CEO decides to adopt an ecologically responsible

A chief executive officer wields an awesome power over his companies’ policies, employees and principles—and just how sustainable each will be. So when a previously ungreen CEO decides to adopt an ecologically responsible agenda, the effects can be wide-reaching, and exceptionally inspiring. Here’s a list of the top 5 formerly environmentally oblivious business execs who’ve changed their tune for the greener.

Photo courtesy of the New York Times
1. Ray Anderson He may be chairman now, but while he was the CEO of Interface, the world’s largest producer of modular carpet tiles, Ray Anderson made one of the most massive reversals of attitude towards sustainability in history so far—he’s one of the most memorable personalities in the popular documentary “The Corporation” because of his inspiring about-face.
After running Interface on a strictly business agenda for twenty years—one that included the regular dumping of tons of waste in landfills—he read Paul Hawkens’ book The Ecology of Commerce while trying to prepare for a sustainability conference. It literally changed his life.
The thesis of the book is that businesses, more than anything else, are responsible for the future of the environment. Either they could profit by finding ways to renew resources, or they could destroy themselves along with the earth as they maintained a plunderer’s attitude towards creating profits.
Shortly after, he vowed to move his company towards complete sustainability—no easy task for a billion-dollar-a-year factory based company. But by implementing intensive recycling programs, turning to energy-efficient computer controlled boilers, using corn to create carpet, and utilizing solar and wind power, Anderson has made some serious strides towards his goal. And the conserved energy and reused materials have helped Interface’s profits rise.
Just as important, Anderson showed the business world that even an international, multi-billion dollar company can go green without dipping into the red.
Photo courtesy of Time
2. Sir Richard Branson Thanks in part to his gasoline gorging Virgin Airlines, Richard Branson is one of the most famous billionaires in the world. So why would he say something like skyrocketing oil prices “are the best thing that has happened to this world”? Seems contradictory, sure. But it’s never too late to come around.
Branson started the Virgin brand with a successful record label and built it into an empire that includes an international airline, cell phones, and even spacecraft. Yet he never seemed to show too much concern with the environment that his jets were spewing tons of emissions into.
That is, until he decided to initiate one of the largest biofuel investments in the world, under his Virgin Fuels division. Virgin Fuels has since morphed into the Virgin Green Fund, which currently has investments in companies working in biofuels, desalination plants, energy efficient lighting, and solar power.
Additionally, Branson’s also launched an environmental consultancy in the UK, done humanitarian work with Nelson Mandela, invested $3 billion to fight global warming, and pioneered fuel efficient electric trains in Europe.
So what turned him around? A single breakfast with Al Gore. Seriously—Branson has said that he was a global warming skeptic before he sat down with Gore for a breakfast meeting.
3. Brad Hole Brad Who? You probably wouldn’t recognize Brad Hole if you saw him on the street—he’s not a green celebrity CEO or an infamous international magnate. But it’s worth including a lower-profile CEO who has nonetheless given up an unsustainable company to place running a green one as a top priority.
Brad Hole is the CEO of Sustainable Group, a fast-growing company that deals in recyclable home and office supplies. Before he ran Sustainable, he owned a barcode and data collection company called Eversio for 12 years. According to Hole, the “business wasn’t green, nor were the products. We actually just brokered hardware and consumables and drop-shipped them to clients.”
But five years ago, he and his business partner had an idea to create a binder out of recycled materials, noting how many PVC binders they sent to the landfill every year. So he created the Rebinder, and its strong sales blazed the trail for the environmentally conscious Sustainable Group. The company now has multiple product lines—and all are made from recycled materials—and is growing at a clip of 300 percent a year.
Hole recently sold the barcode business, and completed his 180 degree turn to green.
Photo courtesy of Time
4. Rupert MurdochI know you're thinking 'You've got to be fracking kidding me!' but there he is. One man you likely never expected to see TreeHugger congratulate: Rupert Murdoch, CEO of the global media goliath News Corp. He’s probably best known for his news outlets: Fox News, the Star tabloid, and The New York Post, to name a few.
What makes him so unlikely for placement on any green CEO list is the fact (among other things) that most of his news outlets are notorious for being vocally skeptical about climate change. And that’s putting it lightly.
Fox News especially has been renowned for giving credence to global warming denial, and one of his latest acquisitions, the Wall Street Journal still regularly runs op-eds calling climate change a hoax.
So how is it that Murdoch has made a public decision to make News Corp. carbon neutral by 2010, saying “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats”?
Call it a change of heart, maybe. While he once admitted to being "somewhat wary of the warming debate" according to the Independent, now he’s actively advocating environmental action. He’s going to attempt to use his ‘global reach’ to encourage climate change action, he says. And he’s already begun using recycled paper in some of his companies, and building sustainable studios.
However, the gap in ideologies between his news organizations and his personally stated beliefs continues to be an issue, since neither FOX nor the Wall Street Journal has yet adopted a productive view of climate change. And while there are certainly plenty more CEOs out there who’ve done more for the environment, perhaps no convert to the environmental movement was as unlikely and attention grabbing—and potentially inspiring to his peers.
Put it this way—it’s one thing when the CEO of Google announces his new green initiative; it’s something else when the owner of FOX News does.
Photo courtesy of the Independent
5. T. Boone PickensT. Boone Pickens of the infamous ‘Pickens Plan’ rounds out the last spot on our list. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Pickens is that his plan is birthed from pure capitalistic incentive—Pickens has stated on more than one occassion that his green motivation has more to do with money than the environment—and it’s brought him through maybe the most dramatic 180 of any of these CEOs, at least in terms of business focus.
In the course of a few years, Pickens went from spending millions to fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in their attacks on 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and donating huge sums to George W. Bush himself, to soft peddling his Republican affiliation and spending time working on his energy plan with Democrats.
So that’s a political 180, how about the environmental one? Well, he built his fortune as an oilman—growing Mesa, the company he founded, into one of the largest oil companies in the world. And he continued its growth through a series of acquisitions of other petroleum companies until last year, when he proclaimed that the United States had to become more energy independent, that peak oil was a reality, and he unveiled one of the now most hyped plans for developing alternative energy in the USA—the Pickens Plan. What?
Whether or not you agree with the plan’s strategy, which is to curb reliance on foreign oil by developing wind power and using more natural gas, the massive publicity the plan has generated has brought wind power (and the general notion of widespread alternative energy usage) into a very public forum.
In the end even if the Pickens Plan doesn’t come off exactly as planned, and considering some of Pickens' recent statements regarding slowing the project due to current world financial conditions, there is some doubt about that, the dialogue alone T. Boone's generated (especially coming from a wealthy, conservative oil baron) is noteworthy in itself.

