What if a company could be run less like a machine to be optimised, and more like a living thing that’s meant to thrive?
Lovely idea. Also the kind of sentence that makes a sceptical CFO reach slowly for their coffee. Fair enough. “Regenerative leadership” can sound like something you’d whisper around a campfire rather than bring into a board meeting.
So in this post I want to stay concrete. No grand abstractions (well, maybe a little). Three real companies already leading this way and making it work commercially, plus one quietly radical question most of us were never invited to ask: who actually owns a business, and who is it for?
During the modules of our Regenerative Leadership program, Kim & I often link back to how nature ‘leads’, and for this article I want to offer you the image of the mycelium: under every healthy forest runs a web of fungal threads, the mycelium, quietly moving nutrients to wherever they’re needed, with no single tree in charge. The forest isn’t led. It’s tended. Hold that image. You’ll spot it in all three companies below.
1. Buurtzorg: what happens when you actually trust the people doing the work
If you live in the Netherlands, you may already know Buurtzorg. Jos de Blok founded it in 2006, fed up with a home-care system where nurses spent more time filling in boxes than caring for people.
His move was almost embarrassingly simple: get rid of the managers. Buurtzorg’s nurses work in small neighbourhood teams of up to twelve, and those teams run themselves. They plan their own schedules, make their own decisions, bring in new colleagues, and organise care around the actual human in front of them rather than a centrally dictated minute-by-minute protocol. A lean back office and a handful of regional coaches support them; nobody hovers above them telling them how to nurse.
You’d expect chaos. Instead: higher patient satisfaction, lower cost per client, and some of the lowest burnout in the sector, with Buurtzorg repeatedly ranking among the best employers in the country. It turns out that grown adults who chose a caring profession tend to do rather well when you treat them as capable.
That’s the mycelium principle in a uniform. Intelligence distributed to the edges, where the real information lives.
2. Patagonia: the leader who called himself “a node, not a hub”
Patagonia is famous for the surface stuff: the activism, the “don’t buy this jacket” ad, the refusal to behave like a normal apparel brand. Less famous is how it actually makes decisions.
In much of its product development there’s no tidy hierarchy waiting to approve things from on high. Decisions sit with whoever holds the relevant expertise and relationships, not whoever holds the most senior title. Founder Yvon Chouinard described his own role as a node, not a hub: one connection point in a web, rather than the centre everything has to flow through.
This is a genuine shift, and a hard one for most leaders, because it asks you to give up the quiet pleasure of being needed for everything. The reward is a company that can sense and respond without waiting for permission to travel up and back down a chain of command.
3. Interface: the carpet company that decided to give back more than it took
This one I love, because Interface had no business becoming an environmental pioneer. It made carpet tiles. Petroleum-based, industrial, deeply unglamorous carpet tiles.
Then in the mid-90s, founder Ray Anderson read a book on ecology and had what he later called a spear-in-the-chest moment, the dawning horror of realising his successful company was, in his words, a plunderer of the earth. He could have filed that feeling away and gone back to selling carpet. Instead he set the company a goal that sounded absurd at the time: Mission Zero, eliminating any negative impact on the environment by 2020.
Here’s the part that matters for leadership. Anderson didn’t issue a top-down sustainability mandate and walk away. The change happened through a network of suppliers, communities, and internal champions co-creating their way toward it, learning as they went. And once they got close to “zero harm,” they didn’t stop and congratulate themselves. They asked a bigger question, now called Climate Take Back: not how do we stop taking, but how do we actively give back? How does a carpet company leave the world a little better than it found it?
That move, from doing less harm to actively restoring, is the whole heart of regenerative thinking in one company’s story.
What these three quietly have in common
None of these companies got there by adding a values poster to the break room. Look closely and the same three things show up each time.
- They moved intelligence to the edges. Trusting the people closest to the work to make real decisions, the way a forest moves nutrients to wherever growth is happening.
- The leaders let go of being the hub. Authority became relational instead of positional. Less heroic, far more resilient.
- They played a longer game than the quarter. Decisions got judged not only by this year’s number, but by whether they left the wider system more alive or more depleted.
If you’ve sat in our cohort, you’ll recognise the through-line: a shift from predict, control, optimise toward sense, respond, evolve. These companies aren’t being soft. They’re being accurate about how living systems actually work.
And then there’s the question almost nobody asks: who owns this?
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, and where I’d gently stretch you a little further than the usual conversation goes.
We talk endlessly about how companies are led. We almost never question who owns them and what that ownership is allowed to demand. Yet ownership is the deepest layer of all. You can have the most beautiful regenerative culture in the world, and a single sale or shareholder vote can undo it overnight.
This is where steward-ownership comes in, a model that’s been around for decades (Bosch, Zeiss) but is suddenly getting a lot of fresh attention. It rests on two simple principles:
- Self-governance. Control of the company, the voting rights, stays with the people genuinely connected to its purpose and its work. Those rights can’t be inherited by virtue of wealth or sold off to the highest bidder.
- Purpose over extraction. Profits serve the mission rather than being siphoned out to shareholders. They get reinvested or given away. The company can’t be turned into a thing to be cashed out.
In practice it means a company, in a meaningful sense, comes to own itself. It can’t be flipped, asset-stripped, or floated. Its purpose is locked in, legally and for the long term.
And look who turns up here. Patagonia, in 2022, did exactly this: Yvon Chouinard and his family transferred the entire company, worth around three billion dollars, into a trust that holds the voting rights and a non-profit that receives the profits to fight the climate crisis. As Chouinard put it, instead of going public, they were going purpose.
Buurtzorg, too, sits within this movement; its structures are designed so the mission can’t be quietly sold out from under the nurses. Two of our three companies, arriving at the same destination from completely different directions.
I’m not suggesting you restructure your company’s ownership by Friday. (Please don’t email me from a chaotic board meeting blaming this blog.) But the underlying question scales all the way down: whose interests is this team, this decision, this strategy actually serving, and for how long? You can ask that of a multinational. You can ask it of a Monday-morning meeting.
So, where does this leave you?
You don’t need a three-billion-dollar trust or a fungal network under your office floor. What these companies share is something far more portable: they stopped treating the organisation as a machine to be squeezed, and started treating it as something alive that needs tending.
That begins much closer to home than corporate structure. It begins with how you hold your own authority. Whether you trust the people at the edges. Whether you can resist the very human urge to be the hub everything depends on.
The forest manages all of this without a single manager. Worth a thought, next time you’re tempted to approve every last decision yourself.
Curious how this translates into the way you and your team actually lead? That’s exactly the ground Kim and I work with leaders on in our Regenerative Teams journeys. Also, we’re starting a new cohort of our open enrolled program on Regenerative Leadership. Come stand on the soil with us.