Regenerative operations: From efficiency to regeneration

Regenerative operations: From efficiency to regeneration

Here, Jean Garner Stead reframes operations as a dynamic capability for regeneration, with flourishing circularity as the resource lens. The first article in this series argued that transformational marketing must move from creating demand to stewarding it. But stewarding demand raises an obvious question: demand for what? Someone must produce the regenerative products that a transformed marketing function can honestly stand behind. That is the work of operations. In the value chain of Sustainable Strategic Management (SSM), flourishing circularity assesses the resources that flow into the firm, regenerative operations transform them, and what emerges is precisely what transformational marketing exists to steward. Operations are where regeneration is either built into the product or lost — and under closed- system assumptions it cannot be built in at all.