Plathon

What is the role of philosophy in business? A majority of executives, faced with the need to be competitive, would probably reject the question itself, with a "what do we care?" attitude. Indeed, a still widespread corporate mindset considers the "humanities" as a charming but useless hobby. The concern of contemplatives, so to speak. In business, one might say, we don't have the luxury of contemplation: we have to produce, to be efficient. In the reign of competition, speed and permanent renewal, there would therefore be little room for the abstract and inapplicable considerations of a few enlightened people who have really too much free time.


The opposition between the time to think and the need to act is an old one. The thinkers of antiquity, Greek to begin with, in the concept of skolè, then Romans with the opposition of otium (leisure) and negotium (occupation), opposed the field of business, generating hassles and devouring time, to the field of to study and contemplation. Fifteen centuries later, the opposition between action and inaction, decision and indecision, is renewed, so to say, in a passage from the Discourse on Method. Descartes offers the example of travellers lost in a forest, with no other resource to get out of it than to commit themselves to a direction and stick to it until the end, because "the actions of life suffer no delay". The ability to make a decision in the face of uncertainty and lack of time, and to lead their teams in the direction chosed, requires special form of courage, which is the foundation of the recognition and authority that a leader enjoys in business. A talent apparently very different from that of the philosopher: short time of action versus long time of study.


And yet! In a world where the quest for meaning at work is the subject of growing demands from all professional categories – millennials, senior managers, but also simple long-term employees – and where the public and regulators expect companies to have substantial programs in terms of corporate social responsibility and sustainability, has philosophy not become indispensable to companies?


Let's look at an example. The globalized economy in which companies have been operating for several decades is characterized by a competition with no limit, order, or unity. A globalized workforce, homogenized by effective know-how and techniques to be more and more competitive, devotes itself to the cult of performance at all costs.


In order to integrate into this need for competitiveness, companies have developed more and more measurement tools to constantly improve their productivity. But this technocratic vision of management is laden with faults that are easy to identify. The professionalization of skills in a context of exacerbated competitiveness means that we seek to ensure their effectiveness by formatting humans into reproducible methods, practices and processes. In the world of global companies, both "technical skills" and "soft skills" are measured, i.e. even what is eminently qualitative gets quantified: the capacity for empathy, listening, motivation, conviction, etc. become instruments for measuring and rating performance. By giving such technicality a dominant place, we instrumentalize humans, we condemn them to be sacrificed to the progress of technological innovation. And, running behind a technical progress that would always be ahead of them, to constantly and relentlessly adapt to the new processes of increased productivity. With dramatic consequences on mental health: burnout, brown out, depression, etc. the number of which has been steadily increasing in recent years.


A philosophical perspective on competence can be constructive. In short, we need to stop conceiving people skills as objectives but rather look at them as beginnings. We need to stop treating skills as if they were tools, as if they were instruments whose power and limits could be indefinitely calculated. A skill is much more than a potential instrument, it is an inspired capacity for action. To escape the pitfalls and consequences of an excessive culture of instrumental efficiency, we have to discover a culture of fecundity, which finds its legitimacy, even beyond collaboration, in the co-action of the participants. In other words, to establish a corporate culture that makes the creative transformation of oneself the condition of production – and not the other way around!


Does this mean abandoning performance objectives and the need for competitiveness? Of course not. In the competitive environment of companies, this would be economically illusory and even destructive. But it's about leading people in a different way, with another motivation, another perspective. Thus, the specific mission of the business leader is to increase the potential of an organization. In this way, it inspires and transmits to each of the co-leaders a real capacity to act. Above all, the leader must be capable, i.e. make the dispositions bear fruit by providing them with opportunities for development and deployment. A leadership that provokes capability does not encourage or promote emulation, but rather the autonomy of initiatives integrated into the harmony of wills, and it restores in each person a collective power of action.


Without giving a ready-made "recipe", philosophy offers a source of inspiration, vision and legitimacy to meet the major challenges that await companies: giving meaning to work, thinking about the place of artificial intelligence in the company, or establishing social and environmental responsibility programs. In other words: far from being the business of somewhat idle dreamers, the practice of philosophy is indispensable, even essential, to the action of the enterprise. It is essential for structuring the organization's values, rethinking its leadership practices, and giving meaning and legitimacy to its action in and on the world.

Romain Leroy-Castillo