Let's Talk About Business

In the Oxford English Dictionary “A business is defined as an organization or enterprising entity engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities.” Stripped of culture and context, the key elements that create a distinct identity, a business then is an open system engaged in absorbing energy in the form of raw materials, ideas or talent and, like a sausage factory, produces at the other end a product that can be priced much higher than its costs.

To be able to survive a business then needs two distinct things: the ability to communicate unambiguously so that those who see its message understand what the business does and whether it is something they need. And, the ability to form working relationships with people it has never met before. For that the business needs to be able to create trust.

That’s it. It kinda makes this article very short and to the point. The simplicity of the ingredients however, just like in sausage making, masks the skill that goes in making the mix. How does a business form an identity which then describes it not just in its structure and function but also in the mind of each of its employees?

How does it then make each employee a fully integrated member of the business in a way that passes Bruce McTague’s litmus test of a business creating value and its employees creating meaning?

These are seemingly simple questions. Their answer however is wrapped in layers of complexity. That complexity arises out of the function of each unit that a business hires to power its operation, which is a clinically sterile way of saying that the behavior of each employee of a business is key to its success or failure.

Behavior, itself, is incredibly complex. What we see is only the tip of an iceberg that is built out of memories and experiences of our most distant childhood, liberally mixed with what we know, what we believe and what we value, filtered through what we perceive and expressed through what we experience as context.

If we built a robot to operate like that it would either go haywire or it would freeze, its brain incapable of carrying out the processing needed to establish the priority and importance of each moment. We are not robots but neither are we as good as should be. There are hidden complexities in our make up that make our every waking moment a potential minefield.

The reason we don’t explode (usually) is because our superpower is the ability to hide our complexity by normalizing our behavior to fit an acceptable, socially-derived standard. In a roomful of smart people, the dumbest of us begin to function at a much higher level than usual and in a roomful of idiots PhD holders soon begin to spout meaningless drivel.

This makes a business a construct that’s built out of the quality of the relationships of its people and their interaction with the environment the business creates. Understanding how we work, as individuals, has a direct impact on how we can work together on either side of the business interface. Whether we are colleagues interacting in a business environment or service/product providers or just customers, we are governed by the same dynamic behavior that reassesses each moment through the context of our particular need, our beliefs and our values.

The world has never been simple. In the past though maybe we couldn’t count on being alive long enough for the complexity of our mistakes to catch up with us. Or, we didn’t work at the speed and scale at which our technology enables us to work at, today. So, we face now the uniqueness of our situation because of the technological progress of our civilization.

It is up to us to step up and be the smarter versions of ourselves this situation demands.

## My latest book is Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully.