It was really great to hear Paul Hawken give the welcome address at the Green Business Camp UnConference last week. I had previously heard him speak at Greenbuild ‘07, but that was such a huge event that it was practically impossible to see him, let alone hear him ad lib his talk. So it was insightful when, on what appeared to be a sudden thought, he mentioned old t-shirts he used to wear with the phrase “Nature Sucks.” He explained that to mean that nature never pushes; whatever it needs, it draws in. Water, minerals, even the wind, all are drawn. Nature does not waste energy forcing itself onto anything. And Hawken explained that is how green businesses should operate, drawing in allies, clients, resources.
I found that to be a great analogy, and fundamentally similar to Duke Stump’s explanation of the bonfire brand (I wrote about this just last week). At AIGA L.A.’s SEEing Green 2: Moving Beyond Green, Duke explained that the best green brands will be those that, like a bonfire on a beach, draw in people, energy, and resources, and that can galvanize those elements into something meaningful.
These two gentlemen are saying the same thing: green businesses cannot force themselves onto anyone. That would be a recipe for failure. To be sustainable in the long term, from an economic perspective, green businesses need to find ways to appeal to people almost on a basic, instinctual level. According to Duke, the bonfire analogy works because people are naturally drawn to that kind of a setting: to fire, to people, to a community.
The trick for all green entrepreneurs out there will be to find out how to make a bonfire out of their business plan; to find out how to … suck. It’s an approach that forces out-of-the-box thinking. And it sounds to me like it would be much more fun to work on a business plan from this perspective.
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