Show Notes
Article critiqued in this episode:
Every Leader Has Flaws. Don’t Let Yours Derail Your Strategy
By Ron Carucci and David Lancefield
Harvard Business Review – September 29, 2021
From this episode:
There is potential for all of these flaws in each human but with power hierarchies, they get magnified.
The alternative we recommend ongoing development of every persona in an organization to self-observe and self-correct because they are reflecting on their effects and the source of shortfalls. No one person is called out for flaws.
In this episode:
This episode uses a Harvard Business Review article on leadership flaws and failures. They offer suggestions on mitigating these flaws. Of course, we critique their diagnosis and solutions and give better alternatives from a regenerative and developmental philosophy.
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Transcript
Zac: Welcome back to Business Second Opinion Podcast. We’re always excited to bring you another episode. Business Second Opinion Podcast digs deep to explore questions about business and business practice. In the process of examining them, we give you a second onion, as you know by now usually a contrarian opinion, but one that is well tested and proven to give the outcomes you really want without the nasty side effects. And by the way, if you want to learn more about how to work more closely with us, stay tuned at the end of the show. I’m Zac Swartout, and always with me is Carol Sanford, our in-house positive contrarian responding to big and hard questions with a radically different take. Hey Carol.
Carol: Hi Zac. I have to tell you, I really felt sad as I read the suggested article this time mostly because I really felt sorry for the leaders who they’re critiquing and trying to fix in here. It made me worry that this is a lot of how coaches work. So if you’re a coach out there, really listen to what we’re talking about today. And the reason is that the theory base which they’re operating from which you and I are going to highlight a bit in our dialogue, kind of violates everything I believe about how you should design work for people, how you develop people, how you get them involved in change. A long time ago I found my elevator speech when you’re out in the world and people say “What’s your podcast about?” and I say “Well Zac and I critique Harvard Business Review one article at a time and give a better alternative.” And they’d say all sorts of things like “wow” or “boy you must be smart” or “is there that much wrong with what they’re saying?” Well yeah, there’s that much wrong. So, what did you think? Maybe you should tell people how to find what I am so critical of here.
Zac: Sure, I’ve got you. So this one is called Every Leader has Flaws. Don’t Let Yours Derail Your Strategy. And it’s by Ron Carruci and David Lancefield. And it’s actually pretty recent; it’s from the September 29, 2021 issue of good ol’ HBR. So in it, the authors discuss how important strategy execution is. But they kind of contextualize it by saying that one of the more overlooked failures of that execution actually starts with the personality flaws of the leaders calling for that strategy. We’ve covered focusing on personality previously on the pod but I think having us re-examine it through this connection to strategy might be helpful for people to see how thinking like this can get folk in trouble…almost twice. But before I pass it back over to your Carol I just wanted to say, as you were saying before, we do get a lot of these requests, and people will say “How do you do this?” One of the things that kind of strikes me about many of these HBR Articles is they’re all sourced from the same worldview. So I think Carol and I would both encourage folks to continue to read these articles on their own before sending them in and use framework thinking and use your own modes of self-reflection. And I think you’ll start to see the patterns in the same way that we do.
Carol: And what you’re really talking about here; the reason that you can see that and I can see that is we can see the same assumptions are being made that do not fit in what we’re, in every way we can, trying to get you to see a developmental view of humans. So what we’re doing is pointing out the assumptions, the paradigm assumptions people are making, the assumptions about humans. And I think there are several things in this one which you would have heard versions of before but we need to keep questioning so that we can really get a hold of it. So kind of overall they all are talking about a way of working that’s about command and control hierarchies. Their foundations, all of the flaws that are cited here, and because it’s a command and control hierarchy, they never never question that there is even an alternative or that that may be the alternative problem that’s bringing about these flaws. How do you see these flaws? I think that we should just take them one at a time and give an alternative as my tagline says.
Zac: Yeah totally. So to outline here first the 4 personality types, flaws, that they outline- let me go through those first.
