If you hold a leadership role in a business corporation – or any kind of human organization, frankly – you need to know something about how humans think and behave. Are they mostly selfish and out to take advantage of you, or are they naturally inclined towards mutually beneficial collaboration? How do you foster trust, rally people around common goals, and help them be the best that they can be?
You also need to know something about the environment – social, political, legal, economic – in which this business organization operates. How do businesses work and make money? What is, in fact, the purpose of the firm? To maximize profits or to support the flourishing of people and communities?
You need know a lot of things about a lot of topics – way more than any one person could ever know. But even if you are surrounded by people who are experts at the various things that will weigh on your decisions, times will come when the buck stops with you and it’s up to you to make the final call after carefull deliberation.
Information will often be incomplete. In fact, information will generally be incomplete and ambiguous. And it will seem to you that the higher the stakes are, the less adequate the information at hand is. You will also find that there is often a difference between the way things are and the way things could be, or ought to be. It will be up to you to decide, in that moment, between taking the cynical path or aiming for something higher, more noble.
As you struggle through your decisions, you will need something to hang on to: the knowledge you have patiently accumulated through theory, observation, discussion, and practice; your values; the views and beliefs that you have formed about people, about yourself, and about the world. You will also rely on the character you have painstakingly developed – or not – throughout your lifetime: the virtues you have – courage, benevolence, honesty, temperance, and wisdom – or wish you had.
I’ve heard people say “it’s just business” but there’s no such thing. That’s just something we tell ourselves when we don’t want to face up to reality. All decisions have a moral and ethical dimension. And as you ask yourself the hardest questions and make the most difficult decisions, you will change. In the words of Lorraine Smith Pangle, “To think these incoherences through to their twisting, subterranean, far-reaching ends is to cease to be the same person one was before one started.” (Smith Pangle, p. 131) Whether it will change you for the better cannot be said, but it definitely has that potential. Would you have it any other way? What a wasted opportunity that would be.
References
Smith Pangle, Lorraine. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 255 pages.
