So how would you answer this question: is business the problem behind, or the solution to, our collective ills?
As trust in social institutions continues to plummet, many people today are looking to business to provide meaning and purpose. Where else to turn, after all, when political institutions are gridlocked, education seems ineffective, and religion is, well, complicated? Business, at its best, gets things done speedily, marshalling resources to achieve goals, finding new and more efficient ways to make life easier for more people. Those characteristics indicate that its leaders—rather than those from government, academia, or religion—can provide us with the practical skills and savvy we need to fix our social ills. So the myth goes, at least.
But business is changing. In our work at HumanWealth Partners to help companies and other organizations to redesign and align their systems and cultures according to a more human perspective, we’ve noticed this hunger for purpose more and more. In two fields in particular—sustainability and human resources—there are movements that, among other things, advocate “bringing one’s whole self” to work, and using business as a platform for “manifesting planetary consciousness,” while touting the ancient practices of mindfulness, meditation, and even stoicism as tools for greater efficiency and success. Whatever their relative merits—and surely there are many—what is most interesting to us is that these movements suggest a widened scope for business, and a hunger for business to play a guiding role in our lives.
What happens when businesses, intentionally or not, begin to supplant other social institutions, providing a surrogate family, replacing the school, offering enlightenment, or crafting public policy? Can business give meaning, offer purpose, or elevate consciousness? These things have typically been the purview of spirituality, education, philosophy, physics, even political theory, and human beings have been talking about them for millennia. That they’ve found their way into the heart of business in our time is striking.
Business no doubt has a significant and powerful role to play in addressing social problems, especially where scale and speed are concerned. But qualities that may be a virtue in business, might be a vice in another context. Ironically, business leaders interested in solving social problems are themselves particularly vulnerable to being trapped in narratives that prevent the action we most need.
The Myths We Live By
Before I became an entrepreneur, I was a cultural historian, which meant that I was constantly attending to the stories people tell about how their world coheres (or not). The most potent of these stories—and all cultures have and live by them—are what we call myths. By myths, I mean stories that tell us something about our origins, our nature, and our purpose, and what those things mean for how we live. The most potent myths—most easily visible in humanity’s spiritual, philosophical, and political traditions—combine these basic ingredients of origins, nature, purpose, and meaning, into one comprehensive story.
As the crisis of trust in our social institutions would indicate, our current myths are facing difficult times. Everyone seems to be searching for “what’s next,” for the new narrative.
I’ve observed this search for new narratives becoming central to what’s next for business. This is an exciting development, as it holds the potential for all of us to be clearer about the “why that underlies the how” of what we do in our work. But if we’re not careful, we can be prone to adopting narratives that tell too simplistic a story and ignore key truths. When that happens, we actually become distracted from our best work and innovation. Adopting certain myths, in fact, can trap us from the very meaningful, purposeful action we so desire.
Two of the most popular myths, which I’ve heard articulated in the news, in conversations with colleagues, and in the wider culture, currently seem to have the most sway over our imaginations: business as “saint,” and business as “sinner.” The fact that these myths function like theological or ideological narratives for business people, and for those who write about and study business, makes them all the more potent, and in need of scrutiny.
The Myth of Business as Saint
At a recent business conference, I heard a main stage speaker assert that business is the most powerful force for social good our world has ever seen. It’s an extraordinary and provocative claim, to be sure, but it was offered up with little sense of irony and no real proof points. According to this view, business is the force that will make us, and our world with its myriad social problems, better. I’ve heard this claim from marketers and management gurus, never as the conclusion of an argument, but as the starting, foundational premise. If true, what follows is the idea that business is better positioned, and perhaps better able, to solve our current social ills than are all other institutions—educational, governmental, religious—which are collectively suffering from crises of public confidence. In other words, this view holds that, through innovation, through efficiency, through scale, business can be the liberating force that will lead us into the promised land.
The problem with the speaker’s statement is that it conflates potentiality with actuality. It would be more accurate to assert that business has the potential to be a powerful force for social good. Business is, after all, just one social force in our world. It is not in a competition with other institutions to out-provide social good, and it does none of us any good, social or otherwise, to marginalize the other pillars of culture that play important roles in helping society hang together. In addition, claiming that business is the “most powerful” force readily invites a history lesson and a recap of all the ways business actually has been a detriment to social good. The speaker’s statement, on its face, it is easily counter-proven by a host of examples—financial crises, environmental disasters, and labor exploitation—to name a few.
The reason why this line of thinking slides into mythology is that it captures something important about business: it is a powerful force in our world. No one stated this truth more perceptively and poetically than capitalism’s great critic, Karl Marx. His well-known Communist Manifesto begins with a litany of the great, if brutal, accomplishments of bourgeois industry and its captains:
It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades… by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, [it] draws all…nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls…It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Creating a world after one’s own image suggests god-like power, which propels us into mythology. Business does indeed possess power, but the questions of how it uses that power, and to what ends that power is put, should caution us from idealizing that power into an unproven, problematic myth.
