[00:00:00] Marie: Hello, Joel, welcome to Companies that Care.
[00:00:02] Joel: Thanks so much, Marie. Great to be here.
[00:00:04] Marie: It's really an honor to be able to talk to you. The first time that I met you was at GreenBiz. You’ve really accomplished a lot in your career.
So I’m really excited to hear more about that. Let's start out by having you just introduce yourself to our listeners. How did you get here in your life and career?
[00:00:20] Joel: Yeah. Hi, I'm a big believer in that old Lennon McCartney lyric that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I'm a journalist by training.
I've been self-employed for my whole career, which is now a long time. If you look retrospectively at the connective tissue of what I used to do was I was a freelance magazine journalist, and then I went in the publishing business.
And then sort of discovered green, if you will, about 1989. The through line for most of it seems to be around the intersection of business technology and society. So just for example, my first book back 41 years ago in 1981 was on the health effects of office environments.
So it was about a lot of things that we talk about with our network; later became green buildings and energy efficiency and healthy buildings and ergonomics and sick building syndrome or indoor air quality and even machine paced work and office workers rights.
I liked seeing where those things come together: business technology and society. I studied journalism because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to be if I grew up and my hypothesis at the time was that sticking my nose in other people's business, through that, I would find something that I was good at and interested in and fit with my values and lifestyle.
And for the first 15 years or so, it turns out what I was good at and interested in, and all that was sticking my nose in other people's business and writing about it. But 1989, I had the opportunity to create the U S edition of a British bestseller called the green consumer guide. And had a weekly syndicated newspaper column soon thereafter in about a hundred newspapers about know the so-called green consumer movement.
And I quickly realized two things. One, there was no green consumer movement in the U.S. I realized, as I looked over my shoulder, I was kind of standing there by myself. And number two, that the companies I was being asked to come in and talk to about this stuff for themselves, grappling with a lot of issues around energy and waste and toxic pollution of all sorts.
And that was interesting to me. So I started at 1991 to what we would now call a dead tree, snail mail newsletter, the green business letter, chronicling what was going on in industry in this and things evolved from there. And it's all of a sudden about 1993, I remember looking back and sitting there and thinking about the original hypothesis and so.
Oh, wow. I'm home. This is what I was looking for, but I found it or maybe it found me. So it's been this great journey. And since then, it's just, really been where I needed to be. And I wake up every day, still excited about this whole space of sustainable business that we'll get into.
[00:03:00] Marie: Wow. That really astonishes me that you've got on your own, your entire career. That must have taken a lot of chutzpah to do that,
[00:03:08] Joel: it wasn't chutzpah Marie so much as persistence and slogging through the tougher times. It was more than offset by just the ability to live my life, the way I want and work the way I want when I want. And I work hard, maybe harder than a lot of sort of nine to fivers, but I just never could figure out what job and what kind of organization I would fit in. I'm probably that square peg that never found the round hole so I made my own
[00:03:36] Marie: I love that. I mean, I worked for CH2M HILL for 28 years so I'm more used to the corporate environment and I just put out my own shingle a few years ago. So I just really impresses me that you've been on your own this whole time. And that you've built this incredible structure with GreenBiz, which we'll talk about.
But going back to your childhood or your young adulthood, what was your relationship to the environment and was there a particular experience that you had that made you decide to focus on that?
[00:04:01] Joel: I grew up in the San Francisco bay area in the fifties and sixties. And my parents I don't think they would call themselves environmentalists, but they were definitely outdoors types. We did a lot of camping and my parents were Sierra club members again, back from probably the fifties. It wasn't beaten over our heads, but we really appreciated things. I went to one wilderness camp, way up in Northern California in the Trinity Alps, almost as far as where you are in Oregon you know, no electricity, a lot of backpacking and really got to look at trees and geology and things. You know that, again, this was in my formative years in ages 12 to 15 or 17 actually.
So I don't think I would have said I'm an environmentalist, cause that word probably didn't even really exist back then, except for maybe a few hearty souls. But again, when this topic came along in my life, it just made sense to be there.
