Ancient Wisdom For Modern Businesses

Entrepreneurship is often focused on novelty and innovation, however there are many ancient wisdom principles that have stood the tests of time. When it comes to revisiting the past in order to integrate the future into the present, philosophical science has a lot to teach business about sustaining more sustainable solutions.

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How might a philosopher like Aristotle or Nietzsche run a modern business? Sadly, traditional management practice suggests many firms wouldn’t even consider it. The reason is because management today is rooted in economics and psychology. It is focused on numbers and productivity rather than the people who make those numbers happen - in such circumstances, philosophy can add the humanising element so many of today’s businesses so desperately need.

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Aristotle and Nietzsche developed radically different yet complementary approaches to life that are both urgently needed; to restore trust in business and to help answer pressing organisational questions around empowering and engaging workers, leadership, values and performance.

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The Balancing Act

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Aristotle asks what distinguishes a person – a fully-fledged human being – from an animal or a slave. Animals are driven by raw passion and appetite; slaves are simply driven by others, with no power of their own. Neither of these two conditions allow for happiness and flourishing. The slave has no freedom to make choices; animals live a hand-to-mouth and suffer greatly in consequence. A flourishing person, by contrast, is someone who has autonomy and learns what is good, giving him the freedom to choose accordingly.

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The distinguishing human quality, Aristotle observed, is this capacity to reason. Animals don’t have it and slaves cannot use it. Reason is the ‘good-maker’, which guides us through the challenges and opportunities that life brings us. Aristotle took the view that ‘virtues’, which make for a life well lived, are pretty obvious. For him, they included friendship, generosity, courage and resilience. It still makes intuitive sense today. But without context, they are meaningless because virtues and vices are complex and subjective, are often collectively agreed upon, and exist on a spectrum as opposed to in silos.

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Courage sounds good, but is only a word unless we know what it means in a given situation. Here Aristotle urges us to discover what he calls ‘the middle way’. This is the middle way between the ‘vice’ of excess or deficiency; going too far or not far enough. So, the virtue of courage lies somewhere between the vice of excess – rashness – and the vice of deficiency, which is cowardice.

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We discover this ‘sweet spot’ through experimentation: using our reason, honed by education, we explore how we and others might act in given situations, carrying out experiments, reflecting on the outcome and trying again. Aristotle’s ideal workplace would be one in which we develop our humanity through opportunity and training to use our reason.

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Automated Autonomy

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Aristotle would have liked the contemporary language of ‘empowerment’ but would then have had second thoughts on how that actually unfolds in many of our workplaces. A large corporate CEO once memorably said that for him “the best managers are those in their late 30s with a large mortgage and several children”.

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Aristotle would see this as modern slavery; reasoned judgement shut down. And that can be infectious. Irving Janis, a leading scholar at Yale University, coined the term ‘groupthink’ to describe a situation in which all members of a group go along with a course of action with which they all privately disagree, but never voice their disagreement.

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Aligning individual and collective values is also a balancing act that requires us to constantly question and tweak our systems at large. The format of the workspace is where nature meets nurture. Beyond profit, the way our environment is structured has the ability to maximise our wellbeing through feelings of purpose and community, our output, productivity and the benefits of the collective intelligence.

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‘Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups’ is a book for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes, including businesses and societies.Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioural and evolutionary science, Prosocial presents a practical, step-by-step approach to help energise and strengthen businesses and organisations.

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It suggests that the stereotypical view of individualism being opposed to collectivism is flawed, and that by designing better systems, the alignment of moving both together in harmony is written in our evolutionary code. Prosocial looks at evolution from both a biological and cultural standpoint.

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Whereas the biological represents the component parts, the cultural represents the emergent features. This draws on an interdisciplinary approach – marrying anthropological, psychological and behavioural science frameworks. Evolutionary analysis is therefore a multidimensional systems model.

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That’s The Spirit

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Nietzsche would have found Aristotle’s reasonable workplace dreary, with everyone musing about the right thing to do rather than getting on with outstanding work and honing their skills to perfection. And yet he is very much in the lineage of Aristotle, addressing the same core question: what is the good life? Like Aristotle, he looks for an objective answer: feeling good is not enough. And like Aristotle he looks for a ‘good-maker’: a yardstick that allows us to figure out what is best, not blindly adopting the moral codes of others or waiting for divine guidance that will never arrive.

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When it comes to balancing nature’s yin and yang, Aristotle may be seen as the cool, thoughtful and structured approach, whereas Nietzsche is often more poetic, extreme and controversial. This can help us locate that ‘middle way’. Nietsche’s teachings are all about how to rise beyond the herd and flourish as an individual – to become ‘Higher Men’, as he describes those who have reached their full human potential – we must make our own judgements about the good life from our own experience. By contrast, members of the herd look to others to make their judgements for them. Those others might be priests, bosses or even philosophers.

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In his own time, Nietzsche saw a collapse of conventional moral authority, which made it imperative for people to discover their own values. The received wisdom of the Church, State and other institutions holding moral authority was increasingly coming into question. In many organisations of late, we haven often seen a collapse in trust and authority, leading to cynicism and apathy. It can be difficult to see moral authority being restored in our organisations in an age where every opinion gets broadcast and any alleged misdeed of our leaders gets immediate exposure.

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However with the new frontline of purpose-driven leaders lighting the way by walking the walk as opposed to talking to talk, times are changing for the better. B Corporations are the gold standard of businesses looking to balance purpose with profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment, and are a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good.

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An Alchemical Art

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To take personal responsibility for who we are and what we do is to craft our lives and what we stand for - which is a process, just as an artist creates a masterpiece. Self-awareness and experimentation (experience) are the keys to better understanding our motivations and desires. In many instances, we have hidden drives behind our behaviour that we dress up as values - the mistake is to mask who we are with a set of values that belong to someone else.

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Nietzsche would encourage us to experiment, choosing which drives to let off the leash, seeing where that takes us, and if that is to a place in which we are more invigorated, less resentful, more potent and proud of ourselves – exercising what he called ‘the will to power’ – then we can attach the label of values to the underlying drives.

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They will then be our own values, which will give us more insight into how we act and reflect on how we can act even better. Some of those drives will come from dark places but with awareness can be transformed: the impetus to power, for instance, can be sublimated into competition for excellence. But if we continued to fool ourselves with the value of humility, then this would remain a hidden drive with more negative consequences, and the opportunity for excellence could drift by.

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Can our organisations accommodate both aspirant Nietzscheans and followers of Aristotle’s Middle Way? Within your organisation you will no doubt find arenas for bold experimentation and revitalisation that need the Nietzschean spirit. In other situations, the call will be for stability, coordination and progressive improvement rather than revolutionary change – here the Aristotelians will thrive.

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The key is to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to people, organisations, purpose, management, measuring performance, offering rewards and shaping processes, so that we design our organisations around our people rather than trying to fit square pegs into round holes the other way around.

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