Abundance-Why Now

Never has innovative sustainable leadership been more necessary. As we grapple with the enormity of climate change, the inevitability of peak oil, dangerously depleted fishing stocks, economic challenges and a surging demand for more ethical and transparent business practices and governance, there are new, emerging opportunities to change the way we choose to live and do business. Many of those opportunities lie in reduction: reducing resource usage and waste and shrinking our ecological and carbon footprints. Imagine achieving those goals of reduction by creating more…

By helping leaders in sustainability strengthen and enhance their leadership we believe we can move the needle from simply making less bad to creating more good. This is the journey from sustainability to abundance. Creating more good generates  jobs and new business opportunities, makes our communities more resilient and allows us to sustain the ecosystems that support us while living well.

In business we talk about “value streams” and “value chains”. In sustainable business we believe we need to start thinking in terms of a “value web”. This is what we need to sustain because this is what sustains us. To create more good means strengthening and enhancing the nodes of the value web. When we can do this consistently and skillfully we create sustaining value throughout the web. This is abundance.

To consistently and skillfully create this kind of value is difficult. Leaders and their organizations need to develop coherent approaches to sustainability that suit their areas of endeavor, market and the communities in which they operate. However, it is not something we can do alone. It is a collaborative effort, something we do together.

In terms of sustainability, organizations, as they mature and engage with the world, move up and down a continuum of effectiveness. Each organization does this differently. Some may remain in Compliance, however, according to research, most sit around Conformity and Cooperation. More are now flirting with Collaboration. A few are at Coherence. The difference is in how they engage with and incorporate the value web into their business.

Through Abound, we help leaders make sense of the opportunities in the value web, as they help each other and their organizations develop and grow.