Everyone has one….hiding in a closet.

That forgotten box of out-of-date and broken electronics you just can’t seem to part with. Well good news! The Humane Society of the United States and the United Service Organizations (USO) have partnered with MyBoneYard.com; you can recycle all that ‘junk,’ support America’s troops, animal cruelty prevention and even get some money back.

From cell phones and old GPS systems to computers and video game consoles, MyBoneYard®.com makes recycling electronics hassle-free. Once you are at the site, choose the item you wish to recycle, complete a few simple questions about the product and you will see the possible monetary reward for recycling the item. A pre-paid shipping label can then be printed, and all you have to do is take the item to your local post office.

MyBoneYard® even wipes all your personal information off the item for you so there is no threat of identity theft. Items in good functioning order will be donated or resold to legitimate businesses; all other items are recycled through The Wireless Source and eco International. Profits go to the Humane Society of the United States or the United Service Organizations.

In this technological world, electronics rapidly become obsolete or are replaced by newer and better versions. Instead of tossing electronics in the trash or allowing them to take up space in a closet, help out the planet by recycling while also giving back to the community through support of the armed forces or animals in need—and making a little money to boot.

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When you think of incentives and motivation in the workplace, do you think organizations are doing enough?

I came across this cartoon, Farcus, in a magazine recently: A manager tells an employee (who’s dressed in a cheer-leader outfit), “Get out there and improve morale –or you’re fired.” It feels a bit cruel to even snicker at something like this, but it gets to the point about how employees are being driven to be participate at any cost.

Policies or manifestos? Carrots or sticks? Corporate culture has experimented with all of these models. No one would claim that the average employee leaves home each morning saying “honey, I’ve got to go in early today to read the absolutely fascinating policy handbook being handed out this week.” A policy manuals is important. But too often it is a blunt object, rather than an instrument of motivation.  Not every organization runs like Southwest Airlines, which states “We consider our employees to be our number one customer.” It empowers them from within.

In his book Drive, Daniel Pink states that carrots and sticks may have worked for 20th century corporate world, but they are the wrong motivation model for today’s challenges. He presents some of the evidence used in the book pertaining to rewards in a great video. In eight of nine tasks examined, higher incentives led to worse performance. “There’s a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does,” says Pink. Extrinsic motivators, the carrots and sticks don’t work, but intrinsic motivators are what get results.

I like the big example he ends with –the difference between Encarta and Wikipedia. We know who won. Which brings us into the realm of the wisdom of the crowds, and finding ways to motivate, collaborate and engage people without anyone standing over them to crack the whip.

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Everyone is aware of how social media has taken the Internet by storm.

Facebook, the leading social media application, grew from 20 million US users in October 2007 to 103 million US users, about one third of the entire population, in January 2010.But not everyone is embracing it.

Today’s front page of the Arizona Republic ( “social media raise red flags for employers“) worries that “bosses have struggled with managing employees’ Internet access at work since e-mail and web browsers became part of the daily grind,” the article stated the additional fear driven by social media technology:

“The explosion of social media, which encourage users to spend a moment here and a moment there all day long, has given workers even more reason to use their office computers for personal activity.”

But is it really so bad? Will social media be merely another distraction to already distracted employees further reducing productivity?

There are three reasons why this fear is misplaced. You shouldn’t fear social media.:

1. If you are a CEO trying to create a workforce that responds rapidly to changing situations, taking initiative independent of the central management structure, without a lot of overhead.
2. If you want to design and implement a corporate system centered on constant improvement and change.
3. If you want to engage employees and unleash their experience and creativity to improve both products and process.

Welcome to the developing fields of collective intelligence and collaboration science. And welcome to the use of social media tools in the daily fabric of business.

James T. Lincoln, the founder of Lincoln Electric Company,  and one of the pioneers in employee engagement programs, succinctly stated the problem in 1946, saying that“Management, if it is to be the best obtainable, must be the collective intelligence of the whole organization.” (Yes, people actually had some useful ideas prior to social media!)

