Rodney Williams, Addis Creson, HiBrand 2008 Rodney Williams leads Addis Creson’s strategy group, bringing more than 18 years of business management experience to the firm. From innovative startup ventures to Fortune 100 corporations, he has led brand and general management programs for a diverse portfolio of companies. Most recently, as Senior Vice President of the Robert Mondavi Lifestyle Brands, he oversaw the successful turnaround of Woodbridge, the country’s top-selling domestic wine brand. Prior to Robert Mondavi, he served as Vice President of Marketing for Galileo Laboratories, a pioneering biotech firm, and Chingari, an enterprise software startup.Rodney also led the marketing team behind the launch of OnStar for General Motors. The OnStar advertising campaign garnered over 30 marketing awards, including the coveted David Ogilvy Research Award for Best Consumer Durable Campaign. Before his work for GM, Rodney served as Group Product Director for the First Aid, Sports Medicine and Home Health Care franchise at Johnson & Johnson, where he led the Band-Aid brand to its largest share gain in 11 years. He got his start in brand management on the Pampers business for Procter & Gamble.Rodney currently sits on the boards of Maverick Beverage Brands, a Sunkist joint venture, and Pkolino LLC, a manufacturer of innovative children’s furniture. He is also a director at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, based in Oakland, CA, and the United Movement to End Child Soldiering, based in Washington D.C. and Kampala, Uganda.Rodney earned a BA from Amherst College and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.

Addis Creson is a firm of brand innovators that partners with clients who have the courage to redefine their business categories and create positive change in the world around them. The company believes that mission-driven companies can lead by example and express their vision through brand experiences. Based in Berkeley, California, Addis Creson resisted the trend of network roll-ups and remained independent, in both its operations and its thinking. During the past 24 years, the firm has helped created innovative brands for a wide range of companies, such as:
- Intel Centrino and Pentium: During its 14 year relationship with the company, Addis Creson shaped the image and branding of Intel’s flagship processor brands that continue to stand as an unparalleled model for effective ingredient branding.
- Pepsi and Diet Pepsi redesign: In the mid-1990s, Addis Creson created the global package redesign of one of the world’s best known brand, Pepsi Cola.
- Kashi: The firm has been instrumental in helping create the growth juggernaut this brand has become in the natural foods marketplace. From packaging updates to bold new product entries in new categories, Addis Creson’s work has helped this brand achieve significant growth.
- Sephora: Addis Creson helped shape the consumer experience for this high-end, premium quality cosmetics retailer by designing its first website.
- Better Place: Having played a key role in developing the brand’s strategy and positioning, Addis Creson is now fully engaged in shaping a consumer experience and brand expression that could see Better Place grow into a powerful, recognized, and valued electronic transportation brand within the next few years.

Creating Meaningful Brand Value In Today’s Marketplace

Many studies have validated the importance of branding in creating value in the minds of customers and consumers and ultimately driving profitable growth. With this recognition has come a profusion of new branding initiatives, not just for consumer goods, but tied to charities, cities, even politics. If the power and ubiquity of branding has become clear, how to create meaningful brands that standouts in an increasingly cluttered marketplace is less so. This session will address the components of successful brand building by examining two effective case studies. The first is about a company that, while less than two years old and pre-IPO, has already amassed significant brand recognition and market capitalization. It is well on its way to becoming a globally recognized brand name for consumers and industry. The second case study tracks the brand re-launch of a post-merger, business-to-business high tech powerhouse faced with the challenge of creating one unified, successful identity from the several that have been combined through acquisition. With internal issues from different corporate cultures and clients across continents, this company has learned some powerful lessons - some sobering but many more positive - about how to roll out a new global brand for an existing company. A discussion of both of these brands will yield helpful insights and real-world examples of how some of the world’s top marketers are succeeding in creating meaningful brand value.

The report of Rodney Williams took place on the first day of the conference HiBrand 2008, 24th of October 2008, during Session 2 - "Corporate Brand Strategies"

Comments

Truth is the foundation for any strong brand, and this applies in the realm of sustainability, too. Consumers expect all claims to be authentic and relevant. Retailers can strengthen their brand and relationship with consumers by:
•    Being authentic - do what you say you’re doing
•    Ensuring stated actions are quantifiable and verifiable
•    Choosing actions that fit best with your business and brand

Prior to embarking upon the development of a sustainable brand strategy, consider these three questions. Your answers will help you assess the readiness of your brand’s ability to take on a sustainable brand strategy:

•    What does my brand mean to people?
•    What are the promises my brand makes?
•    Are these promises able to evolve so that they align with the promises of the sustainability movement?

By proactively integrating sustainable brand strategies now, you set your business up for financial strength into the future. In the current economy, sustainable strategies give retailers an edge.  These are just some of the benefits you can realize:
- Revealing ways to decrease costs
- Cleaning operations to avoid fees and fines (such as those emerging for energy and water use, and other carbon impacts)
- Building ties to your customers by creating programs to become a community partner
 
From a brand strengthening perspective, sustainable strategies
- Improve brand reputation
- Increase profile
- Strengthen loyalty

Sustainable Brand Strategy – A Mini Case Study
 
Marks & Spencer’s integrated approach to sustainable branding is demonstrated through Plan A, which has made the company a model exemplar within its category, both in the communities in which it operates and across the globe.

The UK company first published a CSR (corporate social responsibility) report in 1990, far ahead of other retailers. Now, with Plan A, the company has a five-year plan to address 100 issues they see as the most pressing for the health of ourselves and our planet. The plan addresses issues such as climate change, waste reduction, preservation of the environment, and socially responsible trade. In fact, Plan a identifies five pillars  that guide their efforts, and include:

    * Become carbon neutral
    * Send no waste to landfill
    * Extend sustainable sourcing
    * Help improve the lives of people in our supply chain
    * Help customers and employees live a healthier life-style

To achieve the program’s 100 goals, the company works with a number of stakeholders - customers, suppliers, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and civic groups.

Plan A demonstrates a highly integrated approach through addressing an array of issues across multiple areas f company operations. From goals that include committing to carbon neutral operations in all UK & Ireland facilities by 2012 and fuel efficiency across their fleet, to sourcing as much local food as possible, tripling sales of organic food, and eliminating “post-harvest” pesticide use, Marks & Spencer has addressed a multitude of operational impacts that can be improved.

Marks & Spencer’s Plan A can be used as a best practices example in your own integration of sustainable brand strategies.

How do you integrate a sustainable brand strategy?
Your business operations are the starting point. Focus on measuring the environmental and social impacts of each operation. Your business facility is the best place to begin your sustainability journey.

Three initial areas to address include
- energy usage
- water consumption
- facility upkeep

Conduct an audit of energy and water usage to determine the amount and sources of consumption for each. The audit results will reveal opportunities to create energy and water use efficiencies.  For facility upkeep, consider the types and frequency of usage for fertilizers and pesticides used in landscaping, the ingredients of cleaning products used throughout the store, and the soap, toilet paper, and paper towels used in the employee and customer bathrooms.

From here, a sustainable brand strategy can be developed with objectives and goals that target reductions in operational costs and environmental impacts, resulting in increases in social value. Once the plan is implemented, results should be measured frequently, which will reveal the need for any real-time adjustments to ensure desired outcomes are achieved. Branding and marketing activities promoting sustainability should commence only after measurable improvements are demonstrated.

BUILDING THE BRAND

The Foundation: Authenticity Authenticity is the defining factor that separates truly successful sustainable brands from brands that flounder. With documentaries, news articles and activities focusing on the negative environmental impacts of consumer goods, we see companies trying to hide behind a green veil by simply adding on a temporary marketing scheme. What happens when a brand lacks the proof to demonstrate authentic sustainability actions yet begins touting its greenness? The sad truth: the public becomes skeptical and loses faith in brands that extol sustainable actions. This kind of inauthentic marketing harms brand reputation while ultimately rendering all green marketing activities ineffective. Taking on a sustainable brand strategy is more complex than simply applying a green veneer to the standard marketing toolbox.

The Action: Alignment While textbook approaches to marketing are effective in businesses where values do not take center stage, they fail to address the defining difference of the sustainability movement: environmental and social promises must align with the retailer’s actions in order to be effective for the long term. To successfully implement a sustainable brand strategy, the retailer’s activities must be indicative of its own brand core values, embraced by all key internal stakeholders, and believed by consumers.

