There are ways to make money. There are ways to save the world. Then there are ways to do both. Those are the most interesting. They require more ingenuity than pure-profit or pure-charity endeavors. And by appealing to free markets instead of the government they can do more good, more quickly.

Profitable ideas that make the world a better place are less common than ideas for profit or world-saving alone. This graphic illustrates why.

By meeting two requirements instead of one we exclude a lot of ideas. We could add more requirements too, such as a third oval representing stuff you find interesting.

It’s important to understand that though the overlapping area is smaller it is still a large area. There are thousands of ideas lying there undiscovered, they just require more ingenuity to find. That’s why when aspiring entrepreneurs come to me with ideas just for making money, I usually shrug and tell them it sounds kind of boring.

The world needs a new breed of entrepreneur. One who won’t settle for profit at any cost. One who will bring a dose of self-sufficiency to the ranks of traditional do-gooders. Only then can we transition to a regenerative economy that puts economic growth back in its place, below human growth and ecological repair.

It’s long been a mystery to me just why I’ve never liked most management advice, even advice I’ve heard so many times that I thought it must be tried and true. Stuff like quarterly performance reviews, cash bonuses, etc. But this TED talk has helped solve that mystery.

Essentially it says that traditional carrot and stick motivation hurts, rather than helps, anyone doing creative work. Attempting to drive creative performance directly through monetary incentives makes people myopic and less creative.

The carrot and stick does, however, work if instead of creativity you need compliance with arbitrary rules. Or if you’re asking people to do a lot of boring work, then you actually need myopic employees.

But that stuff has never felt right around here because TransLoc isn’t about ditch digging — it’s about coming up with the most elegant technological solutions possible. Ok… there are boring things we all have to do — forms to fill out, tedious bugs to fix — but after getting a handful of that stuff out of the way it’s generally back to actually using our minds.

So what about money. Don’t we pay well? We do. But in talking to our employees I find that their salary is more of a technicality. It ensures they won’t feel pressured out of “financial responsibility” to go do work they wouldn’t enjoy.

None of this is to say that money is evil or that we should cap how much people can make. Profit can be a healthy indicator that you’re doing something of value; a natural side-effect of being creative.

In the same way a lack of profit can betray a lack of creativity, even among so-called “creative types.” Starving artists, for example, generally exhibit zero creativity with business models.

As Dan Pink says in the talk, if you want motivated people don’t tell them they’ll get a bonus if they’re creative. Instead give them as much autonomy as they can handle, let them do work that affords them an opportunity to master a skill, and let them do work that actually matters.

At TransLoc I think we’ve got three out of three. But now that this principle is no longer just a fuzzy sort of intuition but consciously and rationally understood, I’ll be doing my best to make sure.

I hopped on the bus the other day headed for the airport. I paid my fare and asked for a transfer ticket for another bus I’d have to transfer to.

“No where to transfer to,” the driver informed me.

It turned out there was an odd two hour window during which there was no bus to the airport. I was distraught. I always took the bus to airport but apparently not at this time of day.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you there,” said the driver, seeing my distress.

He and his bus would soon be going off duty. Since the bus yard wasn’t far from the airport it wouldn’t be too far out of his way. He did all this cheerfully too and made good conversation.

A while later I arrived at the airport, in an out-of-service bus with a driver who would be home for dinner a few minutes late. The driver, Sam, is an example of the right person in the right job.

“I like people,” he explained.

This post is not an attempt to greenwash our company. There are, in fact, almost no green companies. Nearly all pollute more than they clean up, consume more than they restore, and waste more than they save.

Greenwashing is dangerous too. The planet needs us to change our lifestyles and greenwashing does the opposite by giving the impression that we’ve already changed.

At best there are companies who understand that they, and society on the whole, aren’t anything close to green and are beginning to do something about it. This blog will (among other things) chronicle our efforts to do something about it.

So what are we doing? For starters, we’ve moved our offices downtown where parking is bad but where mass transit is easy. We’re actually located right across from our city’s main public transit hub. The company doesn’t pay for our parking spaces but does buy us bus passes. As a result, more of us ride the bus and some have even moved downtown so they can walk to work.

Composting is another. We do vermicompost, which is a fancy way to say that we have a bin full of thousands of worms that eat food scraps, coffee grounds, napkins, and shredded paper. We also have an outdoor bin that handles the rest of our waste. And the resulting compost goes to nourish the crops of urban gardens nearby.

While all this makes us comparatively green it still doesn’t make us actually green, which is what the planet really needs. But it’s a start — stay tuned.