TEL 254: The Responsible Business with CAROL SANFORD

A summary of things you should know about The Responsible Business according to CAROL SANFORD

Introduction (0:41)

About two weeks ago a joined The University of Washington founding a center that is going to house the many many decades of my work under something called ‘The Responsible Business Center.’ I also work a lot with individuals now through seed communities, I’m an author of two award winning and Best Selling books, and as a result I do a lot of keynote speaking.

The Book’s Unique Quality(3:09)

One of the real differences is that it goes away from the flat line view and everyone is developed in their functional role. This book is to help innovative people understand how all of that fits together. It really gives you a systems view, rather than a fragmented view, while telling stories of businesses.

The Best Way To Engage

Actually I suggest that people go to the last chapter and read it first because it gives you a philosophical stance on the book. Most people tell me that if you read the first four chapters that you then can move around. But until you’ve read the prologue (which is a case study), the overview of the case stories, and the structure of the book, then you can move around through the book.

The Reader’s Takeaway (14:00)

I think it’s a paradigm shift of going from breaking things down into fragments to where you start to think and know that everyone that works there can think from the mind of the CEO. If they have a framework that gives them a system then they can understand how it all works together.

A Deep Dive Into The Book (6:16)

This book is really about a way to have people experience a radical different way of experiencing business. Can you imagine that if you went into a laboratory in biology and someone said, “here’s a living frog, now put it in the jar and put chloroform on it, and then cut it up in pieces.” And then they say that they want the frog to hop, the frog can’t hop once you cut it up, but that’s exactly what we do to a business. We have people become so functionally driven, so broken apart into pieces. We even take the strategies and make lists of them and the people responsible for them and then we are very surprised when we can’t get alignment and create something that works well. We created that same dissected frog way to people that might be called stake holders in a business and we have to figure out how we trade off, one for the other most of the time. Then you have a view of being an upstanding citizen and wanting earth to be healthy and then we treat those as they are independent processes. Then we do the same thing with people we hire, employees are working hands and suppliers are even further away. There’s so much energy put into looking at those as different departments and functions, this book has the intention of how to understand how it all works together.

NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 6:16

Notable Quotes From The Book (14:45)

“Be value adding and not value added.” – Carol Sanford

The Credibility/Inspiration Of The Author (2:10)

One was that I had been working with corporations for 25 years and I maintain relationships with people and they told me that I needed to tell all these stories. The bigger one was I was walking around a book store one day and I was looking at a table of business books and they all had a separate subject. There was marketing, accounting, sales, but there was no sense that there was one written by the mind of the CEO about the business as a whole.

Other Books Recommended By The Author (16:20)

The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

More Information About This Book and The Author

Buy on Amazon today
Her Website: http://carolsanford.com/
carolsanfordinstitute.com
Add him to Twitter: https://twitter.com/carolsanford

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Wade Danielson

Wade is a 4-time serial entrepreneur and is the Founder/Host of The Entrepreneurs Library. With a long time passion for reading books, Wade created an online resource and podcast for entrepreneurs who love to read personal and business development books. His long-term goal in life is to start an entrepreneurial home schooling program for children of business-minded families.