifestyle that my daughter and I learned  that the real source of sustainability is to be part of a community and economy that values education, health and sustainable income.

Movements of change do not survive without the heroes and the heroines fostering a road map of resource in which people can learn to live the values the heretics espouse. We believe members of our team exemplify the leadership principles and practices of leaders today fostering innovation and leading change by

• a passionate curiosity
• battle hardened confidence
• team smarts
• a simple mindset
• fearlessness

Without living life in light of these habits, leaders who opened the frontier of sustainability would not have known intuitively of the change we had to foster for future generations before the science proved the need and established the baseline of necessity, e.g. 350 parts per M related to carbon reduction to counteract global warming.

Thank you for reading and keep letting us know if we are providing you content and learning of meaningful use.

All the best,

Lavinia Weissman

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