Philip Wright St James Ethics Centre in Sydney

Higher purpose

According to Philip Wright, who works with the St James Ethics Centre in Sydney, misaligning a mission statement with the ultimate purpose of a business is a common trap.

“Whenever I ask people about purpose they usually come back with a mission statement. But we’re looking for something higher than a mission statement. What is the higher purpose?”

A mission statement might be a useful guiding slogan, but purpose speaks to the values that underlie it.

“The difficulty is if you don’t have a clear sense of purpose, then sometimes your values don’t make a lot of sense, they become disconnected from purpose. One of the things that happens a lot is when people lose sight of the context they’re working in then there’s a potential for error to creep in, or more importantly, ethical blindness.”

Wright finds that a business might often articulate one set of values while their processes exemplify a different set.

“For example, they might have a value of ‘we trust our people to do the right thing’. But then you find they have policies and procedures that imply they don’t trust their people, because they have a thousand processes and policies and procedures detailing every single move they make. So there’s a disconnect between what is espoused and what actually takes place.”

Which brings us to the chestnut of ethics. All businesses are bound by ethics, both at the professional and the personal level. There are many regulations that guide how businesses can operate but there are also deeper values that inform how we make personal decisions within that business. Philosophy can help us understand those values, how to communicate them and how to resolve conflicts when they are arise.

This is particularly important because the business world is rife with tension between ethical behaviour and short-term rewards, and it takes a strong moral compass to steer clear of the ethical shoals and reefs.

“Many years ago there was the notion that business had to have more than just profit as their bottom line — the notions of triple or quadruple bottom lines came up,” says Wright. “But the reality is the system doesn’t really reward that. So when an organisation wants to do something, it’s pulled in other directions by short-term reporting, need for profit, shareholder return.”

Is there a philosopher in the house?

Employing philosophy in your business and conducting it ethically can also boost your bottom line.

“There is research that shows longer-term profitability is far better inside an ethical organisation rather than a non-ethical organisation,” says Wright.

Armstrong agrees that philosophy can yield tangible benefits.

“The ultimate test for any business is whether it can hold its own in a competitive environment and continue to make money,” he says.

“The idea that philosophy could make a difference in every single business is clearly not going to be right. But a great many enterprises are fundamentally about human relationships, quality of information, how well people understand one another, how well they make decisions in complex situations, what are their values, what are their ambitions. These translate into the profitability of a company.”

If you suspect that philosophy might be of help to your business, there are a few ways you can introduce it. If you’re big enough — say, the size of Google — nothing beats having a philosopher-in-residence, says Armstrong.

“In principle that could be great, but it has to be designed carefully if you’re to extract a lot of value from it. In terms of getting the best value, an organisation has got to be willing to give some time to understand its own problems as philosophical, to notice the bits of their problems that they’re really not addressing.”

While clearly an in-house thinker is not for every business, you can also turn to external consultants.

Armstrong is also Philosopher in Chief of the independent School of Life, which is headquartered in London but operates throughout the world. It has a business arm that can put you in touch with philosophers who know how to work particularly with businesses.

The St James Ethics Centre also runs ethi-call, a free hotline in Australia (1800 672 303) that can help you specifically deal with ethical issues.

Finally, you can embrace philosophy yourself and encourage your co-workers to do likewise.

Cultivating questioning, reflection, critical scrutiny and rational discourse can improve ad hoc information flow and create an environment that encourages experimentation, innovation and learning from past experience. If you’re already employing ideas in your business every day, you might as well do it well.

Tim Dean is a philosopher, editor and science writer.

This article was first published in the August 2014 issue of Acuity magazine.

（Source: 01/12/2016 https://www.acuitymag.com）