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

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"The work that Carol Sanford describes in The Regenerative Business profoundly changed my life, and I'm confident it will change yours too." - Jeffrey Hollender, Founding CEO, Seventh Generation

What if leaders stripped away all preconceptions about how business operates, allowing the organization to go back to its core and build itself back up to become something new-something so responsive, so innovative and resilient, it becomes virtually non-displaceable in the market? The Regenerative Business sets the stage for what is now only dreamt of by most of today's forward-thinking leaders and paves the path to make it possible. The book features:

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2017

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About the author

Carol Sanford

10 books39 followers
Carol is recognized as a Global Thought Leader by Conscious Company Medea & Athena Awards for Mentoring and Community Service to small businesses. A Senior Fellow of Social Innovation, Babson College; CEO, The Regenerative Paradigm Institute, Educator and Social Change designer for people in change agents roles, organizational leaders who aspire to make a difference, business and organizational teams pursuing non-displaceability. Author of six award-winning, best-selling books, including The Regenerative Life: Transform Any Organization, Our Society, Your Destiny, No More Feedback, The Regenerative Business (Google VP, Michiel Bakker, foreword.) All six books are built around case stories of specific transformations in people, businesses, communities, and regions. Exec Producer, The Regenerative Business Summit and Producer & Narrator of, Business Second Opinion Podcast..

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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
Profile Image for Marc Buckley.
105 reviews11 followers
October 15, 2021
Carol Sanford uses language in a unique way, you immediately become alert while reading. Taking in her sharpness and wisdom. In a clear way helping you to learn how to view things differently.
We talked a lot about Regenerative in my conversation with Carol on my podcast Inside Ideas.
The word regenerative has fast become a buzzword and it is important to know the different meanings. Learn what regenerative meant for Carol's grandfather. You can find episode 138 here:
https://youtu.be/y_JS_n2uNQQ

Or check out the links below:
https://www.innovatorsmag.com/how-to-...
https://medium.com/inside-ideas/carol...
December 19, 2018
A great book for entrepreneurs and small,medium enterprise ,and just for personal human capital growth .l loved it thank you Carol.
Profile Image for Matthias.
32 reviews
September 9, 2018
Read the full review at excellentbookreviews.com!

What is a Regenerative Business?

There are a dozen buzzwords describing the modern, desirable company. It is agile, lean, and nimble, disruptively innovative, robust, resilient, antifragile, sustainable and even kind. So what the hell is a regenerative business supposed to be? In the words of author Carol Sanford

“Regeneration is a process by which people, institutions, and materials evolve the capacity to fulfill their inherent potential in a world that is constantly changing around them. This can only be accomplished by going back to their roots, their origins, or their foundings to discover what is truly singular or essential about them. Bringing this essential core forward in order to express it as new capacity and relevance is another way to describe the activity of regeneration. In other words, regeneration is the means by which enlightened, disruptive innovation happens.”

That’s gibberish. Feel free to introduce fancy concepts like “regeneration”, but please have somewhere in the beginning of your book a chapter that starts with “My idea is about…”, followed by a clear and succinct definition.

After reading the entire book, it seems like a regenerative business is one that develops its people and culture to bring about the highest standards of innovation and customer centricity. Sanford offers a method to design work in a way that complies with these principles.

Managers regard employees no longer as lazy and stubborn beings who need constant supervision and incentivisation, but as a creative, entrepreneurial force, with capabilities to foster and develop. This shift of paradigm does not come naturally to most companies, but is born from necessity: the demographic development begins to favor employees, because there are less and less of them.

Disruption and innovation are words that usually go along with “digitalisation”, often in a context of a company’s future development. There are many reasons why legacy firms struggle with innovation (you can read about them here), but “bad corporate culture” sums up most of them. Modern, seminal companies aspire to actively enable innovation, which requires not only excellent people, but also processes that foster risk-taking and personal accountability.

Following from here, The Regenerative Business throws around a lot of concepts and philosophies, so I tried to graphically arrange everything Sanford talks about.

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December 26, 2018
I found The Regenerative Business well structured and easy to read. The reading flows in a linear manner and it offers many ideas to reflect on. Despite not all the readers might share the same points of view, Carol Sanford supports properly her opinions and makes them understandable even to someone who doesn't read often books which deal with economics.
Profile Image for Zoe Routh.
Author 7 books19 followers
November 2, 2021
challenging and mind stretching

Sanford takes leadership,ideas and pulls them forward. A great restive business is one where everyone is involved in active improvement of systems and processes, in radical support of one another.

This book needs a good chewing: plenty of big concepts to chomp and work at to get the most value from. I’d put this on the ‘review and ponder’ list.
Profile Image for Simon Hohenadl.
229 reviews10 followers
September 24, 2022
This book sounds good, but I couldn't get anything concrete out of it. When the author explains that feedback doesn't work and should be replaced by self-reflection, I couldn't take it any longer and stopped listening.
182 reviews4 followers
September 24, 2018
Interesting ideas about how to run a business, but not my favorite writing.
13 reviews
Want to read
March 11, 2019
Very interesting and like how she points out the need to get the basics right. Totally recommend for anyone who wants to build something that stands
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews

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