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Feb 27 is Oscar night.  Pundits have been busy predicting outcomes for the last several weeks now.  I am sure you have a few of your own, and may even have bet a few quid with friends, family, and colleagues.

But have you checked out the Hollywood Stock Exchange's (HSX) predictions?  The HSE is a digital community that allows members to buy and sell "stock" in the nominees.  Each nominee is given a stock symbol.  Community members trade the stocks they like and can therefore bid up, or down, the price of various nominees, based on their beliefs and preferences.

So, who's leading the pack?  Around 14:00 EST (Feb. 27), the "stock price" leaders for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director, and hence the favorites to win are:

• Best Picture - The King's Speech; ticker symbol A1PTKS, has the highest quote, selling at H$17.49.  Yup, the HSE has its own currency!  The closest competitor - The Social Network (A1PTSN) - is trading at a distant H$2.42.  Close to a sure bet, would you say?
• Best Director - David Fincher (A1DDF1) for The Social Network, trading at H$13.39.  The closest competitor - Tom Hooper (A1DTHO) for The King's Speech, trading at H$8.43 (though on a downward tick).
• Best Actress - This one seems to be a no-contest.  Natalie Portman (A1CNPO) for the Black Swan is way ahead of the pack; trading at H$20.16 and rising.  All other contenders are trading in single digits.
• Best Actor - is shaping up as a no-contest as well.  Colin Firth (A1ACFI) for his role in The King's Speech, is trading at H$22.19, and rising, and commands a huge lead over his competitors.

There is still time to play and win; play money that is.  Those who successfully pick winners will get a play money dividend of H$25. Either way, whether you play or merely watch tonight, I will be back tomorrow comparing the actual results against predictions.  The HSX traders seem to be very sure of themselves, they are not hedging their bets.

  

UPDATE: I've posted an entry on the $300 House on the Harvard Business Review site: The $300 House: The Co-creation Challenge >>

One of my professors, the late C.K. [Prahalad], used to say that "managers are so preoccupied with operating efficiently that they don't even think about value in terms of the consumer's experience."

Sadly, despite all the brouhaha about customer-centricity, most companies still operate in a highly product-centric manner.   The difference between the two approaches, using C.K.'s words follows:

The traditional company-centric view says: (1) the consumer is outside the domain of the value chain; (2) the enterprise controls where, when, and how value is added in the value chain; (3) value is created in a series of activities controlled by the enterprise before the point of purchase; (4) there is a single point of exchange where value is extracted from the customer for the enterprise.

The consumer-centric view says: (1) the consumer is an integral part of the system for value creation; (2) the consumer can influence where, when, and how value is generated; (3) the consumer need not respect industry boundaries in the search for value; (4) the consumer can compete with companies for value extraction; (5) there are multiple points of exchange where the consumer and the company can co-create value.

All is not dark and bleak of course.  Several countries, cities, companies, and nonprofit oranizations are beginning to take the initiative to collaborate with their customers to co-create value in fields as diverse as healthcare innovations (Norway), improving the quality of life of 50+ year olds (Scotland), Swasthaya Chetna; Hindi for creating health awareness (Hindustan Lever), and Crashing the Super Bowl (Frito-Lay).   

In my new book, I devote an entire chapter to co-creation beyond the business world.  I share case studies of how the new platforms of customer collaboration and co-creation can be applied equally effectively beyond the business world, to drive collaborative innovation efforts in fields such as education, health care, energy, alleviation of poverty, and sustainability. The consumer-centric view is gaining momentum in non-business environments as countries, regions, and cities experiment with collaboration to co-create more promising futures for their people and the environments in which they live.

One example of a project which will be using co-creation at the bottom of the pyramid is the $300 House (disclosure: I'm an advisor).

The project, which came to life based on the remarkable response to a blog entry in Harvard Business Review, will take into account customer needs in various countries - from Haiti to India and the Philippines.  I don't expect to see a single house design emerge, but rather a variety of local designs - each designed to meet local needs.

