My concept of the ‘philosophy of enterprise’ (or philosophy of business, or ‘enterprise theory’) isn’t just a collection of ideas and theories about the practice of business – like those promoted by journalists, consultant-gurus, and business school professors. It is a higher mode of generalization, integrating existing knowledge into a more inclusive theoretical field, with the aims of limiting redundancy and making the theoretical connections among related disciplines (eg. political philosophy, psychology, sociology, and economics) more fruitful, manageable, and effective.
I’m not talking about a new field of sub-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary study. The philosophy of enterprise represents a whole new attitude – or perhaps more accurately, a return to an old attitude – towards doing both philosophy and business. Think of it like as analogous to a change in musical key [1]: it consists of almost all the same notes, but by replacing just one or two of them, the change in dominant overtones makes it an entirely different mode of working, and requires all of the accompanying parts to be transposed. From a business perspective, we’re still concerned with organizational psychology, finance, economics, etc; and from the perspective of philosophy, we’re still concerned with – well, whatever philosophers are supposed to be concerned with. Let’s just say (for now) that business philosophers will still be concerned with what is said by other philosophers.
This change is needed partly to address the potential liberties that will be taken by philosophical amateurs (like me). People who research, think, and write about business problems seem to be increasingly inclined to make large psycho-sociological, economic, and even metaphysical and epistemological generalizations. Business isn’t just about counting money; and in the past ten years, the web has made money almost a secondary consideration in some enterprises. The important commodities are increasingly things like knowledge, attention, creativity, innovation, experience, relevance, ideas, change, etc. And trying to make sense of such ambiguous notions eventually leads to universal conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful – often in an arbitrary, inarticulate, and incoherent way – without due respect to the thousands of years of thinking and arguing that have already been invested by philosophers.
And it doesn’t help that the rapid emergence of digital enterprise has raised a generation of people (like me) who take for granted that nobody really knows anything – especially not old people, and certainly not dead people – and that you can do pretty much anything you dream, as long as you do it quickly, before someone else does. And those ambitious people (like me) who don’t become the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, might believe they still have a chance to invent some cool new catch-phrase and become the next Tom Peters or Malcolm Gladwell. Meanwhile, resources like Wikipedia are making it easier to find just enough information (regardless of quality) to inspire or support our big ideas and communicate our clever concepts. And it hardly matters to us whether these ideas are rational, falsifiable, or coherent; it’s far more important that they are “search-engine optimized” and “made to stick.”
As long as we’re generating enough click-thrus and subscriptions to our blog feed, who’s going to tell us we’re wrong? Why would we stop and listen to critics when it’s so profitable and fun not to? We’ve been taught that the key to success is being a ‘change agent’ – doing a lot of brainstorming, rapid prototyping, interacting, etc – and it’s all about getting things out as fast and far and wide as possible, whether the product is a new Facebook application or a general theory of creativity: ‘don’t wait, don’t criticize, get it out and let the market decide.’
The situation isn’t necessarily bad (I happen to be an enthusiastic supporter of rapid prototyping, etc.); but it’s potentially bad – or potentially very bad – just as it could be potentially much better. Of course, I can’t list the opportunities we might be missing out on, because I’m asking for help in trying to figure out what they might be; and if you need me to spell out all of the risks and flaws, I might as well save myself the trouble. First, I don’t expect you to believe me; second, I’d rather refer you to the people who’ve already said it better than I could (like Thomas Homer-Dixon, Charles Taylor, Peter Drucker, Mark Kingwell, Jacques Barzun, Robert Bellah et al)[2]; and third, there’s no way I (nor anyone else) can prove such potentialities until they really occur. [And since writing this, I picked up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, which I highly recommend.]
Of course, by the time a potential event has occurred as real, it isn’t potential anymore, so there isn’t much to gain by objectively talking about it – unless we use the occurrence to help us understand new (or continuing) potentialities, along with the general processes and conditions through which they might emerge. This is what I’d rather spend my time doing: actually doing something about potential problems and challenges, or at least discussing them with responsible and intelligent people who can speak the language of history and reason, and who know how to tell me I’m wrong. This is what philosophers do: they criticize – they tell each other they’re wrong, incessantly – and if they’re actually doing their job right, they keep telling themselves they’re wrong too.
But criticism isn’t merely telling each other we’re wrong; it involves identifying and distinguishing particular fallacies and weaknesses; it’s also about identifying, distinguishing, and pursuing the apparently stronger insights, reformulating them to generate new concepts and criticism.