A well known consulting firm recently put forth the argument (and even a model) that posited companies should simply look at the category in which they do business to determine which green marketing activities should be employed. While this model is a handy way to focus on potential green strategies, it neglects the deeper aspects of brand building. If a brand lacks values that align with the green movement, has never taken actions to be green, and is perceived as inherently unsustainable, then taking on a green strategy may be both ineffective and damaging to the brand itself.
A brand stands for more than just the products or services it offers the marketplace. The brand is its personality, tone, and values. To apply a sustainable brand strategy, the brand personality, tone, and values must be able to integrate values aligned with environmental and social sustainability.

Interface carpet is an excellent example of reframing the context of an extractive, wasteful industry into one aiming to take less from the earth than it makes. Its FLOR brand of carpet tiles has transformed an otherwise unsexy product category into one that leverages a chic modern sensibility while applying environmental and social sustainability throughout its product design.
Virgin Airlines, by virtue of Richard Branson’s commitment to supporting research into renewable fuels and taking a very honest approach to their position on sustainability, has redefined the possibility of air transportation becoming a sustainable industry.

On the other hand, brands that have no demonstrable actions to back up a green orientation or claim fail to build credibility with consumers. In March 2008, Cotton USA ran a campaign in the UK touting conventional cotton as “soft, sensual, and sustainable.”  Since conventional cotton does not adhere to the principles of environmental and social sustainability, the Advertising Standards Authority, at the behest of concerned consumers, banned the campaign. The Authority determined the term sustainability was misused, erroneously leading consumers to believe that conventionally grown cotton—which is widely reported to be one of the most polluting crops in industrial agriculture—is environmentally and socially sustainable. Greenwashing in this case resulted in Cotton USA squandering vital resources and tarnishing its reputation.

In another example of greenwashing, MiniCooper made a misleading sustainability claim in current print advertising. The headline reads, “Hug trees. And corners.” The meaning of “tree hugger” hinges on the action of saving forests , but in this case the relationship is either so far removed or not at all relevant that the claim is erroneous. This kind of claim is what Futerra Sustainability Communications  refers to as “fluffy language” — the use of words or terms that have no clear meaning. It’s no wonder with the skyrocketing price of fuel that the company has found that false or misleading sustainability claims made by car companies rose by 24.2% from 2006 to 2007. By joining the ranks of greenwashing brands, MiniCooper made itself vulnerable to consumer backlash, and risks tarnishing its brand reputation and diminishing its cache among increasingly sustainability savvy consumers.

Creating an Authentic Sustainable Brand Strategy: The Steps

The proliferation of greenwashing illustrates the market demand for sustainable solutions. Numerous studies indicate that consumers care about the health of the environment, the fair and safe treatment of workers, and they look to business for improvements on both. At the Sustainable Brands 08 conference, MindClick CEO JoAnna Abrams declared that 60% of consumers think businesses should change their behavior to become more environmentally and socially sustainable. So the question now is not should but instead how do we transform our brand? And with the transparency and values-based drivers of the sustainability movement, it is essential that a retailer first address its own actions before promoting any green activities.

•    Think, plan, and act systemically
•    Assess the organizational situation
•    Conduct reputation audit
•    Analyze industry alignment
 

Think, Plan, Act Systemically
The ability to think, plan, and act systemically is critical to success. A system is comprised of activities that connect to form a complex whole. We are in the midst of the greatest information, environmental, and cultural revolution humanity has yet known, with complex change occurring every day. The most effective brands of the future will be those that address the evolving context of industrial, economic, environmental, and cultural forces holistically to offer products, services, and indeed experiences, of tremendous value that actually restore the integrity of ecosystems and cultures. Interface carpet is a classic example.

A systemic approach uncovers the most fruitful pathway to change.  At Addis Creson, we recommend clients undertake the following examination to create a sustainability forward brand:
- Organizational situation
- Reputation audit
- Industry alignment
These combine to form a solid foundation from which the sustainable brand strategy—relevant to the retailer and valued in the marketplace—can be created.  
Organizational Situation An analysis of the retailer’s structure and culture reveals its ability to take on a sustainability forward brand strategy, and indicates what actions must be taken to create a state of readiness for transformation. The structure dictates the level of flexibility, innovation, and cross-departmental collaboration, crucial to the change effort. Critical to the success of any new endeavor are the people involved with the effort. Each person within the retailer contributes their own set of beliefs and values.  Assessing the organizational culture will ensure alignment, relevance, and championing of the resulting strategy.

Reputation Audit The brand reputation—past and present—further determines the retailer’s readiness to evolve toward a sustainable proposition. A deep look at the past actions and current products and services informs the trajectory of the strategy. For example, a retailer with consistent environmental and health offences will require a strategy that starts out by eliminating those outcomes through the implementation of cleaner, safer operations. Once a track record of success has been established, activities to clean up the brand reputation follow.
Industry Alignment Finally, an analysis of the industry is conducted to assess alignment with the values and actions of the sustainability movement. The outcome of this analysis demonstrates key leverage points for change toward sustainability, and becomes a roadmap for operational change toward more sustainable practices such as eco-efficiency, a strategy in resource optimization that results in reduced environmental and social impact while realizing financial value.

Conclusion
The successful design and implementation of a sustainable brand strategy requires

•    Commitment to a framework that integrates benefits for society and the planet
•    Alignment of the brand’s personality, values, and actions
•    Collaborative creation of the new strategy, including buy-in from the top down

Once the retailer can demonstrate environmentally and socially sustainable actions, they are ready to promote those actions.

With strong leadership, foresight, and a long-term commitment to success, retailers that develop a sustainable brand can expect to improve the financial position of the brand over the long term. Guidance through such a large-scale initiative calls for objectivity, deep experience with brand alignment, and a clear pathway for organizational culture change.

Successful retailers of the future will not consider whether to integrate sustainability, but instead assess how to derive increased value for society and the environment through the creation and execution of innovative brand strategies that maximize financial, environmental and social benefits for the good of all.

—Jeni Rogers is senior strategist at Addis Creson. She holds and MBA in sustainable management and has been developing sustainable brand and marketing strategies across industries since 2000.

RESOURCES   Blackburn, William R. The Sustainability Handbook. Washington DC: Environmental Law Institute, 2007.
 Doppelt, Bob. Leading Change Toward Sustainability. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, 2003.
Esty, Daniel C. & Andrew S. Winston. Green To Gold. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.
Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins & L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism. Little Brown & Co.,1999.  Laszlo, Kathia. “Systems Science: Creating the conditions for conscious evolution.” In W.V. van Huyssteen (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. New York: Macmillan Reference USA. May 2003.  McDonugh, William & Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle. New York: North Point Press, 2003.

Comments

The BPL logo, with its fractured circular shape influenced the quarter circle design theme of the two minute film in which black dots represent all oil-based fuels while blue symbolizes a fresh, new electric car-filled world. Animated in After Effects, the elegantly design-driven 2-D animation had a very short turnaround; Blind delivered it in one week.

Lawrence Wyatt, Blind/Dan Chau, Addis Creson, art directors; Chuck Guest, Addis Creson, writer; Erik Buth, Blind/John Creson, Addis Creson/Sean Holt, Glue, creative directors; Maithy Tran, Blind/David Hwang, Blind/Stef Roberts, Blind, 2-D designers/animators; Dana Vaden, Blind/Ryan Amen, Glue, producers; Mark Galbraith, Addis Creson, senior producer; David Kleinman, Blind/Hugh Barton, Glue, executive producers; Glue, music/sound design company; Tim Redfield, Glue, composer.

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These days, you can make green by being green. No longer do environmentalists need to take a vow of poverty before starting their careers. Global giants ranging from Google to General Motors are making room in the corner office for executives with titles like chief sustainability officer and chief environmental officer.

By The Numbers: Six-Figure Green Jobs

Rogers believes there are many career opportunities that integrate sustainability into mainstream businesses. Many companies don’t understand what to change because they don’t have the experience or expertise. "There is a tremendous opportunity for people with the understanding and tools to implement more sustainable businesses," she says.

In further proof that it’s possible to support the environment while living a comfortable lifestyle, postings for environment-related jobs on TheLadders.com, a job search site for $100,000-a-year and more jobs, have increased by 25% over the past year.

As companies become more open-minded about corporate sustainability, Rogers believes the flexibility she found in her company will become more common. Others agree.

"We’ve gotten to the point where the environment is way too important to be left to environmental departments," says Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy.

Environmental engineers are well positioned to profit from this trend. Demand is predicted to grow more than 25% over the next eight years and many of these engineers will make well over $100,000 a year. Many environmental engineers work as consultants, helping their clients find ways to decrease the environmental impact of their projects.