How do you engage the customer at the bottom of the pyramid?  By spending time with them, and understanding their experiences, challenges, and frustrations as they tackle everyday tasks and chores that so many of us take for granted. Or like A.G. Lafley was fond of saying - by doing your laundry in 25 countries! 

Let's just pause for a moment to acknowledge that your company's customer of the future may well be at the bottom of the pyramid.  You would be well advised to adopt a customer-centric mindset and develop a system of initiatives to engage her.

Come October, Springer will launch my new book, Collaboration and Co-Creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation.  In this blog post, I'd like to briefly introduce the book - what motivated it, its structure, and essence.  I'd also like to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate my collaborators.

It's a rare day when some media personality or academic guru doesn't proclaim - this is not your father/grandfather's economy!  It isn't. The reason it isn't is because the ethos (defining characteristics) of today's world is different.  Several C's and a T; connectivity, creativity, collaboration, community, and technology, especially the Internet, best capture the ethos of the world we live, play, and work in.  At the center of this maelstrom lies a new and empowered customer that best exemplifies this ethos in motion.

Companies today are dealing with a new type of customer; one that is more educated, better connected, and infinitely more creative and resourceful than at any time in the past. Today's customers expect to be heard; they are unwilling to be mere consumers, passive and invisible at the end of a long value chain - instead they want to be collaborators and co-producers of the products and services they consume.  They don't want to merely watch TV reports on Haiti's earthquake, they also want to report on it and use their social media skills to mobilize aid.  They don't want to merely watch the Super Bowl game, they also want to win Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl Ad Contest" by creating ads for Doritos.  They don't want to merely moan and groan about Dell's lousy customer service - been there, done that - they also want to shape Dell's customer service and product innovation priorities by participating in its IdeaStorm community.   

Consequently, customer collaboration and co-creation is a hot item on the strategic agenda of most companies.  They have been fired up by books like Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, Crowdsourcing, We-Think, etc., that applaud and celebrate the rise of the empowered customer.  They hear pundits urging them to rethink the way in which traditional firm-centric activities like marketing and innovation should be implemented to win the empowered customer's business.

But for most companies the key question is how?  There is little out there to help them migrate from applause to implementation.  What does a company do after it gets all excited and motivated about collaborating with customers?  How does it engage them in re-shaping its marketing and innovation efforts? A few market leaders, like Unilever, IBM, Hallmark, and Audi have figured it out.  But the majority of companies are still huddled at the starting line debating how best to implement collaborative innovation programs.

About the Book

Collaboration and Co-Creation helps bridge this gap.  Using a simple and easy-to-understand framework, Listen-Engage-Respond, and numerous case studies from around the world, the book helps readers shake hands with a core set of thinking and action tools for implementing collaborative innovation programs in their own companies.  It nudges readers to view collaborative innovation as a business process that can be systematically designed and implemented, not as some spontaneous, self-organizing outburst of periodic customer benevolence.  The book was written with a show, don't tell mindset.   Hence the emphasis on sharing, discussing, and guiding using a variety of business and non-business cases, examples, and stories, so as to make the content eminently readable and interesting.   

Collaboration and Co-creation is a compact eight-chapter book.    

• Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage.  Using case studies like the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, birth of mountain biking, open source software, and Hallmark, chapter 1 discusses the evolution and dissemination of collaborative innovation in contemporary businesses.  Chapter 2 presents the Listen-Engage-Respond framework and illustrates it with case studies involving the Phoenix Suns and Unilever's Marmite.

• Chapters 3 through 6 provide an elaboration of the Listen-Engage-Respond framework.  They discuss each of the legs of the framework, once again liberally supported with a large number of short (a few paragraphs) and regular (a few pages) case studies.  A few examples being - Barak Obama's election campaign, International Flavors and Fragrances, Nike, Audi, Blizzard Entertainment, Nokia, P&G, Frito Lay, NASA, Ellen Degeneres, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.

