My latest HuffingtonPost piece reflects the coalescing of my consulting and master’s program work toward a new research focus.  How can we take what we know about how women think to both develop better sustainable organizations and to better serve consumers supporting those organizations?  As always, my intention is not to say that women are the greatest and the only gender to combine systems thinking with empathy.  Rather, the fact that women are good at a kind of thinking so important in sustainable business is a clue to the bigger picture.  If your organization is reviewing and developing its sustainability efforts, this clue should help you source those best suited for your team: systems thinkers that embrace and reflect an empathic perspective on life.

An excerpt from my piece:

Women have generations of practice using and developing their empathic skills. When you combine that with solid business smarts, you get a sustainability powerhouse. It’s probably safe to say that without empathy, no business leader — male or female — would come to believe in the “triple bottom line” or the “people, planet and profit” mission. It’s the empathy extra that brings people and planet anywhere near the profit.

For those of you working in or with already well-functioning sustainability efforts, let me know if the empathic systems thinker is well represented, and how/where you’ve put that sort of mind to work.

My latest HuffingtonPost piece considers extreme business culture pendulum swings and where things might soon settle – the sweet spot.  That’s where women and men, and traditional and sustainable businesses, get beyond extreme differences toward a more collaborative and productive place.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sustainability has a bad rap with some, for being overly emotional and other-focused. But instead, in a more sustainability-focused business, efficiency, quality and innovation are still “king.”  There’s just unimaginable added value to boot. In other words, sustainable business is not necessarily something new, it’s just the highest standard.

My recent experience at Sustainable Brands 2010 (SB2010) reflected the settling to center pendulum effect.  That event had the likes of Ford and Coca Cola sharing their sustainability-oriented developments.  Let’s remember that a few years ago that would have sounded like a dream.  To be clear, no one is saying that the big, traditional brands are fully into their likely very long sustainable journeys. However, these beginnings do reflect the pendulum heading toward center.  Alternatively, the many smaller, less “known” companies at SB2010, like H2O (boxed water) and Nature’s Path, are also doing amazing good by making sustainable steps more accessible to consumers. Such brands are by no means out in some sort of green la-la land (i.e. at an extreme pendulum swing).  Rather, they’ve figured out how to do business with the big boys, and are even teaching them a few things along the way.

Back to Rosin’s article, and one of her points: “A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge.” Similarly, I’d argue that both conventional and sustainable businesses have the core business part down, but the sustainable enterprises likely have an edge in understanding, and serving, the social side.  That’s the “people and planet” part.

I shared my thoughts on President Obama’s comments first in a VPR commentary (you can read or listen), and then posted the text on HuffingtonPost.  Here’s a clip:

Whether we like to admit it or not, as the privileged citizens many of us are, we choose where we live and how our on- and off-line social communities are built.  It’s easy to think that racism, age-ism or sexism doesn’t have much to do with our own lives. But not engaging with the idea of the other can lead to long-term misunderstandings and crossed human connections.

Consider the systemic premise of sustainability.  All things are interconnected systems.  All decisions affect other decisions.  What you do today actually does affect the lives of people you will never know generations from now.  Oh, yeah…

Operating only in our small personal and business worlds hinders a truly holistic perspective and stunts our own growth as productive citizens.  My own professional challenge is a good example.  I study and interpret how consumers engage with sustainability.  What draws them in, how will they stay interested in sustainability?

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You can’ t really begin to understand why people engage with sustainability unless you first understand where they are coming from – left or right, blue state or red, privileged or disadvantaged background, to name a few possibilities. This is certainly true of marketing, in general, but with sustainability the stakes are that much higher.  To get to a more holistically functioning world and economy, we’ve got to think and act more holistically ourselves. Seeing through a new lens can help.

A lot of people don’t relate to or put up with patriarchy in their daily lives.  Many consumers/citizens are also trying to live personal lives and work for companies that focus a bit more on sustainability.  So, what are brands doing about it?

My latest HuffingtonPost contribution compares the findings in a new Catalyst report on how to engage men with gender initiatives to what I see as a difficulty in engaging conventional business thinkers with sustainability.  In the piece, I cover a few of the points of myth/reality in both of those cases.

Here’s my conclusion:

The point is not to polarize the conventional and sustainable business mindsets away from one another. That gets us nowhere. Instead, the point is for all of today’s business thinkers to innovate as they always have, but to do so within exciting new parameters that serve planet, people and profits.

Just like the marketing to women advice I often give: shut up about it, but do it! If the term “sustainability” makes business decision-makers uncomfortable, don’t mention it. Just embrace the inevitable, commit to integrating sustainable development in to your business, and join today’s wise and innovative business pioneers.

Think of it as being akin to the great conversations that often come from the bigger fights in personal relationships.  There’s got to be a major blow-out between the two parties before they’ll admit an issue needs to be hashed out.  And, voila, the bubble bursts on false assumptions and it isn’t that hard to talk…

If it takes a fight to get men and women talking about the discomfort of gender issues – let’s go there (leaving it to “feminists” defeats the point). Imagine the consumer awareness and marketing insights that would bubble up based on such honesty? No brand would ever “get pink,” because women and men working together behind the scenes could call one another on their gender issues and work through to more effective, transparent marketing, for one.  I’ve got rose-colored glasses of hope for this idea.