For those in law school, environmental law has a bright future. Environmental lawyers have the potential to earn just as much as their counterparts in other areas of law, with salaries exceeding $145,000 a year.

Those with a more creative bent may find an outlet in industrial design. Industrial designers have control over many elements of manufacturing from selecting the materials to designing the packaging, and they can directly impact the creation of environmentally friendly products.

Mathematicians and scientists hold many of the best paying green jobs. Climatologists, who study climate changes, may be consulted in the design of anything from buildings to heating systems. They can expect to make in the six digits at an experienced level. And environmental scientists can also make more than $100,000 a year studying our air, food and soil.

Another option is to consider getting a formal education in the field.  Rogers got an MBA in 2005 at Presidio School of Management, a business school in San Francisco that focuses on sustainability.  Stanford also offers a sustainable-business MBA, as does Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vt.

What can you do to develop your own eco-friendly career? One option is to work for a company that will train you in the field, or you can search executive job sites such as TheLadders.com for green jobs you may not even know exist.

"Rather than flooding the business world with environmentalists," Makower says, "we need people with traditional skills that understand challenges and opportunities in a growing green economy."

Comments

Nothing about Better Place’s electric car business looks like the automotive industry as we know it (see sidebar below). And for Addis Creson, the branding and design consultancy charged with building the one-year-old startup’s brand, that’s a good thing.

Better Place puts electric cars and their energy supply together in a way that founder and CEO Shai Agassi says is more akin to the cell phone industry than the auto industry. You get the zero-emission car from Better Place at a low cost, and then pay the company to use its ubiquitous plugs, the electric-auto equivalent to cell towers. But consumers aren’t used to getting their car from the place where they fuel it, nor are they accustomed to thinking about paying for gas like paying Verizon. And with Better Place not rolling out until 2011, and then only in Israel and Denmark, most won’t get to see what the new model looks like in practice for quite some time.

That’s what Addis Creson was facing when Better Place CMO Joe Paluska asked the Berkeley-based design shop to build a brand for the 21st century—something sophisticated, contemporary and internet-based with global scale. But how do you do that for a business that’s not the Chevy Volt and not Chevron, but aspires to eventually replace both?

"We didn’t really think of it as, we’re creating a new car or we’re creating a new energy company," says Steven Addis, the design agency’s CEO and founder. "We really thought of it as, we’re creating a brand that should symbolize the break from oil and reflect the next 100 years of this combined transportation and energy mindset. We didn’t feel like we needed to tell the specific story so soon. Right now, it’s about focusing on the need and get people talking about electric as a solution."

Even the company’s name is more evocative than descriptive. The concept started when Agassi was asked to think of ways to make the world a better place. In 2005, Israel-born Agassi joined Young Global Leaders, a group of power players under 40 invited by the World Economic Forum to envision a better global future. The forum assigned Agassi—at the time, the products and technology group president and an executive board member of the world’s largest business software company, SAP—to focus on climate change. He decided eliminating global oil consumption was a way to reduce carbon output. By October 2007, Agassi had left SAP to launch Better Place, a company he named after the YGL challenge.

So, outside of Agassi’s story, the name Better Place doesn’t read "electric cars" and, for a relatively unknown company with global aspirations, some might see that as a problem. But Addis says a name that doesn’t sound like consumer branding works for Better Place because it communicates the idealism and optimism that’s at its core. While heightened climate consciousness and runaway gas prices have opened the door for that idealism and radical alternatives to the current automotive model, Paluska, who came to Better Place from the company’s public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, still thinks the company’s biggest obstacle is the status quo. People have entrenched relationships with their cars and gas stations, and electric vehicles aren’t a brand new idea—they have a history, one that has included some major hurdles. The fact that Better Place is designing solutions to those hurdles to promote widespread adoption, like a recharging infrastructure and ways to work around limited battery capacity, is not the story. At least not yet.

Addis says Better Place will initially operate more like a movement than a brand for consumers, so people first align with the global need for electric cars. The company will wait to tell the tactical story—individual benefit, cost and how to use the service—until the infrastructure and cars are in place. To kick things off, this summer Addis released the company’s branding and a Web video that animates Better Place’s cyan tear-shaped logo to illustrate its vision of a world off oil. Shapes derived from the quarter-circle (what Addis calls "the switch") depict the global oil addiction and then the antidote: the brand’s four pillars—plug, people, planet and prosperity—that eventually come together to form the logo. The company used one basic shape to build the story to highlight how Better Place is only reordering components consumers are familiar with to create a solution.

Looking ahead, the logo will need to move from the Web to cars, without the help of copy or voice-overs. The car logos will be blue ("Green seemed too trite," Addis says) because of the color’s emotive qualities, unlike the chrome logos automakers primarily use.

Paluska says the next step is to foster the movement online with a portal to house Better Place original content as well as user-generated videos, images and stories about what’s happening in the world of electric transportation, even if it doesn’t concern the company explicitly. Recent stories about a 14-year-old girl who rode her bike from Minnesota to D.C. collecting signatures in support of electric vehicles and Beijing Olympics buses with swappable batteries are fair game—the content doesn’t need to further Better Place, but it should link it to the latest in clean transportation so, when its cars actually hit the road, a global community will be built and waiting.

"It’s not a car, it’s not a particular process; it’s a movement and getting people excited about that movement," says Addis. "So, we had to create a brand that would work at that level, but then seamlessly morph into a consumer product. This is truly category creation."

What is Better Place?

Better Place is planning to build and operate an electric recharge grid, the infrastructure that’s meant to support widespread use of zero-emission, all-electric cars. The one-year-old startup, with headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. and satellite operations in Tel Aviv, also plans to sell vehicles, but not as a profit driver. Better Place compares its business model to that of cell service providers. Profits will be based on consumer subscriptions to the grid—they’ll buy miles, like minutes, bundled in unlimited, monthly maximum or pay as you go plans. Better Place will distribute low-cost vehicles, which may even be free in some markets—like cell phones, which are often inexpensive or free with a contract. For CEO and founder Shai Agassi, this is a service business, because a ubiquitous grid is what will make electric cars—and environmentally responsible driving—practical.

Addressing electric car technology’s biggest issues to date—the lack of charging infrastructure and short battery life—the grid will include charging stations in parking spots at work and retail locations, so parking becomes refueling time. With battery capacity only at 100 miles, Better Place is designing swap stations, where a car’s depleted battery can be replaced with a fully charged one in the time it takes to fill a tank of gas, to make long distance trips possible.

So far, Denmark’s largest utility company, Danish Oil & Natural Gas, and Israel have invested in Better Place networks. Partnering with automaker Renault-Nissan Alliance to mass-produce electric cars with removable batteries, Better Place plans to have close to 100,000 vehicles in Israel by 2011. Shortly after, cars will follow in Denmark, where Better Place batteries will store DONG’s excess wind energy. Until then, Agassi will continue to present Better Place to heads of state, energy companies and car manufacturers to engineer tax breaks to make electric appealing to drivers, to supply his grid with clean energy and to get more all-electric vehicles coming down the production line.

Comments

Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he’s out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he’s been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.

It’s December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We’ve got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won’t be a problem.

At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world’s largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he’s SAP’s head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he’s not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. It’s a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It’s not exactly what this audience wants to hear.

Now it’s Agassi’s turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He’s got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world’s.

Agassi has dark hair, light brown eyes, and a square jaw. He’s a careful speaker, holding back until the right moment before delivering his thoughts. He’s partial to dramatic pauses, especially if he’s about to explain how the future is going to look—something he does all the time. People often think he’s kidding, partly because he always has a slight, wry smile. But when the pause ends, what follows—no matter how far-fetched—is never a joke. At his first executive board meeting at SAP, a company that had grown dominant by moving slowly and conservatively, Agassi suggested nearly a dozen heretical ideas. He said SAP should give away its hardware and software for free—just charge for IT support. He said SAP should make its database business open source to undermine Oracle. The other board members laughed: The new kid was a cutup! But they stopped when SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner looked around the table and said, "He’s the only guy making sense here."

Agassi’s interest in energy is new. In 2005, he joined Young Global Leaders, an invitation-only group for politicians and businesspeople under 40. The four-day induction seminar was held at the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt. Between lectures, YGLs like Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström and NBA star Dikembe Mutombo pledged to find ways to "make the world a better place" by 2020. Agassi’s assignment was the environment, and he quickly focused in on climate change.

