Alan Heeks' book, The Natural Advantage, was published in the UK
by Nicholas Brealey in July 2000.

To order The Natural Advantage by mail,
send a cheque for £12.00 payable to
A D Heeks, Cole Street Farm, Cole Street Lane,
Gillingham,
Dorset SP8 5JQ
Telephone:  01747 835835

The Natural Advantage has also been published in the USA (by Rodale) and in The Netherlands, Korea and Japan.


  Organic Fruits  Cultivating Sustainability
Click on these links for details of the book contents.

Back Cover Copy

In this strikingly original book, Alan Heeks - Harvard MBA, successful entrepreneur, and founder of an organic farm - shows how to increase results in your work whilst renewing your resources. This is a new and sustainable approach to work, in which organic farming models the principles of cultivating natural productivity.

Every company says that people are its greatest resource and sadly it's true - human resources are being exhausted and polluted as badly as the environment. The Natural Advantage uses the revealing lessons of organic farming to show how individuals and organisations can grow output values whilst renewing, not depleting, their potential. This book pioneers the concept of human sustainability at work: cultivating the roots and fruits of production. It demonstrates how each of the seven interdependent principles of organic growth has a powerful analogy to the world of work.

The organic approach starts with ground condition: 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. From crop rotation, to the natural cycles of growth, to achieving real quality - nutrition and satisfaction - in our outputs, Alan Heeks lays out the organic way to work more effectively.

"Alan Heeks has done a marvellous job in first mapping out the basic principles of organic farming, and then demonstrating how each of those principles bears directly on the business of running a successful organisation. The Natural Advantage is both practical in its day-to-day application to management practices, and rich in its philosophical implications."

Jonathon Porritt, Forum for the Future.

Alan Heeks began his career in marketing with Procter and Gamble, and at 37 became a founder-investor in Caradon plc, a management buy-in which became a UK Top 100 company nine years later. He went on to start the Wessex Foundation, an educational charity and 132-acre organic farm in Dorset. 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 and his hobbies include owning a wood.

ORGANIC ROOTS
Forward to Nature
The issue of human sustainability at work, and the relevance of organic farming as a model. The Natural Advantage model: seven organic principles of sustained performance. Alan Heeks' story: business success, and the Magdalen Farm project. How to use this book: initial check on the sustainability of your current way of working.

Principle 1: Ground Condition
How the earth operates as a self-renewing organism. Explaining the concept of cultivated natural systems as a model for sustained productivity. The four elements of natural growth. Explaining aspects of soil condition, eg organic content, structure, depth, soil types, and translating these to the individual and organisational work context.

Principle 2: Natural Energy
The importance of clean, sustainable, energy inputs in creating organic, renewable growth. How the four elements in organic plant growth translate to four types of human energy: physical, emotional, mental, and inspirational. The Personal Energy Audit, using the analogy to raise your clean energy inputs. The contrast with intensive farming/work methods. Natural energy in organisations: the Caradon story.

Principle 3: Composting Waste
The principles and practicalities of harnessing waste as a major source of future fertility. Identifying the waste in one's work, eg personal stress, contradictory data, uncertainty. How farm composting gives us practical guidelines for recycling physical, mental, emotional and inspirational waste to create energy for future growth.

ORGANIC GROWTH
Principle 4: Organic Synergy
Growing through Uncertainty How an organic farmer achieves results without control or certainty. Generating synergy through co-creative tension: using uncertainty and conflict to find the gift in the problem, the creative leap forward. How to achieve working vision. The principles of synergy, and methods to achieve it, eg the Diamond Process.

Principle 5: Riding the Cycles
How to sustain high output through the four seasons cycle: seeding-growing-harvesting-rest. The priorities of each season, eg propagation, weeding, feeding in spring. The competence cycle. The crop rotation cycle (high output-low output- fallow). The nutrient cycle. How to develop cycles in organisations.

ORGANIC FRUITS
Principle 6: Resilience through diversity
How diversity in organic farming and the natural world provides resilience, sustainability and creativity, contrasted with the monoculture of intensive farms and organisations. Assessing and improving diversity in your own work, eg the importance of structural and skill diversity, and of the wild margins.

Principle 7: Real quality
Contrasting real and nominal quality in food, and work: the importance of emotional content and direct rapport in the supplier-customer link to create lasting satisfaction and real quality. The concept of organic marketing, and learning from the entrepreneurial successes of the organic food sector. Understanding the full content of work outputs, including the emotional benefits customers receive. Creating right and resilient two-way relationships with customers. Assessing the real quality of your own work.

CULTIVATING SUSTAINABILITY
Going Organic: the Conversion Phase
The issues which arise in converting a farm from conventional to organic methods, and their parallels in the workplace. Sixteen practical pointers in moving towards sustainability in your own work. Developing your own conversion plan. Towards natworking: organic, sustainable work methods. Conversion in organisations.

The Organic Growth Toolkit
Additional methods and processes. The Witness Triangle. Aikido Approach and Creative Conflict Resolution to enable organic synergy. Connected Breathing for composting. Additional reading.

Epilogue: Three Healing Crises
A personal view of how the next twenty years could see a move toward global sustainability through successive crises of environmental, human and business sustainability. The reaction against genetically-modified foods as a model for these forthcoming growth crises. The Green Circle, Green Heart and Green Dollar Codes: worldwide standards for sustainable growth.

Appendix: The Natural Step
The Natural Step and The Natural Cycle as our basic matrix for sustainable growth and energy re-cycling. The four Science Principles of sustainability, and their application as a basis for the principles of human sustainability.

Back