All people on real estate-related sites reaching at least 100K US people

Site Name


Target People
US People
Coverage
%
Index
Category Affinity

unitedcountry.com
303,389
303,389
0%
100%
100
276
ziprealty.com
1,473,242
1,473,242
1%
100%
100
275
ucoffices.com
114,232
114,232
0%
100%
100
274
tenmanagement.com
142,916
142,916
0%
100%
100
272
williamsauction.com
182,360
182,360
0%
100%
100
268
cyberhomes.com
195,746
195,746
0%
100%
100
268
manufacturedhomesource.com
108,346
108,346
0%
100%
100
267
redfin.com
188,664
188,664
0%
100%
100
260
hotpads.com
294,206
294,206
0%
100%
100
260
lennar.com
141,439
141,439
0%
100%
100
257
point2.com
598,453
598,453
0%
100%
100
257
rentalhomesplus.com
391,914
391,914
0%
100%
100
249
ushomeauction.com
360,208
360,208
0%
100%
100
244
rentalads.com
139,526
139,526
0%
100%
100
242
realtystore.com
453,391
453,391
0%
100%
100
242
rentalhouses.com
310,332
310,332
0%
100%
100
241
fnismls.com
326,868
326,868
0%
100%
100
240
mris.com
380,293
380,293
0%
100%
100
237
listingbook.com
129,842
129,842
0%
100%
100
237
fanniemae.com
143,923
143,923
0%
100%
100
235
rapmls.com
804,078
804,078
0%
100%
100
234
mlxchange.com
933,849
933,849
0%
100%
100
233
thatrentalsite.com
267,015
267,015
0%
100%
100
227
industrybrains.com
232,522
232,522
0%
100%
100
224
marketlinx.com
635,375
635,375
0%
100%
100
223
rentals.com
876,284
876,284
0%
100%
100
218
vflyer.com
200,341
200,341
0%
100%
100
217
housevalues.com
376,604
376,604
0%
100%
100
214
edinarealty.com
106,150
106,150
0%
100%
100
213
mortgageloan.com
168,508
168,508
0%
100%
100
213
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Monthly audience past 30 days as of: December 31, 2008