This activity requires an explicit conceptual framework or background – a fluid schematic diagram or map – to understand how one’s various ideas influence each other and affect action. This framework doesn’t have to be comprehensive, complete, or final (or rather, it can’t be), but anybody who makes a claim ‘to know’ should be willing to articulate their underlying assumptions in objective terms – at least as far as may be relevant to given circumstances – making them available for evaluation and criticism. In other words, we don’t all need to have a comprehensive theory of the universe, but we should at least be prepared to make inquiries into the source of our ideas and intuitions, so that in situations of disagreement or failure, we will be better able to assess and improve our ideas and intuitions for the future.
But ideas and theories in business are, for the most part, shallow and arbitrary. I don’t mean that in an insulting way; I simply mean that people who think about problems and opportunities in business don’t go very deeply into them — at least not to the depth where the full relevance of business to the rest of society becomes apparent — and why should they? There is no immanent need to do so; business provides such an open and dynamic field of opportunities that people can just keep moving forward, while ignoring the more deeply problematic issues. One big obstacle to thinking in business is that sometimes flawed ideas are the most profitable ones to have in the short term, and it often incurs losses to stop and consider them more thoroughly. When problematic ideas eventually become losers, it’s better just to abandon them and ‘follow the numbers’ to the next cheap buy: grab whatever idea seems to be on the rise and ride it as far as it’ll go – but if you stop and think about it, you might miss your ride. This attitude is what makes business so successful (and what makes it able to serve the general good as a secondary aim); it’s also what makes it so dangerous.
When we talk about the purpose of a business, we talk about things like creating wealth, satisfying customers, and increasing efficiency; but when we talk about ‘business’ as a whole, those aims are no longer valid. When we talk about the purpose of something, we mean, What role does it fill in a more general environment or ecosystem? What problem does it solve beyond itself? Business as a whole doesn’t solve problems of wealth, customers, and efficiency: they are a part of business; they would not be problems if ‘business’ suddenly became extinct, because those needs would go extinct along with business. The real problems (in a very serious way) would be the production and distribution of food and material goods, the organization of labour, and perhaps – depending on the abruptness of this hypothetical ‘extinction ’– the organization of society in general: the integrity and harmony of all of the various energies, ambitions, conflicts, and needs.
It’s almost silly to consider; and it seems that all of that organization is essentially the same thing as ‘business’: managing wealth (including land, resources, power) and making it work more efficiently. Now maybe business terms like ‘customer,’ ‘employee,’ ‘manager,’ ‘executive,’ and ‘shareholder’ are simply how we refer to people who have become organized. In other words, if business went extinct there would be no more customers, employees, or shareholders to satisfy; but those customers, employees, and shareholders would become unsatisfied people; and it is because people are satisfied in the real world that we call them ‘customers,’ ‘employees,’ and ‘shareholders,’ because business defines the forms such satisfactions take, and has proven itself to be very effective at it. So it seems that business does play a very important role beyond itself, and that it may even be difficult to separate ‘business’ from society in general.
Now the fact that business may be indistinguishable from general society makes it even more responsible to general (or ‘non-business’) needs. It means that business is largely an extension or refinement of political philosophy – a discipline that goes back to thinkers like Plato and Confucius. Yet histories of business theory [apart from economics] usually begin with Frederick Taylor in the early twentieth century – what passes as business theory is often business technique – the other three thousand years of accumulated knowledge about managing groups of people is treated by business people as a scrap-heap from which to find business-is-war analogies and parables about empathy, creativity, and change.
Matthew Stewart (author of The Courtier and the Heretic) wrote an interesting piece called “The Management Myth” in The Atlantic Monthly in June 2006, about possible relations between business and philosophy. Stewart is in a good position to know: he has a doctoral degree in philosophy from Oxford and was a founding partner of a business consulting firm. His argument that “management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy” (and that “management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much”) turns on his brief history. Stewart shows that many of the supposedly great new ideas about management – “integrative,” “organic,” and “flat” organizations; “bottom-up management”; etc – have been around for decades. He specifically points to Harvard business professor Elton Mayo, who in the 1920′s gave a rough outline for a “humanist organization theory.” Stewart juxtaposes Mayo with Taylor to claim that “you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists… Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.”
