My dear Sarah,

You have often felt awkward about my deep involvement in business as a management consultant. We are alike in so many ways—we love literature and teaching, we love big ideas, and we are passionate humanists. Both of us are reformers who don't take the party line. But you are a passionate purist who has no heart for the world of business, and who in fact thinks, like many of your generation that "business sucks" whilst I appear to have sold my soul to it.

We think alike in so many ways, but I can hear you asking me, "What are you doing in the dark world of business, Dad?"

This is my attempt to answer your questions.

Yes ... business has sold its soul

First of all I want to admit that you distrust business with good reason. Big businesses have behaved unethically over a long time and the recent scandals of top firms like Enron and Andersons appear to prove the point that the profit motive fundamentally corrupts human institutions. To make matters worse, most companies are pretty bleak places to live and work in. Management is autocratic and control oriented and structure is hierarchical. People are viewed as "resources" which is one of the most distasteful namings of human beings that you are ever going to come across. Businesses make matters worse still by demanding so much of the time and energy of their "resources."

People give up lives and families for these caves of commerce. Thus I concede that you have every reason for your distrust of business. They have earned it. But the problem runs deeper than just ethics—it isn't just about whether or not people stick to their nine to five working hours. If we are to renovate modern business we cannot just adjust it around the edges: we need to explore some deeper principles that can help us understand and then reframe the very nature of business as a social institution.

How did business get to this place?

We can get a good sense of how the business world got to this point by looking at the history of business schools—they house the prevailing theories of what business is all about.[1] Bear with me while I spell out some of the history.

Joseph Wharton began the first great school (Wharton at University of Pennsylvania) in 1881 to "aid in producing a class of men likely to become pillars of state whether in private or public life." In other words he was envisaging a "liberal education"[2] not just a pragmatic one. He wanted students to have a broad understanding of life and to be assisted in becoming great leaders, not merely people who were successful at trade. Wharton thus proposed to use a humanities faculty, trained in the liberal arts, to teach business subjects. A noble endeavour it seemed, yet it failed miserably because the humanities professors resented this task since they did not believe true knowledge was practical. In 1883 they abandoned this approach. Business lost its dialogue with the humanities, and with it, its higher calling as a moral or liberal institution. It was now wide open to be defined as a pragmatic and purely economic enterprise with no social obligation or agenda. The natural reflection imposed by the humanities was lost, and instead business found itself dominated by the pragmatics of activism. Business became defined through the lens of economics and finance.

If it lost its soul and its ethos in those early years, it lost its mind in the 1950s. Business schools lacked legitimacy after they followed their pathway of pragmatism, so two reports in the 1950s, the Carnegie Report and the Ford Report, recommended that the business schools lift their game intellectually and adopt the rigour of becoming a "social science." That meant two things: adopt the scientific method as the way of thinking about management; and conceptualise the organisation as a mechanical entity, which could be studied and manipulated like any other object of scientific inquiry.

This was a sinister move. It imported a scientific worldview not just a method. Humans became mere "resources" who need "managing." The goal of management became control and certainty. The organisation became a machine that could be studied and manoeuvred just like a truck. Knowledge became chained to the rationalist paradigm, fed by data and statistics. In this way, the modern organisation became a kind of Frankenstein. Organisations are not naturally occurring phenomena. We make them. And as we make them, they mirror our own beliefs. In this case, we made a monster.

The story of Wharton's business school is telling because it does not let us put all the blame on the merchants who have traded down the image of business, and with it, organisations and leadership. The humanities scholars too had their chance to have an influence, to adapt their thinking to these new business schools, but they despised the very idea and so gave up. What let them down was that they had swallowed an idea that has been around since the Greeks—literally. Plato thought that the world of ideas was better, more truthful, more noble, than the messiness of physical life and trade, which he called "shadows." This idea has had a big influence on the Western world. The humanities scholars, implicitly falling into Platonism, split the world between what they saw as the pure and the lesser, without seeing that they could bend down from their ivory towers to help dignify the world of trade and business. 3

Recovering the dignity of work

To recover that dignity, I often return to the ancient Judeo-Christian story about the beginning of the world, found in the book of Genesis. It helps me explore the meaning of work, and from that, the nature of organisations.

