Seeley Conference to Highlight Environmental Footprint

Here is the official news release that went out this week regarding this year's Seeley Conference:

The 25th annual Seeley conference will be held June 26-29, 2010 in Ithaca, NY. The theme this year will be: Floriculture's Environmental Footprint: An Inconvenient Truth or Consumer Opportunity?

For several years, we’ve heard about global warming and climate change as issues we need to address. And the debate has had arguments spanning from compelling science to just a natural cycling of weather patterns. Now, legislators the world over have begun to amend the dialog to one of measuring the carbon footprint. Scientists have added water to the equation and now are beginning to speak of measuring the entire environmental footprint.

One can hardly open the newspaper, watch the news, or go anywhere without running into some mention of what has become the most notable environmental issue of the decade, said Dr. Charlie Hall, holder of the Ellison Chair in International Floriculture at Texas A&M University, who is coordinating this year’s Seeley Conference.

For our industry, the issues are more compelling. We think of ourselves as being the original green industry, but we often fail to promote that, perhaps, partly out of fear. Do we know what our environmental footprint really is? Are we as green as we think? Do we have an opportunity for better promotion, or do we need to get our house in order first?

Of course, the real issues revolve around what it means for our individual businesses -- our bottom lines. Will the outcomes of the legislative debate impact our businesses? Are there modifications we need to make to stay in business once the debate ends and the laws are enacted? Will our businesses be able to remain financially solvent or will regulations force us out of business?

Hall adds that business owners should not think of the climate change debate as merely an environmental issue. Instead, they should view it as a market transition and as in any market transition; there will be winners and losers. With the water and carbon policy debates occurring locally and nationally this year, this year’s conference is all the more critical to attend, Hall notes.

As always, the think-tank atmosphere of the Seeley Conference will allow for plenty of interaction with fellow industry leaders regarding these timely issues. For more information regarding the Seeley Conference and this year’s program, the conference website is www.hort.cornell.edu/seeleyconference, or Facebook users can refer to the Seeley Conference fan page.

Bill Gates on Sustainability at TED 2010

One of the day’s strongest talks at the most recent TED conference was by Bill Gates. He’s spoken at TED previously on a variety of topics, among them education and malaria (last year he set free some mosquitoes from the stage to make a point about the latter). This time he directed his mind toward energy and climate; in particular how to get CO2 levels to zero. He presented an equation in which:

Total CO2 = People x Services Per Person x Energy Per Service x CO2 per unit of energy.

So, if he’s right, one of the variables on the right of the equal sign has to go down to zero. He argued why it won’t be any of the first three and focused on the last one, CO2 per unit of energy. He spoke of reducing and converting fossil fuels, managing nuclear energy in ways that are safe and don’t promote proliferation. He’s investing in these areas and he was clear that he’s early on in thinking about his problem. This one is a must watch.

Fewer sick days in green buildings

Nearly $5 per square foot per year. That's the estimated savings by tenants of environmentally friendly buildings because of fewer employee sick days, according to a study cited by the U.S. Green Building Council. About 55% of respondents in the study also indicated that employee productivity had improved in green buildings.

Source: U.S. Green Building Council

Say Goodbye to the McMansion

Times have changed, and the square footage of new American homes is dropping. Super-sized homes are out, and efficiency and versatility are in. MarketWatch's Amy Hoak reports on the latest building trends.

Big snow could fog up economic view

The massive snow storms that blasted the East Coast this week could reverberate in the economic data for a couple of months, clouding any assessment of the health of the economy. Click here for the full story.

Mostly good news...

The latest from Bill Conerly:
Source: http://www.ConerlyConsulting.com
Charts are in pdf at http://www.ConerlyConsulting.com/charts.php

Maintaining Brand Stature in a Crisis

From The Core: (This is a produce industry blog, but the point made here has application to the green industry.)

If you’ve been living under a rock or don’t have access to television, radio or the Internet, you might have missed the recent news about Toyota. First, they announced depleting sales due to the recent recall of eleven vehicle models following the malfunction of a floor mat entrapment and sticking gas pedal. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, came the question about the functionality of the brakes on all of the company’s hybrids, including their famous Prius model. Ouch.

Toyota’s public relations crisis worsens on a daily basis, yet the company continues to push through each blow by responding apologetically and sincerely through several media vehicles to reach their target audiences – current and potential owners of Toyota automobiles.

As if they wrote the book on “crisis management,” Toyota started with a massive public relations campaign with press events in both the United States and Japan featuring politically correct statements from top executives for television, print and digital media hunters to push. On YouTube, the President and COO of Toyota North America posted a heartfelt apology video to Toyota owners promising to “fix the problem.” On the company’s website, a page is devoted to the recall and provides customers with a “Customer Experience Center” phone number.

Taking ownership for its problems, Toyota has exhibited a concentrated effort to own responsibility, taking control of its story and communicating with honesty and regularity directly to consumers. Toyota’s response comes across as apologetic and believable. But have they done enough to sway public opinion amidst the media storm? To find the answer, I sought consumer conversation on Facebook and Twitter. What better way to gauge consumer attitude? The disparity in reaction on the social media sites surprised me.