• Chapters 7 and 8 aim to end the book on an emotional high.  Chapter 7 discusses the implications of becoming more open and collaborative on traditional firm-centric activities like marketing and innovation.  Supporting examples and case studies drawing on the experience of Unilever, Crayola, IBM, Sun, and Ubuntu are provided to help support the discussion.  Chapter 8 takes the reader on an eclectic journey beyond the business world.  Using examples ranging from the country of Denmark, to a clinic of innovation in Norway, to IBM's innovation jams, the chapter discusses how the Listen-Engage-Respond framework is just as effective and relevant in co-creating value in the fields of education, healthcare, economic growth, and global welfare, as in co-creating advertising based on UGC (user-generated content).

The book's Foreword is by Mr. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever.  Leading business executives and thought leaders from the academic and consulting worlds, like Vijay Govindrajan, Nicolas Mirzayantz, Jacob Buur, Vince Barabba, John Hagel III, and Steve Howe, who had a chance to review the content before it went to print, have provided their insights and frank assessment of the book's framework and ability to foster customer-centric transformation.  We hope you will find it just as useful in leading customer-centric transformations in your own companies.

Collaborators

Writing a book is seldom a solo endeavor; it is always a team event.  Collaboration and Co-creation is no exception.  I would like to acknowledge and celebrate Deanna Lawrence and Gabriela Head's valuable contributions to researching the myriads of cases and examples that breathe life into the book's content and their participation in triggering and writing various chapter drafts.  

This collaboration has a very compelling underlying story that deserves to be shared.  Deanna lives in Michigan, Gabriela in Arizona, and I in Virginia.  I have known and worked with Deanna for several years, so working remotely with her was not a big deal.  But till today, one book and hundreds of calls later, I have yet to meet Gabriela.  And barring a two-hour meeting over a cup of coffee while in Arizona to attend a wedding, well after approximately 70% of the book was written, neither does Deanna have any previous history of working with Gabriela.  Needless to add, we are working hard to synchronize intent and calendars so we can all be in one place and toast the launch of the book in October.     

As the famous line in the classic short story - Face on the Wall - states, truth is not only stranger than fiction, but also greatly more interesting.  Yes, it is true, honest and productive work relationships can flourish, despite time and distance barriers.  They merely need a steady and constant infusion of trust and commitment.  Make no mistake, though, it is difficult, but infinitely rewarding.  I was not surprised at all therefore to learn that the latest "Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize" for the best article published in 2008-2009 was awarded by the editors of Sloan Management Review to the article  - How to Manage Virtual Teams.  Folks, if anyone is looking to do more research on this subject and needs first hand experiential data, please talk to us.  We will be happy to tell all!

In the coming weeks, I intend to feature interviews with companies and individuals who shared their stories with us and also provide more details on selected aspects of the book.  Stay tuned!

In Rethinking Marketing: From Marketing Products to Cultivating Customers my co-authors and I wrote about how companies must make products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships.  We also made the point that for ongoing customer value innovation to become a part of the DNA of the organization, it is important that the company move from an internally focused concept of customer value creation, to a more open, collaborative model of co-creating value with customers and other key stakeholders.

In much the same way, I'm more convinced than ever that we must rethink the purpose of modern businesses.  As the global financial crisis has so bluntly shown us, "maximizing shareholder value" is no longer a sustainable purpose for business.  We doubt it ever was.  But back then, Jack Welch was preaching the gospel and companies were lapping it up.  Interestingly, even Jack Welch is no longer singing the "maximize shareholder value" song. This is the age of consumer capitalism and the triple bottom line.  The new gospel is people, planet, and then profits.  Near term thinking that just does good for the company without consideration for the environment, or the social social systems that a company operates in, is not a responsible option!    

So where should we look for new role models? 

Across the border to the north, and across the Atlantic to the sub-continent.

 

Recently I read an article describing Ratan Tata's visit to Canada to deliver the first Thomas Bata Lecture on Responsible Capitalism.

The late Thomas Bata and Ratan Tata, and their corporations have a lot in common.  They epitomize socially-conscious leadership. 

The Tata story has been well covered in this article, which sums up the vision as follows:

Since its founding in 1868, Tata has operated on the premise that a company thrives on social capital (the value created from investing in good community and human relationships) in the same way that it relies on hard assets for sustainable growth. With every generation, Tata's executives and managers say, they have nurtured and improved their capability for "stakeholder management": basing investments and operating decisions on the needs and interests of all who will be affected. For Tata, this means shareholders, employees, customers, and the people of the countries where Tata operates -- historically India, but potentially anywhere.

