of Shou Bao Zhuang. It contained many subdivisions, each hosting and recycling a different kind of trash—glass, metal, paper, tires, old clothes, plastics, and foam materials.   Families lived in the trash compounds for cheap housing and easy access to goods. Even though migrant workers in general are on their own, with no rights, no land, and no legal protection, a powerful hierarchy has firmly established itself in the trash-collecting business. Mr. Ku, the owner of Zheng Jun Hotel where I stay during my visits to Dandelion, began his career collecting trash. Due to his keen sense of business and shrewd maneuvering, he is now a ... posted on Jan 20 2013 (8,869 reads)

He had a warm smile and an open demeanor, and was wearing a hat that said he was a Vietnam vet. Like everyone else on the subway car I looked down, hiding in my iPhone. A monologue ran through my head about how his story couldn’t be true, and how the smartest, best thing I could do was nothing. This wasn’t an academic question for me. Just two years before I had left the private sector to work at Acumen Fund, a new nonprofit that fights global poverty by investing in businesses that serve the poor. Acumen’s investments had brought safe drinking water to millions in rural India; had helped hundreds of thousands of farmers in Kenya earn more money; had created... posted on Feb 14 2013 (19,571 reads)

process, and focusing on smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. What do you need to "unlearn and let go of" so that increased focus on what you have could make you very effective and successful? Pursue unlikely connections and look for odd juxtapositions. The eye surgeon Dr. Venkataswamy, also known as Dr. V, created a revolutionary approach to curing cataract blindness in India by studying McDonald's. He was able to develop a high-efficiency, standardized, replicable business model that organized patients in operating rooms and broke the procedure down into a series of discrete processes so that nurses and doctors could treat large patient volumes with high qualit... posted on Apr 2 2013 (40,572 reads)

whether they’re monetary resources, in-kind materials, our time, our energy, or our home. When we bring these into the flow of sharing as a community, it can serve and support all of us. Believe it or not, but I do: we have everything we need already. We also support people who want to look at possibilities for learning outside the monopoly of schools and colleges. All around our communities are an abundance of resources. They come in the form of artisans and artists, farmers and business people, home-makers and spiritual guides. Each brings wisdom, creativity, curiosity, imagination, skills, vision, and experience, which can be shared across generations. For example, Shi... posted on May 8 2013 (15,129 reads)

has been touted to be a cure for nearly everything in life, from depression, to memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and more. At the same time, similar to the topic of sleep, I found myself having very little specific and scientific knowledge about what exercise really does to our bodies and our brains. “Yes, yes, I know all about it, that’s the thing with the endorphins, that makes you feel good and why we should exercise and stuff, right?” is what I can hear myself say to someone bringing this up. I would pick up things here and there, yet really digging into the connection of exercise and how it effects us has never been something I... posted on Aug 27 2013 (59,273 reads)

from the inside out. This lack of knowledge constitutes a blind spot in our approach to leadership and management (Figure 1). Slowing Down to Understand At its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend to and subsequently respond to a situation. But most leaders are unable to recognize, let alone change, the structural habits of attention used in their organizations. Learning to recognize the habits of attention in a business culture requires, among other things, a particular kind of listening. Over more than a decade of observing people’s interactions in organizations, I have noted four diffe... posted on Jul 9 2013 (95,412 reads)

the surfer ends up in the water. There's no other possible way to wrap up a ride. That got me thinking: What if we all lived life like a surfer on a wave? The answer that kept coming to me was that we would take more risks. That difficult conversation with your boss (or employee, or colleague, or partner, or spouse) that you've been avoiding? You'd initiate it. That proposal (or article, or book, or email) you've been putting off? You'd start it. That new business (or product, or sales strategy, or investment) you've been overanalyzing? You'd follow through. And when you fell — because if you take risks, you will fall — you'd... posted on Jun 13 2013 (37,106 reads)

including how the burning of garbage releases particulates linked to asthma and other respiratory problems. Rossano Ercolini. Photo by Goldman Prize. Over the course of the next 30 years, Ercolini led a David-versus-Goliath struggle, with education as his slingshot. In the 1990s, waste incineration was embraced by the Italian government as well as by big environmental organizations, all of whom bought into the premise that it was a safe and effective technology. Big business and the mafia also supported incineration because of the 20- to 30-year lucrative contracts and large government investments it involved. The conjunction of economic and political interest... posted on Jul 27 2013 (23,041 reads)

for ways to do my part for Gaia. I’ve also learned that when doors magically fly open, you’d better walk in with your pragmatic hat jammed firmly on your head, your practical feet encased in sturdy shoes, and your sleeves rolled up for the grind of making (and keeping) it real. You Don’t Need Money (Then Again, You Really, Really Do): Time, energy, vision, and love will go an astonishingly long way, but funding counts. “Your balance sheet is feedback,” a business adviser bluntly told me. “It shows whether you have a viable model." True, the only meaningful metric is the thriving of people and planet. And the financial system is fictive (the... posted on Apr 13 2014 (13,499 reads)

