Joel Makower is a world leader in the field of sustainable business and its relation to climate change. Marc and Joel share a heartening conversation about how sustainability gives him hope, and how to shift from overwhelm and despair to committed and engaged activism. Joel invites young leaders and entrepreneurs to not settle for vague answers and to truly believe and work toward a better future. He highlights the power of community during these times and affirms how there are more of us who care about the health of this planet than those who do not.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Joel Makower is chairman and co-founder of GreenBiz Group, a media and events company focusing at the intersection of business, technology and sustainability. For more than 30 years, through his writing, speaking and leadership, he has helped companies alig pressing environmental and social issues with business success.

Makower has written more than a dozen books, including Strategies for the Green Economy, The Green Consumer, The E-Factor: The Bottom Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business and Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World. In 2010, Makower was awarded the Hutchens Medal by the American Society for Quality, and in 2014, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals.

---

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. My guest today is Joel Makower. He’s the chairman and co-founder of GreenBiz Group. GreenBiz Group is a media and events company that focuses on the intersection of business, technology, and sustainability. For more than 30 years, Joel, through his writing, speaking, and leadership, has helped companies and individuals align pressing environmental and social issues with business success.

In this episode, we had a most heartening conversation about how sustainability gives him and gives us hope, how to shift from overwhelm and despair to more committed and engaged activism. Joel invites young leaders and entrepreneurs to not settle for vague answers, instead to truly believe and work toward a better future. He highlights the power of community during these times and affirms how there are so many more of us who care about the health and wellness of this planet than those who do not.

I hope you enjoy and appreciate this episode as much as I did. This is Marc Lesser. This is Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times. I’m here today with Joel Makower, and I’m just so happy to be here with Joel, who’s been an entrepreneur, a real leader in the realm of green business and sustainability. Welcome, Joel.

[00:02:06] Joel: Marc, it’s so great to be here. Thanks so much.

[00:02:10] Marc: Being in this space, a question I think I want to start with is what gives you hope these days?

[00:02:19] Joel: Wow. Well, hope is an interesting commodity these days. Let me start by saying that being in sustainability is an inherently hopeful profession. We wake up everyday thinking of solutions, big ideas, moonshots, if you will, or earth shots, some people call them. In that context I live a hopeful life, professionally speaking, but it’s hard because every day is this rollercoaster. Those of us in sustainability and in the world, it’s not just limited to sustainability, but every day is this rollercoaster of optimism and discouragement, hope and despair, exciting promising things and then some soul-sucking reality check and up and down and up and down and before long it’s time for lunch and rinse and repeat.

That’s the challenge, is how do we stay in that zone? I guess what keeps me hopeful is a lot of things. A lot of the businesses that are at the core of the work that I do are really leaning into solutions, not necessarily at the scale, scope, and speed we need, but it’s just a huge change from just even three, five years ago. Mostly what gives me hope is the new generation of youth activists that they’re really stepping into be leaders even before the point in life when they could be what we would necessarily call leadership in communities, in business, in society, in politics, or anything else.

Around the world, there’s just this amazing wave of not just activism, but really pro-activism, I guess, where the young generation, and I’m talking about the late teens, mid 20s, are really stepping up and trying to move things along. It reminds me a little of when you and I were much younger men, Marc, and the Vietnam War was raging, and I don’t know about you, but I did not know anybody who served in Vietnam, at least until later in life.

I was personally a conscientious objector, so I was exempt from selective service from the draft. Even without having that visceral connection, we were in the streets, I was at least, and protesting and marching and writing letters and sometimes doing little bit more civil disobedience kinds of things. I think that made a difference. Now we’re talking about something, changing climate and so many other things that are not 6,000 miles away. They’re visceral, they’re personal, they’re local as well as global. They’re immediate, but also long term. I think it’s really refreshing to see them really stepping into the role that I long hope that we’d see.

[00:05:47] Marc: I think maybe a little context for anyone who’s listening to this might be useful. I was just learning about your business and that you have a company that’s growing quickly, has 60 plus employees, and that you do conferences including one that you just mentioned called Verge, that had 4,000 attendees in Silicon Valley. I think on some sense it’s maybe, as you’re saying, not at the scale to change climate change, but it’s at a fairly large scale, the work you’re doing. I’m curious to hear both more about your business and also what you might say. You talked about how impressed you are with leaders, especially the young generation of leaders and how we might support those leaders and what you think are the qualities of leadership that you’re noticing that are most prominent.

[00:06:51] Joel: Great question. One of the things as we, if we’re talking specifically about the youth leaders and the young activism in general, one of the things that I think has naturally happened that is not that we need to change is that we invite them in. It’s not a token thing, there’s a lot of tokenism. Let’s bring in some young people, hear what they have to say, applaud them, thank them and then let’s get back to whatever the heck we were doing before that. I think really listening and engaging and being in for the long haul and inviting them in and over time, that’s really I think something companies have not done well, probably not just companies, but in society overall.

We still tend to treat them a little bit as a novelty act, and, of course, this is deadly serious stuff to them and should be to us as well. Part of it is we need to support them by, first of all, encouraging them, and second of all, by bringing them into conversations in a way that is substantive. It’s not just a matter of inviting a young person to a meeting or a conference or into some board or anything else. There’s a lot of power dynamics that are naturally in there, even if we don’t necessarily think about it, in terms of who’s paying the bill and who really can make the decisions. This is a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges, and I don’t know how well this has been done, is how do you, again, bring in young people, not in a tokenist way, but also with those power dynamics minimized and maybe it’s meeting on their turf, for example. There’s ways of mitigating if not leveling those power differentials, but those are important. I don’t think we’ve thought much about that yet. I haven’t seen a lot of good examples where we’ve done it. That’s a huge way in how we can be supporting them. That holds true for any marginalized community.

It holds true for people of color that have not been as much a part of the mainstream sustainability conversation, at least at the levels that’s taking place at say the big climate conferences or elsewhere. Certainly at the community environmental justice level, there’s people of color, the ones who are most affected typically are certainly people, the more marginalized economically or racially, we tend to bring them in a token way as well. The i word inclusive has become very big in business now. How do we make a transition to a just and inclusive economy? It’s a good word, but I don’t yet know that we really understand what that means, let alone how to do it.

[00:10:20] Marc: What might you say to these young entrepreneurs? What are the core qualities that you see in them, and that you would want to help grow and support in them?

[00:10:36] Joel: Well, vision is part of it. Enthusiasm and passion, as you may recall is a particular value of the young, but also just holding everyone accountable, and holding our feet to the fire, and not accepting vague or elusive answers to really important and sometimes difficult questions. I see a lot of that whether you’re an entrepreneur or an activist truly believing in a better future, truly believing in solutions, and understanding that the solutions that we need are not simply incremental.

We’re drowning in what I call radical incrementalism, or maybe random acts of greenness, where you’ve got a lot of different initiatives, not just environmental, but social as well, but they’re still a series of disconnected dots. You’re not really thinking systemically when we need to be thinking at the system’s level here. There’s just a lot more that we can be doing in terms of thinking in those ways, but really supporting the work of those who are. At the Verge conference you mentioned, actually at multiple conferences, we have some fast pitch competitions from entrepreneurs, primarily on what is now called Climate Tech, used to be called Clean Tech back in the day.

It’s not just renewable energy and electric vehicles or mobility, it’s a whole range of things, from food systems to circular business models, monitoring and verification systems that we desperately need to track our progress or lack of progress in fighting the climate crisis. It’s just a breathtaking breadth of solution sets, and it’s very exciting. Of course, like all entrepreneurs, they need support, they need mentoring, they need customers, they need to cross through what was often called the valley of death between basically proof of concept and getting to scale. We have so many solutions out there, and many of them are coming from the next generation of entrepreneurs. It’s very exciting to see and we need to make sure that as many of those as possible do not wither on the vine.

[00:13:14] Marc: It’s interesting you’re mentioning the excitement and passion that I can feel from you about all of the different solutions that are emerging, but I also heard you say some concern, deep concern about the lack of a more sustained effort or integrated effort. Do you have any sense how do we get there? How do we move more toward sustainable and integrated actions?

[00:13:46] Joel: Yes, that’s a really good question, Marc. I don’t have a pat answer for that at all. We need to be moving much further, much faster, and not just here in the United States or North America, but globally. Just in Egypt at the COP27, they’re fighting over important things, but not necessarily the right things. In the meantime, the problems keep getting worse and worse every year. We’re reaching tipping point, we’re reaching tipping points across a whole range of environmental systems, ecological systems, and we’re just not addressing those.

