In order to integrate sustainability into the core of a business, it has to be a part of the company’s culture. For this to happen, a top leader must be willing and ready to go first and evolve, according to leadership advisor Sandja Brügmann. Published January 10, 2020 on SustainableBrands.com, originally written in Danish by Tine Brødegaard Hansen, and published in SustainReport 29. Sandja Brügmann is a sought-after leadership advisor who, among other services, has helped top leaders from Grundfos, The Body Shop, and Chr. Hansen CEO Mauricio Graber integrate sustainability into core business practices. Whereas CSR is an extremely narrow term, often associated with CO2 reduction, compliance and risk management, to actually become regenerative — meaning to contribute more than we extract from the world — we need… Read more »

These 5 Tips to create a Strong Sustainability and Purpose Culture from Sandja Brügmann, CEO The Passion Institute, was originally published alongside an interview in SustainReport, the full article (in Danish) is accessible here: 5 råd til lederen, der vil skabe en stærk sustainability kultur.   1. Move from being Change-ready to Change-driven  In order to solve the sustainability challenges we are faced with, as a leader you need to be able to bring other people to life, to flourish, such that they experience and are able to access their innate passion, innovation and creativity. This require leadership development on the personal development plane to know what motivates and drive others, beneath the obvious and spoken. This is why you… Read more »

  Tiden for CSR og langsigtede strategier er forbi; den etiske og bæredygtige forståelse skal helt ind i kernen af os som ledere og i vores virksomheder. På det grundlag vil et nyt netværk for bæredygtig ledelse få os til se sandheden i øjnene og skabe reel forandring. Chr. Hansen og Ørsted er blandt deltagerne. “Sustainability is an integral part of Chr. Hansen. Currently 82% of Chr. Hansen’s product portfolio have a direct positive contribution to the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development no. 2, 3 and 12. We work to continuously understand, monitor, and improve our performance on the issues that are most material to our stakeholders and thereby to the future success of our business. With our Nature’s… Read more »

  by SANDJA BRÜGMANN, Originally published in Conscious Company Media. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – R. Buckminster Fuller The future of work encourages whole human beings to move toward their highest soulful potential. This requires a drastic redesign of organizations, how we work, and what we recognize as success. It calls on us to move away from control, manipulation, and fear toward cultures that support and foster personal growth, freedom, autonomy, and blossoming of the individual. Leaders operate their businesses within an increasingly complex context of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). They must navigate resource scarcity, economic polarity, the speed of technological… Read more »

It’s not what you learn, but what you unlearn that matters. Sometimes, success comes not from what you learn to do but what you learn to stop doing. That bit of wisdom comes from Sandja Brügmann, a serial entrepreneur and founder of the Passion Institute, a conscious leadership, strategic purpose, and sustainable business consultancy for executives and entrepreneurs. “Once we have developed understanding of how we interfere with our visions and goals, then comes the challenging process of unlearning and changing specific behaviors,” she explains. Unlearning is hard work. “It requires one to move out of automatic behaviors and into conscious understanding, where we take control of our own actions and lives,” Brügmann says. “It requires confronting uncomfortable feelings and an… Read more »

“If everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing” – Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw Holacracy is a new management system for a rapidly changing world, where power is re-destributed, each member on a team has autonomy and can contribute and bring value to the organization based on a new organizational model. Currently more than 500+ organizations run with Holacracy including Zappos, Pantheon Enterprises and Socialsquare is the first Danish company to adopt Holacracy. Holacracy began with a question: What gets in the way of people working together as effectively as possible? In the most efficient way possible? It completely replaces the conventional management hierarchy with a tested, customizable self-management practice that empowers… Read more »

PassionTalkTV with Sandja featuring successful business woman, Inez Van Oord, founder of Europe’s largest mindstyle magazine, Happinez

Mark Nepo is a New York Times best selling author, poet and spiritual teacher. He has been featured in Super Soul Sunday with Oprah, and he is the featured poet and spiritual teacher in the film The Power of the Heart, currently on world tour. Mark’s new book Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness was just published. You might think, what does a poet and spiritual teacher have to do with conscious leadership and success in business? So let me explain just briefly how this connects for me. Our inner journey of being broken open, so we can learn to sink into our own real, humble, authentic, feeling selves is the very same journey we need to master in… Read more »

Our leaders of tomorrow need deep emotional awareness and radical empathy skills.

Sometimes, success comes not from what you learn to do but what you learn to stop doing.