The Responsible Business
Reimagining Sustainability and Success
By: Carol Sanford
Published: March 15, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
ISBN-10: 0470648686
ISBN-13: 978-0470648681
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
"Responsibility isn't a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and the prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in in its practices", writes CEO of InterOctave Development Group, Inc., Carol Sanford in her visionary and thought provoking book The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success. The author describes the critical importance of taking a system wide approach, to the concepts of responsibility and sustainability, that moves far beyond the conventional wisdom. She challenges companies to leverage their own distinctiveness to make the necessary changes.
Carol Sanford wants to make a difference in the world and believes firmly that business has a crucial role to play in building a better global society. The author transcends the standard best practices, benchmark metrics, and ad hoc approaches to business responsibility. Instead, Carol Sanford advocates a systemic model of company transformation that not only encompasses the entire organization, but becomes part of the very essence of what the company does, why it exists, and how it plans to operate in a future. For the author, the entire concept of responsibility must involve all of the company's stakeholders, both inside and outside of the business. A company is not simply responsible to the shareholders alone, but to its employees, customers, suppliers, and every community in which it operates. A responsible business is, in effect, a partner with communities, and is an integral part of the very fabric of those communities as well.
Carol Sanford (photo left) understands intuitively, and empirically, that corporations are living organic entities. As such, they exist as part of the living world, both locally and on a global scale. The conventional thought has long been that organizations were closed societies that had no innate relationship to the societies in which they conducted their business. Carol Sanford refutes this concept, as not only being outdated, but also incorrect in its very premise. A company is not a closed society, responsible only to itself. The author demonstrates that a business is a partner within the larger community, and shares a deeper and more complex level of responsibility than is often thought. While many supporters of the conventional wisdom would see this fresh thinking as a challenge to the business, Carol Sanford offers business responsibility as an unprecedented opportunity that benefits all stakeholders in the company, and in the wider community as well. With an eye to changing the thinking from corporate responsibility, with its best practices, metrics, and guidelines approach, to one of being a responsible business with holistic societal thinking, Carol Sanford provides a new paradigm for business philosophy.
For me, the power of the book is how Carol Sanford provides a comprehensive and systemic approach to developing a responsible business. Effectively combining theory with practical advice for transforming the company culture from standard best practices thinking to a holistic philosophy, Carol Sanford has written a monumental and landmark book. The author completely redefines and replaces the usual and limiting concepts of corporate responsibility to the fresh idea of the responsible business. Along with the theoretical underpinnings of this new and collaborative paradigm, Carol Sanford applies a framework to implement the change within any organization. By including all of the stakeholders, both within and outside of the organization, the author's fully integrated system becomes part of the very DNA of the company.
Instead of ad hoc and heavily delineated additions to the organization, Carol Sanford provides for a full and complete change in the underlying vision and mission of the company. To further strengthen the reasoning behind this holistic change in philosophy, the author shares in depth case studies of how the principles of the responsible business not only work effectively in the real world, but also enhance the company's overall profitability. As Carol Sanford demonstrates clearly, responsible business is not only good for all of the stakeholders, but this community partnership is good business as well. The author invites and challenges organizations to rethink and re-imagine their organizations in an entirely new light. This self examination process will form the basis for a complete and fundamental rebuilding of the company from a conventional one to the next realm of the responsible business.
I highly recommend the seminal and must read book The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success by Carol Sanford, to anyone in any for profit or not for profit organization, who is serious about transforming their company into a collaborative partner within the community in which it resides and operates. This book provides the basis for understanding how organizations can partner with communities, as well as all of their other stakeholders, to build a brighter future for everyone.
Read the groundbreaking and important book The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success by Carol Sanford, and discover a holistic and systemic approach to rethinking the vision and mission of any organization. The result is not only a healthier organization, but a stronger and more engaged one as well.
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