[00:04:54] Marie: Yeah. I grew up going to camp as well and having that relationship to the outdoors and I feel like a lot of our children are lacking including my own children. So let's talk about GreenBiz. How does she get the idea to start it and just take us through that journey?
Because now it's really quite enormous and it has a huge impact on sustainable business.
[00:05:14] Joel: As I said, I had this newsletter and then through that newsletter, I started to gain a little bit of a following and I wrote several books on that environmental business and corporate social responsibility in the early mid 1990s.
And then I'm old enough to say the sentence ‘and then the internet came along.’ And, it turns out that I had always been sort of an information pack rat. I had actually built some consumer almanacs in the seventies and done some other things in the book world.
And all of a sudden I realized that I was not really an information pack rat. I was a content aggregator. Much cooler in this digital world. And so I realized that there was so much information coming out from so many sources, government, NGOs, academia, but also obviously the companies themselves that wasn't being captured.
So I decided to create this online resource center called greenbiz.com. Now this was about 1998 and there was no business model at the time for giving away information on the internet. And as you may recall, there was the.com crash about a year or two later. So, I had never done anything nonprofity in my life, but I created a 501C3 non-profit to create this website andit came and had a good following.
And then, in the mid two thousands, I met a guy called Pete May who's a long time advertising magazine website B2B sales guy and he's also from Oakland. He approached me at a conference and said, you know, there is a business model now it's called advertising.
So I ended up buying the intellectual property from the nonprofit…real money. And starting this company with Pete mostly to monetize the website. And that's how we started. And then later on, we started doing events and eventually we realized that events is where the business is.
GreenBiz group, now we're about 50 employees, based in Oakland, California, but we have employees all over the country now, largely thanks to the pandemic. This remote world has shown us that we can work from anywhere. It's a lot less intimidating to have people who can't be in our physical space.
We do three basic things. One is the news and information that comes out every day and the seven weekly newsletters on topics like circular economy or sustainable finance or transportation, mobility, energy, and such. We do, in that vein, webcasts and webinars and podcasts and all the basic things that a media company would do.
The biggest thing we do is events and we have four event brands, one called GreenBiz, which I think you've been to Marie down in Phoenix, every February and that's for and about the profession of sustainability. We have one on the circular economy called circularity this year. It'll be in Atlanta, and travel around a little bit.
We do one on sustainable finance and ESG called Green Fin. It'll be in New York this year at the end of June. And then our biggest event is called Verge. It's about climate tech and it's an expo and five or 10,000 people there. At the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California at the end of October.
So the four events that we do, a number of online events, just virtual events as well. So we have the media, the events. And then the last piece is we have a membership group of sustainability executives from large companies, about 90 of them that we bring together pre and post pandemic.
It's been online for a while for obvious reasons, but we'll be coming back together, physical space, multiple times a year. For what we call peer-to-peer learning and what they tend to call group therapy. But it's this really interesting group of companies. I mean the tech companies, apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, we have three airlines, two railroads, five banks, three media networks, McDonald's, General Motors, B2B companies that most people including me had never heard of. And it's a really interesting group of companies and they're all kind of the same in the sense of the kinds of things they're working on and struggling with. And so learning from one another turns out to be a very valuable experience.
So we have that called the GreenBiz executive network, and we're just now in the process of creating some more affinity networks: first one's on circular economy, and then we'll do a number of others. So, we are for and about business, mostly larger companies, although small and medium sized companies, there's plenty of those who come to our events and the website, and really helping them move the needle on the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges.
[00:09:28] Marie: So much to be proud of what you've created. I've heard amazing things about GBEN. I remember when Brandy Wilson, I don't know if Brandy's still a part of it in her new role,
[00:09:36] Joel: She is at JR Simplot potato company up in Boise, Idaho. Brandy's a terrific member in very good standing in our world and a delightful person. Just really, one of the most thoughtful people in sustainable business that I know..