Most left the event and just poked around in their own industries, looking for small tweaks and improvements. But Agassi wanted something bigger. Back home in Silicon Valley, his day job involved coaxing SAP into the Web 2.0 era. But after Zermatt, his nights were devoted to dinners with energy experts, books on energy policy, and sessions on Wikipedia, learning everything he could about the carbon economy. Getting off oil was the key, he decided. But how? He started by looking at cutting energy usage in the home, then moved to a more tempting target: transportation. Was hydrogen the answer? What about embedding power in the street—like slot cars? Could more be done with biofuels? Agassi kept a running file on his home PC and began working on a series of white papers.

The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.

This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest automaker in the US, with dealers from Paris to Mexico City. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don’t last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding "range extenders"—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.

The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.

This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest automaker in the US, with dealers from Paris to Mexico City. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don’t last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding "range extenders"—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.

Agassi unveiled the outline of his vision for the crowd at the Saban event: a new kind of infrastructure, with ubiquitous charge stations, that was not only simple and logical but potentially profitable, too. As he talked, he read the body language of the audience—they were leaning forward, they were nodding—and he fed off it, layering on details. A country like Israel, he told them, could get off oil by simply adopting his new business model. No technological breakthroughs were necessary. No new inventions. It was as if he’d discovered a trapdoor beneath both the gasoline industry and the auto industry, a combined $3 trillion market. It sounded easy and unavoidable. Even Daniel Yergin was amazed. Shai Agassi had stolen the show.

A week later, Agassi was in bed when his phone rang. He was asked to hold for Shimon Peres. At first he thought it was a joke.

"Now what?" said the familiar rumbling voice on the other end of the line. Peres said he had been thinking about Agassi’s speech since returning to Israel. He wanted to know what Agassi was going to do about it.

"What do you mean?" Agassi asked.

"You spoke so beautifully, you have to make this a reality. Otherwise, it will remain a speech."

After that conversation, Agassi couldn’t get Peres’ voice out of his head. A few months later, when his boss broke the news that he wouldn’t be getting the top job at SAP anytime soon, Agassi shocked just about everyone in the tech world by quitting. And not long after that, in May 2007, he launched Project Better Place, the world’s first global electric-car grid operator (he later dropped "Project"). He had no cars, no test site, and no electrical engineering or auto experience. It wasn’t even clear that consumers wanted change. They were paying $3 a gallon, painful but bearable.

Nevertheless, many of Agassi’s colleagues from SAP joined him. They realized that what Shai was building was still essentially a software company. He needed a network that allowed cars to tell the grid how much charge they were carrying and how much more they required. The system had to know where the car was so it could tell the driver where to go to "fill up." And it had to electronically negotiate with the local energy utility over when it could and couldn’t take power and how much to pay. Few of his colleagues asked to read the business plan before signing on. They were joining the cause, not just the company. "Once you have a mission," Agassi told me over dinner one night last winter, "you can’t go back to having a job."

By early summer 2008, Agassi had two countries ready to roll out the plan, a major automaker producing the cars, and $200 million in committed capital. He had launched the fifth-largest startup of all time in less than a year.

After a career spent thinking exclusively about business software, Agassi now thrills to the idea that he’s changing the world. "I get to shift multiple markets," he says. "I get to shift economies. It’s extremely liberating. I breathe differently."

Israelis like to call Peres, now their president, a visionary, and they mean it as both a compliment and a dig. He sees where things can go but not necessarily how to get there. When I spoke with him, he recognized that Agassi has to deal with the same challenge: "When you translate a dream into reality," he said, "it’s never a full implementation. It is easier to dream than to do."

It is mid-May, and Agassi is sitting at the head of a conference table in the Kiryat Atidim high tech office park in northern Tel Aviv. Two dozen Better Place engineers and executives are grabbing platefuls of fresh watermelon and finding seats. About a third have flown in from the company’s Palo Alto headquarters; the rest are based here. Agassi knows the Israeli tech community intimately. He was born here to immigrant parents—his dad’s family fled from Iraq, his mom’s from Morocco—and at 15 he was accepted into the Technion, Israel’s MIT. After graduating, he and his father, also a Technion alum, started a series of software companies. They had their pick of talent: The country’s density of scientists and engineers is among the highest in the world.

This is the first time that most of these Better Placers have been together in one room. Agassi slumps low in his chair, staring at this morning’s first speaker, his little brother, Tal. Better Place is a family affair. Agassi’s younger sister, Dafna Barazovsky, also works there, and their father, Reuven, frequently sits in on meetings.

Tal wears a tight-fitting button-down, and as usual his hair is heavily gelled in spikes. At 33, he is Better Place’s head of network deployment, overseeing every aspect of the all-important electric grid. Behind him are three gray-and-blue mock-ups of the charging stations. These will be much more than dumb sockets; they have to carry the charge, sure, but they also must withstand being dinged by cars, vandalized by thieves, and subjected to the heat and cold. And they have to communicate with Better Place headquarters to verify that, yes, this is a subscriber and here’s how to bill them. The first order of business is to choose a design.

"Put them on the table," Agassi tells his brother, who gently positions the foam models so everyone can vote. The first looks like a giant Pez dispenser, with a skinny trunk leading up to a cantilevered box that houses the charging equipment. The second has a fat base and a skinny body that zigs in the middle, like a svelte E.T. The last one is waist-high, smaller than the others, and resembles a stunted drive-through squawk box. It’s the most practical: It can be freestanding or mounted, and it would be the least objectionable to retail centers. It wins unanimous approval. Then, from all around the table, come the real questions. How does the box signal that it’s out of service? Where will the 32-amp charging cable go—in the charging spot or in the vehicle? "In America and Australia, it has to be outside the car," declares Ziva Patir, a former vice president of the International Organization for Standardization. Agassi hired her in April, because he not only wants Better Place to adhere to every country’s existing regulations, he wants to define the new standards for the coming global electric recharge grid. So the power cords will have to be coiled inside the device and pulled out like a garden hose. But how many hoses? Enough for two cars? Four cars? And if four, won’t the box be too small to hold them all? Plus, what if the power outlet on the car is in the back and the driver pulls in facing forward?

Agassi has been listening, saying nothing. But now he reacts. "Our customer goes to park her car," he says. "She pulls in, then she’s squeezing between two cars to drag out this big cable and walk it back to her car. She’ll be wearing her nice work clothes and getting them dirty." His eyes are closed, his hands resting on his head. "Guys," he says, using a term that always signals his disappointment with the group, "we’ve just lost half the market. You need to make life simple for people."

Tal stands in the front of the room, slightly stunned. A small-scale Agassi family feud breaks out. Dafna, 37, head of marketing for Better Place’s Israel operations, says it’s not asking a lot for people to pull into a parking spot a certain way. Their father is sitting up front, but he remains quiet. Tal finally comes up with a response: "We can have a hydraulic arm holding the cable," he says.

That enrages the rest of the room. An arm! The cost of adding an arm to the hundreds of thousands of charge spots they envision will crater the business model, argues someone from the Israeli office. Forget money, someone else says: Redesigning these things will push us way behind on our deadlines. Agassi dismisses the whole idea of an arm. "It’ll break in three months," he mutters to himself.

He tries to move the meeting along, but the cable and the connector keep coming up. Each proposed solution creates a new set of problems. ("It’s like a fractal," Agassi tells me later of the process, with a hint of pleasure. "But at the end, what you want is a snowflake.") He asks occasional questions, but usually just about how the speaker came to a certain conclusion—it’s the thought process more than the answer that seems to intrigue him.

Finally, as Hebrew and English blur into a confusing Esperanto roar, Agassi raises both arms over his head: "One conversation!" he shouts. And then, the pause. He suddenly sees how it’s going to work. Maybe the arm isn’t so wrong. "This is ‘think different,’" he says, invoking Apple, a company that features prominently in the detailed business metaphors he always seems to have at hand. "What do we need to make this happen? Two servos, two degrees of movement for the arm." Pause. "This is the driver experience: He goes into a spot and the spot connects itself. In 2008, we put the cable in the unit, in 2010 we use an arm, in 2012, there’s a smart arm that connects automatically. For the home unit, the users get a pull cable for free, or they pay $500 and they get autoconnect. It’ll cost $250 to build, and we’ll sell it for $500." Agassi has not only come around on the arm, he now thinks it is essential. End of discussion. He even names a company that can build the arm and suggests how to structure the deal.

"Shai’s got two big traits," says Aliza Peleg, Better Place’s VP of operations. "By the time he’s thought of something, to him it’s been completed, it’s been achieved," she says. "The other trait is that by the time you’ve understood what he’s thinking, he’s already somewhere else. You’re in catch-up mode 24/7."

