Carol Sanford

“The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work. Agha Hasan Abedi, Banker and Philanthropist”
― Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes

“The minute a business groups people into categories, it diminishes their unique individuality, which is the most sustainable source of their motivation and desire to contribute. It also puts a box around the workers’ potential.”
― Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes

“Because incentives trigger a primitive, engrained response, they produce a number of unintended consequences. First, they strongly reinforce self-aggrandizement, so much so that people can dedicate highly creative energy toward the counterproductive purpose of gaming the system. Second, they focus people’s attention on the incentive, rather than on customers. Third, they reduce the sense of agency and locus of control in workers, placing it instead in the hands of those who are creating the incentives and providing the rewards. This not only undermines the ability to be self-managing, it also infantilizes people. Thus it is small wonder, given the ubiquity of this practice, that Americans struggle to see themselves as engaged, empowered participants in their own democratic institutions.”
― Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes

“Many people believe that problem solving is the source of innovation. However, problem solving is by definition focused on addressing what exists and attempting to make it better. True innovation comes from reaching for the potential in something: its possible manifestations that don’t yet exist. Bringing entirely new things into existence is what makes innovation so disruptive, and this is precisely what gets shut down when thinking is defined or circumscribed by problems.”
― Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes