Call Me Trim Tab: Part One

This is part of a series on change and what it means to be a “trim tab.”

TrimTab Media was founded on the “trim tab” metaphor that was conceived by Buckminster Fuller.

Why tell your authentic “trim tab” stories with your customers and supporters? It creates relationships based on shared values and inspired action…

Our vision is that businesses, as well as individuals, can be “trim tabs.” In doing so, they become the driving force for the sustainability and health of the people and our planet.  That would certainly, in Fuller’s words, change the course of history.

And now, there’s an even more dynamic question for all of us to ask – that is, what does it take to be a trim tab? And what happens when many trim tabs shift the course of history in the same direction, perhaps, within the same small timeframe of a decade or so? This could happen.

Being a “trim tab” requires one to have many characteristics: courage, innocence, wisdom, commitment, idealism, self-respect, hope, imagination, vision, integrity and perhaps pragmatism…

History boasts very daring and visible trim tabs – Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Einstein, to name a few of the obvious.  The main character in The Help, Aibileen, was a trim tab. In the midst of the hardest labor pains of an old southern culture dying and a new one being born, she chose, with tremendous courage and self-respect, to put a stake in the ground for her humanity.

2011 will be the year of small, sustainable changes…

Trim tab actions are all around…“P&G’s Auburn, Maine plant achieved zero waste to landfill. …Caterpillar announced two plants in the UK achieve the same distinction….Carry-your-own-shopping bags, once the habit of patchouli-lovers alone, is now …mainstream. Italy is banning single use plastic bags at shops. 2011 will be the year of small, sustainable changes,” says Adam Werbach, Chief Sustainability Officer for Saatchi & Saatchi, and former Exec Director of the Sierra Club, former head of Act Now.

At the risk of facing some disagreement, I would assert that Adam Werbach himself is a trim tab having had the courage, imagination and pragmatic wisdom to step into the belly of Wal-Mart, against the wishes and better judgment of most of his environmentalist colleagues, to leverage the reality of the waste behemoth of the century and steer them towards a sustainable future.

I can eliminate all the incandescent bulbs in my home, but when Wal-Mart stops selling them and sets out to sell 100 million compact fluorescents instead, that has global impact.

So trim tabs are sprouting up all over the place – at work, in schools, in families, in all sorts novel ways, big and small. And we need them all.

You can be a trim tab. So can your business.
Most importantly, sharing your authentic trim tab stories with your customers and supporters creates relationships based on shared values and inspired action.