[00:09:53] Marie: Yeah, she's great. I miss working with her a lot. So in your most recent newsletter, you wrote about becoming immune to most mind-numbing headlines, which I think so many of us can relate to, but two stories out of India caught your attention. Can you share more about that?
[00:10:07] Joel: Sure. There were two headlines I guess in early May. One was that record temperatures in India caused toxic landfills to burst into flames as the company grapples with heat waves and the second, and these are really both about the same thing, but the second headline said a 17 story tall mountain of garbage spontaneously combust during the Indian heat wave.
These bring back to mind something we don't talk a lot about, but it's just the dangers of excessive heat that we're increasingly going to become part of our landscape around the world. And particularly in places as we are speaking now. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, where temperatures are in mid forties Celsius, I guess that's the temperature where humans can't survive because their bodies are unable to cool.
But it's not just there. We certainly saw that in the United States, uh, Pacific Northwest where you are, back in 2021, uh, all the way up to British Columbia, where we seeing this wildfires, obviously in California, in March this year, half of Mexico saw temperatures above 140 degrees and that was this year. So it's just the ability for people to work. Uh, lots of people have to work outside. Farmworkers most notably, but construction workers and others. The crops that we need to feed ourselves often can't survive or the droughts that leads, which again goes to water. It goes to crops, goes to everything, has a life. And so, I was just really calling out that what's going on with heat and there's a number of efforts, to at least start to think about that. The Biden administration has a new heat illness prevention campaign, and they're also developing a national standard on heat stress for workers.
Right now only a few states, California, Minnesota, and Washington have those standards. City of Miami just hired their first chief heat officer, basically, to all of a sudden, have someone who's on point, to take the lead on climate and heat related issues.
So this is just becoming a bigger issue and sometimes it takes a headline like, you know, a 17 story tall mountain of toxic trash spontaneously combusting, to really say, wow, this is something we need to be looking at. So that's what I try to do. And in my weekly column, and the weekly newsletter I write is just bring some of those issues to light.
[00:12:28] Marie: You know, my husband and I got engaged in India. We traveled there in 89. So I have a real affinity for India and, concerned about what's happening in the Southern hemisphere around climate change. Yeah, very concerning. So GreenBiz provides incredible opportunities for environmental, social, and governance professionals to network learn from each other and push forward with the work.
What lessons have you learned along the way in creating this organization and helping it grow?
[00:12:54] Joel: Well some of it is that, you know, none of us knows as much as all of us. And so there is combined wisdom and insights and knowledge, when bringing people together, this is also unlike a lot of topics, most other topics in business. Where there's just a lot of it's pre-competitive or non-competitive where companies who would never come and say, look, here's how we, designed the marketing campaign or here's how we're manufacturing cars more efficiently would definitely say, Hey, come on over. Let's show you how we did this employee engagement initiative or any number of other things?
There's just a lot of high desire to share because everyone understands that crystal ball there is strength in numbers. There's also strength in diversity as there is in nature where the more we know about different ways that other people are doing to reach some of the same goals, the stronger and better everybody gets.
On the events side, one of the things we learned, Marie is that the power of an event is certainly in the programming and giving people knowledge that they need. And it's certainly in giving them a good experience in terms of the venue and the food and all that kind of stuff. But it's mostly in creating community. And that sort of goes back to what I was saying before about the pre-competitive nature, that this is very much a community that wants to come together.
And I think to maybe a large extent, that's the benefit, the secret sauce, if you will, that GreenBiz provides. We created a community that did not exist. There are now, but there certainly weren't 20 or 30 years ago, associations of sustainability executives from big companies.
We didn't even talk about sustainability. They were EHS environmental health and safety or environmental, or corporate responsibility. And so, helping people understand that they're part of something bigger than themselves. We all can get tunnel vision. We all are head down and whatever the heck we do every day at work.
