What is the point of a business?

Is it to earn a profit? To make and keep a customer? To maximize returns to shareholders?
To provide meaning and purpose for employees? To contribute to society? To have some fun with your friends? To seek personal fulfillment? To feed your family?

The truth is there isn’t really a right or wrong answer. Some people have no desire to scale up. Others don’t see any point in an enterprise that doesn’t have the potential to make them a billionaire. One of the greatest things about running your own business is that you get to choose your own philosophy — and philosophy is the key word.

Last week some people took offense when I suggested that business is not a science. But if science is concerned with the domain of facts, evidence and objectivity, and the humanities are concerned with subjectivity, opinion, and values, then any commercial activity is more firmly rooted in the latter than the former.

Whatever science people like to think exists in business — the data gathering, analyzing, structured experimentation, and formulating of principles — is relatively insignificant compared to how much the philosophical realm dominates our decision-making, the activities we undertake, and the reasons we undertake them. 

Perhaps it’s time we shifted our mental model appropriately and stopped deluding ourselves that detached objectivity is the holy-grail of business decision-making, and instead embraced a more expansive, not to mention balanced view of the world. 

Maybe if we did we’d actually create more fulfilling and meaningful places to work, while setting our organizations up for greater success in the long term.

See this post on LinkedIn