Category: Holistic Management

What is Holistic Management?

Post author By Jeanette Oslund
Post date July 24, 2024

What is Holistic Management?

Holistic Management is a comprehensive decision-making framework that integrates social, economic, and environmental considerations to manage resources sustainably. It was developed by Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean ecologist and livestock farmer. The goal of HM is to create thriving ecosystems by improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, and restoring natural water cycles. The holistic approach approach aims to regenerate degraded landscapes, improve ecosystem function, and build biodiversity by mimicking natural processes¹ ²

Holistic Management International (HMI)

Holistic Management International (HMI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and supporting farmers, ranchers, and land managers in adopting holistic management practices. HMI offers training programs, workshops, and resources that empower individuals to make informed decisions that benefit their land, communities, and economies. By promoting HM, HMI aims to foster regenerative agriculture and land stewardship worldwide. Founded in 1984 by Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield, HMI has trained over 70,000 people in more than 130 countries. The organization’s mission is to envision and realize healthy, resilient lands and thriving communities by serving people in the practice of holistic decision-making and management³ ⁴.

Key Principles and Practices

Holistic Management involves several key principles and practices, including:

Holistic Goal Setting & Decision Testing: Establishing clear goals and testing decisions against these goals to ensure they align with the desired outcomes.
Holistic Financial Planning: Creating financial plans that support sustainable practices and long-term viability.
Holistic Grazing Planning: Managing livestock to mimic the behavior of wild herds, which helps regenerate soils and improve ecosystem health.
Holistic Land Planning: Designing land use plans that consider the interconnectedness of all ecosystem components.
Holistic Biological Monitoring: Regularly monitoring biological indicators to assess the health of the ecosystem and make necessary adjustments ¹ ²

Holistic Management Beyond Agriculture: How does this help your business?

Holistic Management is not just for land and livestock; it is a versatile framework that can be applied to all aspects of life. The principles of HM encourage a comprehensive, systems-thinking approach to problem-solving, making it relevant in various contexts, including personal life and business management.

Holistic Management in Business

Businesses can benefit immensely from applying holistic management principles. Here are some ways HM can be integrated into business management⁵:

Holistic Goal Setting: Just as HM emphasizes creating a holistic context for land management, businesses can define a comprehensive vision that includes financial, social, and environmental goals. This ensures that business decisions are aligned with long-term sustainability and profitability.
Decision-Making Framework: HM provides a structured approach to decision-making that considers the impact of each decision on the entire system. Businesses can use this framework to evaluate the short-term and long-term consequences of their actions, leading to more thoughtful and effective strategies.
Resource Management: By treating resources (financial, human, and material) as interconnected parts of a whole system, businesses can optimize their use and reduce waste. This holistic view helps in creating more resilient and efficient operations.
Employee Engagement and Well-being: HM’s emphasis on the well-being of all stakeholders can be translated into better employee engagement and satisfaction. By fostering a healthy work environment and addressing employees’ needs, businesses can enhance productivity and loyalty.
Community and Environmental Impact: Holistic Management encourages considering the broader impact of business activities on the community and environment. This perspective can lead to more responsible corporate behavior and stronger community relations.

Practical Steps for Implementing Holistic Management in Business

Develop a Holistic Context: Create a clear and comprehensive vision for the business that integrates economic, social, and environmental objectives.
Adopt a Systems Thinking Approach: Recognize and manage the interconnections between different aspects of the business, from supply chain to customer relationships.
Use Decision Testing Guidelines: Implement HM decision-testing guidelines to evaluate the potential impacts of business decisions on the holistic context.
Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Encourage ongoing learning and adaptation, ensuring that the business remains resilient and responsive to change.
Engage Stakeholders: Involve employees, customers, suppliers, and the community in the decision-making process to ensure that diverse perspectives are considered and valued.

Well-Known Practitioners of Holistic Management

Allan Savory

Allan Savory is the pioneer of Holistic Management. His groundbreaking work demonstrated that planned grazing can reverse desertification, a major global environmental issue¹ ². Savory’s holistic approach challenges conventional agricultural practices and offers innovative solutions for restoring degraded landscapes. He is also the founder of the Savory Institute, an organization that continues to advance the principles of HM through education and research.

Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin is a prominent farmer and author who advocates for sustainable and regenerative farming practices. At his Polyface Farm in Virginia, Salatin applies holistic management principles to create a diverse and productive ecosystem. His innovative techniques, such as rotational grazing and pasture-based livestock farming, have inspired farmers around the world to adopt more sustainable practices. He is known for his innovative and sustainable farming techniques that emphasize healthy grass and symbiotic relationships between animals⁵. Salatin’s work emphasizes the importance of transparency, local food systems, and ethical animal husbandry.

