[slow down to speed up]

Journey Beyond Business as Usual

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[slow down to speed up]

Welcome to a journey beyond business as usual! Here, you can learn more about conscious and transformative strategy and leadership development, to accelerate Better Business, and co-creating a better future—from the outside in, inside out, and from the future back. Your guide and coach is Elisabet Lagerstedt, who has chosen to dive deeper into Transformative Business Leadership as part of a PhD after 30+ years in business and leadership.

The book 'Better Business Better Future' helps business leaders understand the Sustainability Revolution and decodes the strategic practices of purpose-led sustainability trailblazers. From Patagonia and Interface, to Ørsted, Unilever, IKEA, Oatly, and more.
Better Business Better Future
“I liked most about the book, that it spreads hope. It shares a vision about how Better Business can contribute to a Better Future. We, leaders, are not passive victims waiting for slow policies to save the world…” -Dr. Michael Kolk

This short clip is from a longer dialogue with Vincent Stanley, the Director of Philosophy at Patagonia (January 12, 2023), as part of the Better Business Acceleration Program™. You can read more about Patagonia’s journey here >>

The Better Business Acceleration Program™ will help you move beyond business as usual to develop future-fit leadership and a future-fit business.

Learn more >>

This journey starts with you!

As business leaders, we can go far beyond demonstrating in the streets. We can mobilize capital, minds, and actions and cooperate to nudge consumers into making choices that co-create the healthy future we want and need for our business, humanity, and the generations to come—our own children and grandchildren included. Below are a few resources to help you accelerate this important shift.

Learn more, and accelerate your own work in building a Better Business and a Better Future, in the book by Elisabet Lagerstedt.
Elisabet Lagerstedt
Sign up to Elisabet's newsletter to go beyond business as usual, explore Better Business, and co-create a Better Future.
This unique online program helps you as a business leader to navigate the why and the how of the Sustainability Revolution.
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Latest blog posts

Beyond Business as Usual

Welcome to slow down to speed up – and enjoy the reading!

The Key to Future-Fit Leadership: Why Growing Yourself Is the Most Strategic Move You Can Make

Leadership

The Key to Future-Fit Leadership: Why Growing Yourself Is the Most Strategic Move You Can Make

9 June, 2025 Leadership , ,

Next to me lies Giles Hutchins’ latest book, Keys for Future-Fit Leadership. It’s a book summarizing and visualizing the very best of Giles’ insights…

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Business at a Crossroads: a Global Snapshot of Leadership, Themes, and Tensions

Trends

Business at a Crossroads: a Global Snapshot of Leadership, Themes, and Tensions

6 June, 2025 Trends , , ,

I will be joining the President’s Summit in Copenhagen next week. It’s one of Northern Europe’s leading business conferences, with more than 3000 participants…

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Rethinking Growth: Why the Future of Progress Needs a Rethink

Trends

Rethinking Growth: Why the Future of Progress Needs a Rethink

16 May, 2025 Trends , ,

Rethinking growth? If you are a business person like me, this may feel like an odd and strangely relevant question at the same time,…

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Whole Systems Transformation – from the inside out

Leadership

Whole Systems Transformation – from the inside out

21 April, 2025 Leadership , ,

Last week, I participated in a deeply rewarding program outside of Paris: Transforming Organisations with the Barrett Values Centre. Our focus was on whole…

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Facing the Wild Times: Cooperation, Collapse, and What It Means to Lead Now

Leadership

Facing the Wild Times: Cooperation, Collapse, and What It Means to Lead Now

8 April, 2025 Leadership , , ,

Apocalyptic thinking usually doesn’t attract me, but yesterday, I still found myself adding Athena Akipis’s audiobook A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly…

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Reflections on 55 Years of Change: From Moon Landing to a Regenerative Future

Trends

Reflections on 55 Years of Change: From Moon Landing to a Regenerative Future

31 March, 2025 Trends ,

  I was born on July 15, 1969—just a few days before we as humankind first set foot on the Moon. As Neil Armstrong…

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The Challenge of Rising Complexity in a VUCA World

Future

The Challenge of Rising Complexity in a VUCA World

15 February, 2025 Future ,

I can’t help but be fascinated by history and currently read Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), where he describes complexity…

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The DELA Summit: Supporting Social Entrepreneurs for a Better Future

Leadership

The DELA Summit: Supporting Social Entrepreneurs for a Better Future

10 February, 2025 Leadership , ,

Last week, I attended the DELA Summit in Älmhult, Sweden—a remarkable gathering co-hosted by Ashoka and IKEA Social Entrepreneurship. The summit brought together a…

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Thriving in a VUCA World: Why Vertical Leadership Development is Key

Leadership

Thriving in a VUCA World: Why Vertical Leadership Development is Key

23 January, 2025 Leadership

In today’s world, we as business leaders face challenges that the best practices of management theory and even the best Ivy League business schools…

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Book: Leadership and the New Science

Leadership

Book: Leadership and the New Science

17 January, 2025 Leadership ,

I just finished listening to the book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret Wheatley, initially published in…

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My brain is plastic – yours too!

Leadership

My brain is plastic – yours too!

31 December, 2024 Leadership ,

When I was younger, I was taught that our brains stopped developing at the age of 25. It was believed that the brain had…

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Why We Need Inner Development to Navigate and Catalyze Outer Change

Leadership

Why We Need Inner Development to Navigate and Catalyze Outer Change

3 November, 2024 Leadership , ,

Today’s world is often described as VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The acronym captures the unpredictability of modern life, where everything from climate change…

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"Like the digital revolution before it, the sustainability revolution promises to change everything. Yet, just as with digital, many companies are moving too slowly, taking an incremental approach to a challenge that demands a radical rethink." -World Economic Forum
"The Sustainability Revolution has the magnitude of the agricultural and industrial revolution, but the speed of the speed of the digital revolution." -Al Gore
"Good business is simply good for business and seriously needed in co-creating solutions to the worlds wicked problems." -Elisabet Lagerstedt
"Instead of seeing our potential contribution as limited, we need to realize that our zone of influence as business leaders can be much larger than we think." -Elisabet Lagerstedt
"Slowing down is sometimes the best way to speed up" -Mike Vance
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi
”No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘today I’m going to destroy the planet and inflict harm on myself and those around me’. Yet at a collective level, that’s what we are doing.” -Otto Scharmer, MIT
“In the next 10 years, we will experience as many changes as humanity has seen during the past century.” -Ray Kurzweil, Futurist at Google, Co-Founder of Singularity University