The Natural Advantage: Renewing Yourself - Softcover

Heeks, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185788261X ISBN 13: 9781857882612

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

In this book, Alan Heeks offers a new approach to work, a way for you to increase production whilst renewing your resources and fulfilling yourself in the process. Alan Heeks shows that the key to increasing your output sustainably is to move from a linear mechanistic mindset to a cyclical organic one: working with natural principles, not overriding them. People are an organization's greatest resource. However, just as in nature, these valuable resources are often over-used and depleted in the production process. The linear approach simply uses input to produce desired output, ignoring depletion or pollution caused by the choice of input and any waste by-products of the output. An organic approach chooses and uses resources where there is no waste and every output becomes a future input. "A Natural Advantage" sets out to show how important it is to maintain our human "ground condition" by balancing our physical, emotional, mental and inspirational energy, while demonstrating that adding natural forms of energy to our working life sustains our growth far more than any artificial stimulants can.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Heeks is the founder-trustee of the Wessex Foundation, an educational charity and 132-acre organic farm, set on the Somerset/Dorset borders, and a trained facilitator for The Natural Step. He is a noted expert in sustaining high performance at work and the clients of his consultancy, Working Vision, include 3M, Mercury, Glaxo and BP as well as small businesses and public sector bodies. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MA in English from Oxford University. He lives in Hampshire in the south of England where he enjoys owning a wood.

From the Back Cover

In this strikingly original book, Alan Heeks - Harvard MBA, successful entrepreneur and founder of an organic farm - offers a new and sustainable approach to work based on the natural principles of organic farming: a way to increase your results whilst renewing yourself.

Every company says that people are its greatest resource and sadly its true -human resources are being exhausted and polluted as badly as the environment. The Natural Advantage uses the evocative lessons of organic farming to show how individuals and organizations can achieve results whilst renewing, not depleting, their potential.

The Natural Advantage addresses both the roots and fruits of personal sustainability and shows how each of the seven interrelated and interdependent principles of organic growth has a perfect analogy to the world of work. For example, the organic approach starts by feeding the soil from which output grows naturally and sustainably. This means drawing energy from clean sources, like appreciation and inspiration, not from polluting pressures such as stress and fear. It means composting our problems so that waste becomes a major source of future growth - turning our negative feelings into constructive output.

Few of us would want to return to Eden without our house and car, so this book does not advocate a 'downshifting', 'back to nature' approach. What we need to do is go forward to nature. From natural cycles of growth to achieving real quality, Alan Heeks lays out the organic way to work more effectively.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185788261X
• ISBN 13: 9781857882612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288