Pursuit of profit for profit’s sake has left humanity in terrible shape

The pursuit of happiness is one of the tenets of the American Declaration of Independence – what it really means is the right to find meaning in life. Meaning or purpose are the most important principles to achieving success and reward.

The iconic Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl said it best in his seminal Man’s Search for Meaning: “…for success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

We could just as easily add the pursuit of profit. If anything has taught us anything in the dying decades of the previous century and the ever-evolving two decades of the new, the pursuit of profit for profit’s sake has left humanity in the worst shape it has ever known since the dinosaurs.

Climate change, geopolitical tension, societal subjugation, the weaponisation of expression, the squandering of trust and the exponential growth of cynicism can all be laid at the door of feral capitalism – even State Capture here at home.

If we have purpose, we could fix that. Not merely in a Pollyanna way that would necessarily have stopped us from going down the rabbit hole of greed in the first place, but one that would have created a conscience within us that would have checked us and helped to just get back on track.

I like to think of purpose being like a GPS, while strategy is more like a map printed on paper. When we come to something that isn’t on the map, it might put us off our stride entirely, render the map entirely useless and end our quest then and there.

A GPS on the other hand, merely recalibrates our journey and finds a new route past the detour to the destination we were wanting to get to when we set out.

Having a purpose helps us in many other ways. For a start, when there’s a problem, we can go beyond the symptoms to find the root of the pain, if we have a purpose, rather than just taking two paracetamol and lying down in the hope that the moment will pass.

In business terms having a purpose to why we do what we do means that looking at business margins happens in far more profound ways than forever looking to cut costs – and staff and/or their benefits.

The purpose that gets us up in the morning, that provides the North Star to which we always tack, allows us to reframe the issues that we are facing with authenticity, integrity and proper leadership.

It is also about being able to authentically interrogate the value of what we produce and sell, whether it is a service or an actual thing and being able to sell them at a point where our price actually matches the perception of their actual value in the market – otherwise we are defrauding our customers.

Business, especially now, is about learning and unlearning, it’s about communicating, it’s about showing empathy and, yes, it’s about changing course if the original strategy is not working. We can only do that by having a purpose that guides all of this and allows others to contribute.

Businesses need to make profits, but they must never fall into the trap of profiteering. At the same time, no business can afford to be commercially incontinent – at least not for very long.

And this is the other great thing about purpose – it allows business leaders the space to grow and to develop because what we are doing is bigger than us. Purpose is something that both guides us and creates a continuum for us to be challenged.

It is a standing operating procedure on flight decks of airlines for the captain to be challenged on his or her decisions, because there are millions of micro decisions being made every minute with the potential to become catastrophic if left unchecked.

Likewise, an unchecked leader who is espousing their version of the company’s (or the nation’s) purpose is neither the CEO nor the president, but at best a cult leader and at worst a dictator.

There is an inherent paradox here too, because while leaders have to be challenged, they also have the belief in their own abilities within the overarching purpose of the company to be able to lead, even if it means taking unpopular decisions for the benefit of everyone in the organisation, not just the chosen few or their favourites.

As the great Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard reminds us: “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self... and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of one’s self.”

It is a terrifying balancing act, made manageable only because of the overriding purpose of why we do what we do. As Frankl notes, paraphrasing Nietzsche, when we know the why, we can cope with the how. 

All purpose must be rooted in context. Each of our contexts is different from one another because of the products we sell or even the societies and markets in which we work. Western solutions (and values) will not necessarily apply in an African context – and nor should they.

Purpose can never be an abstract concept either, because when it is allowed to become that it becomes a dogma: unchecked, unmoored from reality and practicality – and almost impossible to challenge peacefully.

We know what dogma costs: we are living through flashpoints of intolerance, hatred and untrammelled greed every single day.

If we all had purpose, it wouldn’t be like this, we would have recalibrated and got back on our journeys to create a better world – together. DM