An Interview from the Sustainable Brands Conference ’09 with Kellie A. McElhaney, PhD, UC Berkeley
PART TWO: Being Effective Is More Important Than Being Right
One of the things Kellie tries to practice in her personal life in addition to her profession is to “focus on being effective instead of being right”. She told me how when she was growing up, if someone had shown her a chart of the 100 Top Economies in the World, they would’ve all been countries. But now it only takes until you get to number 22 before you see Walmart’s ranking. This means the size of Walmart’s business activity is larger than over 70% of the countries in the world! “So to ignore them and to exclude them, and say, ‘we’re not going to work with them’ is probably not an effective strategy”, Kellie explains. “It might not feel like the right strategy in terms of pure, journalistic freedom, but if our focus is to open up discussion and dialogue, and to do so effectively, we cannot afford to alienate anybody”, says Kellie. Dialogue is really the missing link, which is great to hear since that’s why we decided to call our network by that name, for that very solution extends itself to all of the world’s dilemmas.
But do corporations really want to be dissected by the people, in particular, the informed and influential viewers of Link TV— Us steely citizens who have been digesting the bulbosity of uncompromising programming such as Who Killed the Electric Car and The Corporation?!
Kellie truly believes our corporate neighbors do want to engage and respond to our questions and concerns. According to her, many of these behemoths value opportunities to rise above the noise and differentiate themselves from their competitors, even if it means having to sit in a hotseat. I was sure to warn her, proudly, that Link TV viewers are people who would truly crank up the heat to sweltering levels...
However, what we’ve been coming to realize is that although the hottest fire yields the purest gold, it is only the coolness of finding solutions that solidifies that gold into something worth its weight. What I’m trying to say here is that these problems we bring to light on Link TV will not be solved on a meaningful scale if we breed
an “us against them” mentality. Link TV has grown to admit that we really need to work together, like David & Goliath. It’s a scary place to be when you’re taking your first step into this unknown territory— Ask Adam Werbach! As the interview continued, Kellie helped me to have faith that we are doing the right thing, in our choice to be effective.
Kellie understandably likes to explain that the effective way to engage is to approach from a position of mutual interest. She uses the giant technology company Cisco as an example. It just so happened that before our interview, KQED had called Kellie and asked her if she could comment on a story about Cisco, and how one of the janitorial services they had been subcontracting had just laid off one of their workers. Justice for Janitors had already started waging a big political campaign against Cisco, and KQED wanted to know if Kellie thought that was an effective strategy.
Kellie’s killer response was that “It depends on what the goal is. If you want Cisco to engage with you, then no. Why not just have a conversation? Instead of starting out from a polarized position and saying, ‘Cisco, you are evil! You are laying off the poor working man’, why not approach them in the spirit of mutual concern and figure out how it might be possible to come together around that common agenda. They will not agree all of the time, but you don’t just break up because you have one disagreement.”
I started to imagine how Link TV could facilitate this type of dialogue. I agree with Kellie when she rhetorically exclaimed, “where has it ever been written that it is inherently socially irresponsible to lay somebody off?” She pointed out that the world goes through economic cycles. We are obviously in a recession right now. Kellie continued, “Cisco is laying off their own people, so it makes sense that everyone who contracts to Cisco is going to have to lay some people off too.”
What would it be like if Cisco had the chance to explain this on Link TV? How would you respond? Tell us what you think! You are the missing link!
And I’m a closet rapper ; )
Part Three: The Rules of Engagement
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This week several of Link's staff, including myself, attended SOCAP09 in San Francisco, a conference of social innovators and entrepreneurs investing in doing GOOD in the world. At the keynote address of the Embrace Disruption mini-conference on social media, Adam Werbach (former president of the Sierra Club) alerted us to the scourge of "yuppie mouth". This term is apparently used by dentists to describe tooth decay in young people who have avoided fluoridated public tap water in favor of an exclusive liquid diet of bottled waters, sodas and juices.
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