Gabe Brown

Gabe Brown is a North Dakota farmer and a leading voice in the regenerative agriculture movement. Through holistic management, Brown transformed his conventional farm into a model of soil health and biodiversity. His approach includes no-till farming, cover cropping, and diverse crop rotations, all of which contribute to improved soil structure and increased carbon sequestration. Brown’s success demonstrates the economic viability of regenerative practices and their potential to mitigate climate change. His book, “Dirt to Soil,” details his journey into regenerative farming⁶.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is a renowned animal behaviorist and professor of animal science. While not a direct practitioner of holistic management, her work in improving livestock handling and welfare complements the principles of HM. Grandin’s designs for humane livestock facilities have revolutionized the industry, ensuring that animals are treated with respect and care. Her work has revolutionized the livestock industry and promoted humane treatment of animals⁷.

Holistic Management in Popular Culture

The principles of holistic management have gained mainstream attention through documentaries that highlight the importance of regenerative agriculture.

Kiss the Ground

“Kiss the Ground” is a documentary that explores the potential of regenerative agriculture to combat climate change. The film features interviews with experts, including Allan Savory, who discuss how holistic management practices can restore degraded soils and sequester carbon. “Kiss the Ground” presents a hopeful vision of the future, showing how farmers and consumers can work together to heal the planet⁸.

The Biggest Little Farm

“The Biggest Little Farm” follows the journey of John and Molly Chester as they transform a barren piece of land into a thriving, biodiverse farm. Through the use of holistic management principles, the Chesters demonstrate the challenges and rewards of regenerative farming. The film highlights the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the importance of working with nature to create resilient agricultural systems⁹.

Conclusion

Holistic Management and Holistic Management International play a crucial role in advancing sustainable and regenerative agriculture. Through the efforts of pioneers like Allan Savory, Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, and Temple Grandin, these practices are gaining recognition and adoption worldwide. Documentaries like “Kiss the Ground” and “The Biggest Little Farm” further amplify the message, inspiring a new generation of land stewards to embrace holistic management and work towards a healthier planet.

By incorporating holistic management practices not only in agriculture but also in business and personal life, we can create more sustainable and resilient futures for our lands, our communities, our economies, and our planet.

Would you like more information? Find links below

Links:

More about using Holistic Management in business:

Holistic Approach in Business: Definition, Characteristics and Benefits

About Allan Savory:

About Gabe Brown and his book, Soil to Dirt:

soilhealthacademy.org

About Joel Salatin:

organiclifestylemagazine.com

thelunaticfarmer.com 25

About Holistic Management and Holistic Management International:

holisticmanagement.org

savory.global

permalogica.com

holisticmanagement.org

en.wikipedia.org

globaledge.msu.edu

About Kiss the Ground:

kissthegroundmovie.com

imdb.com

en.wikipedia.org

About The Biggest Little Farm:

youtube.com

en.wikipedia.org

amazon.com

Growing Your Business with Branding

Post author By Jeanette Oslund
Post date February 1, 2021
No Comments on Growing Your Business with Branding

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” -Mark Twain

It is my belief that we are all talented. We each love something and are so passionate about that something, that we can get lost in it for hours without noticing the time go by.

Maybe these are our callings, or our hobbies. Sometimes we have many of these passions and sometimes just one.

These tasks call to us. Unavoidable. Insatiable.

I have the curse of having many callings. For several years I passionately made decals. For another stretch of time, I did embroidery. Yet another set of years were dedicated to crochet. More recently, I spent many nights sewing masks until I could barely see straight.

I have had many, but two passions stand true through all of this: branding and design. I can’t help myself.

I never simply made decals, I created a brand around my artful decals complete with a name and a logo. I couldn’t find patterns for the kind of blankets I wanted to crochet, so I made my own geek-themed blanket patterns and branded them before I put them up on pattern sharing sites and groups.

A friend of mine once told me that not every idea or hobby has to be turned into a business. And of course, she is right. But when my hobbies turn into walls full of scratchboard portraits or cupboards full of homemade soap and household cleaning products it only makes sense to start selling it. If I am selling it, I should put my name in it. It can’t be my name, so I may as well make a cool name. If it has a name it may as well have a logo. If it has a logo. . .

Yeah, I may have a problem.

I see brands everywhere. I guess when you look at the connections between all the past times my real hobby becomes obvious: branding businesses.

