I’m not sure whether it’s me. But I’m REALLY noticing a focus on water when it comes to giving.  Scott Harrison’s Charity: WATER continues to do amazing things and now one of my favourite bloggers, Chris Guillebeau has joined the cause too focussing on water in Ethiopia.

But there’s another groundswell going on where B1G1 businesses are linking their water-based products and services directly back to water charities like WellWishers.

We’ve already written about the great things going on with Elaine Buckland’s mokitaonline and Patterson Stark’s alkaline water . But one that’s escaped our attention (at least in print until now) is the lovely concept of Water-In-A-Box done by New Zealand-based Aquaceuticals.

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Over the last four weeks, there was no blog entry on this site.

Did B1G1 team loose the energy and momentum? - Absolutely NOT!

We were touring in Australia and New Zealand covering 7 cities in total. And our main blogger and social media writer Paul Dunn was the centre of all these events this time.

Paul's fun, engaging, inspiring and insightful talk, "WOW - Standing out in 2010" created great energy and interest toward B1G1 in every city we visited. Some of the events attracted so many more people than we expected that we did not even have enough seats (RYDGES in Auckland for example ran out of all spare chairs and we had to 'steal' more from the restaurants!).  Many people were standing at the back of the room enjoying every moment of the evening until the very end. 

If you are one of them who missed the opportunity to be there, make sure to watch out for the next round because we had so many people saying that the event was full of amazing values that they could not believe it was free (thanks to the generous sponsors for each of the event) and some people even came from other cities driving hours to get there. 

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I received an email just before Christmas. In part it said, “…. 2009 has been a horrible year — can’t wait for 2010.” You may have heard something similar. And normally I’d just write back ‘Happy New Year’. But when I got the original message it struck me how our lives have little to do with the year. Or, to put it another way, how much ‘the year’ has to do with us, not the other way around!

 Another friend, Tim Fernandez in Kuala Lumpur , put it this way: ‘The year has been somewhat extraordinary. The reason, not only because of the many things that have come to manifest themselves – I would say it was extraordinary for the simple reason that we’ve reached out to many and created possibilities.

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In my live seminars, I love drawing upon the work of Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom and their first Funky Business book .

My favourite quote which provides a platform to build from is this one:

It’s so true. Every word of it.

And if, as they say, normal does equal nothing, then it seems obvious that abnormal equals something.

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At Buy1GIVE1 (or B1G1 as most people know it now) we’ve got a clear mission — to create a world full of giving. And we do that through providing people with the wonderful process of transaction-based giving — increasingly being called, 'Embedded Generosity' or 'Embedded Giving'.

I find that creating a world full of giving is pretty inspiring. Then I got a note taking it all to another level from my friend (and B1G1 Business client) Tom Minter in the UK. Tom co-founded and co-runs the wonderfully zany and magically brilliant ‘Socks for Happy People ’.

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Call it ‘pushing the envelope’. Or perhaps ‘being on the edge’. Whatever you call it, it’s cool to be identified as a ‘trend’.

And so we feel good that Embedded Generosity – another label for B1G1 transaction-based giving – recently made number 8 on the Trendwatch Top Ten Trends for 2010

It’s not surprising either. All of us have at some level noticed the additional

consciousness around giving back. As I’ve written elsewhere, giving is a HUGE wave – one that is larger than any trend I’ve seen in my business life.

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Yesterday I blogged about words and how they make a HUGE difference. Here’s another example (though maybe not quite as impactful as yesterday’s banning of the word ‘corporate’ ).

As you’ll see from the photo, this ‘interesting thing’ occurred when we checked in at my favourite airline counter here in Singapore (Singapore Airlines in case you don’t recognise the uniform).

And the most interesting thing about the picture is not the smile but the badge the check in person is wearing. It’s a normal Singapore Airlines badge with her name on it but attached to the badge is a little bouncy badge. It shows the lady’s ‘position’ in the team.

She’s what most airlines would call a ‘trainee’. But her badge doesn’t say that. It simply says, “I’m new here”.

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You know how it is when ideas hit you – it’s kind of like a ‘KAPOW!!!’ moment.