We won’t get too far trying to resolve those dialectics by just reading more business books; for this, it makes more sense to study the work of people who specialize in such generalities: philosophers. Here I’m going to make a controversial suggestion: the philosopher who most addresses the general problems of business is Alfred North Whitehead… Who?
Professional and amateur philosophers will recognize the name as a historical relic. I remember last summer reading a comment on The Valve where analytic philosophy was being discussed; Whitehead’s possible relation was suggested, and a (fairly accurate) statement was made comparing him to Wittgenstein: effectively that Wittgenstein is someone you can assume everybody has read, while Whitehead is someone you can assume nobody has read.
When I pick up any outline or history of philosophy, I usually flip in index to see if his name appears. It usually doesn’t (as in the case of Matthew Stewart’s own Truth About Everything; although Bertrand Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is mentioned, for which credit – or blame – is given exclusively to Russell); or his name does appear, I find that he’s often mentioned in a dismissive or disparaging way. I was going to mention Richard Rorty as an example of this (and it’s worth noting that Rorty wrote his masters thesis on Whitehead before moving in a different direction, along with the rest of professional philosophy), but I hesitated — rigorous researcher that I am — and decided to take ten seconds out for a Google search. I found this from Rorty’s Acheiving Our Country (1998), which helps illustrate both Whitehead’s legacay and the need for a philosophy of business:
In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the Englishspeaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole.
Most of Whitehead’s influence seems to be primarily in theology. Here, his “process philosophy” is seen by some to contain a hope of reconciling science and religion. But such a reconciliation must probably take the form of grand old-fashioned metaphysics, which is not something that many philosophers take seriously any more. Outside of a few small niches (philosophy of education may be another, which is where I first heard of Whitehead), it seems there has been a virtual blackout on Whitehead scholarship for several academic generations.
But it has been pointed out that “old-fashioned metaphysics” is starting to reappear in professional philosophy [see Brian Leiter's Future for Philosophy, 2004], and just as the climate of professional philosophy became inhospitable to Whitehead’s grand style, it could just as easily become quite welcoming.
It might seem strange that a philosopher whose work is too metaphysically inclined for professional philosophy could be any more suitable for something as practical-minded as business; but Whitehead is an example of the notion that the greatest attention to details sometimes requires an equally great attention to general principles, and vice versa. Whitehead devoted entire chapters of his work specifically to business and business education; he even spoke at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Harvard Business School, which was published in the Harvard Business Review.
In the same way that Elton Mayo anticipated the humanist management theories of today, Whitehead anticipated the importance of aesthetic value and individualized tastes — design — in business. Whitehead’s comments on this issue are insightful for us because he sees it from an inverted perspective from ours, helping us understand it more broadly, deeply, and dynamically. While contemporary commentators on aesthetic value like Virginia Postrel and Bruce Nussbaum deal with its rising demand, Whitehead was addressing (and trying to reverse) the devaluation of business aesthetics during his time. As he said at Harvard, “We are witnessing a determined attempt to canalize the aesthetic enjoyments of the population,” which was “produced by the determined attempt to force completely finished standardized products upon the buyers.”
Whitehead’s concern was not profitability or sales, but rather the long-term sustainability of an effective society: “a decay of individuality finally means the gradual vanishing of aesthetic preferences as effective factors of social behaviours,” and a diversity of individual taste is necessary for social stability and cultural growth. But he was not cynical about the overall rise of large-scale industry and commerce; he explicitly stated that “such organizations are necessary for our modern type of civilization.” What he recommended was the kind of balanced approach that is just now becoming widely practised: “The great producers and the great distributing corporations should include in their activities the work of craftsmen and designers.” He even anticipated the currently fashionable suggestion that executives shouldn’t merely work with designers, they should be designers. Consider what Whitehead meant when he wrote, “art concerns more than sunsets. A factory, with its machinery, its community of operatives, its social service to the general population, its dependence upon organizing and designing genius, its potentialities as a source of wealth to the holders of its stock is an organism exhibiting a variety of vivid values” [my emphasis], with “vivid values” referring to aesthetic values. In other words, business is an artistic medium.