I have studied business since I was in middle school when I began babysitting for extra cash. I was drawing my logo, consisting of my initials, on all my drawings, notebooks and whatever else I could find. Soon, friends asked me to make their initials into logos too. I spent many afternoons as a teen at the library researching how to start a tee-shirt store.

I have done enough studying on branding and marketing that many friends have come to me for advice on how to make their business stand out. I’m no lawyer or CPA and would never give the kind of advice that these professionals can give when someone is starting a new business; but, if you have a small 1–3-person operation trying to find ways to getting your name out there, build your brand and reputation, marketing and the like, I’m your girl!

Why is any of this important?

At the end of 2019, Intuit commissioned a Gallup survey of the “gig economy”—the population of freelancers and self-employed individuals and their means of making a living, a population that has grown a lot in the last decade. This report shows that 28% of the workforce is made up of gig-workers and 14% of that group is made up of people that are 100% self-employed. Most of these workers stated that their reason to be self-employed stemmed out of a need to be their own boss and have greater autonomy. The number of freelancers in the workforce continues to steadily climb as we become more able to do work remotely. You can find the complete report for this survey here.

With the huge number of freelancers, self-employed and gig-workers in the workforce there is also a great possibility that a portion of our readers are a part of this percentage. While the term “freelancer” often conjures up the image of a desk-jockey (at least it does for me), the term includes many service-industry workers. I grew up with my parents running a two-person operation: my dad doing home maintenance and my mom running his office. My mom also ran a house cleaning operation for many years. They had many friends who ran similar small businesses, painters, drywallers, repairmen, mechanics, etc.

The number one complaint any of these people had? Finding work! In fact, this problem of feast or famine—either too much work or long stretches of searching for work—was not just an isolated issue found in the small group of self-employed individuals we knew. A survey by the freelance marketplace “Freelancermap.com” showed that finding clients was the #1 complaint of their freelancers. This leads to a feeling of instability and the idea that you need to be on the clock always.

Self-employment is not for the faint of heart.

This month, I am introducing my new business column. It is my goal to speak to all my friends that are self-employed and bring some of my knowledge to you. We will discuss marketing, brand personality, websites and even (one of my least favorite things) social media marketing (bleh). We will have interviews with local businesspeople and learn what tools they have used to help them succeed. Most of all, I hope to help you grow and succeed!

In the competitive world of self-employment, you need to find a way to stand out in the crowd as the best solution to your target-market’s problem. If you can brand yourself and your business in a way that does this, you will set your business up for much steadier growth. How do you do this? Step 1: Branding.

Next month we will go over some of the basics of branding and what it can do to help you bring in work. Whether you are a plumber or a programmer, branding can help you build trust with your target market and that trust can lead to more business for you.

Blog Business Consulting Holistic Management Tips And More Information

6 Ways I Avoid Burnout

Conceptual photo illustrating burnout syndrome at work

2020 was going to be my year for my freelance graphic design business. I had been taking marketing classes, learning to build websites, and networking. I gained a consistent client; I was receiving many inquiries and projects. I even rented a desk at my local coworking space. It was all working out!

Unfortunately, I was wrong. As with almost everyone else in the world, COVID-19 sent me spinning totally out of control. I had clients who could not pay for finished work. Many even dropped me. Leads disappeared as their businesses lost their footing. By the end of the spring, I was back to where I began.

But suddenly having so much down time felt strange. I started helping friends repair and build their dreams, sewing masks for local medical workers and friends, founded Mind Travelers, and then in the fall, started homeschooling my two teenagers.

I was working on some project or another from the moment I woke up to when I went to bed—which was very late. And yet, while I spent many late nights working on this or that, I would wake up early. I didn’t stop, and when I did, I felt useless, empty, and hopeless.

Several times during the year, I had to stop working due to a sharp pain radiating from my right hand up to the base of my skull. I was unable to bend or rotate my wrist and ended up wearing a wrist brace to stabilize it. It often caused me to break down in tears. I could barely read a book or cook dinner in this state.

All my hard work had earned me “Cervical Radiculopathy”. The tension in my neck was causing muscles to spasm, pulling my neck out of alignment and pinching the nerve causing my hand to be weak and hurt. If I wanted this pain to go away, I needed to start making some changes in my life. Thus, started my long journey towards healing.

Even during lockdown, I was experiencing physical and mental burnout.

The work of healing my body has meant working on many other aspects of my life. In the end, a lot of what I had gotten used to as a normal needed to be changed. My time spent working on projects needed to be in shorter spurts, causing me to consider each one more seriously. I had to add many stretches and exercises throughout the day. I had to reduce my screen time which I replaced with more exercise. I have been spending more quality time with my kids and taking little moments for myself. I still have a lot of healing to do, and it is a slow process that involves both my body and my mind.