These are not platitudes. Tata has won the goodwill of the people not by talk, but through action. Key decisions are based on the impact on society.  The company's humanitarian actions, for both employees and non-employees, following the dastardly November 2008 terrorist attacks on the Taj hotel are well documented, and have won raging applause from even the most anodized critics of business. 

People first, business second.  Both Bata and Tata teach us that it is possible to be a global powerhouse without sacrificing one's soul.  It is not necessary to separate social good from business well being, as so many companies do.

Dartmouth's Professor Vijay Govindarajan explains the Tata Nano as a social innovation:

Through his actions in the Tata Nano project, Ratan Tata has demonstrated that capitalism can have a soul--the profit mission and the social mission do not conflict and can, in fact, be pursued simultaneously. 

Increasingly, we are going to see businesses doing well by doing good, a philosophy that guides thinking and decision making at Unilever. In a recent discussion, Harish Manwani - President Asia, Africa, Eastern and Central European Regions at Unilever - shared that for Unilever value co-creation was not just collaborating with customers, it is collaborating with the interlinked ecosystems that the company operates in.  According to him, this passion and commitment to doing well by doing good, is the reason why the Dow Jones Sustainability Index has rated Unilever as the best company in its category for ten years running. I intend featuring more of the Unilever social responsibility story in my forthcoming blogs.

Social good and company well being can co-exist, as the examples of Bata, Tata, and Unilever demonstrate.  They should not be divorced from each other any longer. The people and the social systems they live in are both customers of the company.  The paramount purpose of modern businesses should be more than just "Do No Harm."  Rather it must be "Do Long Term Good for All."

India's economy and its companies have been getting a lot of attention in the past decade.  A trend map of India at the annual Davos conference will attest to this.  A decade ago, India was invisible at Davos.  Today, to the uninformed observer, Davos may well be a Bollywood party.    

The Tata Group, Mittal, Reliance, Infosys, Hindustan Computers Limited, Ranbaxy, ICICI, Hero-Honda, and Bharati Airtel are a few Indian companies that regularly garner media headlines.  The world knows a lot about these companies, and their products.  But what does the world know about the leadership of these companies?  The answer is very little.  Beyond a few names, like Naryan Murthy, Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani, and Laxmi Mittal, the West knows little about how Indian companies are managed.  The India Way, authored by Peter Capelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra V. Singh, and Michael Useem intends to rectify that.  

Do Indian companies have their own way of managing and running their companies?  The answer is a most emphatic YES!  Instead of using management ideas and practices that dominate Western businesses, Indian companies are applying fresh practices of their own, to shape their strategy, leadership, talent, and organizational culture.

Here is a sampling:

• The best Indian companies drive their performance by investing in people; motivating them, empowering them, and investing in their training
• For them, the CEO's office and function is not as critical as in the West.  Many of these companies don't even have that title, and practice group decision-making at the top
• Envisioning a path to the future, strategic thinking, and guiding change is very critical to the leadership of these companies
• As is being inspirational, accountable, and entrepreneurial

 

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), is not an occasional, negotiable activity for most Indian companies.  Partly because most organizations in India tend to be surrounded by mass poverty, and partly because CSR is a reputational asset that helps negotiate deals with the government, companies are very serious about their obligations to the ecosystem they operate in.  40% of all Indian companies routinely monitor their progress on CSR goals, compared to just 17% in the U.S.  

Are these practices transferable to the West?  That all depends on the priorities of Western companies.  Consider the top priorities of Indian companies:

• Looking beyond stockholders' interests to public mission and national purpose
• Drawing on improvisation, adaptation, and resilience to overcome endless hurdles
• Identifying products and services of compelling value to customers
• Investing in talent and building a stirring culture. 

Perhaps the experience of dealing with obstructionist bureaucracies, crumbling and antiquated infrastructure, and growing up in hardship and scarcity can't be replicated.  But inspiration to do well by one's employees, and build lasting legacies, around entrepreneurship and long-term success, can certainly be imported, and emulated.   

