It is traditional to define an organization’s health by the amount of profit it makes. But how does nature define profit and what lessons and implications might it have for how we lead our organizations? In nature, profit is defined by the evolution of the system. As...
What changes if we trust our employees? Does that change how we supervise? What do we use as a criterion for good performance? It seems like this question should be obvious, however, management and leadership literature is filled with language that suggests manager...
If you are a gardener, you are familiar with weeds. Weeds are abundant in a garden and weeding is a constant activity in the summer. Some gardeners compost weeds to turn it into nutrient-rich soil that can be recycled back into their gardens, others bag them up and...
Nature has a beautiful way of recycling nutrients. A legacy tree in a forest will continue to give nutrients back to plants and species five times the length of its lifetime after it dies. If a tree lives to 500 years, it will still be contributing nutrients for 2,500...
Nature starts with two generous acts of interdependence. The first is that it provides sunlight, a free resource that makes life possible on earth. Nature runs on sunlight, but sunlight alone cannot generate life. Its energy must be transformed into useable nutrients...
Nature has many things to teach us about the importance of organizational feedback. In nature, feedback is designed to help the ecosystem maintain a dynamic balance and remain resilient. Feedback plays the important function of curbing excess from within the whole...