And it's sometimes hard to see the bigger purpose or that we're not alone or that we're part of maybe even a revolution that even the people in it don't really readily. See. And so that's a big part of this is how do you create a community and then drive that community to go further, faster, and really give them the tools, the resources, the inspiration, maybe a little fear of now and then, or after, reaming them out a little bit from the stage.
But inspiring. And equipping them and informing them and engaging them and maybe even entertaining them along the way. So that's what we realized is important. Lots of other lessons about, what it takes to move people that aren't necessarily unique to sustainability, but we're finding great value in understanding those in the sustainability space.
[00:15:36] Marie: I remember Brandy talking about how in GBEN there's a confidentiality pact that they're not going to share information outside. I would imagine that protects the type of communication that is shared in that group.
[00:15:48] Joel: It's not exactly right, Marie. You can share anything you want, but we operate under the Chatham House Rules, which is very common these days in business. It basically says that you can share anything you want that takes place in this room, or this event, you just can't name any individual or organization that’s there.
That gives people the freedom to talk openly without necessarily, some of these things are legal issues or they're very sensitive around politics or company politics or any number of things and either internal or external to the company. One of the things, when you get a bunch of sustainability people together, they talk about what they failed at and not trying harder to do and what they learned along the way.
So these are things that don't want to get out. But the lessons are ones that we openly share. And I think that's a very valuable part of this is the ability to, it just for example, one of the things my colleague, John Davies, by the way, GBEN you mentioned that the acronym for the GreenBiz executive network membership group, we have. So if you're a member, you send a question to John.
I'm just wondering who else has encountered this problem, has done this or knows about this. He'll anonymize it and send it out to all 90 members. Two or five or 20 members will respond. He'll compile those anonymously those instead of out to all 90 members.
Marie: Wow. That's great.
Joel: Everybody gets to learn what everybody's learning. And that's a very valuable part of that in addition to the in-person and online meetings. So there is a great spirit of sharing, but obviously some of this stuff is sensitive.
[00:17:16] Marie: I love that. That's great. I also read that you went to plant-based food at your big GreenBiz? But that had some mixed reactions.
[00:17:25] Joel: That was this year, at the GreenBiz event in Phoenix, Arizona. We had about 1500 people there and always trying to model zero waste events, like 99.8% zero waste.
There's always this teeny bit that we can't seem to figure it out. But we also, in the sense of trying to model the world we all want to live in, or at least we model the change we want to see in the world. We went to plant-based and vegan and vegetarian food. It wasn't a screaming success for a number of reasons.
One was that I think that the food wasn't that good, and it had something to do with the fact that the kitchen crew at the Marriott hotel where we had this event in Arizona, they didn't have experience with this. And we were asking them to do something they'd never done before.
And a number of other things. But I think the bigger issue is that we went too far, too fast. Was my opinion, not speaking for the company, but how you go to events and they have a buffet line and there's, whatever the chicken or whatever it is. And then there's a vegetarian or vegan alternative.
I think we probably should have flipped that script and had a vegan, vegetarian thing, but have food protein fish chicken or fish or something for people who want. Or need it in some cases that animal protein, physiologically, and show what vegan or plant-based food can be, but not necessarily, as it were shoved down there.
And so, we learned some things there. A lot of people were very, very appreciative and, some people were annoyed. And, I have to say, I did not like the food myself and, unwittingly we ended up doing the opposite of what we intended, to show that you can eat well delicious well-prepared nutritious food without eating meat. And instead we showed that it's still not ready for prime time.
[00:19:12] Marie: Lessons learned, I mean, you can make really excellent vegetarian food, but you need to know what you're doing,
[00:19:18] Joel: We have a conference coming up called Circularity and I'm doing a main stage interview with Levi's um, Loreal and a company called, Human space, that, is called Tried, Failed, Learned.
You know, companies always like to get on stage and talk about “we did this and it's, you know, we changed this.” They don't like to get up and talk about what, didn't work, butyou know, failing is part of success. I used to be involved in the venture capital world and there's an old adage that if your business ends up looking like your business plan, you probably did something wrong, because you weren't open and adaptive and all that. Anyway, I think, there's that failure certainly of the food at GreenBiz 22 event was very much a learning experience and we're going to do it right next time, or at least we're going to try.
