Do You Have a Philosophy of Business?
When I ask the entrepreneurs and companies that I work with if they have a Philosophy of Business, I usually get blank stares.
For the most part, people in the business world are not engaging in this conversation - they are not taking the time to slow down and contemplate what their philosophy is. Are you in the same position - working and operating without a philosophy that you have created for yourself?
Even if you do have a philosophy of business, it is probably informed from old and irrelevant ways of thinking that are no longer adequate for the fast-paced and volatile times we are now living and working in.
In The Autonomy Course, we are engaged in creating, distinguishing, and building a new Philosophy of Business.
What is a Philosophy of Business?
Very simply, we can say that the intention of any philosophy should be to answer the following two questions:
What is of real value and importance, and what isn’t? What should I care about?
How do I fulfill my most important financial, business, career, and life intentions while at the same time being true to what I most care about?
Many of us have this in life, but what about for business?
To have power, peace of mind, confidence, and success in business, (and ultimately in life) especially during periods of uncertainty and rapid change (like now!) requires that we examine and create from new knowledge and new principles. From there, we can access new interpretations, perspectives, and insights about the responses to the two questions noted above as they relate to business and career. This will empower us to invent a new philosophy that is current and relevant to the times.
Start Here
First, to ensure that you are examining and creating from NEW knowledge and NEW principles, ask yourself the following questions:
Are you challenging yourself to engage in uncommon thinking? What would you need in order to do so?
Are you expanding your capacity to engage in high-level thinking?
Are you rigorously engaging in the areas where you have kept yourself uninformed or ignorant? What intellectual or spiritual areas have you avoided or discarded?
Most of us need structures and community support in order to expand our capacity and capability to engage in the above areas. Once you have created a reliable access to develop yourself in all of these ways to think NEWLY, you can start to inquire into your philosophy of business.
A NEW Philosophy of Business
If you know that you do NOT have a philosophy of business, let alone a NEW philosophy of business that comes from something other than the already existing, default world of business that you inherited, you can ask and reflect on the following questions:
What is the value of grounding assessments and designing offers vs. the value of common sense, busyness, and hard work, and how can you know that?
How must you be in the marketplace?
What should I most care about, what should I do, and what outcomes do I need to produce to fulfill my financial, career, business, and life intentions?
The new knowledge businesspeople need to seek out and learn remains unclear because it does not yet exist. It needs to be continuously invented and it is never obvious, objective, commonsensical, nor immediately perceivable. It is philosophical knowledge, and taking it on is always costly (primarily costly to your energy and emotional engagement) and risky.
We propose that most of what passes for current day business philosophies are actually an amalgam of truisms, platitudes, strategies, inherited beliefs, and the like.
As a result, it doesn't occur like “I really need a new philosophy of business” because we believe that we already have one!
If you slow down and create some space to engage in these inquiries and start to develop your thinking so that you can create your philosophy of business from NEW realms of thinking, you will be well on your way to living true to your calling while working in alignment with your philosophy of business.