047: mutual value, regeneration, and the second half of a career | dean carter
In this episode, Deb Knupp sits down with longtime mentor and HX Ally Dean Carter, a four-time CHRO turned first-time CEO and co-author of Employee Experience Design: How to Co-create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive.
“May everyone that knows you and spends time with you be better off than when you found them.”
Dean reframes employee experience as something far more cellular than perks and ping pong tables. It is the lived, daily reality of every person doing the work, and it can be designed with intention. Through stories from Patagonia, Sears, and Guild, he shows how mutual value, small starts, and a clear why can transform organizations without spending a fortune.
Underlying the conversation is a quiet but firm challenge to extractive workplace systems, the annual performance review, the once a year engagement survey, the cultures that ask employees to give 120 percent and then sell them benefits to recover from the harm. Dean invites a regenerative approach instead, one borrowed from agriculture, where leaders put more into people than they take out. The result is not soft. It is measurable. Productivity rises, retention strengthens, and people, in his words, become better than when you found them.
Key Highlights
Why Dean is treating his sixties as the start of his learning years, not his earning years, and what that reframe unlocks for anyone navigating the second half of life.
The Patagonia traveling companion program that lets nursing mothers bring their babies and a caregiver on business trips, costs the company almost nothing, and helped shape future CEOs.
How a four day work week at Patagonia retained climbers and skiers, drove three years of record profits, and produced 26 three day weekends a year for every employee.
The Titanic and the rubber raft, two metaphors Dean used to lead 6,000 HR people through the deterioration of Sears and Kmart, and how that environment produced more than 22 future CHROs.
Why the annual performance review and the annual engagement survey are extractive systems, and the single question Dean now asks employees instead.
A regenerative framing of HR, drawn from regenerative agriculture, that asks leaders to put more into people than they take out.
About Our Guest
Dean Carter is the newly named CEO of Instill and the co-author, with Mark Levy and Samantha Gadd, of Employee Experience Design: How to Co-create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive (Wiley, 2026). A four-time CHRO across Fortune 50, high growth, and culture driven organizations, Dean has led people, culture, finance, and legal functions at Patagonia, Sears Holdings, Fossil Inc., and Guild. He launched his HR career at Procter and Gamble, Pier 1 Imports, and Pearle Vision. His perspectives on the future of work, regenerative people practices, and purpose driven companies have been featured in The Economist, NBC Nightly News, Harvard Business Review, NPR, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also a guest lecturer at business schools including USC Marshall, UCLA Anderson, Columbia, Stanford, and the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. What distinguishes Dean’s voice in this conversation is not only his resume, but his insistence that the next chapter of work must be designed with people, not for them.
Connect with Dean Carter
Dean Carter on LinkedIn
Order Employee Experience Design: How to Co-create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive
Learn more about Instill
About The HX Collective:
The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.