I had one yesterday.

It’s been brewing for a while and like all ‘interesting’ ideas, it’s so simple and obvious you wonder why it took you so long to get it. So here it is:

Take for example the oft-heard phrase ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’. It’s used so often we don’t even think of the potential turn-off effect it has.

For example, imagine a conference being held in your city. It has the theme of Corporate Social Responsibility. And imagine too you’re a so-called ‘small-to-medium scale-enterprise’ or SME.

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Disclosure: I’m not what you'd call a keen student of the Bible. But after a recent trip to New Zealand, I believe I can imagine how the man felt who actually did pick up his bed and walk.

That’s because I was ‘operated on’ (as you’ll soon discover, that’s COMPLETELY the wrong term) by new B1G1 Business owner, Master Applied Kinesiologist, Doctor of Chiropractic and author of  ‘Live now - Die later’, Patterson Stark .

I’d met Patterson the night before with my dear friends Martin and Sarah Jimmink. They’d held the equivalent of a B1G1 Seminar in their home in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And after the program, Patterson and his Partner, Gayel Marquet, not only decided to become a B1G1 Business linking their Alkaline Water with giving kids access to water in Africa, they stayed for hours talking about water, about B1G1 and about Patterson’s views on health.

Twenty years ago, Patterson was told he had 2 weeks to live.

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If you know anything about Australian music, ‘All my friends are getting married’ was the title of a huge hit for iconic Australian band Skyhooks in the seventies (OMG am I that old???).

And it’s not strictly true that ‘all’ my friends are getting married but my best friend is – this Monday saw Martin Cooney tie the knot with his South African sweetheart, Pam Lakey.

And in an act of total weirdness, I’m going to Bali to spend some time with them on their honeymoon (don’t read ANYTHING into that!)

And what on earth does that have to do with Dame Anita Roddick and the Body Shop ? Simply this.

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Today I had breakfast at Bumbles on Budds Beach with a charming 9-year old, Grace Clark-Reynolds. Grace is the daughter of one of New Zealand’s most famous entrepreneurs, Melissa Clark-Reynolds whom we’ve blogged about here  recently too.

Like most 9-year olds, Grace is playful. And once you get to know most 9-year olds a little, they open up and tell you the latest ‘silly’ joke OR, in Grace’s case, the latest mind-bender or riddle.

Grace chose the latter course. She asked our waitress for a piece of paper and a pen. And on the paper she wrote:

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Soon I’ll be writing about one of the most amazing life experiences I’ve had.

It concerns a new B1G1 Business in Christchurch New Zealand called Stark Health run by an absolute magician, Patterson Stark.

I’ll be writing more about Patterson soon – and it’ll have something to do with water. So today when he emailed these photos from Clark Little I just had to share them with you.

You’ll find out more about the real gift of water right here . Come join

Most weekends I try to get started on at least one book. Some I can start and then get back to over the course of a few weeks. Others I've just got to keep reading.

This weekend I got one in the 'other' category. I'd actually had the book for 4 weeks but hadn’t read the inside flap properly. Had I done that, I would have been writing about the book 4 weeks ago.

The reason? It's brilliant: probably THE best book on Social BUSINESS Entrepreneurship and so-called 'Conscious Capitalism' I’ve yet read.

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Every day I’m in the gym early in the morning. And I find it tough whether it’s 25 minutes at level 6 on the stepper or 40 minutes on the treadmill at a 15 incline. Then there’s the ‘core’ exercises afterwards. Sweaty. Puffing. And tough.

But I’m fortunate to share the gym with Buy1GIVE1 (B1G1) founder Masami Sato. Yesterday she asked me to take a look at my face.

‘Is it hurting?’ she said.

‘Your face looks like it’s in pain and it always does even when you start exercising. Why not try smiling and see what happens,’ she said.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Because after the gym yesterday I caught up with some reading. In the Chronicle of Philanthropy I learnt of a survey that ‘verified’ that sad photos of kids in fund-raising campaigns raise more money from donors that happy faces. I find that probably true but sad if you know what I mean.

