Feature

Creative Business

By Dylan Scudder

Looking at business as more than just an activity through which to earn a living, many today are asking how we can leverage business to improve our quality of life. More and more people on both sides of the equator have begun exploring ways to do so by integrating social or environmental issues into their businesses. What many are discovering, however, is that pursuing anything other than profit often conflicts with corporate culture. What they are finding out is that corporations, shielded by limited liability, are not legally designed to put the public good before the shareholders' bottom line. Would making these competing interests more compatible perhaps improve our quality of life?

Throughout most of human history people had very few choices about the type of work they did. They most often took over where their parents left off, becoming farmers, herders or craftsmen of some kind. That started changing in the 1500s in Europe, as young people began leaving the farms for the cities. People were now able to choose their work, a tendency that has escalated ever since.

Broadly speaking, we might say that today there are three ways to approach one's work: as a job, which offers money; as a career, which may offer money or social status; or as a vocation or calling in which one pursues a deeper sense of fulfillment by linking one's work to a greater purpose such as reducing global poverty or global warming. Can people raise their quality of life by approaching their current job or career as a calling, taking on the challenge of overcoming the contradictions inherent in the corporate model?


Creative Response

According to the renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee, it is a civilization's ability to generate creative responses to challenges that threaten its survival that enables it to rise and flourish. One such example was a regional shift in rainfall patterns in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With less rain, the traditional lifestyle of hunters and gatherers in this region could no longer be supported. Those unable to adapt perished. Others migrated and remained hunters and gatherers. A few, the "creative minority," stayed and developed a means of irrigating the Nile, allowing for agricultural trade and the birth of the Egyptian civilization.

[Mathew Spolin]

Today, the United Nations Environment Programme reports that an area of forest the size of a football field is currently being destroyed every second while the temperature of the planet steadily rises. Awareness of this has prompted many companies and individuals to work toward having "zero footprint," meaning to devise ways of conducting their business that do not harm the environment or people.

Much of this creativity is reflected in the ability to hear the voices of so-called silent stakeholders such as future generations or the environment, looking upstream to see where one's products are sourced, and downstream to see what kind of long-term impact they are likely to have on society. Those successful at launching initiatives based on such insights might very well be considered part of today's creative minority.


Earlier Perspectives

The ethical contradictions between profit-making and the public good have been scrutinized differently within specific cultural and religious contexts. The Islamic tradition for example, as many other traditions, disallows interest. The accumulation of idle wealth is also penalized through the giving of part of one's wealth (zakah) and by encouraging reinvestment, especially in order to increase employment.

In the East, Confucius warned that profit-oriented behavior would disrupt social harmony, whereas the Buddhist concept of right livelihood simply recommended engaging in work that does no harm to others. It is, however, from the Western European tradition that the predominant model of today's corporate world emerged.

Socratic philosophers Plato and Aristotle developed an analytical framework for the still ongoing ethical debate about how to live a life of virtue. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing heavily on Aristotle, began to write about the possibility of achieving happiness before one's death. Though the discourse included profits, ethics and happiness, how to make these mutually reinforcing had not become a topic of discussion.

During the Renaissance, scholarship came to be seen as an alternative source of moral inspiration to that of the Church. The 18th-century Enlightenment then brought with it Adam Smith, who explored in his famous Wealth of Nations how a commercial society can prosper, even though individuals tend to pursue their own selfish interests. The battle cry of the day was achieving "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."


Material Constraints

If the only purpose of our work is to earn money or social status, then life becomes something that passes us by while we toil away at the office. It goes without saying that people living in poverty are less miserable when their earnings increase--but the extent to which wealth affects happiness is surprisingly small. Research shows that, soon after one's basic needs are met, one reaches a plateau followed by a progressive decrease in satisfaction despite increased consumption. People get stuck on what psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell coined a "hedonic treadmill": their expectations rise with their income, and the satisfaction they long for remains forever just beyond their grasp.

As we make incremental progress toward reshaping our everyday business into our own personal calling, there is no shortage of causes to choose from, and they are often interrelated. Currently, for example, over half the world is forced to subsist on less than two dollars a day. Depriving people of their basic human needs increases the likelihood of conflict, which can escalate into wide-scale violence. In spite of this, while a small elite is thriving in today's marketplace, current systems of international trade are structured to exclude poorer countries from access to their markets.


Breaking Through

Regardless of where they are in the world, people today engage in business knowing or soon learning that the quality of life cannot be improved by pursuing profit for the sake of profit alone. Gaining the deeper sense of fulfillment that comes from developing one's full potential is a lifelong endeavor. Business can support that objective if coupled with creativity that integrates the public good into financially sustainable business activities. For some, crafting one's work into a calling may begin by trying to "do no harm" or by simply using both sides of a sheet of paper. For others it may mean setting up a partnership with a civil society organization or even launching a new social enterprise.

Like the creative minority from millennia before, we too are faced with life-threatening challenges such as resource-related violence, environmental degradation and climate change. A vanguard of pioneers from all walks of life is stepping forward, people with a vast supply of business skills who are developing their own creative means of overcoming the contradiction between shareholders' interests and those of the broader public. Our efforts to come up with our own creative responses may set in motion our own personal "Renaissance," summoning forth the da Vinci or Galileo dormant within each of us. Given the hours we spend at work and the far-reaching impact our consumer decisions have on people around the world, leveraging business to achieve "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" might indeed prove a promising means of improving the quality of life, both for ourselves and for society at large.

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