An Interview with Joel Makower

HK; Why did you start your business in the field of environment?

JM; Well, I’ve been self-employed for 35 years, first as a journalist, and then in the book business, publishing business, and the thread that has woven throughout my career is the intersection of business, technology and society.

I started off first from a consumer perspective. I was a consumer reporter talking about the impacts on consumers, and I quickly realized that consumers are interesting to me, but the business, really, the machines of commerce and innovation and technology are more powerful, and the consumer willingness to change much was less interesting. That’s something I’ve always been interested in, and I’ve also been interested in environmental issues for a long time.

I grew up here in the San Francisco area, and this is a great area of environmental consciousness, as you probably know. I was just raised with it, and this was just interesting to me. I wrote a book, The Green Consumer, in 1989, about the new wave of consumers who are going to be shopping with environmental interests in mind, and then I realized that, at least in the US, that there was no real green consumer movement, but that the companies were doing a lot of things that were very interesting, and nobody was bringing all that information together and making it accessible, and amplifying all of the company achievements. That’s really what led me down this path.

In 1991, I launched a monthly newsletter called The Green Business Letter, and then the web came along in the later 90s, and I launched a website around that, and grew into GreenBiz.com, and then around HYPERLINK “http://greenbiz.com/”greenbiz.com grew this whole constellation of projects and partnerships and products and services, and so, that’s where we are now.

HK; I notice that you’re focusing on the topics of sustainable business, green energy and green marketplace. Why do you focus on these topics?

JM; Well, they’re all interesting to me, number one. Number two, I think they’re all misunderstood by both consumers and businesses, and partly because they’re misunderstood, there’s a great need for education and clarity and a balanced perspective on what those things are and what those things aren’t, and what we really need to bring all three of these things to scale, to the masses. They seem like they’re all one piece but they’re kind of different parts of a bigger pie. So the short answer is, I take on topics that interest me personally, and that’s certainly, those are three.

HK; Are you focusing on your works in the United States or as an international movement?

JM; Well, I certainly look internationally, but, in terms of the audience that I address, it’s primarily North America. It’s not that the rest of the world doesn’t matter; it certainly does. It’s just that there’s so much going on here and there’s such a big audience here, that we still haven’t really scratched the surface.

HK; Certainly there is a gap among nations – especially between developed and developing countries. Can you tell me about your sense of this difference?

JM; Well, that’s a big question. First of all, the gap is closing, partly because some of the developing countries are leapfrogging us, they’re jumping ahead of us with new technologies and innovative government policies and other things.

Americans have been saying for years if everybody in the world lived like we do, it would be unsustainable. And for a long time that was just an academic question. Now that’s no longer academic, because you’ve got billions of Chinese and Indians, and others who are coming into the marketplace and want to live like us. So the question is probably not going to be, well, how do we keep them from consuming, or how do we, in North America or developed countries, consume less? It’s how do we balance, how do we innovate our way so that we can create new technologies that have fewer trade-offs?

Not just products and technologies, but business models. For example, why does everybody need to own a car? Cars sit idle 80% or 90% or 98% of the day, and you have to find a place to park them. Why can’t we figure out a way of car sharing? That’s happening, but in China or India, instead of going from ownership to sharing, as we have, why don’t just leapfrog that and go right to sharing? There are a lot of opportunities that are going to help that. These are complex political, economic and personal and philosophic issues that nobody can seem to get their brains wrapped around, let alone figure out.

HK; In terms of green business, what kind of possibilities will be in the marketplace? For instance what kind of product will be hot?

JM; It’s kind of like, ten years ago, saying, what’s going to be hot in the Internet? Because, what’s happening right now is, that we’re starting to see a mash-up — a confluence of energy technology, information technology, building technology and vehicle technology. They’re starting to come together in extremely innovative ways that over the next ten years, certainly over the next generation, are going to transform how we live, work and play, just as much as the Internet has.

And trying to predict what’s going to happen when there are a million car sharing customers in the US or China or anywhere else and they are electric cars, and there are a million cars together. They create a mass storage for renewable energy during the time when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, and how that enables the reduction of building new power plants or running power plants less, because you can tap that during the times of peak power use, and how that enables people to make money from their cars that are sitting there.

And then, how those cars or electric bikes, or whatever the vehicle is, have next generation GPS and anti-collision technology that allows them to fit closer together on the road, which allows them to increase the density of vehicles to the point that they might even be more dense than a bus. The individual vehicles might fit together in terms of the spacing and the people per square foot more than mass transportation, but each individual has their own ability to go somewhere.

So, this isn’t just some crazy idea. These are the new technologies that are being developed right now. There’s no end, to answer your question about what the cool technologies are going to be. There may not be, or some of them will be consumer products like whatever the next, the ten year version of clean technology is to today’s iPod. But some of those are just going to be enabling technologies behind the scenes.

HK; Talking about innovation and entrepreneurship, is there a difference between normal business and green business?

JM; Well, first of all, people use the word innovation like they use the word sustainability. Everybody talks about it, and everybody means something slightly different by the word. For some companies, innovation represents incremental eco-efficiency improvements, and for some, it’s blowing up the model and rethinking the business. So, innovation means many things to many people, just like sustainability does.

Right now, the overlap between green or sustainability and innovation is still pretty weak. We’re doing an event in San Francisco in October called the GreenBiz Innovation Forum, that actually addressed the intersection between sustainability and innovation, and trying to teach innovation professionals about sustainability, and trying to teach sustainability professionals about innovation.

So, I think we’re just now starting to understand what your question even means, let alone what the answer to it is in terms of, how is green innovation different from plain old innovation? And maybe it isn’t, but in some cases we still need to understand how the two fit together.

HK; From what you are saying, I guess green business is just at the beginning, and I want to ask your opinion — how long does it take to settle down as a form of business?

JM; Well, in some cases, there’s no such thing as green business. There’s a series of different practices, and some of those practices, like recycling, that used to be a big deal, are now much more mainstream, or buying recycled paper. Just small things where energy efficiency is now part of the fabric of business. Not every business does it, but the smart ones do, and the ones that want to get ahead. And so, little by little these things creep into normal; they become normalized, and they become part of the fabric of business.

So, I don’t know, in general, there will be some time when there’s no such things as green business, there’s just business. Probably. Think about it. About 25 years ago, everybody was talking about quality, right? American business was learning from the Japanese, and everyone talked about quality, and Total Quality Management – TQM. There were hundreds of books and conferences and consultants and newsletters, and it was pre-web, so there weren’t websites yet, and blogs. But it was just part of the fabric, part of the discourse.

Now you don’t hear about quality very much, but that doesn’t mean quality’s gone away. Quality’s now embedded in how companies operate. It’s not even something that’s optional; it’s just how you have to operate. I think that green business is going to be like that too.

HK; I want to talk about your personal thoughts. As my research is on the law of success, I was just wondering about your definition of success.

JM; Well, my personal definition of success is across multiple dimensions. The past 35 years has been a constant parade of projects and partnerships and ideas, and just things that I do. There’s never been a shortage of opportunities. So the question is, how do you filter these things and how do you think about which ones to do?

I sort of have five different dimensions that I think about. Not formally – I don’t have a spreadsheet. In no particular order: I want to learn, I want to make a difference, I want to make money, I want to have fun, and I want to work with really great people. When you’re starting off in your career, one out of five of those is great – I hate my job but I’m learning a lot, or I’m not making any money, but I love the people I work with. As you get older, and you become more focused, your criteria increase – that money is important now, or learning’s really important, and so on. If you’re lucky enough, as I believe I am, that you want all five.

By the way, it’s a three-dimensional metrics, so I’ve had projects where I’ve been thinking about them and I say, okay, well, I’m learning a lot, having a little fun, making okay money, I think we’re making a difference, and I really like the people. So, there’s threes and fours, an occasional five. Again, that’s not a formal process I go through, but it’s sort of what goes through my mind as I think about things I’m doing or could be doing. It’s concept re-evaluating it. That’s not a loss so much as it is a process.

HK; That’s very interesting. I’ve got a final question. I’m just wondering, what would be your advice to achieve success in general life?

JM Well, I think you have to be adaptive. If you go in and say, I want to do X, very specifically, that may be hard and you might find yourself closed off to opportunities. At that same time, you have to be focused. If you just go in and say, I want to change the world, or I want to work in clean technology, well, what does that mean? Are you an engineer? Are you a marketing person? Are you a sales person? Are you a designer? So, where do you fit?

I think part of it is to have some skill sets – and by the way, the more skill sets, the better, because today in business, you need to be able to do multiple things. Very few people just do one thing. You have to be able to think about design, but also finance and marketing. Or you have to be able to think about operations, and also energy and engineering. Or maybe, if you’re an engineer, you might have to think about biology in terms of how would nature design something?

In a world of ecology, or business for that matter, where everything is inter-connected, you have to be able to connect things much more than in the past. In the past, you could fit into a box, and you could say, I’m an engineer, that’s all I’m going to do or I’m just going to make the most efficient, best designed widget. But now, you have to think about how, where it comes from, and where it’s going, and how it’s made, and the energy and carbon and toxic and material inputs along the way. That’s just one example for a product.

The same is true for any kind of business or even if you’re in government or a NGO; it’s still the same, that the more skills you have, and yet, at the same time, the focus you can have – but not too much – I think you’re going to be putting yourself in a good position. Again, the ability to connect the dots is really important, and to understand how what you’re doing fits into the big picture.

I think it’s also important to have a personal story. In other words, I don’t think most of us can answer the question, “what’s the story that you get to tell if you succeed?” Not necessarily the story about changing the world, not necessarily the story about making large sums of money, but your personal story about, I made a difference, I worked on a great team and made people laugh, and whatever it is. What is the story? What does success look like?

It may be that your success for you is to have a job and to go home at the end of the day to my family, forget about the job until the next day, and that’s a perfectly good story, because it’s about family, it’s about compartmentalizing and balancing work and non-work, which not everybody does well. But I don’t think most of us have that vision of success.

HK; Can I ask just one more question? I’m just wondering about what you said “don’t be so specific.” Does that mean that being a specialist is dangerous in the 21st century?

JM; Well, it’s not a yes or no answer, because we need people who are really good at specific things. We need the best engineers and scientists and finance people and business brains, entrepreneurs. It’s good to have a focus, but I think you have to also have good peripheral vision to be able to see what’s going on next to you and around you, and to be able to connect that to what you’re doing so that you’re not so focused on what you’re doing that you lose sight of the connectivity to other opportunities, other people even within your own organization, or even on your own team.

I think in the past we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble, both individually and as a society, by becoming too focused on narrow things, and not necessarily connecting the dots, and not necessarily understanding the results, the unintended consequences of focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

So, I think the key word is balance – being a generalist, but having specific things, of having an idea of what you want to do, but not excluding other opportunities, of being focused on a task and on a mission, but understand the bigger picture and where it all fits.