- The overconfident, chronically certain leader who they claim has a tendency of overpromising and developing unrealistic strategies.
- The impulsive leader, who they say can’t resist the titillation of a new idea or latest fad.
- The rigidly controlling leader, who works and has everyone else work they say in a prescribed way.
- The insecure leader, who the authors say lives with a paralyzing sense of self-doubt.
And we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of each of these but first I wanted to ask you, Carol, what do you think, broadly speaking, is kind of missing here? Also, listeners, keep in mind that the authors have been doing this work for a combined total, as they say, of 60 years so even they cannot see what’s missing in this approach.
Carol: Well you know, it’s funny, I just listened to you just now and thought that these sound like characters of roles for scripts in a reality movie. Alright so let me speak to your question. I think the kind of overall thing that I see is that the real flaws are in the diagnostic process and in the solutions that they’re recommending to fix it all. I already mentioned you did too, the top-down decision making. Second is the idea that it is the top dog’s responsibility for shortfalls. And of course, in a commanding role, you get to boss people but the buck stops there. The real disconnect that I see is that there is potential for all these flaws in each human but with power hierarchies, they get magnified. The third flaw is that anyone can diagnose another person from outside of that person. I can look at you, I can watch your behavior, I can add it all up and I can give a diagnosis, a personality type, or a score. One of my problems with this concept which is the same as with coaches is that they interpret or give people a test or something where just from behavioral answers you can diagnose someone. And then of course the fourth one is that the solutions, as well as the diagnosis, are all externally determined and the levers that go with fixing them are all external. They never start really from inside a whole human being.
Zac: And actually, to that point Carol, I think we need to also be transparent about how we are actually pulling the article itself apart so our listeners can see our thinking at work as well. In terms of our diagnostic process. So let’s look at each one of the aspects of how we are actually doing this…
The first place where we start is we question the theory behind the diagnosis and solutions. And then we look at how each solution plays out when one uses HBR vs our philosophy of discovering what is going on and what we really want to see in this situation. And then from there, we look at better alternatives and a better way than their solution and effects. And then lastly we see its larger effects in the world and kind of look at each one in parallel and why it can make such a drastic difference. So Carol let’s look at the first one.
Carol: Yeah and if people use what you just laid out every time they read one of these articles you get better and better at catching yourself but also catching the so-called experts like in this article where they give you this nonsense. Like this first one where it’s “overconfidence.” Well as you said this is more like where a leader never questions themselves. The suggestions that are offered here are that you can fix this if you do something like set up debates and you get almost an image of the leaders sitting there watching the ping pong debate. Somehow when that happens that gets added into their thinking and opens them up. The problem is that the additional information is not the problem that is really challenging people. Think about it for a minute. What’s going on when a person watches a debate is they debate the other two people using their own attachment toward what they think is really needed. And you don’t learn to question by watching others. You join them in the debate and reinforce your own opinion. So that’s one of the problems here. The other thing is that if you identify with a particular role like “I’m the leader, I’m supposed to make decisions” or self-image like “I’m fast and quick and I get the right answers” and you don’t learn to see that through inflection then you’re in serious trouble. They hint at the idea that you could work on seeing some things for yourself but the fixes are all external – add more, get people you trust – all of it’s outside. So Zac, what does the HBR way look like in terms of the effects on people and the organization? And by the way, what’s your experience with this?
Zac: Yea so if you look at what they are saying here, all of the solutions they offer start from, as Carol points, an externally determined standpoint. In other words, the leader needs external input and perspectives from others in order to be able to manage their personality flaws. And so it puts the responsibility and agency on others to navigate around this leader, and feed them back their own ideas of how that leader should behave, rather than actually have the leader start from a place of their own self-reflection and internal work. This fundamentally undermines a human’s ability to self-observe – or to be able to see their own mind at work in a more conscious way. This is a core and significant practice for internal change that is fundamentally derailed by the author’s approach.