The second sentence of Genesis is one of the most evocative accounts of what it is to create something. It says, "The earth was without form and empty, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep. Then the spirit hovered over the waters ..." Primordial matter was "empty" and "dark," a seething, chaotic and unproductive soup captured in the famous Hebrew phrase "tohu wabou." We see in this story, three trajectories of transformation that are part of creativity—formless becomes formed (aesthetic); emptiness becomes productive (function); and darkness becomes light (knowledge).

The story then goes that humans were placed in creation with a special mandate to continue the dynamic creation. This seems to be an accurate reflection of what we humans are like when we are at our best. We are shapers, illuminators and fillers. And our ability to shape and create is, at its finest, an expression of our own identity and values. We make things in order to express ourselves. In fact we even 'make' ourselves as we shape the social creatures that we become. This conception of humanity's creativity and influence, ignited the Italian Renaissance. The essay that lit the fire was Pico's[3] extraordinary "On the Dignity of Man" in which he says:

thou ...art the moulder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer.

When humans design something, we are moving from merely being observers of a reality to creators of a reality. We are moving from studying effects to causing effects. Aristotle called this "agency." Another word for it would be "authors"—humans become authors of what takes place in the world, not just observers.

Rewrite the nature of the relationship between the organisation and the individual

This definition of human work and creativity allows us to reframe the nature of the relationship between the individual and the organisation. The organisation that understands the real power and nature of what we do, must enable people to become designers or authors.[4] It needs to tap into people's natural creativity and agency to solve its problems and to transform its processes, products and even its cultures. But this isn't how organisations have to be.

This shifts the function of the organisation away from control and towards "author-ising." In the classical world, this exercise of influence was called "authority." Authority then did not mean what it means now. Today authority means power. In the ancient world it meant a zone of influence.

Authors need "author-ity"

One of the places where we see this authorising take place is in the city-states of classical Europe. The mediaeval princes would create a city. This city captured their ideals and their values, and it housed these aspects of their character in its designs of streets, marketplaces, piazzas and public buildings. You can see this vision preserved in modern day Siena, which is possibly the most beautiful mediaeval city in the world. In 1347, the leaders of Siena commissioned a great artist, Lorenzetti, to depict their vision of good government. He painted a famous mural around the walls of their great parliamentary chamber which portrayed their vision of an ethical community on the front wall, and the effects of good government down the adjoining wall. He also painted a third wall portraying the effects of bad government. The front wall was an "allegory"—fictional creatures depicting their core values such as the separation of powers, and the role of the judiciary versus the executive arms of government. But the facing wall described their ideal of the real city—full of commerce, learning and celebration. The city was their zone for humans to flourish.

For centuries afterwards people could "read" the story of their city and their collective life every time they walked the streets and looked at this mural. The aim of the government was to create a zone within which citizens could exercise their creative agency. This zone combined boundaries and constraints, with resources and opportunities. In other words the Sienese leaders were saying that no individual can exercise their agency autonomously—we all require a social context to make our individual agency meaningful and productive. This is the job of leaders and the job of "good government."

Just as surely as the cities were made by their mediaeval princes, a social unit is made by people. A modern organisation doesn't just exist to achieve one single goal.

So, all this is to say, the business world has the potential to be more than the cheap imitations you and I so often see around us. We can articulate a very different kind of relationship between the organisation and the individual, than the industrial model of a machine utilising people as resources, with the only goal of making shareholders as wealthy as possible. Instead we can see there is a symbiotic relationship between the organisation and the individual, where the shared goal is to harness human creativity and help the world to thrive, not just turn a profit.

A story to make this real

All of this might sound pretty philosophical. You are probably thinking "all of this is good in theory, but ... " So let me rescue it with a story. This story comes from one of my consulting assignments quite a few years ago, but it illustrates how we can try to help organisations redesign themselves to make people authors, not just economic units.

