Featured Guest: Leslie Perlow, Harvard Business School professor and coauthor of the Harvard Business Review article "Making Time Off Predictable—& Required."

Small business owners who have been worried about getting trashed 140 characters at a time may be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that Twitter users tend to stay neutral and focus on facts, and even when they get emotional, they're usually positive.

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Looking for a grand vision to excite imaginations, stimulate investment, and get the economy moving faster? One with potential to improve lives, generate national pride, encourage innovators and entrepreneurs, enhance nonprofits' performance, and save the environment? And a vision with more "grounding" than putting a person on Mars?

Try on the idea of Smarter Cities. SuperCorp IBM and others are going to City Halls, State Houses, and the White House to open dialogue about making our cities "smarter" and thereby more environmentally friendly and human-opportunity-enhancing.

The Smarter City vision is a rising movement right for this moment. Cities bear the brunt of the recession and its nearly 10% unemployment rate. A recent study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors noted a 12% nationwide increase in the demand for emergency shelter and an 18% increase in the need for emergency food assistance. Those numbers are even more acute in the largest urban areas. In New York City, for example, the demand for emergency food alone was expected to increase by 28% over this year.

A smarter city could infuse information into its physical infrastructure to end traffic jams, deliver services more efficiently, conserve energy, improve air and water quality, recover quickly from disasters, increase access to health and education, use data to make better decisions abour public safety, and link nonprofit, government, and community service organizations in collaborations to improve well-being. A smarter city could even route excess food quickly to those who need it.

This is not a game like SimCity or an idealistic Second Life Utopia. It is a significant commitment by IBM and other major companies to work in partnership with government and nonprofit organizations to make the planet smarter - that is, to apply the promise of information and communications technology to solve the world's problems..

On October 1, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage with IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg to take this idea another step closer to reality. It was the start of a two-day Smarter Cities Summit at Lincoln Center in the cultural heart of New York. SuperCorp CEOs, meet Mayors and Governors! It was an unusual and important conversation across sectors, including nonprofits and technology experts.

The business opportunities for technology companies under the Smart Cities umbrella are vast; governments hold the purse-strings now, and with respect to some sorts of infrastructure, parts of the U.S. resemble developing nations. But even greater, I think, is the social good in terms of human opportunities. This emphasis can enable civic leaders to accelerate a makeover of cities into human life-enhancing communities fertile ground to grow businesses, resulting in less poverty and more prosperity, less exclusion of racial or ethnic groups, and more equality of opportunity.

One way to survive a recession and emerge triumphant is to name a big idea and own it, even if it cannot be fully enacted now. The Smarter Cities bandwagon is a good example of that principle, and it has ample room for local nonprofit orgamizations as well as a giant SuperCorp.

To prepare for the Smarter Cities Summit and add a human element to the technology discussions, IBM VP Stanley Litow and I produced a background piece, "Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities. We argued that cities cannot be deconstructed into constituent parts that work as though they are independent of one another, even though institutions such as schools, hospitals, or city halls sometimes operate in silos, as though all of life is contained within their boundaries. A schoolteacher can also be a neighbor, a patient in a health clinic, a weekend tennis player and park-user, spouse to a banker in an interfaith or interracial marriage with relatives in different ethnic neighborhoods, amateur theatre actor, taxpayer, donor to community charities, board member of a non-profit, parent of children in different schools, user of public transportation, and owner of a car that travels regularly across city and state borders for shopping.

Lives are integrated person by person, but cities have become increasingly fragmented --sprawling regions containing many political jurisdictions, a growing number of nonprofits working in isolation on similar issues, weakened civic leadership as footloose companies come and go.

A smarter community needs not only good physical infrastructure but a strong social "infrastructure for collaboration," an essential ingredient in whether a city is "world class." Civic leadership can unite stakeholders from all parts of the community to develop a few common gaols - such as ending the high school dropout crisis, which City Year is advancing in collaboration with mayors and school superintendents in 19 U.S. cities. In New York, Harlem Children's Zone is a smarter neighborhood, a ten-block integrated solution to improves the lives, education, and opportunties for children. In short, smarter cities can help find the "unity" in community.