One of the most helpful and inspiring practices I have completed during this journey was creating my personal mission statement. Having this personal statement means I know what truly matters to me. When a project comes up that sounds amazing and interesting, I can compare it to my personal mission statement. Will I get closer to my personal goals? Will this do me harm? Will this take me away from what truly matters to me? I am interested in so many things that almost any opportunity sounds like a good one to me if I don’t consider it closely. I have had to learn to take on only those things that I need to accomplish, and that I can accomplish.

It is my mission to create meaningful relationships with the people that matter to me, building close communities and helping bring positive change
My personal mission statement.

My new burnout avoidance strategy includes the following:

Set specific hours and place for work, stick to them and don’t work outside those hours.

One of the biggest problems people experience while working from home is the lack of delineation between their work and home lives. It is so easy if a client texts to just sit down and get to work—even if we are trying to cook dinner or get our children to bed. Being “on the clock” all the time really doesn’t help you accomplish more. Clients that demand you help them “right now” even late in the evening are probably not worth stressing over.

Know your priorities.

I encourage you to write your own personal mission statement to see what matters most to you. While many interesting, exciting and socially important opportunities will continue to rise, you cannot be a part of all of them. Having a written and thought-out personal mission statement will help you choose what is most important to you. Armed with this knowledge you can begin to weed out the tasks that don’t align with your needs.

Be organized and schedule activities for work, exercise, family time, self-care and household chores/errands.

This goes hand-in-hand with knowing your priorities. Put time aside for these important parts of your life first, and schedule everything else around that. Sometimes this is hard to do.

Working for others means that we have to schedule important parts of our lives around our work. But this is part of taking care of ourselves and our families. Time outside of work is precious and should be prioritized as such. There is absolutely no shame in working 40 hours a week and then using all the rest of your time taking care of yourself and your family. If this is satisfying, then allow yourself to enjoy that.

If you can’t reduce the amount of work you do, or cut back on projects, then I suggest seeking assistance. Maybe older children or your spouse can help with dinner and/or chores. Maybe that means having take-out more often. Maybe that means hiring someone to clean. Ask for help wherever and whenever you can.

Be kind to yourself and listen to your body and inner self.

When I got to the point where my body was screaming at me (the pain in my hand) I had already been ignoring the smaller cries for help for years. Had I listened when many other problems had come up in my health, my scary and painful trouble with my wrist could have been completely avoided. Spending time stretching, exercising, meditating, eating right and going out for walks is incredibly important. Working from 9-5 in one straight shot without taking regular breaks or even a lunch (something I know many of us do) is so unhealthy. Whether cleaning houses or working at the computer or any other work, we need to find ways to add in movement and fresh air.

Spend less time doing tasks that steal your time and energy.

More and more this year I have personally found myself depressed, stressed and anxious after spending hours a day scrolling through social media. It sounds like a lot of time, but I could bet that if anyone were to actually time their social media use, they would find that what they think is a small part of their day is actually a huge problem. After spending all that time seeing friends argue, people jamming their opinions down your throat, and the constant flow of filtered selfies a person can become drained. And yet, the moment we have a second of boredom, we open the app back up.

This has always been a known problem for me, but this year is the straw that broke this camel’s back. I have not closed any accounts but have removed social media apps from my phone. This has helped me immensely. If you don’t think it’s a problem, keep track of your social media time. You may be surprised. If you don’t think you can give it up, try backing off for a day or a week or setting limits to your social media time. I promise it’s worth it.

Meditation and breathing exercises.

Woo-woo, right? Wrong. In fact, according to Andrew Newberg, M.D., neurologist and author of “How God Changes Your Brain” the acts of meditation, gratitude and prayer physically change your brain, building new neuropathways and helping you recover from stress. Through scientific study, meditation was proven to reduce stress, slow the aging process and enhance physical and emotional health. The studies compiled in this book show meditation to be an immensely beneficial practice. I have found in my meditation practice that I feel more grounded, clearer headed and able to take on difficult situations when I regularly meditate for at least 5 minutes a day.

Burnout is an increasingly common issue. These stories, and how I am handling my trouble is of course anecdotal. Take what you want, leave the rest.

As always, the advice and stories I have written are not meant to diagnose or offer treatment. If you or someone you know is experiencing burnout or any other physical or mental illness, I encourage you to seek the advice of your doctor.

Tags burnout prevention, coping with burnout, Personal mission statement, Rediscovering purpose, Self-care strategy, work-life balance