Company
How organizations can enable people to exercise agency, develop their capacities, and accomplish more together while contributing to the health and regeneration of the larger living systems of which they are a part.
Part of Love & Work's continuing inquiry into what human beings are capable of becoming.
COMPANY
The revolution has a payroll department.
“The workplace is a key site for the development of human beings.” — Frederic Laloux
Founded in Italy in 1965, Aquafil grew from a family business into a global nylon manufacturer before turning its attention to the circular economy. Its flagship product, ECONYL, is Nylon 6 made entirely from waste, including discarded carpets, industrial plastics, and fishing nets. Aquafil breaks the waste nylon down to its molecular building block, purifies it, and turns it back into nylon with the performance of virgin material. Better still, the process can be repeated again and again without degrading its quality. Image via Interface.
I started my first business when I was 19. My then-wife and two other members of our local natural foods co-op and I opened a vegetarian café in a storefront the co-op had outgrown. It was 1973, and our generation was pretty sure we could change the world by changing the way we did business.
We weren’t only trying to sell better food. We were trying to build a different kind of place to work. The natural foods movement was full of businesses like ours: bakeries, small manufacturers, bookstores, farms and speciality distributors. Many of us had very little idea what we were doing. But we shared an intuition that the businesses we created could express the same values we were trying to live by.
That idea has stayed with me. Work is where most of us spend an enormous part of our lives. We use it to define ourselves. When we ask someone we are meeting for the first time what they do we aren’t asking about their hobbies. A career is supposed to be one of the principal ways we develop our abilities and make a contribution to the world.
And yet we often talk about companies as though their primary purpose were something else. We measure what they produce, what they earn, what they are worth, how fast they grow. The experience of the people who spend their lives inside them can seem almost secondary.
But companies are human inventions. We get to decide what they are for. They can be places where authority is concentrated or shared. Where people follow instructions or exercise judgment. Where information is guarded or available. Where ownership belongs to a few people or to the people doing the work. Where success is measured by what can be extracted or by what can be created and sustained.
These aren’t simply management choices. Taken together, they describe a different idea of what a company can be.
Fifty-three years after opening that café, I remain fascinated by the possibility we saw in business back then. I no longer imagine that changing the way we do business will, by itself, change the world. But I do believe companies are among the places where change becomes real.
We spend too much of our lives at work for them not to be.
COMPANY, SELF-MANAGEMENT
Bosses are not a law of nature.
After ten years at McKinsey, Frederic Laloux began wondering why organizations full of capable adults so often produced bureaucracy, politics, and disengagement. He went looking for alternatives. He found large, successful organizations operating with remarkably little hierarchy, using self-managing teams, shared authority, and transparent information. His larger point is provocative: hierarchy isn’t inevitable. Companies are human inventions, and we can invent different ways of working together.
BOOK: Reinventing Organizations
COMPANY, EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP
You can’t take the company with you.
In From Founder to Future, John Abrams asks what happens to a company when its founder leaves. Drawing on his own transition from South Mountain Company, the worker-owned firm he led for nearly fifty years, Abrams makes a great case that succession is about more than replacing the boss. It is an opportunity to share ownership and authority, preserve purpose, and create a lasting legacy by putting the company’s future in the hands of the people who helped build it.
BOOK: From Founder to Future
COMPANY, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
Work is not the price you pay for having a life.
In Good Work, E. F. Schumacher asks a strikingly fundamental question: What is work for? Modern economics tends to treat labor as a cost to be reduced. Schumacher saw work as something more: a way to produce what we need, develop our abilities, and connect with others through shared purpose. Drawing on the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, he asks whether earning a living might also help us become more fully human.
BOOK: Good Work
COMPANY, REGENERATIVE BUSINESS
So much for the idea that values don’t scale
In Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Ray Anderson tells how he set out to transform Interface, his global carpet company, from a petroleum-dependent manufacturer into a regenerative business. Environmental responsibility became a driver of innovation rather than a constraint on growth. Interface redesigned materials, products, energy use, and waste streams—and kept going after Anderson’s death. His experiment demonstrates something important: values don’t have to disappear as a company grows.
BOOK: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist
One liners
ARTICLE: Baltimore is putting public money behind converting legacy businesses into worker cooperatives.
ARTICLE: A Danish EV-charging company with more than 500 employees has eliminated its traditional management hierarchy.
ARTICLE: Haier turned a giant corporation into thousands of small entrepreneurial businesses instead of one hierarchy.
ARTICLE: The four-day workweek may work because companies redesign the work—not simply because people work one day less.
ARTICLE: One estimate puts the coming transfer of American small-business wealth at $5 trillion—and employee ownership could keep more of it in local communities.
