The Fundamental Question

After three decades of observing, teaching, and participating in business and business leadership, I have come to the conclusion that something tremendously important has been missing all along. It is the question of why business and business leadership exist at all.

In truth, the buck stops with business leaders, such as corporate leaders and corporate investors. They are the ones who have to balance the interests of governments, the public, customers, other investors, and other stakeholders in business. If business is chiefly responsible for our current mess, then it makes sense that business should be chiefly responsible for fixing it.

When business leaders see business as disconnected from the world and pursue a purpose that is limited to themselves and their company, they are following a closed model of capitalism. They differentiate their company and themselves from others by asking, How can I do better than others within my closed system? How can I get a bigger share of a limited pie than others?

It is no wonder that the popular approaches are failing us because they do not focus on restoring the context so that business can operate well. We need a new purpose that puts the restoration of nature, our humanity, and institutional credibility at its core.

Business has tried to fix the symptoms without going to the root of the problem. It has done the minimum and given us corporate social responsibility initiatives that are peripheral to a company. Instead, what we need is a more inclusive approach that asks leaders to make the setting in which they and their companies operate central to their decision making.

In such an inclusive approach, while leaders recognise the importance of profits and growth, they don’t see them as the primary goals. Instead, they see them as the outcomes of larger goals that preserve and renew the foundations of business.

Amid the pressures of everyday activities and the business demands of the short term, establishing the priority and resources to take care of the contextual foundations is hard unless there is a strong motivation to do so. For all these reasons, business leaders need to first get inspired before they are willing to act. But what’s the key to inspiration’s door?