6 Levels of Business Impact: From Net Positive to Regenerative Business and Systemic Change
Exploring the 6 Levels of Business Impact framework—from Direct Operations and Value Chain to Systems, Policy, and Society—as a guide for regenerative leadership and strategy.
Can a company truly call itself a Regenerative Business or a Net Positive Company if it reduces carbon emissions in its offices, switches to clean energy, and manages waste effectively, while its supply chain, surrounding communities, industry, or the broader economic system continue to generate negative impacts?
This question is becoming increasingly important in Sustainability Strategy and the Regenerative Economy. The challenges facing the world today do not exist within the boundaries of any single organization. They are interconnected across companies, value chains, communities, industries, public policy, economic systems, and society as a whole.
Paul Polman and Andrew Winston explain the concept of Net Positive through a central idea: businesses of the future should not merely seek to reduce negative impacts. They should aim to create more positive value for people, society, and the planet than they take away.
Net Positive therefore expands corporate responsibility beyond the walls of the organization. It includes employees, suppliers, customers, communities, future generations, and the natural systems on which businesses ultimately depend.
To help business leaders understand this expanding sphere of responsibility more clearly, this article applies the idea of Spheres of Influence through a practical framework called the 6 Levels of Business Impact, ranging from Direct Operations to World and Society.
The six-level framework presented here is not an official structure defined by Polman and Winston. Rather, it is an extension designed to help executives analyze Regenerative Business Strategy and understand how leadership must evolve as business impact moves from areas of direct control toward areas where organizations can primarily exert influence.
If Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 help organizations understand greenhouse gas emissions from direct activities, purchased energy, and the broader value chain, the 6 Levels of Business Impact expand the question further. Beyond carbon footprints, how does a company create or destroy value across society, the environment, communities, the economy, and the systems of which it is a part?
At the heart of this framework is the relationship between Control and Influence. The closer an issue is to the core of the organization, the greater the company’s ability to control it directly. As the sphere expands toward suppliers, industries, communities, public policy, and economic systems, direct control decreases while the need for collaboration grows significantly.
This represents an important distinction between conventional Sustainability Management and Regenerative Leadership. Leaders cannot create systemic change through internal authority alone. They must learn to influence, connect stakeholders, build alliances, mobilize collective action, and enable multiple organizations to move toward a shared direction.
Direct Operations — Transform What the Business Directly Controls
The first level is Direct Operations, where an organization has the greatest decision-making authority and control. It includes activities taking place within factories, offices, facilities, corporate vehicles, production processes, and assets directly managed by the company.
From an environmental perspective, examples include fuel combustion in factories, machinery operation, company-owned vehicles, water consumption, material use, waste management, and production processes. When looking specifically at greenhouse gas emissions, some of these direct emissions correspond to Scope 1.
However, a Regenerative Business should not view Direct Operations only through the lens of carbon. Corporate impacts also include employee well-being, occupational safety, resource consumption, biodiversity, workplace quality, and the relationship between business operations and surrounding ecosystems.
The central question at this level is therefore not simply whether the company complies with regulations. The more meaningful question is: within the areas where we have the greatest control, are we creating conditions that allow both people and nature to thrive?
Indirect Operations — Managing Impacts Generated Through Business Activities
The second level is Indirect Operations. These are impacts resulting from the organization’s activities even when the company does not directly own or control the source.
A straightforward example is electricity purchased by the organization. The company may not own the power plant, but its energy consumption contributes to demand within the energy system. From a greenhouse gas accounting perspective, this can be broadly compared with Scope 2. Companies can reduce these impacts through renewable energy procurement, energy efficiency, and the redesign of operations to consume fewer resources.
The same logic can also be extended to the human dimension through Employee Well-being. A company aspiring to become regenerative should not evaluate employees only through accident rates or labor-law compliance. It should consider physical health, mental health, work-life balance, financial security, workplace relationships, and whether employees are able to grow alongside the organization.
The goal therefore evolves from preventing harm to creating well-being, and from viewing people merely as organizational resources toward viewing the organization itself as a system that should enable human potential to flourish.
Value Chain — Expanding Responsibility Across the Entire Value Chain
The third level is the Value Chain, one of the most critical areas in the transition from Sustainability toward Net Positive and Regenerative Business. For many industries, impacts outside the organization may be significantly greater than those created within the company itself.
The value chain includes raw materials, farmers, manufacturers, suppliers, logistics providers, business partners, customers, product use, and what happens to products at the end of their useful life. From a carbon accounting perspective, many of these impacts fall within Scope 3. But Regenerative Strategy requires organizations to look far beyond carbon.