[00:20:04] Marie: Great. Well, let's talk a little bit about the pandemic and global climate change and what are some positives and negatives that you've seen come out of those two converging.
[00:20:16] Joel: Well, the negatives are obvious, you know, just the horrific, world we live in on both fronts, climate, and the pandemic.
But I think what, what we all started to see is that they were similar. They were all about, early concerted action. The need for that, we talked about, flattening the curve and we certainly, onto the pandemic and that applies. In fact, I wrote a piece about flattening the curve on climate.
We learned, the interconnectedness, what happens when we get things right? When people come together to solve a huge, pressing critical life-threatening problems and challenges. We learned about the unintended consequences of you do something over here and all of a sudden something, you weren't expecting happens over there.
So I think, it was a lot of learning there. I mean, the negative is that we waited too long. Things got out of hand before we fully understood the magnitude of things. So when some people did understand the magnitude, even before we had the pandemic, they knew something like this would inevitably happen and it would be potentially horrific.
But even when it started happening, there were people who said, I don't know, let's not rush into this. And then the political nature, where everything is now political, of the pandemic as it is, we all know very well. Just as it is with climate, where some people, the vested interests, number one, want to protect to protect what they have.
And also the Democrats supported it so it must be bad. And same with Republicans. And so, we’re in a not very healthy place. Understand this: we're in a very unhealthy place right now as a society, as a world where we seem unable to take on huge challenges.
And I think the pandemic has laid bare that fact. As we now think about this slower moving, but more impactful pandemic called climate change. It's going to be a bigger challenge than we thought. Not just because the problems are gonna maybe be worse than anyone had anticipating, but our ability to take it on is going to be challenged.
Marie: And I think another similarity that I see as the way that it affects communities of color or people in less developed countries or things like that as well.
Joel: Yeah, absolutely. The marginalized communities are always the one to suffer.
Most of the people who had couldn't work from home who had to wash dishes or clean offices or working retail or anything else. They're often the lowest paid workers and they suffer the biggest impact and we let them. Shame on us.
[00:22:43] Marie: Let's talk about the world of plastics. Back when I was at CH2M HILL, we were really trying to eliminate bottled water and stuff like that. And I'm discouraged to see how it seems like we've taken our eyes off that, especially during the pandemic. What are you seeing with the issue with plastic? Do you think that we're going to review our focus? What's happening.
[00:23:03] Joel: Well, yeah. Yes and no. I mean, there's probably not a question you can ask me in this space Marie where the answer doesn't begin with it depends. I mean, depends on, you know, there's the half full and the half empty.
I mean, I half full. I mean, companies have made big commitments on reducing or eliminating plastic. And you have to understand before I get into this, that the enemy here is not plastic. It's plastic waste. Plastic has lots and lots and lots of benefits and sanitation and safety and lightweighting, and, just making so many things possible.
I mean, I'm sitting in my office and I'm looking at lots of things made of plastic; well, not a lot, but a few. So the issue is plastic waste. And during the pandemic, we had a lot of disposables, but we're coming out of that, so I think these company commitments are going to continue.
They have to continue and there's lots of people watchdogging them. The half full part or the half empty, I guess. So the bad news is that the plastics industry has very big plans and they're scaling up in a significant ways to, what do you call it? That crack natural gas in order to create…these are billion dollar plants in order to create the precursor ingredients for plastics.
These plants are now in production or in the planning stages, all over the world and a number of the United States. Because the plastic industry thinks they're going to double their output of plastics in the next decade or two. And, that goes to global demand, not just here in the United States.
So, there is an about turn that needs to take place. There's a reckoning that's going to happen as we learn more about ocean plastics and the impact, not just on fish, not even just on seafood Marine life, but on climate change and the ability for the ocean to absorb the greenhouse gases.