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Earlier today we were invited to a trial opening of the brand new Dialogue in the Dark facility at Ngee Ann Polytechnic here in Singapore. It was a stunning experience.

For nearly 2 hours you get to experience darkness and dialogue led mostly by blind people. Sure, you get to experience (ooops, that’s the third time I’ve used that word in three sentences) different sensations in new ways. But because in B1G1 we know something about how Dialogue in the Dark came to be in Singapore , it’s an even more fascinating learning than normal.

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Recently Masami and I were invited to the launch of the new Social Entrepreneurship  and Philanthropy Centre at the National University of Singapore. It was a great day with Assoc. Prof Albert Teo and his team.

And one lady stole the show in my view – Marie So of Shokay (www.shokay.com). In 30 months she and her partner Carol Chyau have set up an amazing social enterprise making a huge difference in rural China AND, in the process, garnering sales of US$6 Million of, believe it or not, Yak’s hair and yak’s milk.

The milk is made into high-end cheese (called Mei Xiang Cheese Farm - a community of ethnic Tibetan yak herders who live in an isolated fir-lined valley not far from the border with the Tibetan Autonomous Region) and sold to hotel chains like Ritz-Carlton.

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This really has been my week for ‘G’ words – words like ‘geek’, ‘gift’, ‘gratitude’ and my current favourite g-word, ‘goat’.

Until Tuesday this week, whenever I used to talk around the world about ‘WOW’ things, I’d always begin the discussion by talking about the iPhone. It is, to me at least, just so cool. People even think of me these days as something of a geek because of my fascination with technology.

And when in the seminars I actually show a video of me using just a few basic things on my iPhone, people do go ‘WOW’ and they do go out and by iPhones. (Yes, I’ve often thought that our live programs should all be sponsored by Apple.)

But on Tuesday, all of that changed.

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Just a few weeks ago, I had the real pleasure of meeting Professor Nicholas Negroponte. He is, of course, most well known for his breakthrough ‘Being Digital’ book, his work at MIT Media Lab and, most recently, his breakthrough One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

Negroponte is a truly warm human being. And he has that special professorial wisdom of asking better questions to get breakthrough answers– it’s that process that led him to create OLPC. And how interesting is it that the largest selling machines right now are NetBooks, muscling in on the market created by OLPC.

And although his questions are searching, his statements carry great power too.

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Yesterday I wrote a blog about a dream I had about President Obama. I related how I’d envisage him taking a stand and imploring business to take a stand.

And today I realised that the President had already said essentially what I’d been dreaming about (more on that in a moment).

And then just a few moments ago I downloaded the latest update on the progress we as ‘the world’ are making on the UN Millennium Goals set down and finally agreed upon in 2002. It’s NOT a pretty picture.

In the foreword to the report, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon writes: 

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Over the weekend I had an email conversation with Vicki Slade, the B1G1 Business Ambassador in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Vicki was what I’d call ‘pumped’ – see what you think based on this initial email from Vicki:

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A few nights ago, I dreamt about Obama making a speech – a very special speech. And I remember now what got me into that dream. Before I went to bed I read a piece that made me say, ‘I wish I’d been game enough to say that’.

The piece I’d read was a post on the Huffington Post from Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen with additional input from the folks at New Profit Inc

What really got me was this quote from the Christensen article in the Huffington Post article .

‘Hence, rather than capital flowing to social initiatives that are most effective, much of it goes to failing non-profits with suboptimal impact or whose footprint is limited and will not scale. Retailer John Wannamaker once famously quipped that ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half. This is true in spades for philanthropic spending.’

And in a funny kind of a way, that’s what I was trying to get at in my blog post last week .

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Just yesterday I wrote a piece for the July issue of the B1G1 newsletter.

I called it ‘Yikes: the giving is disappearing’. And it told the story of how, like the honeybee vanishing, giving is going down worldwide (with the exception of parts of the Asian region).

Yet something else is going up – yes, you guessed it – the number of charities is booming! Last year alone the IRS in the US registered 1000 new charities per week!