ARTICLE: W.L. Gore still operates without a traditional chain of command—with more than 12,000 employees.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Regenerative Business
So much for the idea that values don’t scale
In the 1970s, I helped start a natural foods café, a whole-grain bakery, a conference series on Right Livelihood and Business, an appropriate technology network and magazine, and a tofu factory. We believed businesses could reflect our values rather than compromise them. The obvious criticism was that this was fine for small, idealistic enterprises. Try doing it with factories, thousands of employees, global supply chains, and serious money at stake.
BOOK: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist
Right Livelihood
Books
Work is not the price you pay for having a life.
While better known for Small Is Beautiful, a book that helped popularize the idea that economies should serve people rather than the other way around, E. F. Schumacher wrote another book that deserves just as much attention. Good Work asks a question we rarely stop to ask: What is work for?
BOOK: Good Work
Employee Ownership
You can’t take the company with you.
Twenty years ago, John Abrams wrote what became an influential guide to employee ownership and workplace democracy. The Company We Keep, later revised and expanded as Companies We Keep, told the story of South Mountain Company, the Martha’s Vineyard design-build firm Abrams helped start in 1973 and converted to a worker-owned cooperative in 1987. His idea was straightforward: the people who create the wealth of a company should have a meaningful share in its ownership, its decisions, and its future.
BOOK: From Founder to Future
Self-Management
Bosses are not a law of nature.
As a young man, Frederic Laloux found himself wondering why organizations filled with intelligent, capable adults so often produced bureaucracy, politics, and disengagement—and somehow diminished the very people they depended on.
BOOK: Reinventing Organizations
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The revolution has a payroll department.
I started my first business when I was 19. My then-wife and two other members of our local natural foods co-op and I opened a vegetarian café in a storefront the co-op had outgrown. It was 1973, and our generation was pretty sure we could change the world by changing the way we did business.
Industry Standards
A community for companies learning to thrive within planetary limits
For nearly two decades, Sustainable Brands has convened business leaders, entrepreneurs, designers, investors, and researchers around a simple but increasingly urgent question: How can companies create lasting value while strengthening the social and ecological systems they depend on?
WEBSITE: Sustainable Brands
Organizational Strategy
In an age of disruption, sustainability is becoming the operating system of resilient organizations.
For years, companies framed sustainability as a matter of corporate responsibility—a way to reduce environmental harm, strengthen reputation, and meet stakeholder expectations. That logic hasn’t disappeared, but it is no longer the primary driver.
ARTICLE: Corporate Sustainability Is Now a Resilience Strategy
Organizational Learning
Culture changes one interaction at a time.
Organizational culture isn’t built by mission statements. It’s built by recurring patterns of interaction. The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures is a practical guide to changing those patterns.
BOOK: The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation
Business Model
How to design regenerative business models without a master plan
For systems‑thinking entrepreneurs, business owners, and organizational managers who are trying to redesign how their work creates value, Sustainable Business Model Design: 45 Patterns is a practical handbook for re‑architecting your business around sustainability.
Cooperatives
Mapping how cooperatives have rooted economic life in shared ownership, mutual aid, and place‑based cultures of care
Modern co-op history is often told as beginning in 19th-century Europe. Yes, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844 England is significant for codifying principles that still guide co-ops today. But this narrative sidelines much older cooperative traditions in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Indigenous communities. The International Cooperative Alliance’s Cooperative Cultural Heritage initiative brings those practices back into view, treating traditions such as chama groups, ubuntu-rooted mutual aid, and community land and water systems as foundational expressions of cooperation, not peripheral ones.
ARTICLE: Mapping The Cultural Heritage Of Co-Ops: What Should Be On The List?
Organizational Culture
A regenerative, ‘soil-to-soul’ approach to R&D, manufacturing and distribution ties business growth to healthier ecosystems, collaboration across the industry, and a values-led workplace.
Davines takes both their B Corp certification and their slogan—For a Good Life—very seriously. Rooted in a family legacy that treats the business like a living being, Davines has long seen sustainability not as a marketing angle but as the only acceptable way to operate, framing “good life” as a balance of environmental, social, and economic wellbeing. That ethos shows up in everything from early product formulations to the design of the Davines Village headquarters, a glass “greenhouse” and scientific garden that physically embodies transparency and the integration of science and nature.
ARTICLE: Healthy Soil, Healthy People: How Davines Inspires Beauty from the Ground Up
Employee Ownership
A practical strategy for building true economic resilience
This is a good primer on worker cooperatives. It makes a simple, grounded case: if we want local economies that endure, we need ownership, decision-making, and care to live closer to home. Worker cooperatives are one way to do that. They are businesses owned by the people who work in them, with profits shared and decisions made by those most affected.
ARTICLE: How Worker Cooperatives Are Building the Future of Local Economies: A Complete Guide