Technology makes the goals physically possible, but it will require leadership to remove barriers to change. Barbara Mikulski, the long-serving U.S. Senator from Maryland, started her career as a social worker whose political awakening came when she organized to stop a highway that would have destroyed a strong neighborhood community; now she invests in communities from the Senate. With a community organizer in the White House and companies such as IBM, Verizon, Cisco, and ABB ready to go, Smarter Cities could be the vision that unites and improves America and the world.

The best part about this real reality game is that anyone can play in it, from the smallest local nonprofit that joins a coalition ro a larger company aspiring to be a SuperCorp that finds business opportunities while improving cities and the planet.

Companies may preach sustainability — the need for employees, shareholders, and the public to operate in a way that grows and preserves natural resources and protects people and cultures. But few have figured out how to successfully pursue both profits and social change.

We recently undertook a study of 50 companies that are employing "hybrid" business models. From clothing maker Maggie's Organics; to coffee-alternative company Guayakí; to emerging technology firm PAX Scientific — they're all focused on making money, but they remain steadfastly committed to their causes. They've integrated their core values into every aspect of their businesses.

So how do they do it? How do these hybrid organizations balance financial performance against ethical correctness? How do they maintain their commitments when leadership, shareholders, and market conditions change? We found that hybrid organizations embody five critical practices — business approaches that have been cultivated over months, and sometimes years, of trial and error.

1. Put the mission into action. The company's explicit environmental and social mission is embedded not only in the business model but also in every major business decision and in daily aspects of the company's operations. At Guayakí's company meetings, for instance, leaders pass a gourd filled with mate (an infused beverage) from employee to employee — the organization's way of connecting its people to the traditions of the company's core products and mission.
2. Market premium products. Customers who value sustainability are willing to pay a premium. Maggie's Organics, which sells clothing made of 100% organic cotton, initially identified potential consumers' broad preferences and price points for their products. But when the company began selling its wares in natural-food stores, it found that customers were willing to pay more. Because hybrid companies spend far more time, expense, and effort investing in equipment, people, and relationships that match their core values, a premium price tag is more than good marketing; it's financially necessary.
3. Get comfortable limiting the rate of growth. Hybrid businesses understand that scaling too fast inevitably brings ethical dilemmas that make it hard to square growth with mission-critical values. The solar cooking oven maker Sun Ovens International learned that the hard way: It chased after a fleeting Y2K market only to find itself struggling eight years later under the debt obligation of that decision. It has subsequently learned to balance short-term business decisions about finances (whether to sell off shares) or operations (where to allocate resources) with its long-term social and environmental missions.
4. Cultivate patience. Hybrid organizations are case studies in taking the long view. These companies recognize not just the reality of but also the value in changing customer habits over not months or even years but generations. For nearly a decade, PAX Scientific emphasized small, measured experiments (and accepted the inevitable hiccups along the way). More recently, though, the organization has very consciously begun to pick up speed — in response to market shifts that now strongly favor its position in the clean teach space.
5. Make it personal. Hybrid companies reject the idea that "it's just business." They create unusually close relationships with suppliers, producers, customers, and other stakeholders. Michael Potter, CEO of Michigan-based Eden Foods, says his employees' personal relationships with the company's supplying farmers and their families have created a competitive advantage for the organization: Eden has developed several new product ideas and capabilities based on input from these growers' groups, he notes.

These five practices aren't a prescription for "going green." Rather, they constitute a framework for understanding how the true integration of a mission — be it environmental, social, or cultural — is hard, long, and constant work. Not all businesses will become hybrid ones. But they can take a few lessons from some innovative companies whose mission is their work and whose work is their mission.

Emily Reyna is a project manager for the Environmental Defense Fund's Climate Corps Program. Daniel Wang is a senior practitioner in Deloitte & Touche's Sustainability and Climate Change practice in Toronto. They are two of the coauthors of "Hybrid Organizations: New Business Models for Environmental Leadership," from Greenleaf Publishing and the University of Michigan's Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.