Given yesterday’s post, it was only natural to feature bizsolutionsplus blogger Lewis Green as this week’s Buzz Bin interview (Blogs of Fire will run on Thursday). Lewis is the CEO of L&G Business Solutions, LLC, and has three decades of business management experience including positions with GTE Discovery Publications, Puget Sound Energy and Starbucks Coffee Company. His fifth book is entitled Lead With Your Heart, which is due out in the fall of 2007. Read on for some of Lewis’ insights on conversations in the blogosphere.

BB: What can we do to resolve fractures within societies online and off-line?

LG: Geoff, I don’t know that we can prevent them; I think all we can do is try to fix them. That begins first with listening (or reading) carefully and then pausing before we respond. It’s good for us to use both our minds and our hearts, and that means sometimes we may respond angrily.

When we do, let’s attack the idea. Since the late ’60s, I have been active in supporting social justice issues, beginning with civil rights and women’s rights to today’s environmental issues. I come from a unique approach in that I am a Libertarian, and mostly opposed to government interfering in these great human issues, except to correct a wrong that otherwise cannot be corrected by people working together.

The point I want to make here is that in my experience working on social justice issues is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to mend a fracture if we are busy yelling and screaming at each other, spouting hurtful words, and throwing bottles or fists.

BB: Is conversation the great salve of human differences?

LG: Good question. Conversation can be the great salve, when it includes listening. We need to try to understand the differences between us. It is easy to have a civil conversation with someone we agree with.

The challenge comes when we disagree. We may never come to agreement on any particular subject, but if we can walk away after the conversation feeling respect for other ideas, we have done much to resolves our differences.

BB: How do you envision businesses will impact the social media realm?

LG: I’m not sure. I suspect that marketing and sales are seeing revenue opportunities. Even though I am a marketer, I think that is the wrong way to launch and become invested in social media.

If instead we use it to talk with our customers and listen carefully to their wants, needs, concerns and suggestions, and then use that information to improve customer relations and experiences, I believe revenues will grow much faster than if we use social media as a sales and marketing tool to push information out.

BB: What’s the best conversation you’ve had on bizsolutionsplus?

LG: I hate to say this, but it was the one that caused several of us the most angst. In bringing up the subject of segregation by gender, color and ethnicity, which was inspired by the W List, I received the most comments ever at bizsolutionsplus, and registered over 500 page views in two days on that one post.

The discussion was lively, occasionally hurtful, but at the end of the day, the conversation resulted in meeting new smart people with great ideas and it forced some of us, including me, to take a good hard look at the way we communicate important but emotional ideas.

BB: How has your blog benefited your life? Your business?

LG: I have made new friends all over the world, from Arun in India, to Gianandrea in Italy, to Luc in Belgium, to Anna in England and to Gavin in Australia. I have personally broken bread with some of my new friends in New York.

Also, I am benefiting personally from reading what others write and think, which is a great blessing. The bottom line for my business has been three jobs this summer that I got because of my online blogging at bizsolutionsplus and the Daily Fix.

BB: What’s Lead with Your Heart about?

LG: Lead with Your Heart is my first business book, following the publishing of four travel books, which I wrote as a travel writer during the ’80s. The book discusses a new business model that I build around the idea that if we always put people ahead of profits, our business will create great revenues, do good in the community and help create a better planet for all.

I think the idea is incredibly important in our world today, where business seems more powerful than government. We need that power to be applied in different ways from the way business has traditionally worked.

BB: What’s next for Lewis Green?

LG: I’m sure I’ll write a sixth book, contribute to other’s books, and continue to blog. In the near future, once the details are ironed out by the attorneys, I will be announcing a strategic partnership between my business and another business. My goal is to build valuation within my business, sell it, and return to writing full time. I want to write several books on social justice and the human spirit.