There's always been an India Way.  Its just that its more palpable today.  Hunger can be a beautiful thing - especially the hunger of challenger companies not to be perceived as mere Xerox copies of front line Fortune 500 companies.  Let's hope, for their own sake, Indian companies don't forget this.  

The old adage - Fat Dogs Don't Fetch - applies to all companies in all countries!

Recently, I had the pleasure of being introduced to ICFAI University, one of India's leading educational institutions, recognized for its skills in developing innovative educational programs and writing insightful case studies.  It is also a leading publisher, 18 magazines and 46 journals, in areas such as marketing, finance, environment, and health care.

Effective Executive is the flagship magazine of the University.  Started in 2000 and published monthly, it features articles on topics like marketing, strategy, sustainability, and innovation.  Every issue also features interviews on these topics with experts.  In the recent past, the magazine has interviewed globally renowned experts and intellectuals, like Philip Kotler, Michael Tracy, Pankaj Ghemawat, Vijay Govindarajan, and Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, a renowned nuclear scientist, and former President of India.

The magazine's latest issue is dedicated to the theme Co-Creation: the New Frontiers of Competitive Advantage.  The issue features an interview conducted with me on my HBR article and on co-creation. 

I would like to share two key topics covered by the interview.  The first deals with the nature of co-creation, and the second with the difference between customization and co-creation.

Understanding co-creation

Cogito ergo sum - one of Descartes's most famous legacies - loosely translated as, I think, therefore I am.

Peter Drucker had a similar way of introducing himself - I write - is how he used to introduce himself.  What Peter should have really said was - I think and I write, and I don't know which one comes first.  An interesting chicken and egg problem, but not one you lose sleep over, especially if your writing borders on the prolific, and your thinking can stand the test of time!

November 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker's birth and we should celebrate it.  Universally acclaimed as a great management thinker and business guru, for over 50 years, from the early 1950's to the early 2000's his provocative and often controversial ideas dominated the business world. 

The management kingdom is rediscovering him and finding him to be just as relevant as he was all those years ago. 

HBR ran a special issue on Drucker in Nov. 2009 - asking What Would Peter Drucker Do?

Books like Inside Drucker's Brain are attempting to make him and his cutting edge thinking more accessible.  

Paradoxically, in the West, where he made his greatest contributions, he is all but forgotten, pushed aside by gurus du jour.  On the other side of the Atlantic, Drucker societies are still alive and flourishing.  They assemble routinely to discuss his work and learn from his teachings.

It is impossible to compress a sixty-year career comprising over thirty books that have sold over 5 million copies and scores of articles, including some HBR classics, in a page or two.  So, how about we take inspiration from Hollywood and present instead a 90 second trailer on the World according to Peter Drucker.

His signature idea - Management by Objectives; still relevant, especially as companies flounder with direction and purpose. 

His committed and unwavering focus - the long term health and well being of companies, not short-term hits.  He rarely blamed individuals, maintaining that it was always the underlying systems that were the root causes of failure.  He believed organizations should constantly challenge their design and operations; he saw this as the key to long-term well being.

His favorite questions - What is your company's ultimate purpose? Who is the customer? What is your mission?  What is it you should continue to do?  What is it you should stop doing? Where has the obsession with the short-term undermined long-term effectiveness? Why aren't some younger people in the company earning more than the Directors?  

His passions - writing, context-bound thinking, integrating ideas, processes not outcomes, urging companies to innovate and create the future, long-term corporate well being, nurturing future stars, and of course - the CUSTOMER!

What did A.G. Lafley, ex CEO of P&G, learn from Drucker?

In A.G.'s own words:

Over the years, I learned many things from Peter, but far and away the most important were the simplest:

1. The purpose of company is to create a customer.
2. A business is defined by the needs, wants, desires a customer satisfies when buying the company's product or service.
3. To satisfy the customer is the most important mission and purpose of every business.

No presentation of Peter Drucker's work is complete without sharing some of his memorable quotes and brilliant observations.  A very brief, you might even say self-serving, sampling related to marketing, the customer, and innovation follow.   

• Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. 

• The customer rather than the manufacturer defines a market

• Of course innovation is risky.  But so is stepping into the car to drive to the supermarket for a loaf of bread.  All economic activity is by definition 'high risk.' And defending yesterday - that is, not innovating - is far more risky than making tomorrow.

Paraphrasing Drucker and taking a few artistic liberties: since customers define markets, and market creation should be the fundamental focus of a company, and innovation is the primary fuel that drives this market creation - then what better world to be thinking, writing, and consulting in, than customer-driven innovation!

CMO Archetypes:



While the effort of the AMA to peer into the future is laudable, I am personally very troubled by the output, and the lack of emphasis on some fundamental game-changing trends like customer collaboration, value co-creation, customization, and open systems thinking.  

Hyatt Hotel's has been in the news lately - for all the wrong reasons.  As was the CEO of Whole Foods a few weeks ago!  In fact, I could begin this blog the way I began my May 21 blog (What do General Mills and Finland have in common?) and ask - what do the Hyatt Hotel and the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, have in common?  

On August 11, John Mackey penned a op-ed on health care reform in the WSJ strongly aligned with right wing, conservative thinking.  His opening quote makes transparent his personal leanings.

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher

On Sep. 17, Hyatt fired approximately 100 housekeeping staff in Boston.  According to the Globe, Hyatt fired housekeepers at the Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Harborside, and Hyatt Regency Cambridge, replacing them with workers from an Atlanta staffing company.



One can argue what's wrong with that.  The constitution of the United States guarantees a person the right to free speech, and capitalism the right to a company to structure its labor force and its costs (most of the fired housekeepers were minority women, making $15 an hour; it is expected the replacement workers will make $8 an hour).

However, in today's networked, interconnected world, company's and CEOs are not just individuals or employers.  They are symbols of what their companies stand for, and for what their customers stand for.

Customers who shop at Whole Foods are liberal, pro-environment, anti GMO, pro-organic food people.  It is not that they want to deny John Mackey the right to his opinions; it is that they felt let down and violated.  John's op-ed diminished the value customers derive from their association with the store and their shopping experience there. Take a look at the poll at wholeboycott.com:

 

Clearly, those who run Whole Foods have not spent enough time to understand the dynamics of today's interconnected networked world.  The concept of customer value has changed.  Customers don't just derive value from the products and services a store has to offer, they also derive value from what the company and its executives stand for.

Hyatt's case is no different.  The outrage is not about whether it's a good business decision - its not about Hyatt's understanding of cost cutting and optimizing a housekeeping budget - its whether Hyatt has a good heart or not?  The issue is also about whether I will get value by staying at a hotel chain that acts in such a heartless fashion.

A company or a CEO can't be so naïve as to ignore the context they operate in.  There is still blood on the streets.  A large number of people are struggling to get by and the evening news is full of heartbreak stories.  We live in an era where Politicians are actually regarded as more trustworthy than Business Leaders!  Don't believe me?  Ask CNN!

Today's customers are talking to each other - in both the real and digital worlds.  Though what they say in the digital world can often be more potent, due to the speed and ease with which digital opinion can whip up bystanders into a frenzy about issues they deeply care about.  The environment is one such issue, health care is another, having a job and avoiding economic pain probably tops the list.

Are John Mackey and Hyatt not listening?  Intelligent companies in touch with the realities of the digital market place don't just listen when customers talk to them.  They listen even when customers are not talking to them or about them.  Why?  Because smart companies realize they don't control the conversation agenda, they are merely a part of it. 

It's a good season for change!  Sitting on the fence is not an option, especially when it comes to the environment.  

The United States has reached the edge of deferment; it must now embrace sustainability and engage its citizens in green and clean initiatives.  President Obama has promised $80 billion of the economic stimulus package for this cause.  Furthermore, with the average American generating four pounds of trash per day and 10 tons of carbon per year, rhetoric alone won't do, we need action.  