I saw this play out with one of the executives I worked with in healthcare. I don’t know if I’ve told this story before but when I met him he had gone through so many personality tests and feedback sessions he didn’t know which way was up. While he knew he needed to work on himself, he couldn’t assess how to do that. It’s like they gave him all this information and knowledge but he struggled mightily because there was a gap between the knowledge that he was tripping himself up in some way, and the actual capability required to self-manage his being.
Carol: You know that story is so familiar and people are also taking other people’s words then for what they think is really going on with them based on these testing and feedback and so forth. None of that really helps them to develop themselves. So the alternative that we want to suggest and ongoingly suggest is – development of every person in your organization becomes primary. You have it happening in a ritual way like weekly, or some in every meeting because it takes a long time to break up this addiction that we have to external and to learn to be self-observing, see what I’m thinking about doing, become self-correcting by learning to see the effects of what we’re doing. Why couldn’t this leader, if they were in a normal session, not pointed at him, what if they could observe and say “What’s the effect of that?” Or pick someplace and see what the effect is of your work. Where are you unhappy? Doing that on a regular basis reinstills and redevelops the capacity for people to see themselves. And the thing that also drove me crazy about this article is they call out the leaders for their flaws. My gosh, everyone has flaws in personality. Mine terrify me some days. We want to help organizations to make this reflection, being able to see one’s self, not particularly focusing on personality – I don’t think that’s a good place to start even – but a ritual that underlies our everyday way of working and give people this ability to see themselves together. Secondly, they need a shared framework and process for self-examining – not other examining. This idea to learn to see effects produced, a process a team can use. If you have that kind of shared framework and an ongoing development process you have a really good chance of people becoming mindful. And of course, for me, that has to be connected to the Corporate Direction, and we’ve talked before about many different ways of setting up because if everyone is connected to the Corporate Direction you don’t need a leader delegating from the top down.
Zac: And I think, you know, as we kind of pull out and see the larger effects of this in the world where, instead of building spaces for our own self-reflection, we kind of end up in the place if we follow the authors, constantly judge people’s surfaces and reduce them to the behavior of some kind, and then figure out ways to arrest that behavior. You need to look no further than angry Twitter mobs looking to cancel people for this or that behavior or what have you. This ultimately breeds reactivity, and anger which can become really intoxicating for people.
Carol: And we want more where we have the society that we do.
Zac: Exactly, right? And this ultimately leads to distrust of one another that we see that’s kind of infecting our society. If we can’t trust ourselves and one another, what does that say about continuing to evolve a democracy?
Carol: Yeah. That’s scary. Alright so, let’s do our second leader flaw. You talked about this, it’s the impulsive leader. Their suggestion from the author is that you need to slow them down. Create some artificially constructed gates that they have to pass through that stop action and require things to go much slower. Again, instead of developing the human being, they’ve got an externally imposed process to manage the leader. Manage as you said, around the leader. I laughed when I read the thing about asking them to hand over the keys like you do a designated driver. Boy, that’s a pretty low image of what leaders can learn and can do for themselves. Wow. They suggest some more things like over-indexed accounting. Now just think about what that means. Instead of using accounting, we can make decisions with, let’s make it harder to make decisions and put more gates in the way so that we can compensate for their impulsiveness. Their words, right? And help them examine what drives that. Now, that sounds good, right? Help them examine what drives their impulsiveness. It’s a reasonable idea but the problem is that at this stage we’re starting from fragmented thinking based on “they have a problem, they have a flaw.” Learning to look at ourselves is not a part of how we do business. We do work that starts with essence, right? And then look at how people look at where the imperfections are based on their daily experience and be able to help develop themselves. It not only isolates a person, to start with a fragment of them – a flaw, a problem, something they’re not doing right, not meeting expectations. And it starts with also externally someone telling them, and again we’re teaching them don’t trust your own lived experiences, only trust the outsider.