robots — which she says are on the cusp of reframing our sense of responsibility to other human beings. Again, that's all at onbeing.org. Coming up, more on how creating boundaries with technology can teach and nourish our children; also, strategies for growing up in our relationship with email. Ms. Turkle: I've known a lot of people who declare email bankruptcy. You basically say: There are 10,000 messages in my inbox; yours is one of them. If you have continuing business with me, please send me another email. Ms. Tippett: You do use this phrase "sacred spaces." One moment of insight that I had about technology was when I was talking to Jon K... posted on Jul 1 2013 (29,443 reads)

is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity. This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendab... posted on Jul 7 2013 (39,724 reads)

making your usual, to-do list of tasks for the day, try making a second private list of what it is that you really want in life each day. Discover what you really feel passionate about and make that an essential focus and energy source in your life. Doing so means that passionate endeavors will become a source of personal pride, which will help guarantee that your life will never be “meaningless” to you when you look back on it in the future, as too many economically successful business people have sadly reported. 4. Transform shyness into social engagement. Practice becoming the socially engaging host at life’s parties instead of resigning yourself to be its per... posted on Jul 25 2013 (120,701 reads)

what matters most. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says, "I keep things focused. The speech I give every day is: 'This is what we do. Is what we are doing consistent with that, and can it change the world?'" Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, has this piece of advice: "Pick one thing and do that one thing—and only that one thing—better than anyone else ever could." We can derive a great deal of power from developing a laser focus on our top business priorities. It's one of the attributes that sets apart the average businessperson from the more successful one. 2. Ruthlessly block out distractions. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova ... posted on Aug 12 2013 (154,412 reads)

president of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has written, “Avoiding our relationship with nature only hastens the inevitable: the death of the natural world.” One way to acknowledge our love for nature, grieve for its destruction, and kindle compassion is through ritual. Ritual can help us recognize beauty in people and in our surroundings and inspire one another to develop creative responses to heal ourselves and our world. A Path toward Change In October 2000, shoppers and business people in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, were startled when the wail of bagpipes suddenly filled the air. Men and women wearing black began to file silently down the street toward the st... posted on Aug 26 2013 (16,918 reads)

the grammar of social media to help people share some of the essential resources of modern life: cars, skills, rides, experiences, housing, money, work, workspace, clothes, books, and more. At the same time, the rapid adoption of smartphones turned sharing into a real-time, on-the-go, place-based experience. The Internet, instead of becoming a separate utopia, was unlocking the potential of individuals and idle physical assets in offline communities. Network technologies, shared access business models, and dirt cheap production gear are giving individuals the same productive power and market access that only big corporations could command just a few years ago. In the midst of crisis... posted on Sep 4 2013 (18,264 reads)

first little book for not very much money, I then decided I might be able to do that for a living — and got 900 rejection letters in a row. And then for the next seven to 10 years, my company was basically on the verge of bankruptcy the whole time. There were, you know, really dramatic stuff like when the vice president of AOL threatened to have me arrested if I came to her office to apologize for something we had screwed up. Or having to fire our biggest client who was two-thirds of our business just because they were jerks. And we decided that we didn't want to work with jerks and become the kind of company that was good at working with jerks. But what they all had in common,... posted on Sep 27 2013 (29,488 reads)

Business Simplicity: Simplicity means that a new kind of economy is growing in the world, with healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds (home-building materials, energy systems, food pro­duction, transportation). As the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is being com­bined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of developed nations, it is generating an enormous wave of green business innovation and employment. 7. Civic Simplicity: Simplicity means that living more lightly and sustainably on the Earth requires changes in every area of public life — from publi... posted on Oct 22 2013 (54,857 reads)

level, while good, is just not enough. Change on the scale required by the severity of today's planetary and social crises requires a broader vision and a plan for addressing the root causes of the problem. To do that we must stop thinking of ourselves primarily as consumers and start thinking and acting like citizens. That's because the most important decisions about stuff are not those made in the supermarket or department store aisles. They are made in the halls of government and business, where decisions are made about what to make, what materials to use, and what standards to uphold. Consumerism, even when it tries to embrace "sustainable" products, is a set of ... posted on Sep 28 2013 (31,837 reads)

local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless, local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be demonstrated readily enough.  For example, when a community loses its memory, i... posted on Mar 4 2014 (22,385 reads)

with the network pattern. When you look at the network of an ecosystem, at all these feedback loops, another way of seeing it, of course, is as recycling. Energy and matter are passed along in cyclical flows. The cyclical flows of energy and matter — that’s another principle of ecology. In fact, you can define an ecosystem as a community where there is no waste. Of course, this is an extremely important lesson we must learn from nature. This is what I focus on when I talk to business people about introducing ecoliteracy into business. Our businesses are now designed in a linear way — to consume resources, produce goods, and throw them away. We need to redesign our b... posted on Feb 26 2014 (27,482 reads)