To some extent, and it’s really sad to say this, how bad do things need to get before people rise up, and step up, and stand up, and speak up, and show up in all the ways that we need. Of course, by that time, it’s kind of late, it’s already kind of late. The question now is not whether we’re going to face the impacts of climate change. That’s already happening. We’re seeing that all over the world, including here in the United States. The question is, how bad is it going to get, and what cost in every respect from financial to lives will that exact from–?

Everything of what we’ve just gone through in the pandemic, we’ve seen the ability to come together quickly, but the pandemic is a very different thing because it was here and now and daily and affected us personally in our homes and climate is a slower moving pandemic. It’s taking place over years and decades, and it’s not always possible to see the impact on our lives. Of course, our lives are filled with lots of other things we need to be worrying about. Kids and education and finance and health care and putting food on the table and meaningful work and clean air and water and respect and justice and everything else that really should be a human right.

It’s really hard for people to pay attention to something that may be existential, but it’s relatively far off. That’s the dilemma we face. As I said, I don’t have a solution about how we do this. I do think we’re seeing lots of signs of progress around the world from government, from the business community, from civil society, from homeowners, from all over the place, at the community level, at the national level, but it’s just not enough. The indicators are telling us that, I think it was someone from the UN called it a red light for humanity, or flashing red light or something, I don’t remember the phrase, but you get the point, and yet, it’s on the list of the top five things I need to worry about today. That may be number eight.

[00:16:54] Marc: The work you’re doing is so on the ground, bringing people together. You mentioned, not only do you get to work with lots of young, vital entrepreneurs, you also work with big companies, you do a lot of work, and I imagine with government as well, to some degree, but I know you work with companies like Google and Facebook, and Microsoft. It’s interesting. It seems like you also bring those factions together. That must be very heartening and exciting.

[00:17:35] Joel: Our tagline is we convene communities to confront the climate crisis. Convening is something that we do very well, whether it’s in small groups of 50 or 100 people, or 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 people, and I think some of these events will soon be 10,000 people in the next few years because they’re growing rapidly, and bringing them together. What we’ve learned about that, again, whatever scale is 50 or 5,000, is that the success is partly on having good content, or partly on giving people a good experience, whether it’s just a nice meal at a resort, or whatever the experiences or some extracurricular kinds of things, but it’s mostly run creating community.

People want to be part of a community and particularly with climate and sustainability in general. There’s a general understanding that we can’t do this alone, this is very much a team sport, and none of us can do this, and none of us knows everything. Companies need to collaborate, even competitors, and they need to engage their value chains. These are communities and sometimes there’s communities in waiting. I’ll just give you an example.

About four or five years ago, we launched a conference called Circularity for and about the circular economy, which is around how do we basically keep molecules in play through closing the loop or extending the life and making things repairable, or sharing things so that we get more utilization or bringing in more bio-based materials. It’s a fairly complex and fascinating and systems-oriented field. It’s been around for a long time. There’s been a big conference in the UK, a group called the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. We hadn’t done anything in North America. Nobody had. We convened for this event. It was in Minneapolis and we hoped for about 500 people.

We had to cut registration off at 850 because that’s all the fire marshals would give us, but I remember it was just an amazing moment in this hotel ballroom, packed hotel ballroom in Minneapolis on the opening morning of the first day. People were looking around saying, “Holy crap, look at us. I had no idea how many of us there are.” It was a community in waiting and we catalyzed that and nurtured it and we put a lot of work into nurturing communities.

It’s a little bit of a fake it till you make it aspect, and we call it a community, and then eventually it so becomes that. Now a few years later, there are people who want to come back sure to learn about circular economy and see the latest and greatest but really to be together and share and learn and commiserate and all of that. That’s really a lot of what we need is we need more community, whether it’s at the human scale or the corporate scale, or I suppose at the government scale, although that feels a lot harder these days.

