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Enterprise Strength Philosophy
Does corporate American need to shift its priorities?
Executive Summary
Corporate America treasures its intellectual assets. Recruiters scour colleges for the best and the brightest. Innovation and invention is rewarded. Competitive business must adapt and create new sources of value in order to survive. It is therefore strange that many of the most powerful critical thinking tools common to philosophy are missing from the corporate milieu in any systematic way. In this essay I discuss why it is timely to adopt a business-strength philosophy, how conceptual tools can benefit the bottomline and how more companies deploy top-down thinking strategies for a competitive advantage.
Although just about every industry today has been shaped by previous philosophical dialogue, from the computer to many common marketing assumptions,1 philosophy as an intellectual asset is off the corporate radar. The mere mention of philosophy in a corporate setting can cause eyes to glaze over and, when people are busy, even inspire impatience. Philosophy conjures up a lot of irrelevant, abstract conversations among intellectual snobs with nothing better to do.
It is my belief that corporate America has left vast quantities of conceptual capital2 untapped and that contemporary philosophy provides relevant strategies for thinking that can benefit organizations. Philosophy makes criteria, definitions, and progress through a thought to its implications as plain as possible.
The big cultural schism between philosophy and business has its roots academia. Capitalism, while it is the system best known to get all the boats rowing in the same direction, was not yet part of the worldview that invented the university.
Universities are kind of mediaeval, built around a rigid notion of theory on the one hand and practice on the other. Philosophy and business are often split along these lines with little open exchange between the schools. Add to this the stereotype of capitalism as soulless, a perennial favorite of popular culture, and we have this cynical divide.3 The bottomline is we all have shared concerns and commitments and one of them is business.
Philosophy is packaged in any number of ways, and new schools of thought pop up faster than Universities can type up syllabi. Why shouldn’t businesses explicitly fashion its relevant curriculum? I envision a corrective to this situation, a kind of “enterprise philosophy.” I’m not talking about bringing Socratic dialogues to the workplace, though in special applications it could work. I’m talking about conceptual tools culled from relevant philosophical publications and packaged for multiple business problems.
There is already literature on the business applications of fuzzy logic, relevance logic, modal logic, etc. This is a constructive trend but it’s not exactly what I’m suggesting here. This material is frequently couched in purely mathematical terms that are required within the community of logicians, but create an unnecessary learning curve to grasp a specific, potentially helpful thesis across an organization. I am interested in the systematic application of targeted conceptual tools. Think of this as a kind of upgrade to the corporate OS, designed to shake up old habits of thought that are inefficient and keep people thinking in the box.
Today, the need for an enterprise philosophy is clear enough. The amount of information that decision-makers have to absorb and the pace at which data is collected is rising at historically unprecedented levels. These place an intellectual burden on organizations to process information efficiently. Fields of knowledge continue to specialize and demand finer levels of expertise. High-level decisions have increasing down-stream ramifications.
To help makes sense of the surplus of raw data is business intelligence (BI). It’s a booming business, but even BI giants like SAS will tell you that the bottleneck is mindset. BI vendors encourage companies to push-out the analytic-mindset of the CIO across the enterprise. Emerging is the “intelligent enterprise”4, better able to innovate and adapt in a rapidly changing world.
Another trend facing organizations is the burgeoning secondary market of ways to process information under these historically novel conditions. Trend-spotting, answer providers, guru of the month clubs, all provide guidance gleaned from medieval samurai, untamed horses, basketball teams, movable cheese, and other formulaic devices. Then there are the expert marketers who generally crank the information tread-mill faster. It would seem that if any field can benefit from the conceptual analysis of bullshit5 and systematic methods for demonstrating truths, its business.
Evaluating all of these claims requires critical thinking at the categorical level. Certain common philosophical tools can help process information more efficiently, flag poor quality analysis, codify and improve decision-making, and prioritize & align tactics with strategy. They can reveal useful categories on which to model responsible creative thinking. Once a conceptual tool is firmly grasped, many useless conversations and bad ideas are spotted and pre-empted.