[I should add that Whitehead himself noted that people like Robert Southey, John Ruskin, and our old Professor Mayo from Harvard had already said all of this before him. While I'm already diverging, I should also add that I’m leaving out other good points of comparison. Whitehead explicitly deals with the dangers of over-specialization ("The fixed person for the fixed duties... in the future will be a public danger"), and elsewhere he uses the business context to address big philosophical problems, such as the relationship between the whole and its parts, routine and novelty, conservation and change, etc. I hope to write on all of this again in the future, in a more advanced and refined form. ]
It probably still isn’t apparent what benefit Alfred North Whitehead (or any other philosopher) might provide people in business. I must admit that philosophy probably won’t provide much benefit at all to the way business has previously been done in most organizations; but my intention is to promote a new way – “a new key” – for doing business and philosophy. It shouldn’t be news to anybody that business is already changing rapidly – has already changed a great deal – and that there’s an uncomfortable (for some) degree of uncertainty regarding its future direction. The use of philosophy is to cope with this uncertainty, ambiguity, and change – to discriminate “between the details which are now irrelevant and the main principles which urge forward human existence, ever renewing their vitality by incarnation in novel detail” – to help develop more effective modes of working, learning, and living.
Here my point is demonstrated both by Whitehead’s words and by the fact that I’m quoting them: “in every sphere of life, the best homage we can pay to our predecessors to whom we owe the greatness of our inheritance is to emulate their courage.” You may not tend to associate courage as a characteristic of philosophers, but Whitehead saw the whole range of human enterprise as one common and continuous adventure driven largely by (or at least through) ideas. This adventure has produced many great ages and heroes, but “in its moments of supreme success its limitations disclose themselves and call for renewed exercise of the creative imagination.” Whitehead admired the successes of the past, such as ancient Athens, but knew that imitating the ancient Greeks would be the most un-Greek thing we could do.[3]
Business may be enjoying its “supreme success” at this very moment; meanwhile philosophy seems to have run out of gas [I almost said "steam," but realized that philosophy (especially amateur philosophy) will never run out of hot air], having enjoyed its last peak in the time of Kant and Hegel. [4]
Philosophy and business need to save each other from their excesses. I doubt that many businesspeople will want to become philosophers, but philosophers would do well to take a closer look at business, at least as a way to generate more effective analogies and models. And if philosophers can manage (so to speak) to make management theory more substantial, more falsifiable, and more generally relevant and integral to the history of ideas, then so much the better for all of us.
And at the very, very least, a thorough philosophy of business might be the best way to keep punk amateurs (like me) from taking these kinds of liberties.
Notes
[1] Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (which, incidentally, is dedicated to Whitehead)
[2] These are just a few books that address the changes in different ways: Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, The Upside of Down; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (The Ethics of Authenticity in the US), A Secular Age; Drucker, Managing in the Next Society; Kingwell, The World We Want; Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence; Bellah, The Good Society.
[3] The last sentance is a paraphrase of a Whitehead quote that I’ve lost track of, so I went from memory (sloppy, I know). I’m pretty sure it’s from Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead.
[4] This is one of the stupidest, unfounded, and meaningless claims I’ll ever make.
[*] The Whitehead works I quoted from are “The Study of the Past — Its Uses and Dangers,” from Essays in Science and Philosophy (1948); Science and the Modern World (1925); and Adventures of Ideas (1933). Contact me for more details.
Further Reading
Whitehead entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Other links: http://www.alfred.north.whitehead.com/ and processthought.org
Some business authors I especially like and hoped to mention are Henry Mintzberg, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. Mintzberg includes a few Whitehead quotes in Managers Not MBA’s, and the most insightful thing I’ve ever read about business techniques is a joking comparison, in Strategy Bites Back, to the methods of astrology. Pfeffer and Sutton’s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense is the business book that I most agree with and most recommend. I’m also grateful to Sutton for saying nice things about “slow learners” in Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company, and for his tireless struggle to rid the workplace of ass-holes.
The philosopher Robert Solomon taught and published about business ethics. See Honest Work, (ed. with Joanne B. Ciulla and Clancy Martin), Ethics and Excellence, and It’s Good Business.
For arguments in favour of a more creatively intelligent approach to business and everyday work, see Douglas Rushkoff’s Get Back In the Box and Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind.
Please feel free to email me with any questions about sources and recommended reading, along with comments, criticism, etc.
[Update: I never cease to wonder at how little I know. But one can never build on that little knowledge and grow without taking risks and clumsily speculating new ideas. And whether or not a 'new' idea is actually new-to-the-world can only be decided after it has been laid out. Since writing this I've found a few other places where some form of 'philosophy of enterprise' is studied, such as in the journal Enterprise & Society.]
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