It naturally does. This is another collision course, that's a sort of a subset of climate change and a subset of everything else where we're just looking at these as much as the world of business can be a force for positive change. It's still very much a force for negative change, and that's a duality in which we in sustainability live every day.
At the same time the number of people who are climate deniers and all that it's dwindling quickly, and they may be disagreements over what needs to happen and how quickly.
But people are recognizing the problem and they're starting to be more cognizant and the need for some of the basics, recycling and composting and reducing and reusing and all those good things we've been talking about for decades.
[00:25:24] Marie: That's good news. So that's a good segue to my next question, which is what hopeful things are you seeing in the areas of climate technology?
[00:25:32] Joel: Well, this is what gets me out of bed every day. There's just so much going on. It's very exciting. We have a whole event, I've mentioned Verge on climate tech, on what's taking place in food. It's not just plant-based foods, but, indoor gardening, the ability to grow food at scale with far far, I mean like 90%, fewer inputs.
Much closer. There's a Gotham Greens at one big company based in New York. Although they have now a large football field size or bigger greenhouse, here in California, they have one on top of a whole foods on the roof of a whole foods. Didn't go on us in Brooklyn, New York.
I mean, talk about food miles. I mean, that's food steps, you know, they're growing stuff that they’re selling downstairs. That's kind of cool. And when you think about food resilience and food security and solving the food desert problem where a lot of poor communities don't have any grocery stores, this is very exciting technology.
When you go into carbon removal and making things out of carbon plastics and textiles and building materials. You look at the obviously, vehicles and fleets and not just the electric, but a number of other things and how that goes into to not just cars and trucks, but airplanes and other things ships, and the way we're deploying technologies to get rid of those very polluting, transatlantic and transpacific liners, obviously energy and it just goes on and on and on.
And a lot of these are just technologies that are not green technologies like artificial intelligence or machine learning or satellite technology that are now being deployed to help address significant issues and also create business opportunities in doing that. So that's the really bright spot here.
We could talk for an hour just on climate tech. and all that seeing in some of the coal companies and the billions of dollars of investment. Coming into that, maybe it's trillions by now, but every week there seems to be a new multi-billion dollar venture fund or investment fund.
The Biden administration is really going gung ho on helping find those insertion points to seed funding. Jigar Shaw, the loan officer at the department of energy, himself a very successful clean energy and climate tech entrepreneur, is just finding that, where would some federal money or government money just really make a difference in capitalizing not just a business, but an industry. And so it's just a very exciting world.
[00:27:49] Marie: That's so great to hear, especially because I mentioned I have three kids and when I talk to them about climate change, I usually talk about technology that gives us some hope on how we can heal the world. And speaking of healing the world the world, my next question's a little more fun.
So you found a magic lamp, you have three wishes, three ways to heal the world. What are your wishes going to be?
[00:28:09] Joel: And I guess the third one is not that I get three more wishes.
Well, I guess the first one Marie, is that our political leaders and our business leaders can look beyond their own self-interest and the next quarterly returns or election cycle, to really do the job that we want them to do in terms of thinking about. Not just profits or electability, but also the good of humanity.
And a lot of the obstacles we're facing are the result of just the intractability of that political and campaign funding and all that kind of stuff. If people are looking out for their own interests. So that would be number one is looking beyond our own self-interests for the business and political leaders, beyond the next election or quarterly earning cycle. I guess another one is what I was talking about before is that that all of us can find common cause in our collective future and saying, okay, we may not agree on means, but can we at least agree on the problems and then say, okay, there's no one way to fix them.
There's probably lots of ways. And let's, do a all of the above category and stop saying that this is unworkable, so it's bad. Maybe if we work on it, we can make it better. And let's just not dismiss things because there are, we are a Washington solution, solutions out there.
