* Craft still makes a difference. The premium on information and intelligence, says Hawken, shouldn't lead reflexively to an increased use of the new information technologies. To be sure, these devices can imbue goods and services with more intelligence. This is a major reason why their use is spreading so rapidly, but this doesn't mean tomorrow's economy will be a hardware jungle of computers and robots. As Hawken emphasizes, the older virtues of craftsmanship and personal service can work just as well or even better to inform economic life. "As a matter of fact," says Hawken," they probably give you a distinct edge. The changing economy doesn't exclude anybody." Hawken's own businesses, although they aren't strangers to the new technologies, have stressed the classical virtues.
* Trust your own experience. "Don't try to figure out the market -- be it," urges Hawken. "The market is as fickle as fog in a swamp. It is constantly changing, and there is not any agreement yet as to how to measure it. How else can you explain the fact that the largest companies, the ones with the most money to spend on marketing, launch some several thousand new food products every year for supermarket shelves, and only a tiny fraction make it?"
To organize one's experience, Hawken suggests using his mass-to-information principles. He likens it to a pair of spectacles and says it will help to see patterns that were unnoticed before. Look at our cars, he says. They have shed up to 2,000 pounds of metal. But they have built microprocessors into the engine and dash: mass to information. Look at our homes. They are shrinking in size, and thus mass, but are bursting with information as personal computers and home media centers become commonplace.
"Manufacturers are shifting from duplication to simulation," he notes. "Time was, the only way you could test a car in a wind tunnel was to build a car and build a wind tunnel and put the car into the wind tunnel. Now, you can use a Cray supercomputer to simulate a car in a wind tunnel. This is virtually pure information."
But for Hawken, this sort of analysis is not idle philosophizing. He puts it into practice. For instance, Hawken was hired as a consultant by Lazzari Fuel Co. of San Francisco to develop new markets for its mesquite charcoal. The company was selling the hardwood charcoal to some Bay Area restaurants, but was barely breaking even on the business, and it couldn't add new accounts because conventional charcoal briquets were cheaper. "We ran into lots of price resistance," recalls Kay Rawlings, one of the owners at the time. "But Paul took a very wise approach to solving our problem."
He paid attention to mesquite charcoal's qualities, such as its ability to enhance the flavor of meat and fish and to sear them quickly enough to lock in their juices. Hawken told the company it was selling its charcoal short by selling it as a commodity. "The way he put it was, 'This isn't a fuel, it's an ingredient,' " says Rawlings. Consequently, the company began to urge restaurants to see the mesquite charcoal as an element in their recipes for fine food. To advance this view of it, Hawken recommended a price increase and designed a new package to explain the charcoal's culinary value. The approach is classic Hawken: Through the new positioning and the fresh package, he added information to the charcoal's mass. The company's charcoal accounts increased dramatically.
But the concepts are broad enough to apply to companies regardless of size. One of Hawken's Seven Tomorrows collaborators, Peter Schwartz, is now the Head of Business Environment for Royal Dutch/Shell, the world's second-largest company. He and others in the London office of the petroleum giant are now drawing on Hawken's mass-to-information principle in shaping corporate strategy. "You can grasp how critical this principle is for an energy company," says Schwartz. "Oil has been the fuel of this century. But the fuel of the 21st century will be gas. The key to its use is information: How do we move it economically from the wellhead to its end uses?"
At the same time, Schwartz appreciates Hawken's resolve to use his strategic principles on a smaller scale. "Strategy is simply understanding the proper connections of means and ends. Paul has the best intuitive sense of this I've ever seen. He just happens to apply it to small business." And, as he adds, Hawken's principles are powerful enough to lend themselves to exceedingly flexible use. Thus, he doesn't see Hawken following the lead,of large strategic consulting firms by offering a standardized approach. "For Paul, businesses are like gardens or snowflakes or fingerprints," says Schwartz. "They're all different, unique. You can't impose S-curves on them. You've got to let them speak to you."
If Paul Hawken were a novelist or a painter, then we would call Smith & Hawken a mature work, because it fuses his business experience and his economic philosophy into a single, successful application: the direct marketing of imported gardening tools.
