The Regenerative Business

Forewords by: Cheryl Y. Kiser, Babson College & Michiel Bakker, Google

Courageous leaders today are calling for a disruptive yet effective way of working: one that unlocks significant new levels of innovation, delivers enduring financial results, and creates exceptional customer loyalty while simultaneously building human capacity to contribute to on-going positive change. The good news is there is a proven, but infrequently taken, path.

Through a fundamentally contrasting paradigm, Carol Sanford shows leaders why today's so-called business "best practices" undermine success-and then, how to transform their business into something so flexible, so innovative, so developmental, it becomes virtually non-displaceable in the market.

The Regenerative Business is built by connecting every person in the business to the "essential core" of that business - its unique foundation for innovation and market power. This provides the fulcrum for an organizational culture that embraces the internal destabilization and discomfort that comes with responding creatively to the unfamiliar. The payoff for doing so is a motivated and innovative workforce that is prepared to take a business to the top of its industry - and stay there.

Carol's work focuses on what fundamentally fuels the organization: the capacity and capabilities of the people within it and the design of work to empower them. She defines these for readers and shows that when these are internally developed, you change who people are and what they are able to take on, which she calls "promises beyond able-ness." She shows through many cases drawn from her work that by implement this all-encompassing way of working, businesses are able to have a positive impact beyond the bottom line, to the broader marketplace and the communities in which they operate.