An enterprise philosophy is not the answer, but a method of questioning that reveals the answer more efficiently. It requires mental exercise beyond a PowerPoint presentation. One could argue that decision-makers already employ some philosophical rigor informed by their experience. The same can be said for ethical matters. In either case it is hit-or-miss or not a shared asset. The big lever is raising the intellectual tide of an organization and this is proving to be a competitive advantage for the intelligent enterprise. Here are a few ways conceptual tools can be applied to business processes and how the intelligent enterprise deploys thinking strategies.
The job of a communications strategist is strategic alignment. He begins at the category level and works through its ramifications to ensure optimal downstream benefit. Many big ideas commonly split into facile dichotomies. These dichotomies dominate conversation, attention, and time.
Let’s look at common BI talk. While one BI vendor claims that the days of doing business on gut instinct are over, we get a simultaneous message from the Wall Street Journal, which devoted an entire article to the profitable gut instincts of Warren Buffet.6 The article describes how Buffet built an investment empire on his instincts with the implication that, if you can be more like Buffet, maybe you don’t need analytics. Today there is an industry wide conversation that turns on a difference that works against the goals of marketing.
This back and forth encouraged a thoughtful response from Irving "Bubba" Tyler, former CIO of Quaker Chemical: “Gut-decisions work very well when the person making them has a long history of experience and they study data. So it is not the way you make a decision, it is on what basis you are making a decision. So if I make a decision and I don’t pull out a piece of paper to go back and look at those 25 years doesn’t mean that I am not using business intelligence. It looks like gut decision but I have been in the business for 25 years. It’s data, information, business intelligence.”
The problem is not in either of the perspectives, gut instincts or analytical thinking, but that the issue has been framed in unproductive ways. A discussion of guts and brains, while it may be familiar invites a cultural aporia. BI vendors want a discussion of differences that makes a difference. The strength of analytic tools is that they enable organizations to get the facts right more often and better understand how they got it right than without them. With a little practice this type of analysis can be applied to any high-level messaging in order to ensure it is strategically aligned.
Conceptual analysis can also help decision-makers get beyond in-the-box thinking and approach problems more creatively. Sales is frequently categorized by slotting it into a slightly misleading dualism. Strategy and tactics are of course not synonymous, and the nuances of either are often tainted by another distinction, one between theory and practice.
One helpful philosophic exercise is to “deconstruct” a distinction like that, i.e., look for the ways the one term “bleeds” into the other, and undermines the purity of the distinction. Where we would normally assume that sales is downstream from strategy, and that strategy is articulated by marketing and applied by the sales team, we would reverse this thinking to see what insights this exercise makes available. It is not hard to imagine how such rigid conceptions create inflexible cultures and limit the possibilities between marketing and sales.
Mike Barlow, respected technology writer, told me, “Sales people are an active part of the intellectual network and learning process. They are as hungry for thought leadership as any decision-maker.” The fact is that no theory is ever divorced from the situation. There are only more or less applicable theories. When you shatter a particular category or habit of thought new possibilities emerge.
The art of out-of-the-box thinking is just this. But out-of-the-box thinking is in most cases a cliché that merely leads to a lateral glance at the competition. At best you get something already done and the paradigm of the box continues. Imagine how this works against leadership-positioning and innovation when conceptual catch-up is the habit of thought across the enterprise. When you know the thinking that got you in the box you can more likely think out of it.
So why isn’t there a CSO position, a Chief Strategic Officer to lead a critical thinking culture? In the last 10 years we have seen ethics emerge as a priority for the business that thinks about its actions. Philosophy may become a priority for the business that thinks about its thinking. As the global economy levels the playing field, I believe the optimization of intellectual capital will decide who leads and who follows. How the global distribution of intellectual wealth tips is uncertain.
But I keep thinking of Norbert Weiner's impact on India. How one analytic philosopher opened a few technical schools with the cooperation from their government and helped make India a world competitor simply by making use of the available intellectual capital. Both India and China have philosophical traditions of metaphysical long-term thinking.
1 Berlinski, [2000] Advent of the Algorithm NY: Harcourt.
2 Conceptual capital would be defined as categories and thought tools commonly in use in universities that help sort, clarify, develop criteria, streamline and brainstorm.
3 Clive Crook, [The Atlantic : Volume 297 : Number 2] Capitalism: The Movie
4 Jim Davis, Gloria J. Miller, Allan Russell [2006] Information Revolution NJ: Wiley & Sons
5 Frankfurt, [2005} On Bullshit Princeton University Press
Convergence