The Myth of Business as Sinner
If some business people are apt to sing the praises of business’ power and saintly role, others are prone, perhaps in reaction, to adopt a counter-myth: that business is part of, if not the, problem preventing us from achieving the social goods we desire. This myth is especially seductive to the activists among us, both within and outside of the business community. If the business-as-saint mythmakers glory in the wonders of capitalism, the business-as-sinner mythmakers are its prophetic denouncers.
In this myth, business is cast as the villain, with greed and lust for growth as the vices that dominate the corporate boardroom. There is here a tacit acknowledgment of the power that provides fuel to the saintly narrative of business. But such power, it is reasoned, must be checked—by regulations, by reductions, by radical change. The proponents of this myth see impending doom on the horizon, urging us to take heed and build a collective ark before the floodwaters engulf us all. Business-as-sinner believers often issue a call to repentance: there is time, they say, to avert catastrophe, if we would only turn away from our lazy and wasteful consumption, from the exploitation of people and of the planet, and heed the call to reduce our footprints, our presence, and our impacts.
Again, this myth has power and appeal because it captures something true: if the prognosticators are right, the prospects for humanity’s flourishing are dim, and urgent action was needed yesterday. And the prophets of business-as-sinner proclaim their message out of love and concern—for the natural world and for humanity’s future.
Despite the calls for change found in this myth, however, there is often an accompanying belief that people can’t, won’t, or just don’t change. Ironically, this belief actually has the effect of undermining the myth’s exhortations for immediate and drastic change. When that change is slow to come, doesn’t come in the way its proponents expect, or comes not at all, in their eyes, it simply reinforces how stubborn, greedy, and bad we all are. Activism cannot long be sustained, however, with this corresponding belief in its ineffectiveness, and one wonders why proponents of this myth would push for business to change at all, if they believe that its fundamental nature is irredeemably bad, and that its leaders are simply incapable of changing.
Why Myths are Attractive
These myths are such a part of our milieu that many of us give voice to them, in part or whole, at various times. And yet, we must ask: what makes usually sober-minded, pragmatic business people slide so easily into mythology? I see two typical reasons.
Reason one is our tendency to absolutize certain truths or realities at the expense of all others, and business people are as prone to this as poets and priests. It is true that business possesses both tremendous energy and power—and it is also true that this energy and power have caused both flourishing and suffering. It really shouldn’t be hard to acknowledge both, and you don’t lose anything by doing so. As management guru Gary Hamel notes in his book, What Matters Now, “one doesn’t have to disown an economic philosophy to recognize its shortcomings.”
The second reason mythology is attractive in business has to do with some of the current interest around the role of purpose in business and in life in general, and how companies and employees alike can find purpose in their work. As I defined above, myths can offer a grounding or rationale for purposeful activity. In a time when many of the stories we’ve lived by have been shaken, the presence of business in all of our lives makes it natural that we might turn to business as a source for new myths of meaning and purpose.
The myths above, however, suggest to me that business might not be the best place to turn for myth-making. People whose task it is to provide goods and services that perform socially useful functions are often dependent upon other disciplines and cultural institutions to provide purposeful narratives. If business people were to tone down the messianism of the business-as-saint myth, and the apocalypticism of the business-as-sinner myth, we might be better able to help our companies and employees discover what business does, and can do, quite well to contribute to our collective common good.
Connecting to Core Human Purposes
The myths of saint and sinner have had, and continue to have, their forms in other social institutions, which is in part why they have been so readily adopted in a business context. They are familiar. We know them, and in a time of great change and uncertainty, that familiarity can be comforting.
Nevertheless, business is not, in itself, the most powerful force for social good. Here is what is: human beings, in collective action toward a common purpose. The transformation we seek in and through business is not about business, but about people—how they are formed, what excellences they bring, what blindspots they have, and what their potential is.
Business does have a critical role to play in what I believe is an unfolding people revolution, but these particular myths won’t take us into its next transformation. What businesses can do is focus their efforts on the people they have and on their own work. Rather than forcing businesses to invent original myths or create wholly unique purposes for themselves, we suggest that a better approach is connecting businesses to the core purposes that human beings have been pursuing throughout history. Our research at HumanWealth Partners has shown that these purposes are grounded in humanity’s collective experience, and consistent across time and diverse cultures. Business can align its work, and the day-to-day activities of its employees, with these core purposes, thus providing work that is intrinsically, and authentically, meaningful and purpose-driven.
In the end, the new narrative, the new myth we seek, both in business and society, is one that will accurately describe who we are in all our complexity, without simplifying us, or the work we do, into an abstraction. Until that narrative is fully articulated, beware of those myths that reduce businesses, and the people that comprise them, into something that doesn’t quite reflect reality.