by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Finley

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One ancient resolution, which I thought I had failed to keep, was my 1993 promise to reduce paper use. I, like most computer users of that era, was chagrined that my "paperless office" was anything but. Printing off a final document always seemed to require six test-runs. The man who tipped my curbside paper tub into the recycling bin always winced from the weight of it.

And the waste increased from year to year instead of diminishing. By 1995 I was up to two tubs every two week, not counting junk mail. I came to accept waste as the tawdry price of being in business.

But then usage began to tail off. A box of paper was lasting four months instead of two. Last year I bought three boxes all year, and I still have a half dozen reams left.

To verify this trend, I consulted my Quicken expense reports over the years. Behold the dollars and cents:

COST $125 $119 $94 $100 $70 YEAR '93 '94 '95 '96 '97

Now, I am just a small one-person business, and my trend may be very different from the trend you are experiencing in your work. But I believe that what happened to me also happened to many other small businesses. And the reason is plain: online information exchange is finally taking a bite out of the bite the paper industry is taking out of our forests.

Examples? For years I was the stereotypical freelance writer, pounding out materials on PC and sending them out through the mail, and paying postage both ways. One day it dawned on me that instead of providing editors with a self-addressed stamped envelope, to ask editors to simply throw away unaccepted manuscripts. Instead, I would make multiple copies and flood the market with my material. Paper was cheaper than postage, so why not? That was in the go-go 1980s, when paper use doubled almost by the year.

Encouraged by postage hikes, however, I found myself mailing less and e-mailing more. Today I send all my finished work and invoices out via e-mail. I waste less gas, too -- I haven't been in the Pioneer Press Building in over a year.

Clients have been going through similar changes. Ten years ago, I did a lot of desktop publishing as a sideline, using CorelDraw and Ami Pro to create reports and marketing materials clients. Again, the multiple document versions wasted lots of paper, as did the mailings, 98% of which were never read. But there was no other way for clients to reach their constituents.

Then, about two years ago, my biggest client began to get uneasy with the waste. Printing all this stuff up and mailing it all out was ecologically pathetic and economically indefensible. Publishing and distributing a monthly 24-page, two-color report to even a small customer base cost them a substantial six figures annually. And it took ages to get it out the door.

As the Internet became an everyday thing for about half the world, this organization made the leap to online communication, mounting its reports as HTML documents on their own domain on the World Wide Web. I was retrofitted from desktop publisher to website creator, trading CorelDraw for a fistful of website management programs -- WS-FTP, Pegasus, and Netscape.

Result: costs were reduced overnight by about 90 percent. And annual paper use dropped by three tons -- a tree and a half.

As alarming as it was to change how I did business, I am cheered by the paper savings. After 150 years of logging, the commercial forest land in our state and elsewhere is stressed out. I sat atop a ridge near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area while hiking a year ago, and noticed that the woods leading right up to the protected area were picked clean. Trees had been replanted, but they were small, spindly, and regimented in rows -- a poor excuse for a forest. It was a visual reminder of where paper comes from, and the high cost of waste.

The Internet hasn't solved the problem. We are still eons from a paperless office. Companies still have to win customers, and to most companies, promotion still means direct marketing -- junk mail. That and print media like the newspaper you hold in your hand are the main offenders.

Next week we''ll talk a bit about junk-free, paperless approaches to business promotion. Meantime, make it your resolution in 1998 to tune in, log on, and drop out. Do it for your wallet. Do it for the trees.

TRANSCOMPETITION

A Business Week Book

Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
List: $24.95
Our Price: $17.47
You Save: $7.48 (30%)

Hardcover, 240 pages
Published by McGraw-Hill
Publication date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0070530823

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com