For months, Tal and his team have been working with vendors to design and price the charging spots. Now he has to go back and tell them that they need to add arms—and eventually smart arms—and that the redesign has to be ready by their next all-company meeting, in 90 days.

Crazy. That’s what people say when they first realize the scope of Agassi’s project. He’s tilting at electric windmills, fighting a fight that has undone countless well-funded, well-intentioned entrepreneurs before him. In a time when Silicon Valley is all about small—scalable startups like Flickr, Tumblr, and hundreds of other vowel-deprived minicompanies—Agassi is thinking big. Google, Ford, and Exxon Mobil big. His brother tells me that Better Place is going to become one of the biggest companies in the world. When I ask Shai if he’s worried about a competitor stealing his idea, he stares at me like I’m an idiot. "The mission is to end oil," he says, "not create a company."

Most startups try out their product on beta testers. Agassi wanted a beta country. A cooperative national government would be willing to modify the tax code or offer other incentives—essential to getting consumers on board quickly. He wasn’t selling cars, but really building a network; the bigger the initial base, the stronger the network effect. A small island nation would be ideal, since the range of his car is limited by the range of his charging grid. Fortunately, he already had deep family and business ties to a virtual island—Israel is surrounded by water on one side and by enemies on all others. The farthest a driver can safely go in a straight shot is about 250 miles. Plus, Israel is increasingly queasy about its role as an oil importer. Anything that threatens the livelihoods of hostile Arab oil sheikhs and Iranian mullahs has a special appeal in Agassi’s native land.

Agassi got to work convincing the Israeli government in 2007. First he, Peres, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert pressed legislators to change the tax code to make electric vehicles more attractive to consumers. Under the proposed tax scheme, Israel’s 78 percent tax on cars would be replaced by a 10 percent tax on zero-emission vehicles and a 72 percent tax on traditional gas-guzzlers. (After four years, the sales tax on electric vehicles will rise sharply.) Agassi argued that the revenue losses—calculated at $700 million over five years—would be insignificant compared to what foreign oil costs the economy. At a Jerusalem press conference in late January, Olmert beamed down at Agassi, who was sitting in the front row: "In order to bring about this dramatic change, sometimes we need a boy like in the fairy tales to say, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes.’ We can all see that for ourselves, so how come we haven’t said so? And this boy comes along and puts things in motion to bring about change. And the boy in this story—and he really is a boy, practically, but he has achieved more than many adults have—is, of course, Shai Agassi."

He had a country, but he also needed someone to build the cars. At the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Agassi was still representing SAP, he met Carlos Ghosn, CEO of both Nissan and Renault—related companies that together form the fourth-largest automaker in the world. The two talked in Peres’ hotel room. Agassi’s timing couldn’t have been better. Ghosn was looking for a way to leapfrog his competitors in the clean-vehicle arena. GM was chasing the hydrogen fuel cell, Ford liked biofuels, Toyota had the Prius. Ghosn was especially dismissive of the hybrid approach: "They’re like mermaids," he told the Israelis. "When you want a fish you get a woman, and when you want a woman you get a fish." Ghosn’s companies didn’t have much except a tiny electric Nissan car and plans for a high-powered lithium-ion battery to be developed by Nissan and NEC. At best, he figured, he might be able to sell the vehicles to post offices or other companies that would buy a few dozen and never drive them more than 60 miles. Agassi’s plan could open much bigger doors. Still, who was this guy? Ghosn was interested, but it was too early to make any commitment.

Two months later, Agassi quit his job at SAP. Soon he was looking for money and, in early June, he found himself sitting in an office in Tel Aviv’s gleaming Millennium Tower, pitching to one of Israel’s richest men, Idan Ofer.

Ofer is short and powerfully built; he carries himself like a wrestler ready for his next takedown. Ofer and his family have investments around the world, and much of their money is tied up in shipping. But he’d recently bought the largest oil refinery in Israel and was finalizing a joint venture with Chery Automobile, the massive Chinese auto company. Ofer liked what Better Place could do for Israel, and he thought it could work around the world. Plus, he really liked how it might make his China investment more valuable. Chery could build cars to work on the Better Place infrastructure. China itself could be a market. (Agassi has no deal yet with Chery, but one is being discussed.)

Most Israeli entrepreneurs who tried to get into Ofer’s wallet were interested only in becoming big in Israel, then selling out. Ofer was impressed that Agassi’s global ambitions surpassed even his own.

"He had the self-image of being an equal to Steve Jobs or Michael Dell or Bill Gates," Ofer says. "Even if this ends up destroying—for lack of a better word—my refinery business, that will be small money compared to what this will be. When you play chess, you give up something to get something else."

After the meeting, Ofer joined Agassi in the elevator. By the time they got to the street, he had committed $100 million. The total would eventually grow to $130 million. Agassi raised another $70 million more from Morgan Stanley and two venture firms, VantagePoint Venture Partners and Maniv Energy Capital.

Once Agassi had $200 million to fund the grid and a government serious about tax breaks, Renault began developing an electric car that would be ready for the market by 2011. Agassi promises that 50 Renault prototypes will be on Israeli roads this winter—and 1,000 stations will be there to recharge them. He’s not talking about some three-wheeled, pimped-out golf carts, either, but blend-in-at-the-school-parking-lot cars and SUVs. The sedan will be mid-size, similar to Renault’s popular Laguna and Mégane models and able to go from 0 to 60 in a respectable 7.5 seconds. Better Place expects to have close to 100,000 vehicles by the end of 2011. And while these might show up in Israel first, Renault plans for them eventually to be on roads worldwide. "We wouldn’t have invested if we thought this was a onetime, one-place story," says Patrick Pélata, Renault’s product manager and Ghosn’s number two.

4×4 Projects in Kfar Saba, a suburb of Tel Aviv, is the auto equivalent of an Olympic training center. The building, however, doesn’t look like much, just a mustard-yellow warehouse on a cluttered industrial side street. And inside, it’s just a warren of cars, trucks, and auto parts. But on a lift sits a white Jeep Wrangler that’s been outfitted with supersize off-road wheels, like a monster dune buggy. A green Hummer is parked in back, its diesel engine replaced with a high-powered Chevy small-block. And a silver BMW 318i has a shiny new Corvette V-8; touch the gas and the tail whips out, perfect for drifting. The only vehicle that doesn’t really fit in is a completely ordinary family sedan, a silver 2005 Renault Mégane—Better Place’s first prototype.

Agassi needed some way to test Better Place’s all-important software, called AutOS (pronounced "autos"). The system serves as energy monitor, GPS unit, help center, and personal assistant, packed into an onboard PC that will also hold cellular and Wi-Fi chips. As part of the debugging process, Agassi bought the used Mégane and sent it to 4×4 with his car guy, Quin Garcia. The assignment was to convert it into an electric car.

Garcia was just finishing his master’s in automotive engineering at Stanford University last year when he heard Agassi give a speech on campus. A few months later, he had a job at Better Place. Garcia’s manner is laid-back Northern California until anything related to cars comes up, at which point he turns as intense as everyone else at Better Place.

Garcia reaches into the Mè9gane and pushes a button. Nothing happens. "It needs to be rebooted," he shouts to the owner of the shop. Garcia opens a silver box under the hood and fiddles with some buttons. "Control-Alt-Delete," jokes Better Place executive Barak Hershkovitz.

Hershkovitz oversees AutOS. He is the hard-nosed realist to Agassi’s dreamer, the Scotty to his Kirk. That means Hershkovitz, even when he’s joking, comes off hangdog—he knows that deadlines are looming.

Hershkovitz was about to start a residency in ophthalmology when he teamed up with Agassi in 1998. He was a brilliant, self-taught programmer, and what started as a bit of moonlighting quickly turned into a full-time job, first at one of the Agassi family companies, then at SAP. He quit soon after Agassi left, and now, with a staff of six, he’s building AutOS.

The system reboots, and Garcia taps a blank spot on the dashboard to show where the car’s AutOS-powered LCD will go. The garage’s owner gets behind the wheel. I take the passenger seat, Garcia and Hershkovitz climb in back, and we head toward the highway. As we accelerate, I’m pinned uncomfortably to my seat. Unlike a traditional engine, an electric motor produces all of its power right away. (Recently, Ofer, whose $130 million investment made him chair of the board, took the prototype for a spin. Garcia and others watched in horror as Ofer’s sharp steering, combined with the instant torque, caused an axle to snap.)