We just aren't necessarily deploying them at the scale scope and speed that's needed. So let's find common cause in our collective future. And I guess the third is maybe a slightly more personal, but it's also collective, is that we all find peace, both inside us and around us. I know that sounds a little California woo. And I'll cop to that, but it's also, what does that feel like live that look like, how do we get there and how do we through that piece, you know, get the calmness and the will and the determination and the persistence. To create a great, generous world of abundance, that doesn't have to harm our or bump up against the carrying capacity of the planet.
And it incorporates all as adjust, transition, as we like to say to a sustainable economy. But I think to do that requires a certain amount of, maybe it's just talking about this first two again and revisiting, but you know, finding the peace within ourselves and within the circles in which we operate, I guess that would be my third wish.
[00:30:32] Marie: I love those. I wish I could get you that magic lamp. I support those. You are in the business of working with connecting and amplifying the work for companies that care, which is the whole purpose of this podcast. So what advice do you have for people who would like to create companies that care or change their companies to be companies that care.
[00:30:51] Joel: Well, first start somewhere. It can be overwhelming. There's so much to do. And it can feel like a distraction, but start somewhere, just jump in. And I think a lot of people are afraid to do that. Companies that care I also say it, it rubs me a little bit, the wrong way.
Not that companies shouldn't care, but companies are not people they're not beings and companies will never care. But I guess that's what you're getting is companies where the people care and the company is headed in that direction. I think, it's important that first of all, to understand the impact you have in the world as a company, both positive and negative, and to amplify the positive and figure out how do you reduce the negative? And, it may be, in waste and emissions. So that are the traditional things we think of when we talk about environmental issues, but it also may be in the way we treat people or perpetuate certain inequities in the world. Once you understand them, then first of all, you don't have an excuse for inaction, but then the second thing is to create a plan. What are you going to do about it? And what's the plan? Is it a bold audacious plan? Is it just an aspiration or do you actually have targets and timetables and say, you know, by the end of by 20, 25, we will do a, B and C and you know, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing.
We're going to totally eliminate inequity. But what are you going to do for your part? What's your fair portion or maybe unfair portion of solving the problem. And then the third part, once you know the issues and you're doing something about it as how you're talking about this stuff, both internally and externally, educating people, engaging, learning from others, sharing, not just what you're doing, but why you're doing it so that because people say, you know, that seems like, sort of, a distraction, why are you doing this and say, well, there actually is business value here. We can improve our products. We have some innovation we can attract and retain talent.
It's actually saving us money. It's actually making us money because we're finding new business opportunities and bringing others into that conversation. So I like to say, what do you know, what are you doing? And what are you saying? Those are the three questions that I would bring to the table.
Marie: Yeah, that's great. The name Companies that Care is shorter than Ccompanies with People that Care. I totally agree with you though. On that, I think it's probably because we're word people that we think that way. So do you have anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners?
Joel: Well, wherever you are in this conversation or on this journey, thank you. First of all, for whatever you do, whatever you, you know, concerns and you're curious, and you haven't done anything, thank you for the curiosity. Now, you know, how do you step into that curiosity and do something or do more if you're already doing something and do the right things, you know, we all tend to think that we can still recycle our way to solving climate change, man, not so much, not at all, actually.
And so, are we doing the right kinds of things, so, but thank you for that. You know, I always say that the activist groups have five words that if they said to companies, we would get a lot further with. Thank you; now do more.
And we at GreenBiz, we have lots and lots of free resources, as they say, we have seven weekly newsletters, way more than you're going to want, but, but there's some good ones in there. Just go to greenbiz.com/newsletters.
We have three or four or five or six free webinars every month on a whole range of topics, and daily news. And of course, there's conferences and things that cost money, but I'm not going to pitch those. Just come and learn. And it's pretty interesting and enlightening and hopefully inspiring as well.
[00:34:14] Marie: Yeah, your newsletters are excellent. I highly recommend. I always learned something. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been a great conversation.
[00:34:22] Joel: It's been my pleasure, Marie. Thanks so much.
[00:34:24] Marie: Okay. Have a great day. Thank you, Joel.
Joel: All right. Take care.