[00:20:55] Marc: It’s interesting. I think there’s something so important about that “Holy crap, I had no idea”. I find it in the work that I do, it’s often the holy crap I had no idea that everyone else is dealing with the same problems, the same busy minds, the same doubts, the same imposter syndromes but there’s also that I think that recognition of how many people there are who care about similar things. I think we’d probably be blown away by the level of care that there actually is about these issues. Who doesn’t want well-being, sustainability, a healthy planet, but how to move that higher on the– Also, as you were saying, we need to put food on the table. We need to pay the bills and how to create enough, I think, community is probably the answer. I hear you saying the power of community.

[00:22:02] Joel: But all those things you mentioned about the people that you work with, Marc, the uncertainty, the imposter syndrome, the insecurity, all of that, that’s part and parcel of being human, number one, but certainly in sustainability. All these people, they’re passionate, they’re excited, they have increased influence in their companies and these are sometimes very, very large companies, McDonald’s and Walmart and Amazon and Google and General Motors and so on. At the same time, they constantly I think burdened with, “Am I doing enough? Is this really making a difference? Am I fooling myself? Are we tinkering at the margins? Are we fiddling wall roam?”

There’s this constant radio station 24/7, 50,000 watts playing in insider that brings that uncertainty. That’s one of the challenges at our GreenBiz conference, which we do every February in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it’s for and about the profession of sustainability. How do you become better at your job? I opened it with a little video, a skit basically, but it was two versions of me, one in color, one in black and white, one was optimistic one, and each one was a different camera. This is the most exciting time in my entire sustainability career. Boom. This is the most terrifying time in my sustainability career. Boom.

Finally, everybody, my company understands what I do and appreciates and knows who I am. Boom. All of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of me. I don’t even have time to think and anyway, on and on and on. That’s the world which hit people inhabit. It’s this rollercoaster I was talking about earlier, the ups and downs of just in the course of a single day, let alone a week and a month and a year. That’s what people go through. We need one another. That’s true as humans but I’m, specifically talking about these communities that we’ve helped catalyze and nurtured and convened.

People need one another. They want to understand exactly what you were saying, Mark, “Oh my God, it’s not just me. I’m not the only one who’s thinking this way. How do you deal with it?” There’s just this huge hunger and we’ve been very cognizant of that and have designed a lot of significant part of each of our events around community and around bringing people together and giving them the opportunities to share and as a result, people keep coming back and bringing their friends.

[00:24:54] Marc: You mentioned you were surprised by how many people came to that Circularity conference. How many people are coming these days?

[00:25:03] Joel: We had a bit of an interregnum called COVID but the last one we did, which was in Atlanta, we had just north of 1,000 people but it was still a time when there were a lot of travel restrictions and people couldn’t come. We’ll be in Seattle next June for the third in-person one, about the sixth year but the third in-person one. I don’t know. I’m guessing we’ll be 1,200, 1,500 people.

[00:25:36] Marc: Somehow it hadn’t dawned on me what a tough time it is to be in the conference business during COVID.

[00:25:45] Joel: Considering that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of our revenue come from bringing people together, we came through the pandemic in actually pretty good shape, pivoted hard and fast. The amazing team that we have that I don’t run of, as you said, about 60 people, didn’t say, “We can’t do that.” They said, “Okay, now we’re headed in this direction.” We pivoted to virtual. We continued to nurture the community. We innovated, added some new ways of bringing people together, new ways of making money.

In 2020, I think, our revenue dipped 4%. We came through it I think stronger than ever because we don’t really have that many competitors but some of them aren’t around anymore, let’s just say, or aren’t doing it as well as maybe they could have or certainly as well as we are. We came through it in really good shape and it’s, to be honest, a minor miracle.

[00:26:51] Marc: That’s great. I love the way you were describing how you opened that conference. I think of it in a way as it’s I think an important reality, important paradox to actually pay attention to the sense that on the one hand, everything is terrible. We’re going to hell in a handbasket. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be hopeful for. I think of it as not avoiding the pain and not avoiding the possibility, both. It looks like you described it as a rollercoaster, and I think it has that element to it and it’s also learning constantly, I think, acknowledging the pain, learning and moving toward the possibility. Then we end up in some way back in the pain but to keep raising the bar of the possibility, how can we do that?