I keep waiting for the shift to another gear—the jerk that signals it’s time to breathe again. "A normal gas engine spins at 6,000 rpm," Garcia says, noticing my surprise. "This motor can spin up to 12,000 rpm," which means there’s no need to change gears. "You don’t have the normal car problem where you need first gear to get off the line. We just took the original transmission and stuck it permanently in second."

As we approach a stop sign, the car feels like it’s being held back by a rubber band. The tug, Hershkovitz explains, comes from what’s called regeneration. "When you take your foot off the pedal, the car has kinetic energy," he says. "The motor starts charging the battery, turning the kinetic energy back to electric energy." He starts running through possible ways to turn the physics into a game: He wants Better Place users to be able to go to a Web site and see which drivers have racked up the most "regen." Maybe they’ll win prizes.

Garcia decides to argue the point. "If you’re regening, it means you used too much energy in the first place!" Meaning drivers should just take their foot off the accelerator sooner.

"Ah, you are not a computer. It’s not like you can calculate how much energy you need to get to that red light," Hershkovitz says.

"Every time you do regen, there’s a loss—it’s not like you get it all back," protests Garcia. "The perfect driver would cruise around without ever using regen or the brakes. When they came to their destination, they would coast to a stop."

Hershkovitz ignores him. "Come on, let’s go," he says as we pull back into the 4×4 shop. He has an appointment with a Japanese team from NEC to talk batteries. I follow him into his rented Mazda5 and find my body relaxing to the familiar shifts and jerks of the internal combustion engine.

The initial deal with Israel was, thanks to Agassi’s connections, practically foreordained. The real test would be signing up a second country—a "validator," to use Agassi’s term. In March, he got one. Denmark is everything Israel is not: a cold climate (which is hard on batteries), a net exporter of oil, a nation friendly with its neighbors. Agassi had no ties to the government. But he had a business model that proved irresistible to a Danish company called DONG Energy.

For DONG, Denmark’s largest utility, Better Place offers an opportunity to solve one of its biggest problems: the economies of wind power. DONG makes a higher portion of energy from wind—18 percent—than any other power company in the world. Danish politicians want to see that figure doubled, which is good and green but completely impractical: Some days the wind blows, and some days it doesn’t. Banking wind energy is expensive and inefficient—DONG would have to buy fields of batteries. Rather than lose it, the company ends up giving away excess power to Germany and Sweden. So when DONG CEO Anders Eldrup met with Agassi, he immediately saw that Better Place would not only appeal to his countrymen’s environmental leanings, but the cars would also be a cheap, distributed way to store excess wind power. After the partnership was announced, Eldrup went for a haircut and found himself bombarded with questions about Better Place. His longtime barber had never once asked about Eldrup’s business. Before the Better Place announcement, the man explained, he’d never really cared.

Better Place did seem to sell itself. That’s what Agassi was discovering. The day of the Denmark announcement, he received a text message from an executive at a carmaker outside of the US. (He declines to name the company.)

"What’s going on in Denmark?" it read.

Agassi, a bit confused, wrote back that he had just announced country two.

"What’s the announcement?"

Agassi typed: "Zero percent tax on our cars, DONG as a partner."

The next day he got another text message: "But there was already 0 percent tax on alternative energy cars in Denmark."

Agassi sent back a long missive explaining that because of Better Place, Denmark was talking about expanding its tax break beyond the current 2012 cutoff date; that DONG was promising that it could supply 100 percent clean energy for all Better Place cars; that he’s raising an additional$160 million for Denmark alone; and that Renault intended to supply all the cars Denmark could buy. He finished the message with some barbed advice: "I’ll be offering $20,000 cars in a market where you’re selling $60,000 cars. How many have you planned to sell in 2011 in Denmark? Because I recommend you take them off your plan."

The next day, Agassi was invited to a meeting with the automaker’s CEO.

"I have a strong feeling this is where the industry is going to go," says Rod Lache, an auto analyst at Deutsche Bank. In March, Lache crunched the numbers for his clients on what Better Place might do to their portfolio of auto holdings. He figured a typical driver in the US gets 20 mpg. With gas at $4 per gallon, a driver who clocked 15,000 miles per year would have an annual gas bill of $3,000. The equivalent cost of electricity and battery depreciation—Better Place’s cost to fill up its customers’ cars, in other words—would be about $1,050. If Agassi had cheaper cars (thanks to tax breaks or incentives) and offered monthly plans that were lower than or equal to what consumers were paying at the pump, this would be phenomenally attractive. "Frankly," Lache wrote, "we are not aware of any reason why [automakers] would not sign up for this."

Early this summer, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche told a German newspaper that his company would have an electric Mercedes and an electric Smart car on the market by 2010. When asked about the cost, he said it really depended on whether the batteries came with the car or were leased. No one had thought about separating the battery from the car before Agassi; now CEOs like Zetsche were treating it as standard electric-car business practice. And yes, Zetche confirmed, Daimler is talking to Better Place.

It’s a warm mid-March morning in Washington, DC. Agassi has just flown in from San Francisco on the red-eye. He was booked in business class but ended up in coach, sleeping across three seats. His ever-present uniform—dark suit, white shirt—looks slightly rumpled. For years, Agassi has traveled almost constantly, and the irony of fighting planetary destruction while clocking countless hours of carbon-spewing jet travel isn’t lost on him. "I have so many sins to pay on my climate bill right now that we hope this works really fast," he says.

If Better Place is to live up to Agassi’s revolutionary goal, it will eventually have to win over Americans, the world’s largest per-capita polluters. But that won’t be easy.

He starts the day off with a speech at a conference organized by a left-leaning think tank. Speaking without notes, Agassi roams the stage, preaching the inevitability of his plan. He has a way of describing things that is never zero-sum; everybody wins in his version of the future, even when he’s selling massive disruption.

"For the car companies, we made it simple," he says. "We separated the ownership of the car and the ownership of the battery. See, car companies don’t know how to assess the life of the battery. So they go through these complicated programs of testing them for a long period of time. And we told the car company, you know what? Just like you don’t sell a car with a card that says ‘Here is oil for the life of the car,’ you don’t sell cars with the batteries for the life of the car, because the battery is crude oil." He explains that his plan alone, once scaled up, could produce a 20 percent drop in the world’s CO2 emissions. And he wasn’t stopping there. "If we also buy clean generation, we reduce the price of clean electrons so that at the end of 10 years, clean electrons are cheaper than coal-based electrons, and nobody builds another coal plant at that point. That’s another 40 percent of CO2 emissions; that’s the treaty Tony Blair is now working to get for the world by 2050. I’m telling you, we can get there a decade after we finish the car side. We can get there in 2030—60 percent reduction in our CO2 emissions."

After every speech—or just in the course of everyday business—one or two people ask Agassi for jobs. Michael Granoff, the venture capitalist who was Better Place’s earliest investor, now works for Agassi as head of oil independence policies. ("I joke that 29 days a month Shai’s my boss, and one day a month"—when Agassi briefs investors—"I’m his," Granoff says.) Today in DC, a young man from the Boston Consulting Group corners Agassi on his way out of the Hilton conference room and hands over his résumé. Granoff, who has organized Agassi’s day, waits until the man is out of earshot and reminds Agassi that the same guy made the same request after a speech in Boston. Agassi has a groupie.

Outside the hotel, Granoff and Agassi jump into a hybrid Lexus SUV and head to Capitol Hill for a series of meetings. In the office of a New York House Democrat named Steve Israel, Agassi settles into a leather couch and makes a direct pitch. "Whoever is number 44," meaning the next president, "will transfer $2 trillion to $3 trillion out of the economy"—the amount America will spend on foreign oil in his first term. This is a line Agassi has been testing lately, and Israel seems to bite. "So what do we do?" asks the legislator. Agassi lays it out: He wants tax hikes on gas-powered cars. Israel tells him that will never fly. As Agassi discusses other possible incentives, Israel interrupts him: "We don’t make batteries, so aren’t we going to swap out foreign-oil dependence for foreign-battery reliance?" It’s a strange theory, but Agassi doesn’t blink. The conversation suddenly shifts to the best way to set up a battery-manufacturing center in the congressman’s Long Island district.

Israel is late for a vote, so everyone hustles off toward the Capitol. As Israel veers away toward the House floor, Agassi enters an elevator followed by Kansas senator Sam Brownback. Granoff, who seems to know everyone in DC, introduces the two and quickly explains Better Place. Brownback asks if he can buy one of Agassi’s cars. "One problem: We need the infrastructure first," Agassi says. "That’s what we’re building."

"All you need is a plug, right? Why would you need an infrastructure?" asks Brownback, who towers over Agassi.