Zac: Yeah I think the metaphor of basically thinking of this impulsively or as a drunk driver is pretty ridiculous. So if we think about just the structure of how the authors or proposing this right? You’re starting with a set of problems so you are inherently limiting the possible space of how someone can grow and what you can consider because you’re isolating these problems. They are left instead only working on their failings. But let’s think for a second – what is actually more core to that? What is driving a human from underneath? What we call that is essence and the capability of essence thinking – to be able to see the pattern behind that pattern. Starting instead from essence, for us, allows a developmental process to unfold towards what gives life, rather than what arrests it.
Carol: Yeah, boy. I could take a deep breath as you said that. The thing that feels almost magical to me is what we have to work from that I don’t see anywhere else having is the developmental technology. That means we have developed and worked within our community for over 80 years now, you know? I mean it didn’t start with me and it didn’t start with the person that I got my start from. But it’s working off of fundamentally different premises about how humans work, how change works, how growth and development of people in large-scale change works. Having that developmental technology allows us to see so much more powerful ideas all of which overcome these behavioral external fixes that I believe actually make the organizations work because if you look at what happens in this article, and go back and pick any article from HBR – they’re all now full of ameliorations, mitigations – for all of the problems that have been created by other things like the hierarchy creates what we’ve got in this article. Having to do feedback gets created from the idea that we have to have competencies and people have to meet those competencies. Both of those, hierarchies and competencies, are artificially constructed ideas that come off of a nonliving system’s way of thinking. A better idea here rather than trying to ameliorate and workaround, and this will help with all four of our flaws here, is to work with framework thinking. You mentioned that earlier, what does that mean? That means that you have a living system framework, which takes a while to switch because we’re full of old outdated – if they were ever relevant – mental models that come off of behavioral and machine mechanistic and some humanist theory. If we work from shared, everybody having a shared language, shared framework thinking we can together make decisions. And we can tie those decisions to Corporate Direction so that we don’t have a problem with the impulsiveness. In fact, I have to tell a story about Jeffrey Hollender. When I got to Seventh Generation, my gosh that was 20 years ago now or maybe more, Jeffrey was in trouble with these teams all the time because he was one of these folks that would have been diagnosed with impulsive decision making. He’d meet somebody, he’d get excited, he’d come back, it was his company, he’d say: We’re going to go do this. We’ve got this great new product, or new market, or new technology, maybe even raw materials or communities. And it would jerk their organization and change direction. And everyone when I first got there would say “You have to fix Jeffrey. We can’t run a business.” And I would say “Well no actually we have to fix the way you make decisions.” And Corporate Direction as we came to it and Jeffrey knew now that he was tied to the idea that Seventh Generation was the voice of authenticity to help people make the decisions between the personal and global come together. He now had to, when he came in people would say “So why did you want to do that? How does that carry out Corporate Direction?” Jeffrey Hollender said it was the most brilliant thing that ever happened because it improved his critical thinking skills, his personal self-management, and the ability of the organization to work together.
Zac: I’ll take a shot at another story as well. If I look at my relationship with my stepdaughter, constantly restraining her willfulness, it turns out, only makes her become more willful. I know that’s a big shock to everybody – right, another familiar story for you Carol. But without me understanding what drives that willfulness, to begin with. So while I may think that choices she is making might be risky and impulsive, it doesn’t matter if she can’t also see her own mind at work. She is coming to an age where she needs to source her own ability to self-reflect on the choices she makes – tied to what drives her. That capability can and will serve her in all walks of life.
