Regenerative Business Voices

This is a book about the future of sustainability. Regenerative Business Voices: Values-based Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Enterprises tells the stories of four regenerative organizations and the people who have founded them and guided them towards sustaining futures. Regenerative sustainability recognizes the urgency of transforming organizations to reverse the unsustainable pathways we are currently on. Regenerative businesses do not simply do less harm, or produce zero emissions, or optimize the efficient use of natural resources; they also restore and enhance well-being in social and ecological systems. The stories presented here are analyzed using the business ethics approach called Giving Voice to Values (GVV). Through the application of GVV principles, we uncover the processes involved in how regenerative businesses develop and function, and gain insights into how business leaders voice their deep convictions, overcome silencing rationalizations, normalize their execution of personal choice, discover deep purpose in their work, and draw on their personal histories to create new ways of doing business. We present and analyze these cases to understand how and why expressing values can be so crucial in developing sustainable businesses, and to provide practical examples of how individuals can generate enthusiasm, counter objections, gain allies, and prepare for and practice conversations that help them move forward. The book offers managers and sustainability consultants a new way of understanding some of the central dynamics involved in business ethics and organizational change for sustainability. It will be immensely valuable to educators, business students, and practitioners interested in sustainability, environmental business ethics, and corporate social responsibility topics.

This book by leadership and sustainability experts Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm provides an exciting and comprehensive framework for building regenerative life-affirming businesses. It offers a multitude of business cases, fascinating examples from nature's living systems, insights from the front-line pioneers and tools and techniques for leaders to succeed and thrive in the 21st century. Regenerative Leadership draws inspiration from pioneering thinking within biomimicry, circular economy, adult developmental psychology, anthropology, biophilia, sociology, complexity theory and next-stage leadership development. It connects the dots between these fields through a powerful framework that enables leadership to become regenerative: in harmony with life, building thriving, prosperous organizations amid transformational times. The book is a combination of theoretical frameworks, case studies, tools & practices: Everything the leader needs to be successful in the 21st century. Regenerative Leadership - what's it all about? While the future is uncertain, we clearly see an upward trend towards sustainable conscious business. And this is more than just a trend - we're witnessing a new kind of organization emerging. An organization which is able to rapidly sense and respond to the ever-changing business climate by innovating how and why it creates and delivers value, and the way it engages internally and externally with its ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, resources, investors, society and environment. This new kind of organization is the organization-as-living-system that is designed on the Logic of Life: life-affirming businesses that thrive from the inside out, by cultivating conditions conducive for life, internally and externally. These organizations nurture flourishing cultures while focusing on products and services that enhance society and the environment. Regenerative organizations will be tomorrow's success stories.

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.

This is a ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ for the 21st century: an impressive and wide-ranging analysis of what’s wrong with our societies, organizations, ideologies, worldviews and cultures – and how to put them right. The book covers the finance system, agriculture, design, ecology, economy, sustainability, organizations and society at large.

How can you effectively stand up for your values when pressured by your boss, customers, or shareholders to do the opposite? Drawing on actual business experiences as well as on social science research, Babson College business educator and consultant Mary Gentile challenges the assumptions about business ethics at companies and business schools. She gives business leaders, managers, and students the tools not just to recognize what is right, but also to ensure that the right things happen. The book is inspired by a program Gentile launched at the Aspen Institute with Yale School of Management, and now housed at Babson College, with pilot programs in over one hundred schools and organizations, including INSEAD and MIT Sloan School of Management. She explains why past attempts at preparing business leaders to act ethically too often failed, arguing that the issue isn’t distinguishing what is right or wrong, but knowing how to act on your values despite opposing pressure. Through research-based advice, practical exercises, and scripts for handling a wide range of ethical dilemmas, Gentile empowers business leaders with the skills to voice and act on their values, and align their professional path with their principles. Giving Voice to Values is an engaging, innovative, and useful guide that is essential reading for anyone in business.

A radically new understanding of and practical approach to climate change by noted environmentalist Paul Hawken, creator of the New York Times bestseller Drawdown Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world. Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything. Paul Hawken and the nonprofit Regeneration Organization are launching a series of initiatives to accompany the book, including a streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software. Regeneration is the inspiring and necessary guide to inform the rapidly spreading climate movement.

The book provides the first definitive, scholarly, and systematic history of the Chambers of Commerce (local organizations of business people) from their origins in the 18th century, through their historical development up to the present date. Based on new and previously inaccessible archive information, it covers the UK, Ireland, USA, and Canada.

Urban Regeneration Management analyzes the regeneration management process, locating the issues within both local and international perspectives, critiquing the theoretical literature on globalization, and analyzing a variety of case studies from across the globe.