On Toyota’s corporate Facebook page, proud Toyota owners posted photos of their beloved automobiles and convey their undying faithfulness to the company, no matter what. With a quick Twitter analysis of conversation surrounding #Toyota, I find exactly the opposite, with statements that are primarily negative in nature discussing the company.

As a marketer in the fresh produce industry, I think about the public’s reaction to the spinach and tomato crises that occurred over the past few years. What if the spinach crisis hit today? Would it be a one-sided media story? Are we fully engaged in consumer conversation through the available media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to educate consumers, increase awareness and tell our story?

So what? In an industry where food safety is paramount, I wonder if we can all learn something from the Toyota crisis. Are we prepared for a major food safety crisis and recall from a public relations perspective? What will you do if your company’s name is making headlines and changing consumer perception for the worse about your brand? Or even if it’s not your company, but rather a commodity that you provide? Does your company have a crisis management strategy in place?

Fire Yourself Today

From today's Harvard Management Tip of the Day:

Management shake ups, while disruptive, can be good for a company. They bring in fresh perspectives and require that leaders take a hard look at their own performance. Don't wait for your company to get in trouble. Instead, fire yourself. Not literally, but think about what you would do in your position if you were to start anew. What would you do differently if this was your first day on the job? Taking this step back can help you evaluate the strategies and approaches you are currently using, see things that are too difficult to see when you are entrenched, and re-energize you for the challenges ahead.

Who said economists aren't funny?

From the PBS News Hour...click here.

January 2010 Retail Business Weather Round-up

“The most important and statistically significant factors for stronger retail sales performance in January are the consumer confidence index followed closely by less severe weather,” said Bill Kirk, CEO Weather Trends International. Last year the January index was at an all time low (38) which in part explains the disastrous retail SSS results of -4.8% according to ICSC’s tally of 60 major retailers vs. this year’s confidence index of 53. While 53 is nothing to get too excited about (90 is a strong index indicating a strong economy) it’s still better than last year and combined with the more favorable weather trends retailers should post gains in-line to higher than expected when results are announced Thursday, February 4^th. Over the past 25 years a stronger than expected December (December 2009 brought very strong industry gains of +3.6% according to ICSC) is followed by a stronger than expected January 82% of cases so the math suggests more retailers will again be in positive territory!

For a complete business-weather roundup click on the link below for a detailed PDF summary report:

U.S. January 2010 Retail Business Weather Summary Report

How reducing payroll taxes increases employment

Today CBO released a letter to Senator Robert Casey, Jr., in response to questions he asked about policies that could be adopted to increase employment. Specifically, Senator Casey was interested in a policy option to reduce employers’ payroll taxes for firms that increase their payroll, and how different design elements of this type of policy might affect its impact on employment.

In CBO’s January 2010 publication, Policies for Increasing Economic Growth and Employment in 2010 and 2011, the agency analyzed the effects on employment of several policy options, including giving employers a one-year, nonrefundable credit against their payroll tax liability for increasing their payrolls in 2010 from their 2009 levels. (To finance Social Security, employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent of an employee’s annual earnings up to a maximum.) Such a tax cut would lead to increased employment through a number of channels. For example, some firms would hire more people because hiring would be less expensive; others would lower prices to increase sales, thus spurring production and increasing the demand for labor; still others would increase compensation for employees, which would encourage more spending.

CBO measured the effect of that policy (and others) on employment as the cumulative effect on years of full-time-equivalent employment for each dollar of a policy’s total budgetary cost. (A year of full-time-equivalent employment is 40 hours of employment per week for one year.) CBO estimated that, through its effects on wages, prices, and profits, the policy would add 8 to 18 cumulative years of full-time-equivalent employment in 2010 and 2011 per million dollars of total budgetary cost, measured in terms of lost revenues. Thus, the budgetary cost of increasing employment by one full-time person for one year would probably be between $56,000 and $125,000. Although such a policy would have economic benefits in the short run, it would also add to already large projected budget deficits. Unless offsetting actions were taken to reverse the accumulation of additional government debt, future incomes would tend to be lower than they otherwise would have been.

Policymakers could structure legislation that reduced payroll taxes for firms that increase employment using various combinations of caps on the total amount of the tax benefit a firm could receive, limits on the size of firms that would receive the tax cut, methods of measuring payroll growth, and other elements. In today’s letter, CBO separately analyzed several key policy design elements and concluded that, per dollar of budgetary cost:

• Capping the size of the tax cut for individual firms would decrease the employment effect;
• Restricting eligibility to small firms would decrease the employment effect;
• Limiting the eligible wage base would not change the employment effect, but would alter the types of employment fostered by the policy;
• Basing the tax cuts on the total payroll in 2010 for new hires rather than on the net change in a firm’s payroll from 2009 to 2010 would have a similar effect on employment;
• Offering larger tax cuts in economically depressed areas would probably not significantly alter the effect on employment;
• Raising awareness of the tax change would increase the employment effect; and
• Increasing the complexity of the tax change would reduce the employment effect.