Carol: Yeah, forever. Alright well, let’s take our third flawed leader. This is the one that you called the rigidly controlled leader. And of course, the minute I say that you probably get a picture of micromanaging and can see that that is purely the result of a power hierarchy. That power hierarchy undermines not only all of the employees but the leader having to be saying “what’s the right thing to do?” They even name again the suggestions as mitigation. So you should know anytime you’re mitigating you’re working as a flawed system and when it’s created you’re now creating another word, and of course, these programs and their mitigations are a big part of most HR solutions. And of course, here we’re coupling it with the ameliorations of all of their programs and their side effects. Here, what our authors suggest is the way to mitigate these controlling people is for the leader to become more transparent, tell them what you’re thinking, tell them why you’re thinking it so people will know what’s going on in your head and why you’re trying to control and that will build trust. Well, I’m not sure, because it doesn’t sound like much development thinking there. Sharing is a pretty limited idea. But they thought, well, make it low risk for them because these people are afraid. Take some low-risk situations, which means slowly, creepingly, work on trying to manipulate this person from the outside. Or they said, get them to test their ideas with a few folks, maybe people they respect first. Again, we’re in isolation there’s no development of systemic thinking as strategic thinking. One of the suggestions that they also made was: get people to look at their own history. Looking at your own history to see why you’re afraid and why you’re trying to control is a therapeutic model, it’s not a very developmental model because it’s not giving you a way to understand how to assess business thinking and business decision making in teams where you have shared frameworks. So you end up with more behavioral suggestions all from the outside. And even when they did one inside one, the solution came from the outside and was some kind of generic idea. If you are embedded in a strict command and control hierarchy, no wonder you have overly controlling and impulsiveness. It really does not give any advantage for an organization to be hierarchical. But it does limit people learning and developing and being able to come up with alternative work design because you’re leaving a broken flawed system in place and trying to mitigate, ameliorate around it instead of doing something new and it isolates the leaders as the problem.
Zac: And one thing I actually wanted to point out, to piggyback on that, is this question that we continue to come back to with ideas like this, and I think it’s a useful question for you listeners as well, is where is the source of agency here? So in the case of examining the problem diagnosis method, the source of agency continues to live with the leader, right? This whole article is written around the leader – and as it did in the previous examples. This is the key assumption that continues to confound the author’s approach. What gets compounded in this situation is that the leader is also the source of the work design. Nowhere in this example do they discuss customers. And I think they only bring up customers once in the whole article. In other words, the scope of the problem diagnosis surrounds only the leader and their staff. Nowhere do they consider, and therefore allow their client to consider, a larger scope that includes customers, stakeholders, and the systems in which this client is nested. The failure here is too narrow a scope of considering that starts in a thinking process.
Carol: Yeah. Well said. I like that. So what should they do instead? You know Zach said our way of working is to examine it, we can see it through frameworks and what we were talking about. But how do you come up with a better idea? Well, we’re always starting with a whole different set of premises and one of them is that you need to adopt a developmental work design. And what does that mean? It means a nonhierarchical and a non-driven by action one. By the way, you improve your cash flow by about 35 – 65% per year over time. So when I’m talking about all of these indirect ways of working, they do not make you make less money. You will make an enduring kind of return. But one of the big shifts when you go developmentally, you no longer have a hierarchy, power, and authority where people are reporting to others. Instead, you have a hierarchy of capability, a new kind of infrastructure. Which takes a little while to get your mind… and it’s not about getting rid of supervisors like some people think “You do that and it will all be fixed.” Nope. All of those are still working internally. They don’t actually solve the fundamental problem that hierarchies have now embedded. What you do when you have a developmental work design is people are resources to one another in the design. You designate people who stay in resourcing roles and work to help collectively and collaboratively. Initiate strategic pursuits. Those come particularly from market field teams, those are people who are buyer group by buyer group. And you have people on that team for years and sometimes decades who know about buyer nodes so well and you’re doing strategy on a more specific level. Where this broad level you have some kind of mission or statement, but what you do is you delegate it down from the top. No, you have to get it so it’s created in the bowels of the organization and the teams. The hardest part here is to get the process that leads to a complete design. And it takes a little while to get that set up. But it’s a different kind of infrastructure where everyone is initiating, everyone is then implementing what they initiated. Pulling others in and everyone is evaluating what they’re initiated so it’s not coming from outside. And there’s tons of reflection built-in and development. No one’s expected to delegate, evaluate others, lead from a top-down position – you can’t have this problem. So my answer for each of these is you have to stop what you’re doing. You have to switch to a whole different work design. Stop mitigating, stop ameliorating. Those are degenerative processes that you’re trying to slow down the rate at which they demean all of the humans that are in your organization including the leaders.