While the U.S. is rarely recognized among the greenest countries--in fact, it falls a dismal third from the bottom in its Environmental Performance Index category--it boasts a number of communities and states that are front runners when it comes to sustainability.  In fact, if California were a country, it would qualify among the world's greenest with the world's largest solar power plant, wind farm, and geothermal installation.  

Which begs the question, if a few communities and states can achieve this state of awareness and action, why not the entire country?  The true goal has to be effective and active engagement of citizens on a broader national scale, not just in self-contained, isolated pockets.  It's not going to be easy; USA's population is 12 times that of Scandinavia--the established leader of the green movement.  Add to it the burden of the recession and an argument could be made as to why an average citizen may not be as amenable as in more prosperous times.

But there is hope and energy as a select group of cities like San Francisco (changing the way we think about recycling) and Portland (spearheading the mass transit revolution) lead the charge toward the New Economy. 

Long the capital of American architecture, Chicago has emerged as a leader in green architecture and landscaping as well.  Its "Forward Chicago" initiative engages companies and citizens in improving the city, while also strengthening its bid for the 2016 Olympics through the following measures:

• Recent establishment of a citywide "Challenge" that offers citizens $800 for reducing their carbon emissions.
• Conversion of 4 million square feet of public and private roof space into gardens, saving thousands of dollars in energy costs.
• Citizen contributions to city "greening" efforts, planting more than 500,000 trees and helping convert 200 acres to park space.

Minneapolis empowers its citizens to fight climate change by using a system of mini-grants.  Neighborhoods, individuals, and community groups can submit innovative ideas to receive grants ranging between $1,000 and $10,000.  Funds have been used on projects ranging from the installation of at-home power consumption monitors to "block parties" that focus on how neighborhoods can fight global warming.  Many grant recipients also sign up for the Minnesota Energy Challenge, which encourages residents to make significant lifestyle changes and reduce their carbon footprints.  In 2007 and 2008, the grants collectively aimed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10.9 tons and save $1.33 million in annual energy costs.

When it comes to renewable energy, Austin, Texas--also home to Whole Foods--attracts international attention.  Austin Energy is the country's largest provider of renewable energy, and the City of Austin aims to become carbon neutral by 2020.  With such lofty goals, they use a combination of positive and negative reinforcement to engage their citizens:

• Resident rebates for energy-efficient home improvements; at-home solar panels subsidized at 50%.
• Discounts throughout the city on rainwater barrels and low-flow toilets.
• Home energy audits required prior to putting a house on the market.

San Francisco strengthens its hold on its title as the lead recycler in America with a new mandate for composting food scraps.  With a goal of keeping 75% of recyclable material out of landfills by 2010, residents face a $500 fine should they fail to compost. 

Will these measures close the gap, as San Francisco moves toward a waste-free city?

 
And finally, there's Portland--the city that many recognize as the greenest in America.  Portland stands alone as an example of holistic green urban planning.  Its sustainability plans reach back several decades and have involved its residents at every stage of the process.

A few examples of what the city and its residents have jointly accomplished are presented below.
 

• Investments in mass transit and trail development rather than highway construction result in 25% of Portland residents commuting by bike, carpool, or mass transit.  They've also contributed to a nascent biking industry based in Portland.
• State tax credits for businesses and residents using renewable energy are encouraging a fast transition in power sources.  Currently, 50% of the supply derives from renewable energy, with a goal of 100% by 2012.
• The city's land-use policies and urban growth boundaries have motivated citizens and politicians to commit to becoming a "20 Minute City." This means that residents will soon be able to travel wherever they need to go by walking or cycling for 20 minutes.
• Through the "Portland Composts" program, more than 200 city restaurants have begun composting their food waste--and encouraging their patrons to do the same.  

 

Despite its bad rap, the United States boasts several cities with admirable green initiatives.  However, what's missing from the resume is a single model city representing a comprehensive and complete eco-success story. 

Some may argue that the foundation for such a model eco-city has been laid on the West Coast, and it's only a matter of time as progressive practices spread from Seattle down to San Diego.  That said, a more significant commitment to holistic urban planning, that relies not only on legislation, but an extensive engagement of citizens and residents across all dimensions of sustainability--can only help accelerate the creation of a model American eco-city.