This client was a large industrial rolling mill that processes aluminium. Workers came to work, but did not bring their brains with them. The work was dangerous since it involved large loads and high energy levels  forklift trucks, huge rolling mills, slitting machines and furnaces. The company had a series of procedures that were called "Safe Operating Procedures" which were supposedly to ensure that no-one hurt themselves. In practice, their real goal was more as a legal defence in case anyone did get hurt.

The social system that his company had designed had dumbed down the workers and robbed them of discretion. The CEO had a vision for a better kind of company. He reasoned that the workers were smart people who exercised initiative elsewhere but not at work. Together he and I conceived a bold plan to literally make their people "authors." We decided to rewrite all the company "Safe Operating Procedures" but rather than the company writing them, each work team would write their own after a discussion led by a facilitator. The CEO went even further to emphasise the authorship of the teams, and their need to collaborate. He declared that the team leaders themselves would sign off the document not the company engineers, and that a procedure could only be authorised if it was agreed unanimously. Any individual could veto the ideas, so each member of the group had to take their responsibility seriously.

On the first day that the first team tried the process, the CEO attended all morning. Now most of the workers had barely ever seen this man who was five levels of hierarchy above them in the stratosphere of senior management. But he just sat and listened for four hours while the workers plunged into an eager reflection of what was the best way to do their particular job. Later that evening, the conversation by the team was one of astonishment. Not only had they been given an unprecedented responsibility, but they were struck by the fact their CEO had actually listened to them for four hours without saying a word. He had literally turned them into authors by subordinating himself to being their audience.

The project gathered pace over several years and revolutionised the culture of this very large organisation. The goal or end of the process remained the company's—this company had a business model and mission to make aluminium, and that was not open to debate. But within that broad goal it also had social goals and values about valuing life and intellect. This is where the company's goal met the individuals' goals. The company declared a purpose that actually fitted with the human beings who were a part of it.

So Sarah, I guess we both agree that there are some big problems with the way a lot of people do business. I love that you and your generation can see all the places it has sold out and has compromised on the good things of life, just for the sake of a quick dollar. But at the same time, I guess I don't want to give up on it like the humanities scholars did, back when the first business schools were set up. Business will only be as good as we are—only as hopeful as we are about it and only as ethical as the people who "author" where business culture heads from this point on. Like those princes, who painted on the walls of their cities, a picture for what the world could be like, I hope your generation can hold onto a vision for society that is actually worth dreaming about.

And in the meantime, let's keep talking. Keep reminding me to care about people, to keep perspective in the midst of a world that too often sells its soul for the mighty dollar.

With love,

Dad.

Tony is the founder and CEO of 2nd Road, a training and consulting firm based in Sydney. Tony has over 20 years of broad experience in transforming corporate cultures to become more creative and more open in their thinking and communication. He holds an honours degree in English Literature as well as postgraduate qualifications including a Doctorate for "Pursuing the Art of Strategic Conversations." He is heavily involved in reforming management education both in Australia and North America.

ENDNOTES

[1] For this critique of management education, I rely heavily on the paper by R.E. Freeman and D. Newkirk, "Business as a human enterprise: Implications for Education," Paper presented at the Witherspoon Institute Conference Rethinking Business Management, (2007) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1175312, (accessed 5 July 2009).
[2] I would prefer the term 'civic education' because it moves away from the individual to society. It is the capstone for the "moral" and "liberal" educations. My main inspiration so far for "civic leadership" is Cicero. This term adorns his life, his epic conflicts with the self serving Caesar, and his writings.
[3] G. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the dignity of man, 1486.
[4] From now on, I use the extended metaphor of authorship to explore an alternative view of organisations. This metaphor contrasts with both Weber's machine metaphor, and with the organic metaphor. It shifts the ground significantly from mechanistic and naturalistic to humanistic. The metaphor of authorship finds its richest source in Greek rhetoric, which formalised human agency into an art of collective decision making.

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