Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

As business leaders and owners, we need to be careful on what causes we may want to align ourselves with: it can come back to haunt you.

The latest example is the bottled water issue that really isn't an issue, but is attempting to be made one.

Companies started bottled water in response to consumers wanting even purer water than they were getting out of the tap. Now so-called environmentalists are attacking bottled water companies as their new enemy and target.

They began their assault by getting Pepsi (PBG) to admit the Aqaufina product they sold was in fact from the tap. They thought that made some type of point. Like cigarette smoking being bad for your health, everybody knew bottled water was for the most part from the tap. There's nothing new there. 

The reason they did that wasn't because they cared about that, it was a first step in the strategy to talk about the packaging of the product, which is offensive to their sensibilities.

These nutty people have already brought it from being an issue of whether the water came from the tap or mountain springs somewhere, to packaging waste, to cost, and now the latest: to US security policy and oil imports.
 
The International Bottled Water Association said, "The bottled water industry has recently been the target of misguided and confusing criticism by activist groups and a handful of mayors who have presented misinformation and subjective criticism as facts."

Environmental screwballs (certain environmental types, not all) never are concerned with facts, just conjuring up fear to get their preconceived agendas accepted as their major purpose.
 
The liberal New York Times (NYT) added their stupid comment by supposedly being concerned about it costing some people $1,400 a year to drink bottled water. Guess what? That's the consumers' business, nobody else's.

When bottled water first came out, it was hailed as a healthy alternative to tap water by those consuming it, and was supported by many people interested in health. They even did the fear thing back then to get people to consume the bottled water. Now it's also become somewhat of a status symbol like talking on the cell phone to show you have one.

The point in saying all this is we need to be careful on what we align ourselves with as businesses. There is a ton of misinformation out there being put out as fact that has no basis for the assertions being made. People with hidden agendas do this on purpose to crowd the marketplace with ideas so people are confused or unsure - that's the strategy. From there they continue to repeat themselves until people accept as fact what hasn't been proven.

We should take much more care in what we do in these areas. Those who we think are our allies today could turn against us in a heartbeat as they move to the next world-saving fad.

To me the best thing to do is deal align ourselves with issues that are proven and need help now, not sometime in a unsure future. We know people need help with cancer, heart disease and strokes, among the numerous other proven problems. Those are areas that would make a difference now to line up with.

Certain types of environmentlists are cons, there's no other way to say it. They're looking for corporate money and donations to keep their organizations alive and growing. To do that they have to created artificial problems in order to get the general public to believe there's a problem, and so put pressure on corporations to respond to them. Stay away from these types of people and groups. They don't have your interests at hear, or care what happens to your company or its reputation.

Find a solid, proven need that has to be dealt with and filled now, and you'll do something that will really help people, and not feed the wacko groups that exist for no other reason than to continually spread fear among the population and hurt business.

Be careful who you align yourselves with, tomorrow they could turn on you.