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It's really interesting how things come into your life in groups isn't it. You know what I mean - this happens and then some related thing happens and we go 'what a coincidence' or 'dah dah dah dah' in that scary movie tone of voice.

Well, today that sequence happened to me. Just 24 hours agoI got to meet with the wonderful Jack Sim. Jack is the founder of the WTO - no, not the World Trade Organisation but the World TOILET Organisation .

  Jack is amazing - his life is toilets (or more correctly the lack of them and the impact that has on our world). Typically he's doing media

 One lovely things about being involved with B1G1 is that people 'get' it. And that usually happens in a heartbeat.

That's particularly true when people meet the founder of B1G1, Masami Sato.And last week, lots of people in Malaysia had the opportunity to do that.

Masami was on a sponsored visit to the capital, Kuala Lumpur as part of a tour to promote not just B1G1 but the upcoming 'Live and Inspire' tour she's headlining with Dr. Patch Adams.

Masami made the newspapers and the air waves as well as appearances at Live and Inspire sponsors Starbucks and MPH Bookstores. Here

The Australian Business Awards  for 2009 were announced over the weekend.

And at B1G1 we’re thrilled that one of our B1G1 Partners, Affinity Maker , has been honoured with the award in the Innovation category.

We’re not surprised that the judges of this quite prestigious award have honoured Robin Power and his team at Affinity Maker. They’ve done wonderful things for us in B1G1.

Specifically they’ve helped manage and define B1G1’s move into the Corporate marketplace. Until just a few months ago, B1G1’s focus was almost exclusively on the SME (small-t-medium-scale-enterprise)

Here I am on Flight SQ 245 out of Singapore to Brisbane, Australia.

And in meeting after meeting last week in Singapore I really started toget how wonderfully important this 4-word phrase ‘ Less communication –more connection’ really is.

One is about presence – the other is not.

Right now I’m experiencing the presence piece on the Singapore Airlines flight. Singapore Airlines is absolutely my favourite airline. They get ‘connecting’. From the simple use of my name at every possible point to the simple and gracious way they seem to give. This is not a job – it’s an opportunity

Several times a week it seems we have the question asked, “so when we give, what do we get?’

The question is rarely asked precisely that way. More often than not it comes out like this: ‘so when I give through B1G1 , does it impact my sales; do more people buy from me?’

And perhaps not surprisingly with my marketing background I sometimes want to scream ‘of course!’ I’m eager to tell people about the impact giving has in all sorts of ways. I want to quote the stories of B1G1 businesses. I want to talk about how giving develops much more ‘connection’. And I know the Duke University study backwards (the study that showed as much as a 74% ‘uptick’ in the sales of products directly linked through transaction-based giving).

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Imagine a world in which consumption created contribution, in which our lifestyle left fabulous footprints rather than a path of selfish spending. Imagine if you could patronize the goods and services of companies that give back with every transaction, not to you the customer, but to someone in greater need. Imagine how your company would stand out in the media and the public eye if you engaged in totally transparent transaction-based giving.

This is the mission and the system created by Buy1GIVE1, a Singapore-based service established by a Japanese woman named Masami Sato, who not only imagined all of this as possible, but created the means by which anyone can easily make it happen.

The idea is elegantly simple, and it makes giving back a joyful engagement, rather than a dry duty. It works because it is transaction-based, connected to consumption, and because it is scalable and transparent. Anyone can participate at any level.

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Some reports suggest that the micro-blog platform, Twitter, is growing at the rate of 131 per month. That’s huge. As one commentator put it ‘At that pace of growth everyone on the planet will be Twittering by 22 December, 2009’.

And B1G1 is part of that growth too.

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Interesting questions often come up in life in seemingly unrelated situations.

For example, last night I was at a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) briefing listening to a CSR specialist talking about the importance of harnessing the power of Social Media. He spoke about how, via cyberspace, we can speak out powerfully about what is happening in our world. "We can even impact corporations that are not being socially responsible," he said.

The facts (or often rumours) of how things are produced by exploiting others are revealed by people (for example, the factory workers in China) who now have the power to communicate their thoughts and feelings through the ether like never before.

So, how is this relevant to you and me?

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