Agassi pulls out his BlackBerry: "We’re like AT&T, not Nokia," he says. But the cell phone analogy doesn’t click here.

"So you’re like a long extension cord?" asks Brownback, and everyone laughs politely. Agassi starts to explain, but the senator steps out. Granoff promises that he’ll bring the two men together soon for a more substantial discussion.

The rest of the day proves equally unsatisfying. One senator cancels at the last minute; another offers little but good wishes. In nearly every meeting, insiders ruefully give the same advice. Getting anything like the deal he has in Israel is going to be impossible.

Washington was a bust, but there are other ways to conquer America. Agassi has already been contacted by the mayor of Los Angeles and politicians in Michigan and New York City. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was in Agassi’s Young Global Leaders class. "My proposal was about health care or something in San Francisco," Newsom says sheepishly. He traveled to Israel to meet with Better Place in May. But Agassi is wary. For one thing, San Francisco is hardly an island, and as leader of a municipality, Newsom has few tax levers he can pull to make the electric car affordable. That hasn’t kept the mayor from combing through statutes for fees the city might lift. "This is the irony: The city is working harder to get their business than the business itself. Shouldn’t he be sucking up to San Francisco?" Newsom asks, only half joking.

But there is a natural place to start in the US. The island state, Hawaii, depends on shipped-in oil; a full 14 percent of the state’s annual $62 billion gross domestic product goes to oil producers, more than any state in the nation. After Israel announced its Better Place plans in January, Hawaii governor Linda Lingle asked for a meeting.

This spring, Agassi went to Honolulu. The governor ushered him into her grand koa-wood-paneled conference room. She sat at the head of the table, flanked by cabinet members. Agassi showed them how the model worked, how it would roll out, how unstoppable it would be. The governor’s people wanted to know why this wasn’t just shifting the environmental burden to the electric utility. Agassi said he’d pay a premium to buy energy made only from renewable sources, making it cost-effective for the utility to put in wind farms or solar-powered plants—something Lingle has been pushing for. The tourism and economic development director was impressed, but one thing bothered him: Consumers want choices. "This is Hawaii," he said. "Where are the convertibles?"

At a larger meeting a few weeks later, one of Agassi’s lieutenants made the case to dozens of Hawaii’s business and political leaders. Like others, Dave Rolf was intrigued. He represents the state’s auto dealers, a powerful lobby in the state capitol that’s against anything that cuts into car dealer profits. The meeting lasted eight hours, and Rolf left stunned. Not only was this going to happen, he decided, it needed to happen, and Hawaii was the perfect place. He fired off a letter to GM’s regional head in California urging the carmaker to pay attention. The auto industry needed to be part of this from the get-go. They needed to be making electric cars. "This is kind of a world-changer," Rolf says.

A few months ago, I stopped by Agassi’s Palo Alto headquarters to sit in on a three-day strategy meeting. The company has just moved in, and the walls are still decorated with motivational posters put up by the previous tenant. Empty cubicles are waiting to be filled.

The entire staff is trying to write a mission statement with help from a moderator. He flips through slides on a screen: "Our mission is to transform personal mobility." "Our mission is to break the world’s oil addiction (before it breaks us)."

Agassi, in a black leather jacket, a stiff blue-and-white button-down, and faded jeans, stops the moderator. "We still think we’re selling to them," he says, after one of his long, drawn-out pauses. "We’re not. It’s not us to them. It’s them to us. You see, people want this to happen; we just happen to be in the way of their getting what they want. We can’t give them the car fast enough. That’s something we need to capture: ‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to sell to you.’ We’re a facilitator, not the creator. This is going to be a community. We just need to get out of their way. They’re going to push for policy, they’re going to sell the cars, they’re going to be zealots."

I start thinking about the people he has already hooked: mayors, CEOs, investors, statesmen, even car dealers. At one point, Tal had marveled to me about Shai’s ability to convince you that the answers to the most challenging problems are easy and obvious. "He tells you the story, and it sounds so simple. Why don’t we have it today? Why isn’t it here already?"

It’s true. Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer—yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.

Q&A With Israel’s Shimon Peres

In early June, Wired’s Daniel Roth talked with Israeli president Shimon Peres about Better Place, the greening of Israel, his obsession with Israel’s burgeoning solar industry, and the problems that come with turning a vision into a reality. An edited excerpt:

Wired: Was the message of getting off oil something you were concerned about before?

Peres: I thought that the greatest problem of our time was oil. Oil on one hand is polluting the land, and on the other hand it’s financing terror. They say jokingly that the Middle East is divided into these kind of countries: the oily countries and the holy countries. We are obviously a holy country. We don’t have oil. We don’t have water.

Wired: You brought Better Place and Renault together. Did you expect them to form this partnership?

Peres: I never worried about it. My great advantage is that I’m ignorant. My own mentor was David Ben-Gurion. He used to say all experts are experts for things that did happen. There are no experts for things that may happen.

Wired: Before Israel publicly announced its Better Place rollout, I was told that you and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were going to announce that Israel was going to declare complete energy independence. But the announcement was much more modest. What happened?

Peres: It’s not the end of the story. I am now pushing solar energy and introducing the new environmental approach to life. It’s foolish: Why should we hang on oil when we can hang on the sun? The sun is much more permanent, more democratic, and there’s plenty of it. I’m feeling that our technology will miniaturize the equipment of the solar energy and reduce the cost. So I’m very glad that we started. Israel is going to be a green country. That’s our ambition. And our ambition is to do it as soon as possible.

Wired: So can Israel become a clean tech global power?

Peres: Israel, you know, is too small of a country to become a world market and too small a country to become a great world producer, but we have enough scientists per square kilometer to become a world laboratory. And smallness has its own advantages; when you are small you can be really daring, you can be a pilot plant. You cannot, for example, try a car like Shai Agassi’s in Texas. It is too large and would be too costly and complicated. Here we can do it on a human scale and eventually extend it and expand it.

Wired: Do you see any "peace dividends" coming out of the clean tech push?

Peres: Oh yes. Ecology forces us to cooperate. Water is not disciplined, the air doesn’t ask for visas to fly from one place to another place, and if seas are beginning to die, all partners have to save them. So today the economy is very much a matter of environment, and environment is an independent force that is not committed to borders or rules or conventions. And nature is impatient. You cannot say: I’m going to negotiate pollution for 10 or 20 years. Pollution won’t wait for you. Pollution is not a political force; it’s a force of nature.

Comments

We are enormously proud to be a part of creating this historic brand. I drank the Kool-Aid on Shai Agassi’s ambitious plan to rid the world of its dependence on oil long before the company’s October 2007 launch. When I took a survey of others with whom Shai shared the plan, their biggest objections focused not on the plan’s virtue but on the ability to get it done. The only thing standing in Shai’s way was inertia and a blanket acceptance of the status quo, which was a very telling sign. Everyone knew that our dependence on oil was an evil, but they had resigned themselves to the notion that all other alternatives were mere folly; moving such an entrenched infrastructure was too daunting to become a reality.

But, to know Shai is to know that it can get done. As Shimon Peres describes it, “we need a boy like in the fairy tales.” It takes a purity of intent, an unstoppable drive, and a canny vision to see how existing elements can be rearranged to form a remarkably simple solution.

While the end solution is simple, getting there is complicated and rife with obstacles. And telling the story of the second chapter of the automotive industry (the first chapter has lasted 100 years) before even a single electric car is available to purchase, is equally challenging.

Shai asked us to join his team and, together with Hill & Knowlton, to tell the story of a post-petroleum future. In possibly the most collaborative experience of my career, Better Place, Hill & Knowlton, and Addis Creson worked through the obstacles, stigmas, myths, and biases swirling around the discussion of our collective transportation future.

And the brand we were about to create needed to begin not with a product, but with a movement. It will be a couple of years before the infrastructure for electric cars is in place. The challenge of our brand is to elevate the entire electric car category long before it will actually morph into a consumer product.

With the mission to end our addiction to oil, we landed on the construct of four P’s: People, Planet, Prosperity, and a fourth that triggers either a vicious cycle or a virtuous one. Today, that trigger is the Pump. The gas pump is the addict’s syringe, where we administer our weekly fix. And it is the pump that so negatively affects our people, our planet, and our prosperity. We depict this relationship as a black spot of oil with four equal sections: Pump, People, Planet, and Prosperity.

But, if that trigger is flipped in a new direction, to the electric Plug, we can reverse the effects for people, planet, and prosperity. Visually, we depict this as moving from the black spot to the blue “Switch,” our symbol that embodies the Earth and our optimistic path to the future.

