Quick. What do you think of when you hear the term "cause marketing." If I were to venture a guess, I'd say your mind went right to the color pink and breast cancer. (It has been only a few weeks since the pink month of October, after all). While that...

Nothing about sustainable business is straightforward. Instead, practicing it involves an awareness of complex, interconnected issues, stakeholders, and responsibilities -- likely a few your brain has never before considered. One connection worth considering, however, is that between women, bicycling and sustainability-focused business.

So what if your product...

What if your thought leadership got you very little recognition today but contributed to an incredibly significant cultural shift that made a positive difference for generations to come? It is an interesting question at a time when business leadership should be poised to jumpstart the sustainability movement, but could a...

Because of its potential to change the minds of those people and businesses not currently in the sustainability choir, what I call sustainability hidden in plain sight is an intriguing concept. Take me, as a choir member example. I attend the conferences, read and write for green business publications, and...

"Living Economies." Though the phrase is a mouthful, a lot more businesses, and businesspeople, should be seeing themselves as part of them.

Perhaps because so much of what we hear and read about business today is reports on bad corporate (or corporate leader) behavior, "business" is getting a nasty reputation,...

A fantastic article by Tom Vanderbilt in the March issue of Outside got me thinking. Vanderbilt tells the story of an "extreme" bike commuter, and along the way raises the topic of the psychology behind how and why cyclists and drivers have became so polarized. If you are...

What business leaders know heading into 2011 is that sustainability is good for business. Sustainability results in both innovation for developing organizations and the social and environmental benefits the world needs to thrive. Smart business minds can't deny this. In this way, it should be safe to call the sustainable...

If consumer and business media are any indication, sustainability and green living are all the rage right now. Yet, there may still be a lot of people who think the concept is too different from their own way of life to adopt. Or, there's the reverse psychology of those determinedly...

Let's face it. Sustainable business development is a complex pursuit that can seem a tad touchy-feely in its woo-woo focus on people, planet and profit. All you really want to do as a decision-making executive is cut to the chase, right? It's not so much that you want...

Hanna Rosin's insightful cover story in the July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic got me thinking.  At first glance, the title, "The End of Men," made me hear that ridiculous, booming voice-over for Armageddon-type blockbuster movies.  As in: The END...of MEN!  But, Rosin has a deserved reputation for...

Don't you just hate it when you get called out for living in your own little world?  Especially when it's the President doing the reminding!

I've only recently come down from the high of being in a football stadium with 85,000 others listening to President Obama's University of Michigan...

As I pointed out in Part 1, the women's market is a great place to start to decipher sustainably-minded consumer behavior. In this post, I make the case that moms may well represent the sweet spot of that mindset.

If "having a baby changes everything"...

Just who is this "sustainable consumer" of which we business types now speak? That is the question for both newly emerging brands and those that are long-established with hopes to sidle into the green marketplace.

But wait -- is sustainable consuming even a possibility? I say yes, but it might...

Sometimes the inevitable is just too hard to get to. Misguided assumptions, traditions and all sorts of randomness can get in the way of doing good business. In both the case of the women's market and now, the sustainable consumer market, plenty of decision-makers still hesitate to make the effort...

There's been so much in the news lately about the climate talks in Copenhagen that it's hard to miss the importance of the issue. Or, is it?

As with so many broad-reaching and complex social or health issues, ordinary people may not be able to see how...

Is it just me, or is the conversation around gender heating up a bit these days? There's buzz from groups that run the spectrum -- from what might be called 'raging feminism" to what might then be called "raging anti-feminism" - talking about organizational leadership and speaker lists to name...

Men "just don't understand," and women and men will "never be able to communicate in a productive manner." I'm not the only one who doesn't buy this line of thinking. That's why I was a bit frustrated to read Maria Shriver's announcement of what sounds like a very interesting,...

Gender parity, or lack thereof, is the talk surrounding both the recent Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Catherine Rampell's buzz-generating New York Times article about patterns in layoffs (and how men seem to be feeling the brunt). But, I'm not so sure that...

Every four years, we Americans take our well-practiced consuming cleverness and leverage it to make decisions that will have much longer term national and global repercussions than our choices in material possessions. As consumers, many of us have learned to see marketing for what it is, and now demand much...

Sustainable business and the women's market are hot these days. Don't say you haven't noticed.

While both trends could certainly be leveraged for "wily" marketing purposes, the two should actually be taken quite seriously by brands looking for a bigger bang for their budget in these slow economic times.

The...