[00:28:09] Joel: A lot of it is just learning how to live with duality. The duality of all these possibilities and solutions that just seem incredible and promising and exciting and impactful and may be exactly what we need to solve our biggest social and environmental challenges, at the same time just seeing the headlines and hearing the news and watching the world go by and knowing that things are messed up, politics and climate and the economy and everything. How do you hold those two things? This is not unique to sustainability, although I would posit that it’s those into sustainability live this more intensely.

It’s just part of being human now is how do we get through the day knowing that it’s a beautiful day and my family is doing well, I had a great day at work, I have enough money to pay the bills, I’m looking forward to a great meal tonight, and oh my God, the news, Trump, Ukraine, the economy, Elon, you name it, it’s just a mess. How do we reconcile those two things and how do we just move through them on a day-by-day basis? That’s just a challenge we all face every day.

[00:29:38] Marc: Yes. The human dilemma. Then there’s also our own on a very personal level, our individual level, our minds are a mess, our emotions are a mess and yet there’s something extraordinary about these minds and bodies and [crosstalk]

[00:29:58] Joel: The human experience.

[00:29:59] Marc: The human experience. The gift of our emotions, the gift of our imaginations. There is something about, I think the power, how potent the power of community that you touched on, that’s one of the real striking things from what you were saying today.

[00:30:16] Joel: Community doesn’t have to be 1,000 people or 50 people. It can be five people, it can be two. There’s a huge need for mentoring, not just elder to youth, actually youth to elder in a lot of times, or just peer to peer. Every one of us in sustainability gets calls, emails, social media, pings or friends of friends saying, “Hey, how do I get into the field? I want to be in sustainability. I want to be climate.” It’s now the most important issue in my future. I want to work in that and everybody wants, needs to be part of this. It seems not everybody, I live in a bubble, so I’m probably exaggerating.

I know I’m exaggerating, but, but there’s a lot more people that stepping into this than I ever saw and thought possible. If you just go on LinkedIn and search for sustainability or circular economy or climate tech, and if you had the benefit of what those returns and how many jobs there were three years ago versus now, it’s gone way, way, way up. What’s the opportunity to mentor? I get to do that a lot. Mentoring young people, both in my company and outside. We as a company try to do that. We have a program called Emerging Leaders where for each of our four annual events, we gift not just registration, but actually airfare and hotel to 10 young people of color to come to our event.

Our events are expensive. They were in the four figures at some point or another. It’s really interesting to see that. First of all, we don’t just bring them and we plop them into a conference of largely older white people. It’s not older, but older than them. We have a number of programs and nurture them internally. It’s just phenomenal. Not just the reaction of these young emerging leaders, but the reaction of the elders. Again, some of these elders are in their thirties and forties, but in terms of the opportunity that they see and the joy and satisfaction they get in helping bring others along.

We just need more of that. We need more of that in the world, but in sustainability where it’s really hard to learn because it’s really about everything. One of the remarkable things about sustainability, Mark, is that on the one hand, it’s about this incredible scientific complexity, geekiness nerdiness, that even the experts don’t fully understand just this technical complexity. On the other hand, it’s about our bodies and our families and our communities and our kids and our future and our world and what we eat and drink and all of that.

You probably know, and I’m sure most people know, that if you go too far in either direction, it’s either, it’s like, I don’t know, that’s just way too complicated for me to understand, or, wow, that’s just so California woo-woo. Integrating head and heart is through storytelling, whether we do that on stage or one-on-one. I think that’s a really powerful tool that we’re all learning how to use better in terms of how do we tell those stories. How do we integrate head and heart and increase transparency and share the sets and share ideas.

[00:33:49] Marc: Well, I was going to ask you as a way of closing the question that I started with, which is what gives you hope? I have to say, in a way, you just answered that. Hearing you and the work that you’re doing gives me hope. Is there anything else that you just want to add as a way of closing this today?

[00:34:12] Joel: Well, if I gave you hope, Mark, then my work is done.

[00:34:16] Marc: [laughs] Your work is never done, unfortunately.

[00:34:20] Joel: I know. I wish it was, but you get the point.

[00:34:24] Marc: Thank you. It makes me, I really want to come to your conferences. I get the sense that you’re really good at creating community and providing hope and paths for people. Thank you so much for your work.

[00:34:39] Joel: Thank you for all that you do too, Mark. Really appreciate it.

[music]

[00:34:47] Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations, you’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

[00:35:11] [END OF AUDIO]