The vision for the identity system is to depict the idea of integrating the pieces of the puzzle in new ways to achieve new solutions. Each symbol starts with a quarter circle that is transformed into a part of a living visual vernacular.

As the brand strategy evolves, we are building out the corporate identity to all branded touchpoints. We’re also using short videos as the primary channel to convey the brand’s message globally. The goal is to conceive a brand that connects disparate audiences from its beginning.

—Steven Addis

Comments

We recently launched the branding for two huge start-ups: Elevance and Better Place. Both are category creators and both present the challenge of telling a wholly new story. These are brands with no benchmarks, no successes or mistakes to study, and no competitors from which to differentiate. And, both companies have yet to sell a product.

While facing a truly blank slate is challenging, it’s also quite freeing. Both brands envision a post-petroleum world: Elevance for products (renewable chemicals) and Better Place for transportation (electric vehicle infrastructure). We were able to focus on the higher level ethos these companies embody. Undistracted by competitive positions, we established the tone for these categories centering on optimistic worldviews.

The strategy for Better Place is to build a movement rather than sell a product. As the brand later morphs into a consumer brand, we expect the community created by our early efforts to be a far more potent sales tool than traditional advertising. The lead time to building the brand around the world, coupled with Better Place’s inherent optimism, give us the perfect opportunity to use the many-to-many power of the Internet in its purest form.

—Steven Addis

Comments

Shai Agassi really is one of the most inspiring people Greenbang has ever met.

He’s the man behind Project Better Place, a business that looks to move people over to economies that rely on clean alternatives to oil.

We’re publishing his press release in full because we like what he’s doing, although we’ve heard there have been a few sticking points with the design of his electric cars.

Thing is, even if that’s true, it’s unlikely to stop Shai. If you meet him, you’ll understand. Here’s our interview with him.
www.greenbang.com/2360/shai-agassi-talks-to-greenbang/

Anyway - Mr Shai…

Palo Alto, Calif. (July 28, 2008) – In its ongoing effort to help people live free from oil, Better Place announced today the unveiling of its new brand identity and online campaign aimed at connecting people online with a shared mission and goal. In addition to the company name and Web site (www.betterplace.com) refresh, Better Place launched a dynamic and uniquely animated logo that visually represents the core pillars on which the company stands – people, planet, prosperity and plug.

Better Place is moving the world off of oil by redefining the economics and experience of transportation – but it cannot do it alone. As part of today’s announcement, Better Place also launched its “10 Words” campaign. The purpose of the campaign is to provide a platform via “minifestos” for people to voice their reasons for ending the world’s addiction to oil.

“Across the globe, people are feeling the pain of rising prices at the pump,” said Joe Paluska, Chief Marketing Officer, Better Place. “We’re calling upon the community to tell the world why we must end our addiction to oil. The switch from oil to electric transportation is inevitable.”

The Better Place Model
As a true mobile operator, Better Place delivers transportation as a sustainable service. The company is building the infrastructure needed for the successful widescale deployment of zero-emission electric vehicles (ZEV) powered by renewable sources of energy.

To do so, Better Place partners with the world’s leading automakers to create the EVs; battery manufacturers to build clean, safe batteries; energy companies to accelerate the migration to renewable energy; and policy makers to lessen the economic and social grip that oil has on nations. The Better Place research and development team integrates existing technology components through Better Place software, charge spots and battery exchange stations so that driving an EV will be as convenient as driving a gas-fueled car.

Tell Us Your “Minifesto”
Through the company’s 10 Words campaign, Better Place is asking everyone to create their own minifesto answering the question in 10 words or less: Why do you think we must end our addiction to oil? By creating a minifesto, people from around the world are given a public platform to express their personal reasons for ending our dependence on oil.

How it works: A contributor must first choose from one of Better Place’s four core pillars to identify the overarching reason why they want to end oil dependency. For example:

People: to provide a sustainable and enjoyable driving experience for all

Planet: to recover from climate change

Prosperity: to create new economic opportunity

Plug: to see zero-emission, electric cars rule the road

Next, they must enter their 10 words, name and photo. The system will automatically integrate their message into a personalized animated minifesto – in practical terms, a short online movie published on 10words.betterplace.com and available to share with friends, embed in blogs, other Web sites or community profile pages.

The World’s First Dynamic Animated Brand
Teamed with branding firm Addis Creson, Better Place designed its visual brand elements, including a logo, to incorporate not only the name and “switch” (the icon), but also clever animation. The switch portion of the logo dons a sky blue color that reflects not only the color of Planet Earth, but also the spirit of optimism.

When animated, the logo quarters transform into various graphical images reminiscent of the brand, including quotation marks, a butterfly, a lighthouse lens, a bird, and even the letters of the alphabet. Wherever and whenever possible, the logo will be leveraged in motion graphics, on LED signage and the Internet.

To experience the Better Place brand and learn more about how you can participate in the 10 Words campaign, please visit: www.betterplace.com.

About Better Place
Better Place is a venture-backed company that aims to reduce global dependency on oil through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles, providing consumers with a cleaner, sustainable, personal transportation alternative. Launched in October 2007, Better Place will build its first Electric Recharge Grids in Israel and Denmark and plans to activate the infrastructure on a country-by-country basis with initial deployments beginning in 2010.

Comments

In its ongoing effort to help people live free from oil, Better Place announced today the unveiling of its new brand identity and online campaign aimed at connecting people online with a shared mission and goal. In addition to the company name and Web site (www.betterplace.com) refresh, Better Place launched a dynamic and uniquely animated logo that visually represents the core pillars on which the company stands – people, planet, prosperity and plug.

Better Place is moving the world off of oil by redefining the economics and experience of transportation – but it cannot do it alone. As part of today’s announcement, Better Place also launched its “10 Words” campaign. The purpose of the campaign is to provide a platform via “minifestos” for people to voice their reasons for ending the world’s addiction to oil.

“Across the globe, people are feeling the pain of rising prices at the pump,” said Joe Paluska, Chief Marketing Officer, Better Place. “We’re calling upon the community to tell the world why we must end our addiction to oil. The switch from oil to electric transportation is inevitable.”

The Better Place Model
As a true mobile operator, Better Place delivers transportation as a sustainable service. The company is building the infrastructure needed for the successful widescale deployment of zero-emission electric vehicles (ZEV) powered by renewable sources of energy.

To do so, Better Place partners with the world’s leading automakers to create the EVs; battery manufacturers to build clean, safe batteries; energy companies to accelerate the migration to renewable energy; and policy makers to lessen the economic and social grip that oil has on nations. The Better Place research and development team integrates existing technology components through Better Place software, charge spots and battery exchange stations so that driving an EV will be as convenient as driving a gas-fueled car.

Tell Us Your “Minifesto”
Through the company’s 10 Words campaign, Better Place is asking everyone to create their own minifesto answering the question in 10 words or less: Why do you think we must end our addiction to oil? By creating a minifesto, people from around the world are given a public platform to express their personal reasons for ending our dependence on oil.

How it works: A contributor must first choose from one of Better Place’s four core pillars to identify the overarching reason why they want to end oil dependency. For example:

People: to provide a sustainable and enjoyable driving experience for all
Planet: to recover from climate change
Prosperity: to create new economic opportunity
Plug: to see zero-emission, electric cars rule the road

Next, they must enter their 10 words, name and photo. The system will automatically integrate their message into a personalized animated minifesto – in practical terms, a short online movie published on http://10words.betterplace.com/ and available to share with friends, embed in blogs, other Web sites or community profile pages.

The World’s First Dynamic Animated Brand
Teamed with branding firm Addis Creson, Better Place designed its visual brand elements, including a logo, to incorporate not only the name and “switch” (the icon), but also clever animation. The switch portion of the logo dons a sky blue color that reflects not only the color of Planet Earth, but also the spirit of optimism.

When animated, the logo quarters transform into various graphical images reminiscent of the brand, including quotation marks, a butterfly, a lighthouse lens, a bird, and even the letters of the alphabet. Wherever and whenever possible, the logo will be leveraged in motion graphics, on LED signage and the Internet.

To experience the Better Place brand and learn more about how you can participate in the 10 Words campaign, please visit: www.betterplace.com.

About Better Place
Better Place is a venture-backed company that aims to reduce global dependency on oil through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles, providing consumers with a cleaner, sustainable, personal transportation alternative. Launched in October 2007, Better Place will build its first Electric Recharge Grids in Israel and Denmark and plans to activate the infrastructure on a country-by-country basis with initial deployments beginning in 2010.

Comments