To harness this “collective intelligence,” Lincoln designed an “incentive management” system that enabled Lincoln to become and remain for more than 100 years the world’s largest manufacturer of arc-welding equipment and supplies.

A major limiting factor in the development (and exercise) of “collective intelligence,” however, was the limitations of paper and face-to-face communication systems.

Fast forward 50 years — the rise of the Internet. It’s how hundreds of millions communicate and collaborate on a scale previously unimaginable, leading scientists to focus on the processes of communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing that take place among all these connected individuals.

Take for instance what Dr. Thomas Malone, Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence observes about intelligence gathering,:

“With new information technologies—especially the Internet—it is now possible to harness the intelligence of huge numbers of people . . . however, we need to understand what the possibilities are in a much deeper way than we do so far. The time has come make collective intelligence a topic of serious academic study.”

What does all this have to do with social media technology? Simply put, social media is the prime engine driving the rise of collective intelligence and collaboration networks. More and more businesses are turning to social media tools and methods to build internal communication tools that build on the strengths of applications like Facebook. Starbucks has been using a social media approach in My Starbucks Idea to ask customers for ‘big ideas, little ideas, revolutionary ideas.’ Services such as Idea Scale help a company tap into such ideas from the community.

Most CEOs have received advanced education in business processes which allow them to design successful manufacturing or sales outcomes. But few have received any training in fields of knowledge that will be necessary to understand how to deliberately design what MIT researcher Peter Gloor calls Collaborative Knowledge Networks leading to Knowledge Flow Optimization. Knowledge of how to use social media tools will be a critical part of know-how to create these new processes.

Fortunately businesses won’t have to spend much on training. Facebook users aged 55+ grew 922.7% in the last year, to 10% of all Facebook users. Amazingly, the 35-54 age group, (29%) is now the single largest demographic, replacing the 18-24 demographic, which was the largest (at 40%) at the beginning of 2009. It grew from 7M to 30M, while the 18-24 grew from 17M to 26M.

Businesses should not fear social media tools. Rather, they should embrace them as valuable ways to channel the collective intelligence of their employees.

So, all you CEOs out there, it is up to you to harness the power of social media to … start the conversation.

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There’s no shortage of nay-sayers in the climate change debate, especially after skeptics roared into action on the so-called ‘climate gate‘ findings.

So how does one respond, if at all, to those who say that global warming is a hoax, and that dabbling in sustainability is a waste of time ? Is the debate over climate science is huge distraction (as Andy Shapiro noted recently) for enterprises that want to remain viable and competitive?

How about the business case for sustainability?

In Nurturecast this week, a podcast series about green tech and sustainable business practices, Derrick Mains talks about why we need to retire the doom-and-gloom message about climate change, and re-frame the discussion around issues that get people thinking logically, locally.

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The idea of e-waste comes up a lot.  At least in my life. I have a box of unused electronics components  in my garage. You probably have plenty of seemingly useless bits and bobs lying around too–a discarded cell phone, an old keyboard, battery chargers. These have valuable metals that could be harvested and recycled. I recently spoke to a company built around that eWaste business model. (They will be featured in an upcoming podcast.)

But one story really put that idea on a global platform. Did you know that the 1,014 gold, silver and bronze medals for the Vancouver Olympics (including the upcoming Paralympics) were made from recycled electronics?

The Canadian mining and metallurgy company, Teck Resources Limited, which recycles end-of-life-electronic (EOLE) equipment was the exclusive supplier of the metals for the Olympics, and was commissioned to mint them from recycled electronics. The gold produced from smelting ore from various sources, was combined with gold recovered from e-waste.

And as a great follow up, just last week, the UNEP cautioned that e-waste could rise by as much as 500% over the next decade. It follows a previous report that called for innovation hubs and centers of excellence to recover valuable resources from devices such as MP3 players, toys, cameras, TVs etc that account for about 40 million tons of material each year. Considering that mobile phones and PCs use 3 per cent of the world’s gold and silver mined each year, it’s good to know some parts of it got onto the world podium.