Zac: And without the developmental infrastructure to build the capability to consider the larger context of decisions, we fall back kind of into this problem-solution mindset. The problem with this nature of thinking is it fragments how we approach work. This ultimately leads to the isolation of variables to be solved, ultimately creating unforeseen consequences – which are more problems to be solved. We see this all the time with larger issues with climate change being tied to poverty for example. Without the ability to consider a larger scope that doesn’t end at the walls of a company, we will continue to feel like we are plugging hole after hole in a dam that is fundamentally compromised.
Carol: So our fourth flaw here is the leader who is insecure. I have rarely met a person who doesn’t second-guess themselves, including me. Not only are businesses high-pressure places where we are expected to please many more powerful people, but all institutions seem to be filled with these hoverers who are ready to judge you. And it’s built into the system. Our own judgment is rarely accepted. We’re doing something this year at The Regenerative Business Summit, which I hope all of you will send teams to, which is about looking at how we’ve designed work so that it produces systemic racism. It produces divisive conflict out in the culture like we see nowadays, and it blinds people to the ability to see what their own effects are on climate. If you can’t see that your action designing systems that are undermining you then it’s very hard to work on the right thing. One aspect that we’re routinely taught and raised as we come up in life is to not trust our own lived experience. That’s what it means to have everything driven externally. You trust the expert who gives you the right answer, the teacher who gives you the grade and the answer, the parent who makes you a good person and tells you when you are a good boy, and a boss who tells you when you’re getting it right. No wonder people have insecurity. And we borrow their ideas and adopt their opinions about what is right. Because of all this, we want to get their approval, we feel we have to guess what they think is right… therefore second-guessing. And this tendency of course further exacerbates the problem of not trusting ourselves, or in some ways, we don’t trust anyone except the expert at the top, and they are the one who decides, whoever is on top of us. But all of these processes of not trusting ourselves exasperates the problems for the leader and their need to be the one who figures it out and diagnoses it. They often get expert-hired guns to come and help. I should at least comment on their… although most of this is behaviorally driven, there are a few humanistic processes in there like: go examine your fears, do best and worst-case scenarios, get realistic. Well, all those are lovely, we’ll talk more in a moment about why that doesn’t actually take you very far.
Zac: And the flaw and solution the authors propose here drops out a concept we’ve discussed previously on the podcast: locus of control. In the case of someone who lacks confidence, the belief that is driving that is a sense that they are not in control of their life. I feel this, all the time. The locus of that control, therefore, lies outside of them – and leaves them with a sense that everything is always happening to them. I think this is something we can all identify with. This is a capability that can be worked on developmentally though. Instead, the authors propose a list of behaviors to arrest the symptom, rather than work on the fundamental thinking that lies behind it.
Carol: Yeah. This one’s a pretty sad story here. And I personally was a little offended that they selected a woman to label as insecure. I was offended by that character, but more because everyone’s insecure. Some people have been coping and hiding and managing themselves, but all of us are insecure. From the top to the bottom. Everyone is externally evaluated now. Behaviorism drives culture. It drives businesses, homes, schools, and everything is proscribed as having to come from the outside. In developmental organizations, which we’re talking about, you eliminate those traditional hierarchies, not the people in them – it’s not about getting rid of supervising. You redefine, and that’s a long story about what becomes a role. You stop all external evaluation. That includes performance reviews, feedback of all sorts. Instead, you have ongoing development: weekly, daily if possible, intensely monthly. Not annual events where somehow you all share information and do a little training. No, it becomes a way of explicitly using living systems framework so no one is second-guessing. No one is unclear. You have infrastructure that itself gives a clear path, not your boss who’s telling you what you should work on. You self discover based on a new kind of infrastructure. Particularly it’s all driven by a compelling and singular corporate direction, that which makes your business so important to a particular set of buyers and you’re always working to see how you can make their lives richer and deeper. And off of that then people can do shared co-creation, not waiting for delegation.