Top 10 website re-design mistakes - and how to avoid them

Finally my new site is *almost* up and ready to go, however in the process I was tempted to fall into the typical mistakes that are done while re-designing a site. I read a very good article at which explain them nicely. I am listing them here so you will never go down that path.
Launching before the new design is cross-browser tested. Seriously, sometimes you’ll stumble onto a redesign by a what you thought was a serious website, and it breaks in Safari, isn’t tested in IE7, or whatever.
Launching without giving your readers a heads up. You should definitely inform your readership that a new design is coming, or have a really good explanation ready when you’ve launched. Chock-launching can work, but in today’s very open and transparent web I think you really should let people know that they might see another design next time they pop by.
Removing all key recognition elements in one swipe. Don’t just null out your previous visual identity, make sure there are some elements left, updated perhaps but recognizable, so that your readers can tell that they’re visiting the correct site.
Making everything harder to find. Let’s face it, you might want to move around elements in your design and that’s fine. Just don’t change everything at once, or if you do, make sure that everything is in the second most obvious place (the first being your old design’s locations of course).
Jumping onto the popular style bandwagon. It’s easy to get caught up in the flavor of the day, being rounded corners or pastels. By all means, take the parts you like into your designs, but remember what you’re redesigning, maybe the style doesn’t fit at all, or maybe it just doesn’t benefit the site. If you really want to do the design of the day, then by all means do, but consider carefully where you use it.
Launching too early. I know, I know, it’s very easy to launch early and say “I’ll fix the rest later”. Well, if you’re gonna do a beta launch, be sure you don’t pull a Google and stay in beta forever. Make sure you’ve got a list of features and additions ready, and plan them, so that your premature launch won’t come back and haunt you. Ideally, your design is done when you’ll launch, or at least appear done, then you can add to it and make it look like tasty bonuses!
Redesigning too often. A new design, again? You should commit to your designs, give them time to exist. Maybe they turn out to be “bad” for your site, then fine, go ahead and fine-tune, but watch out for getting caught in the redesign loop.
Removing features without an explanation. Some features and functions should never disappear of course, like the search box on most sites, but some might not seem necessary anymore. Well, that might be true for you, but you should make sure that it goes for your readership as well. I like to ask the readers, or at least post about why something was removed, with alternate (better) functionality for them to use instead. That way, they’ll complain if I’ve been stupid and ignorant in my feature-slashing, and the site benefits.
Too drastic monetizing changes. This is a tricky one. On the one hand, you need to make money on your site, but on the other you don’t want to make the ads too obtrusive. Every change in advertising on your site, be it contextual text links, image ads, or whatever, should be made with caution. This is one point where the chock treatment will not work.
Pushing too much new stuff. This goes for design in general of course, but adding too many things to a page makes it cluttered and that’s ugly. Since a lot of redesigns are pushed because of the urge to add new functionality, nifty new stuff you have to push out there, this is a common mistake. Don’t clutter it, prioritize, and be wary of what you remove to make room for the new things.

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Top 10 website re-design mistakes - and how to avoid them