If you are interested, here are some other resources on ‘dirty electronics’

• WEEE – Waste Electronic and Electric Equipment directive
• United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) – Press Release on e-waste
• Breakthrough international agreement on mercury – Nairobi, 2009 (video)

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Implementing a new idea inside an organization can be a constant battle between company executives and the employees beneath them. The businesses world is currently experiencing this first hand, especially when it comes to sustainability initiatives being delivered through the typical top down approach.

So how does a business engage its employees and create the buy-in to be successful in implementing new concepts? One option is to provide incentives or rewards to the employees who are active in the policy change, as they serve as a constant light of attention for employees to strive for more.

Companies have been doing this for quite some time while maybe not even realizing it. Long ago, some company board probably faced a dilemma: how to keep their salesman motivated and get full effort on a daily basis? It gave rise to commission-per-sale, often resulting in turning the sales rep into the hardest working and most motivated individual in the office. The incentive gave him/her extra motivation to perform better and make more money every day.

Similar incentives and rewards can be used to create a more sustainable workplace, such as:

• Commuter incentives (eco-friendly vehicles, bicycles, mass transit, car pooling, or walking)
• Rewards points for individual green actions (Kashless and RecycleBank –and of course our own GreenNurture rewards)
• Green office building incentives (eco-roofs, meeting LEED standards, renewable energy, etc)

One example of this has really caught our attention. The recent study by the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), reported how Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt company, wanted to decrease its annual energy consumption of its facilities. With employee buy-in seen as the biggest obstacle to achieving this goal, Stonyfield addressed it and essentially eliminated it with the addition of one simple incentive: all profit from the company’s energy savings was tied directly to employee bonus checks! Needless to say, Stonyfield reduced its energy consumption by over 22 percent (per ton of product) in just one year. So energy was conserved, the employees received larger checks, and the company created a competitive advantage through sustainability – all without spending an extra cent!

There is no hiding the fact that employee engagement and company incentives can go hand and hand. No matter what type of program– commission based, rewards points, increased bonus checks, or more time off – an added incentive brings a bright light of attention into your office.

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Re-use is a bit of the poor relation among the Three Rs.

Stores like Once Upon A Child, Changing Hands Bookstore and many others have turned reused items into a great business model. Not to mention the business which racks up more than $2,000 a second in transactions: eBay.

So I found this interesting that two parallel stories broke recently where creative people have found a way to turn once-used items into desirable, functional, highly marketable products.

• A computer programmer and his mom at ReKnit accepting people’s old sweaters to turn them into iPod cases, sweatbands and scarves –story on NPR

• Jim Rosenau who turns old books into shelves and other wonderful pieces of furniture – story in Greenopolis

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The best way to figure out what micro-sustainability is, says Derrick Mains, is to contrast it to macro-sustainanability. It is a more granular look of sustainability, understanding the individual’s role in the organization; it is self-motivated actions that comes from within.

In this podcast, Derrick talks about the importance of making employees sustainable within their own ’sphere of influence,’ and how a CEO could harness this force within an organization.

• Join the conversation: If you’re interested, join our LinkedIn group, where the discussion continues.
• Related discussion: We also discussed it here when we talked about granular engagement last week

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Derrick Mains talks on why the entrepreneurial spirit in Clean Tech and Green Tech now has ‘the right soil’ to flourish. He talks of the vision for GreenNurture as a full-service, turnkey sustainability program that can be turned on in less than 30 minutes.

Mains was interviewed by Brad Dolbel last week in a podcast that’s part of series of conversations connecting companies in the Clean Tech sector with consumers and investors.

• Listen to it here at CleanTech Interviews

• Download it via iTunes.

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You’ve probably come across many definitions of Sustainability. Such as this, this and this.

Torrey Babson, who works for the Economic Architecture practice of GSP Consulting, thinks it is just another way of approaching profitability. He’s had experience in community development, sits on the advisory board of a green jobs authority, and used to work on Capitol Hill.

So we caught up with him, to ask him what the green economy really means for business. Let him explain:

Download podcast here. Or click on player below

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