Zac: And I think the thing to keep in mind here is that the external locus of control is a mindset and worldview. When considered in the larger scope of our relationships, how we are as citizens, parents, and business leaders, and so on, this worldview breeds an inability to truly effect change because we believe that we have no control of our lives, let alone ourselves. However, with work, we can see when we fall into this mindset. I find myself falling into it constantly when a customer cancels a contract, or one of our vendors forgets to accomplish a task. The work then is to reflect and choose a more developmentally contributing mindset. This is where each moment is an invitation for personal, team, customer, and systemic growth. With the framing, the authors offer we are left with a list of behaviors to repeat instead. But with our developmental view, we can see new opportunities for innovation that open up in not only our business endeavors but personal and societal as well.
Carol: Yeah as a way of kind of summarizing where we are today I want to come back to something that you barely mentioned, not that we haven’t talked about it before. These authors have no idea about the idea of essence which is each human being, each raw material, each place on this planet has an essence. It has its own story. It has something that is incomparable, it’s not to be compared. What they’re working from is the thing you can create a typology around, personality, and you can create definitions of what it should be for everyone. And this whole article misses the idea of developing a work system that allows every individual to do an expression of that. To generate and initiate and to really bring forward their own essence experience in the world. You wouldn’t have any of these problems if that’s where you started from.
So thank you all for joining us today. We have an upcoming annual event which we really look forward to. We take a subject and we invite people who don’t work with us daily to come experience how we think about it. This year, I hinted at it earlier, It’s the Three Underpinnings of Systemic Racism, Divisive Conflict, and Planetary Genocide. And why in the world do those seem to keep getting worse as time goes on. We’re going to look at how it is you can be starting at a very different place, just like we do here, and accelerate the transformation. It will have you working on these three issues in a way you’ve never thought about them before and giving you profound ways to take it on through your work life. Go check out and sign up at carolsanfordinstitute.com under offerings you’ll see the Regenerative Business Summit.
Zac: By the way, have you read The Regenerative Life? How would you like to do the workshops that all those in the stories in the book did with Carol? Or maybe even take on one of the nine roles applied to any arena of your life. Well, you can now. The materials, the sessions with Carol, the Q&A sessions. It is now a DIY workshop and virtual for free. If you want to get involved, go to CarolSanford.com under books. Scroll to The Regenerative Life project and apply. You may be a guest on the upcoming, Regenerative Life Hacks with Carol when you submit your story.
Carol: and that hacks is a YouTube channel that we’re launching at the first of the year. If you’d like to get more experience with the Regenerative Life and the nine roles or the Regenerative Business, I have a fairly extensive workbook and a book club that goes with it. In order to get involved with it and get the workbooks free with the purchase of the books, you have to buy those books through my publisher. But the good news is they give you a 50% discount on the minimum 100 books it takes to get all the workbooks, all the videos, etc. And there’s free shipping to almost anywhere. Go check that out at carolsanford.com under books.
Zac: And thanks as always to Numi Tea for sponsoring our show notes for three years in a row. And thank you to our listener who suggested the topic. This has been Business Second Opinion
Great podcast – enjoyed it very much as I believe in a developmental approach and the organisation as a living system where people are ‘invited’ to bring in their whole person..because the purpose and the direction of the organisation is clear and appealing (sense-making). designed for client processes and different dialogue spaces, organisational drivers as a compass and capabilities of people and teams as succes factors, not power structures as such.
That’s the reason why I teamed up with Prof Jan de Visch and some colleges (in Belgium) – business people and consultants – in a co-operative “Dynamic Collaboration app” – https://dynamiccollaboration.app/en/
Thanks.I think we mean different things when say development and living systems. Thanks for sharing