Posted on December 3, 2008
Finally my new site is *almost* up and ready to go, however in the process I was tempted to fall into the typical mistakes that are done while re-designing a site. I read a very good article at Devlounge which explain them nicely. I am listing them here so you will never go down that path.
Launching before the new design is cross-browser tested. Seriously, sometimes you’ll stumble onto a redesign by a what you thought was a serious website, and it breaks in Safari, isn’t tested in IE7, or whatever.
Launching without giving your readers a heads up. You should definitely inform your readership that a new design is coming, or have a really good explanation ready when you’ve launched. Chock-launching can work, but in today’s very open and transparent web I think you really should let people know that they might see another design next time they pop by.
Removing all key recognition elements in one swipe. Don’t just null out your previous visual identity, make sure there are some elements left, updated perhaps but recognizable, so that your readers can tell that they’re visiting the correct site.
Making everything harder to find. Let’s face it, you might want to move around elements in your design and that’s fine. Just don’t change everything at once, or if you do, make sure that everything is in the second most obvious place (the first being your old design’s locations of course).
Jumping onto the popular style bandwagon. It’s easy to get caught up in the flavor of the day, being rounded corners or pastels. By all means, take the parts you like into your designs, but remember what you’re redesigning, maybe the style doesn’t fit at all, or maybe it just doesn’t benefit the site. If you really want to do the design of the day, then by all means do, but consider carefully where you use it.
Launching too early. I know, I know, it’s very easy to launch early and say “I’ll fix the rest later”. Well, if you’re gonna do a beta launch, be sure you don’t pull a Google and stay in beta forever. Make sure you’ve got a list of features and additions ready, and plan them, so that your premature launch won’t come back and haunt you. Ideally, your design is done when you’ll launch, or at least appear done, then you can add to it and make it look like tasty bonuses!
Redesigning too often. A new design, again? You should commit to your designs, give them time to exist. Maybe they turn out to be “bad” for your site, then fine, go ahead and fine-tune, but watch out for getting caught in the redesign loop.
Removing features without an explanation. Some features and functions should never disappear of course, like the search box on most sites, but some might not seem necessary anymore. Well, that might be true for you, but you should make sure that it goes for your readership as well. I like to ask the readers, or at least post about why something was removed, with alternate (better) functionality for them to use instead. That way, they’ll complain if I’ve been stupid and ignorant in my feature-slashing, and the site benefits.
Too drastic monetizing changes. This is a tricky one. On the one hand, you need to make money on your site, but on the other you don’t want to make the ads too obtrusive. Every change in advertising on your site, be it contextual text links, image ads, or whatever, should be made with caution. This is one point where the chock treatment will not work.
Pushing too much new stuff. This goes for design in general of course, but adding too many things to a page makes it cluttered and that’s ugly. Since a lot of redesigns are pushed because of the urge to add new functionality, nifty new stuff you have to push out there, this is a common mistake. Don’t clutter it, prioritize, and be wary of what you remove to make room for the new things

Sven Mathura from patriot

Venezuela Bars Stanford Bank Directors From Leaving (Update1)
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By Daniel Cancel
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A Venezuelan court prohibited the directors of Stanford Bank Venezuela SA from leaving the country after the government took control of the bank yesterday.
The commercial bank is owned by R. Allen Stanford, who this week was accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors through the sale of certificates of deposit from an Antigua-based bank.
Eight directors from Stanford Bank Venezuela SA will be prohibited from traveling abroad while regulators complete their investigation, according to an e-mailed statement from the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Venezuela’s banking superintendent took control of the bank after the company was forced to use 75 million bolivars ($34.9 million) of its reserves to cover withdrawals.
Stanford’s Venezuelan bank has seen “massive” withdrawals and was beginning to have liquidity problems after the SEC accused the Texas billionaire of running an $8 billion fraud through his group of companies, Venezuelan Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez told reporters yesterday.
Rodriguez said the local bank was being affected by external factors and that it was financially healthy.
Venezuelan clients of Stanford Group Venezuela Asesores de Inversion CA, a company that is separate from the Stanford-owned bank, may have bought as much as $3 billion in investments from the Stanford bank in Antigua.
Stanford Bank Venezuela will be auctioned “soon,” Rodriguez said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Cancel in Caracas at dcancel@bloomberg.net. anyone know Sven Mathura from patriot? he tried to recruit me to his network of companies, when I told him that I don't do business with his type and the companies that advertise on their sites moving.bz firstlocal and so... he acted all surprised and said that they scan all of the companies... bulls### this is taken from the contract he emailed me first "1stLocalMoverDirectory.com reserves the right to reject, cancel or remove any advertisement (and any url link therein) deemed inappropriate at any time in its sole discretion" I don't think they ever rejected anyone... more from his email: How is bussiness .
'