Anyway -

My latest HuffingtonPost piece addresses this.  Here’s a quote:

…Men, indeed, have the potential of charisma, the potential to exude optimism, and the potential to be able to encourage others or be interested in mentorship programs. Our organizations and corporations may just need more gender nuance training.

But, whatever you do, don’t call such a training workshop: “Teaching men how to think like women.” Argh! Rather, skip the outrage-inducing language and tell it like it is. How about a title like: “Leveraging Your Right-Brain Leadership Skills “(as per Daniel Pink’s perspective in A Whole New Mind), for example? That’s a straightforward, non-confrontational way to categorize the types of skills today’s leaders really need — no gender (and thus, less outrage) about it.

The truth is that when we focus on the qualities or characteristics of good leaders or speakers, we will get men and women on the same page. Along the way, we will find a broader diversity in gender (and race, creed, religion, too) to share with and learn from.

That’s what my latest HuffingtonPost contribution is about.  Here’s a snippet:

Continuing to strive for a balance of men and women “at the table” or in each industry’s work force, seems like a pseudo pursuit. While achieving a 50/50 gender balance in organization or workforce situations is a worthy and seemingly straightforward goal, can we really force that issue? So far, trying to force it has not gotten us far enough, fast enough. Instead, take a closer look and you’ll see that gender disparity may well be the issue sounding the alarm, but effectively re-adjusting a workforce or organizational power balance will be more than a gender question.

Gender disparity may be what is sounding the alarm (and making us, wisely, look at these issues more closely), but we’ve got to go beyond gender to find the answers.

Here’s an excerpt:

In the early twenty-first century, savvy consumers and voters are past marketing to women 1.0. Instead, they expect that brands, whether consumer products or politicians, will deliver 2.5 level wares and marketing.

Flashy “look at us, we love women” efforts are mere distractions from the bigger, common issues of most Americans. Whether we are shopping for a house, car, President or Vice President, each of us needs to take responsibility to compare, contrast, read deeply into the web site, and explore the brand’s history and past successes and mistakes. With that due diligence behind our votes, the country will end up with the best leading team.

Yes. In fact, there’s a perfect marketing storm building right now: slow economy/lower marketing budgets, an environmentally/socially responsible consumer trend and the fact that women are likely a large part of the market or your goods/services. Sustainable business is no longer some groovy, Vermont-y or Northern California thing – it actually makes incredible business sense.

In my latest HuffingtonPost piece, I write about how the triple bottom line for sustainable businesses actually aligns quite nicely with what women want from brands today. Here’s an excerpt:

If one non-gendered label could encompass the width and depth of what women want from a brand, it might just be sustainable business. The triple bottom line of good for shareholders, society and the environment fits to a “T” the “it all matters,” holistic way women are known to buy. So, as the power and visibility of womenomics continues to grow, sustainable businesses will have the advantage.

We’re already seeing the big, traditional brands backtrack a bit to change outdated practices and proclaim their new corporate responsibility (GE, Walmart and GM, for example). They have seen the writing on the wall: An authentic and established sustainable commitment resonates with women, who tend to be the largest market for many of the products they sell.

I wrote about this in my latest Huffpo piece. Here’s an excerpt:

So, it was with dread that I read of Delta’s plan (and several other airlines are in on this too) to run ads on their boarding passes. This is nowhere near as annoying as the incessant airport cable news, of course, but represents one more intrusion into personal space and into the quiet time that humans get so little of today.

As Anna Prior wrote in the Wall Street Journal (after quoting a Continental representative on how “delighted” customers will be with the boarding pass ads):

But some travelers — who already feel nickel-and-dimed by new airline fees — may be irked by seeing ads splashed on their boarding passes. Travelers already face a variety of come-ons during their flight. U.S. Airways, for example, sells advertising space on tray tables, while other airlines have experimented with ads on overhead bins and promotional messages on the ticket jackets handed to passengers when they check in at the airport.

What would happen if brands started to risk open space?

I recently met someone on a consulting project who got to know my inquiring mind well enough to suggest that I might “appreciate” something called Appreciative Inquiry. The (very) general idea is that groups of people often settle into assumptions as shorthand cues for working together and then forget why they have been thinking one way for so long. Group members will then have trouble digging out from under those assumptions, unless they re-frame the issue(s). The AI theory posits: “Watching a long-held assumption be questioned and replaced tends to inspire people to question other long-held assumptions.” And, a creative vein is opened.

In the marketing to women realm, where I focus much of my attention, a lot of re-framing is begging to be done. The difference in how men and women buy is not an extreme Mars/Venus question, in my mind, but it does involve a raising up and examining a few behavioral patterns — all within a positive frame. So, for example, the issue in training male minds on the topic is not to focus on the fact that “men are so dense that they could never understand a woman’s buying mind” – because that isn’t the case. Instead, try asking whether or not the men, themselves, have noticed that the women they know think and communicate differently. Yes- they probably have. There’s the opening to point out the nuances and make the exploration of this enormous market opportunity a more collaborative and productive pursuit.

If this resonates with you or you have a different perspective – please add a comment to the piece on HuffPo.