A Book Launch, a Big Question and a Different Kind of Growth
On Monday evening, we welcomed guests to Oxstalls Campus at the University of Gloucestershire to mark the launch of Realising Good Growth: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders - the new book from Good Dividends and QuoLux™. Every guest went home with their own signed copy.
It was a good night - the kind where conversations carry on well past the point you'd planned to leave, and people are still talking in the car park on the way out. That felt appropriate, because the book itself is really an invitation to keep a conversation going - one that matters a great deal indeed.
At the heart of the evening, QuoLux™ director Jo Draper interviewed the book's authors - QuoLux™ CEO, Dr Stewart Barnes, and Professor Steve Kempster - drawing out the ideas and the thinking behind them. It was a lively, probing exchange and it gave guests a real sense of what the book is trying to do and why it was written now.
The premise is straightforward, even if the implications are not: Humanity faces a growth crisis. We are on a runaway train hurtling towards a barren landscape - glaciers retreating, ocean acidification, agricultural decline, displacement on a scale that is hard to comprehend. These are not distant projections. They are trends already in motion.
And yet we cannot simply stop growing. Most countries are carrying record levels of debt. We need tax revenues to address the very problems that growth has created. It is, as the book puts it, the moral paradox of our time.
So the question becomes: what if we changed the nature of growth itself?
That is the idea at the heart of Realising Good Growth. Not growth at any cost and not the abandonment of commercial ambition - but Good Growth, where businesses of all sizes create employee engagement, social value and a regenerative economy focused on experience, fulfilment and community rather than endless consumption. Where profit supports the journey rather than defines it.
For businesses, that shift brings real commercial benefits - competitive advantage, top talent, stronger innovation and better returns. But the larger prize is enriching lives and enabling humanity to flourish. True success, as the book argues, is measured by the future we create for all.
It is an idea tested and developed over more than a decade of working with hundreds of SMBs and the book captures those practical learnings in a way that leaders can actually use. The framework is built around a Plan on a Page covering purpose, people, operations, finance, innovation, planet-community and reputation, supported by a digital dashboard of tools including a Purpose Generator, an SDG Configurator and a Leadership Mirror.
We are at a fork in the road. The well-trodden route is familiar and comfortable. The other path takes more effort, more thought, more willingness to lead differently. But it is the one that makes the conversation with future generations worth having.
If you were with us on Monday, thank you - it was a real pleasure to share the evening with you. And if you are curious about what Good Growth might look like in your business, you can find out more at gooddividends.online or order your copy here.
To get a head start and read the preface now, please click here or on the picture below.
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