Here's a tiny question. When you boil it down, what's the human
purpose of enterprise? Of industry and ingenuity, effort and toil? When
it comes to life, what's the point of work — and when it comes to work,
what's the point of life? What's the point of "business", anyways? Is
there one?
You might answer, having spent years in combat on the war-torn front
lines of commerce, countless hours ensnared in soul-sucking conference
calls, endless days enticed by corner offices and promotions, something
like: "Making megabucks, by the most efficient route possible. Hey, dude
— got an iPhone7?". And you'd be perfectly right: the purpose of enterprise is chasing
megabucks. If, that is, the outer limits of your ambition screech to a
grinding halt at spending your days fine-tuning the just-tedious into
the shinily banal. But no one's going to look back on their deathbed and wistfully
remember "Man, I was the person responsible for the lime-flavored energy
drink!"
While it's arguable whether humans have immortal souls, deep down, we
all know: to thrive at the art of living, at some point each of us has
to take a deep breath, step outside the rusting prison or gilded cage,
plant our feet in the soil and reach towards the sky. Life feels
actively, furiously lived when we love, trust, wonder, care, believe,
dream, think, feel, do, count, matter.
Sure, you can argue that the right, true, and best purpose of
enterprise is selling more stuff, at a greater profit, to benefit the
already privileged more, through pure financial gain — and the human
consequences are merely an incidental, almost irrelevant afterthought;
nice-to-have, but as disposable as a plastic razor. But it's a weak
argument — and it's getting weaker by the second. Roger Martin has elegantly and brilliantly argued why maximizing shareholder value's a destructive goal; Jack Welch has called the single-minded pursuit of shareholder value the "dumbest idea in the world;" Teresa Amabile has cogently chronicled why higher purpose leads to better performance; Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Tom Peters have
both found time and again that the organizations that thrive amidst
turbulence are those that aim higher; Gary Hamel has devoted now two must-read books to examining why management's hit a human wall, and what to do about it; Richard Florida has untangled the pulsing link between creativity and prosperity; and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
have pointed to institutions that extract value from people, notably
middle classes, as the prime mover of the collapse of societies. And
that's just the very short list of my intellectual heroes and their
findings.
Here's what we already know. If it's the greatest gifts you want to
receive — whether from the people that work for you, invest in you, or
buy from you — then you're going to have to come up with a more
meaningful answer to the great existential question of enterprise than
"another million units of toothpaste — but this time, with heart-shaped
light-up tutti frutti polka dots!!" Hence, any variant of the answer to
the question "Why are you here?" that goes thus: "selling more stuff to
people they don't really need to buy with money they don't have for
reasons that don't count to live lives that don't matter" is about as
relevant to humans as a pair of ultra-luxe designer sneakers is to a
goldfish.
I'd put it like this: at its best, the purpose of enterprise is to
evoke the highest human potential. The instrumental, calculative,
deterministic view of enterprise, of human effort, of the role work
plays in life, is in its twilight. Not just because it's been debunked,
but because it just doesn't square with the most basic, shared
essentials of a human experience. Allow to me say it kindly for a
moment: Unless, you truly and deeply believe that the majority of us
should spend the majority of our days during the majority of the best
years of our lives being emotionally and intellectually waterboarded in
order to satisfy the whims of narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths,
because since they're meaner and nastier than the rest of us, we owe
them the moral debt of our McFutures — enterprise, and by that I mean
your very hard work and ideas, your talents and gifts, your capacities
and skills, the raw stuff of your fragile human potential, has got to be
employed with a higher purpose: one that speaks to what it means to be
human.
So here's my advice: overthrow yourself. I'd like you to develop a
view of enterprise that's not merely instrumental, calculative, and
deterministic ("Work, money, stuff, power, status, rinse, repeat") — but
humanistic, constructive, and nuanced. And to get there, it just might
be time to square up to your own paucity of ambition, take a deep
breath, and admit that while the point of what you're probably doing
might be good enough for obsessive-compulsive sociopaths seemingly stuck
below the emotional development of a second-grader hell-bent on beating
his bffs at an endless game of Monopoly forever, it's nowhere near good
enough for humanity — as in both "the people inhabiting the earth" and
"the set of built-in emotional and logical wetware that elevates us
above the feudal, militaristic, and bestial."
Consider, for a moment, the uselessness of the corporate "vision
statement." If it's a difference you want to make, try crafting an
ambition instead. A vision statement is egocentric: it's about an
enterprise's vision for itself ("our vision is to provide the world's
best customer service at the lowest cos—" SNOOZZZZE). An ambition, in
contrast, isn't a picture of the enterprise you see in the future, but a
portrait of the human consequences that your enterprise (not just your
"company", but your ideas, effort, time, ingenuity) creates. How do you
want the world to differ — how do you want life to be meaningfully
wholer, richer, better? A vision is meaningless in human terms, but an
ambition is only meaningful in human terms. A vision might be about "the
cleanest restaurants", or "the most fashionable sneakers". But an
ambition is about "the healthiest lives", or "the fittest runners". (I
give some real-world examples of ambitions in Betterness.)
Argue with me if you like, throw your gilt-edged copy of the
collected works of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ronald
McDonald at me if you must, but I'd say: when it comes to the role of
work in life, and the role of life in work, there's something akin to a
grand ladder of purpose, stretching from the deepest subterranean depths
inhabited by the lowest common denominator's immediate gratification up
to the snowy peaks of making a lasting, positive, perhaps radical
difference in the world. It's at the top of that ladder where the act of
enterprise reaches its apex; finds its possibility; becomes its highest
self; because it's there that human potential fulminates and culminates
in what matters. That's where it becomes possible to earn not just
money, but the stuff money can't readily, easily, imperiously buy,
because it's not a beige, interchangeable commodity: trust,
self-respect, adoration, fidelity, passion, dedication, maybe even a
tiny bit of love, fulfillment, and, at the outer limits, a searing sense
of meaning.
I'd suggest: it's time to begin firmly scaling that ladder — or get
ready to be overtaken by those who can, will, and already are. If your
answer to the question "what's the purpose of business" is as sweetly,
tenderly naïve as
"selling out and cashing in by pushing more disposable plastic
junk, odds are, your days are
already numbered with a clock counting down to the nanoseconds to zero
hour — you just don't know it yet.
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