The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success

Increasingly, successful businesses today are adding a simple caveat to the definition of building an influential and profitable company: be responsible. According to Carol Sanford, author of THE RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS (Jossey-Bass; hardcover; March 15, 2011), in order for businesses to truly succeed, they must go beyond simply being “less bad” and instead create healthier, more vital communities, bio-regions and nations where they are based and that they serve.

THE RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS lays out a system-wide strategy for businesses, calling on them to customize their approach and asking them to build from their own distinctiveness. Her approach can be used to leverage not only the effects on Planet Earth, but also to measure the impact of every decision on all the company’s stakeholders – employees, suppliers, customers and the community at large. Sanford sees the relationship among and between these stakeholders as a five-pronged system of interconnected points. Sanford refers to it as a pentad, a term borrowed from ancient Greek geometry representing a multidimensional figure with five dynamic and interactive aspects that move in tandem and can only be understood in terms of their relationships. “It suggests a quintuple rather than a triple bottom line,” says Sanford.

Using global and local examples such as Procter and Gamble, Kingsford Charcoal and Red Hat, Sanford takes and in-depth look at what it takes to truly transform an organization from the inside out.

“The Responsible Business,” writes Sanford, “sees itself as a co-creative partner in ensuring the vitality and health of all the communities it belongs to. It develops its capacity to play the role of partner. It sees itself as getting smarter about what it takes to be a change agent in making the systems it touches healthier and more vital. That includes changing its method of managing, which is often overlooked.”

As the financial meltdown meets the new “green” mandate, the time could not be better for a book that offers a systemic approach to real change that moves beyond mere programs to one that does not limit itself to simply being less bad.  THE RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS presents a means to proactively and continuously build a better world while engaging in the business of doing business.

“Any company can do this,” says Sanford, “be they manufacturer, retail, or high tech. The principles work in all settings where there is commitment to seeing it though and implementing it.”