Companies must ask where their materials come from, how those materials are produced, whether farmers and upstream workers enjoy decent livelihoods, whether procurement practices place excessive pressure on suppliers or enable them to improve, whether products create burdens for customers or help them live more sustainably, and whether resources become waste after use or can circulate back into the economy.
A Regenerative Value Chain therefore does not mean simply transferring sustainability requirements to suppliers. It involves redesigning relationships throughout the system, including procurement, investment, knowledge sharing, technology, contracts, and incentives, so that multiple participants can create better outcomes together.
Sector and Community — Helping Industries and Communities Improve Alongside the Business
The fourth level is Sector and Community. At this point, the organization begins moving beyond the question of how its own company can become more sustainable toward a much broader question: How can the industry and communities of which we are a part become stronger and healthier as well?
Large organizations often possess greater financial resources, knowledge, networks, technologies, and economic influence than the communities around them. If a company uses those capabilities solely to strengthen its own competitive position, the reach of its sustainability efforts will remain limited. But if it uses those same capabilities to strengthen the surrounding ecosystem, the potential impact becomes far greater.
Examples include developing local workforce skills, supporting local entrepreneurs, investing in shared infrastructure, restoring natural resources, creating higher industry standards, sharing knowledge that can help other companies improve, or collaborating on challenges that no organization can solve alone.
Competition does not disappear in the Regenerative Economy. Instead, businesses develop an additional capability: the ability to compete in the marketplace while collaborating to protect and strengthen the systems upon which every company ultimately depends.
Systems and Policy — From Corporate Strategy to System Change
The fifth level is Systems and Policy. This is where Regenerative Business begins to enter the territory of genuine System Change, because many of the world’s largest challenges cannot be solved by one company, one product, or one CSR initiative.
Food systems, energy systems, financial systems, healthcare, education, cities, and resource systems are shaped by interactions among businesses, governments, consumers, investors, financial institutions, technologies, regulations, and social norms. Companies seeking to create Net Positive Impact at this level therefore require a new set of capabilities beyond traditional corporate management.
These include coalition building, cross-industry collaboration, responsible engagement with governments, support for public policies aligned with social and environmental goals, and participation in shaping rules that allow multiple actors within the system to change simultaneously. This is one reason why Net Positive emphasizes collaboration among business, government, and civil society.
For executives, moving into the Systems and Policy level therefore means changing the question from: How should we manage our organization? to: How can we help transform the conditions of the system in which our organization operates?
World and Society — Can Business Make the World Better?
The sixth level is World and Society, the broadest sphere within this framework. It brings us back to perhaps the most fundamental question behind the Net Positive philosophy: Is the world and society better because our organization exists?
This question is fundamentally different from asking whether a company is profitable, growing, or achieving its ESG targets. An organization can increase profits, grow its market share, reduce carbon intensity, and improve its sustainability scores while the larger systems surrounding it continue to deteriorate. Net Positive therefore calls for a level of ambition beyond reducing harm.
Businesses should create meaningful positive outcomes for stakeholders and the planet, while finding ways for commercial success to emerge from that value creation.
Viewed through the lens of the Regenerative Economy, this idea takes us even further than Sustainability. It moves from preserving what remains toward increasing the capacity of systems to recover and flourish. It moves from reducing resource consumption toward restoring natural capital. It moves from minimizing harm to communities toward strengthening community resilience. And it moves from managing stakeholders toward creating conditions in which multiple stakeholders can thrive together.
Conclusion: From Control to Influence and the Ultimate Question for Leadership
When examining all six levels, one major pattern becomes clear: the nature of organizational power changes as impact expands outward. Within Direct Operations, executives can use decisions, budgets, KPIs, policies, and internal management systems directly. But as the organization moves toward the Value Chain, Community, Industry, and System levels, these mechanisms become progressively less effective.
The higher the level of impact an organization seeks to create, the more leadership must shift from control toward influence, from hierarchy toward networks, from stakeholder management toward coalition building, and from competition alone toward the ability to collaborate even with organizations that may simultaneously be competitors.
From Dr. Mai’s perspective, the value of the 6 Levels of Business Impact lies in changing the questions executives ask. Instead of beginning with which sustainability projects to launch this year, organizations ask where their most significant impacts occur and how business capabilities can increase the capacity of the wider system to recover and regenerate.
Ultimately, the defining question for leaders in the Regenerative Economy is no longer just how successful our company is, but how much better the world is because our company exists.