Carol Sanford - The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes

PRAISE FOR THE REGENERATIVE BUSINESS

Carol Sanfords clear and accessible writing keeps urging us toward higher levels of organizational and self-actualization. The Regenerative Business blends an educators precision guidance with a sages wisdom and insight to deliver a roadmap for higher performance, greater impact, and long-term value creation. Her teachings bring work systems design into sharp focus, a new and essential skill set for innovative business leaders to embrace and master.

William Rosenzweig, Co-author, The Republic of
Tea: How an Idea Becomes a Business, Oslo Business for
Peace Award, UC Berkeley, Haas Business School

The work that Carol Sanford describes in The Regenerative Business profoundly changed my life, and Im confident it will change yours too. Carols work also exponentially contributed to increasing the value of my company over the three years we worked togetherthat value increased by about $100 million. Carol uniquely understands how to cultivate human potential by developing more conscious, creative, innovative, and intentional human beings. You will discover purpose in your work that will drive extraordinary results. You will find that you have the ability to develop capabilities that you never dreamed of. And perhaps most important of all, you will discover that your work can be fulfilling in numerous ways that deeply feed your soul.

Jeffrey Hollender, Founder and CEO, SustainNatural.com, and Founding CEO, Seventh Generation

The Regenerative Business is a passionate call to reimagine work that is rooted not only in Carols many years as consultant to some of the most transformative companies of our time, but also in the latest research in psychology and productivity. Rather than thinking of organizations as machines and people as cogs to be manipulated, Carol advocates for a vision of firms as cradles of human development, supporting their employees through journeys of discovery that focus on the lived experience of the customer. Her work points the way to building authentically purpose-driven firms that will drive the kind of disruption that my own research suggests is likely to be catalysts in reimagining capitalism and to a way of being in the world that is simultaneously deeply pragmatic and an expression of transformative hope.

Rebecca M. Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor, Harvard Business School

Carol lays out the future of workplace design just in time for the paradigm shift we are experiencing now. She provides us with a language and methodology, tested for decades, on aligning our highest individual potential with natures patterns to evolve our highest collective capacity. She has already influenced my own thinking and that of Kauffman leaders, and we are partnering with her for more evolution in entrepreneurship and education to great ends. Its just what the world needs to transform our fractured and fragmented workplace culture into a healthy, regenerative whole system.

Mark Beam, Maverick in Residence, Kauffman Foundation

What I appreciated about Carols book is that she has taken what I write aboutthe science of motivation in the individual and one-to-one contextsand through her brilliant approach, shows us how to apply the science in the organization context. She demonstrates, with dozens of case stories, how to apply the concepts systemically. Why not design organizations where people thrive? Carol shows you how.

Susan Fowler, Author, Why Motivating People Doesnt Work and What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging

Leading successful business transformation in a complex and challenging environment requires clarity, alignment, will, and a sense of purpose at all levels across the organization. The principles and ideas presented in The Regenerative Business deliver these effects systemically and in a way that brings deeper satisfaction and meaning to work. Carol explains her approach using real-world examples and with candor that is both clarifying and refreshing. Using her frameworks to build a developmental organization is producing significant cultural shifts that are moving our business forward. Associates are energized to grow their impact, and customers are feeling the difference.

Lara Lee, President, Orchard Supply Hardware

Carol Sanford has deep experience helping the leadership of a diverse range of companies address pressing business challenges. Drawing on a unique embedded responsibility perspective, The Regenerative Business offers important new methodologies for human development and work design, aligned with strategies that ensure business and society thrive together in an increasingly complex world.

Steve Lippman, Director of Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft, Inc.

Carol Sanford has fundamentally challenged and transformed the way we think about entrepreneurship, innovation, and developing our leaders. Since she began teaching at the school, the impact of Carols regenerative frameworks and concepts has reached beyond the classroom. She has supported the students, faculty, and leadership to explore how the curriculum, learning community, and organization can form a seamless whole in pursuit of driving transformative change. The Regenerative Business is essential reading for any leader looking to design and lead a thriving twenty-first century organization.

Christer Windelv-Lidzlius, Principal, Kaospilot, Denmark business and design in leadership and entrepreneurship

Prepare to abandon all current thinking about what makes organizations great. Original, powerful, and persuasive, The Regenerative Business exposes the limited worldviews and minimal expectations that drive most organizations. In their place, it offers practical and insightful frameworks for creating regenerative processes, illustrated with successful and profitable real-world applications of these ideas. Promoting ways of seeing and being in the world that couldnt be more timely or essential, The Regenerative Business details frameworks that engage the whole person in the larger systems in which they operate.

Jessica Lipnack and David McConville, Co-chairs, Board of Directors, Buckminster Fuller Institute

Everyone is talking about the future of work. Carol Sanford offers us a clearheaded framework for how to get there, while leaving us with important questions that we need to answer for ourselves. If youre looking for a thoughtful and comprehensive guide to evolve your organization, youll love this book.

Jonathan Raymond, Author, Good Authority, and CEO, Refound

At Sustainable Brands, we are committed to being a living lab of the sustainable brand of the future. I know full well Carol is a master at applying systems thinking to smart, sustainable organizational behavior, and I cant wait to put Carols concepts into practice at SB.

KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, Founder/CEO, Sustainable Life Media, producers of Sustainable Brands

Carol Sanford is one of the most interesting and unique business thinkers we know. Her approach is integral, whole, and holistic. In fact, it is the way we should run business in the twenty-first century.

Food Inspiration Magazine

For all the talk of efficiency, modern business is grossly inefficient in developing its most valuable resource: the people who work in it. Only 13 percent of the global workforce is actively engaged by work (Gallup 2014). Carols book offers a vision and blueprint on how to start to change that. Borrowing from deep ecology and studies of living systems, she has written a timely guide for all those (from leaders to students and everyone in between) interested in the redesign of work itself.