Pearls ...

A colleague on a mailing list forwarded this TED talk by Daniel H. Pink.

I'm going to try to say what I have to say about this in a single sentence... sort of as an experiment. After all, if you can't express your idea in a single sentence, can it really be a good idea?

Here goes ... Because business purpose must be achieved either by 1) grafting that purpose onto its constituents or 2) preparing "scaffolding" so that when a group of constituents with that purpose arises, a pre-adapted organization is ready to launch, only a subset of businesses and their domains can ever successfully apply this (autonomy, mastery, purpose) management technique.

Hm. OK. That doesn't read very well; but it's a legal sentence and says what I need it to say. I.e. Business consists largely of man-handling some natural resources (including cognitive skills) and squeezing them through a Play-Do device to produce a thing with an externally imposed purpose. Pink even implies this in his talk by pointing out that management is like a television. It's an invention. What he really means is that management is, like a business, a tool.

Businesses are means, not ends. The natural resources we abuse to construct these tools are, by contrast, ends in and of themselves. (And although you may balk at the idea that a rock or a piece of iron ore is somehow NOT merely a tool, available for unlimited use and abuse by us, you may want to re-think your position on environmental and ethical positions to be sure those constructs in your mind are consistent. ... I'm just sayin'.)

Now, I'll allow that some of the phenomena we call "businesses" do, indeed, arise naturally from the mechanisms of their constituents. Perhaps even most of them do so, though I find that unlikely because I think we'd see a much higher overall success rate for businesses, in general, if that were the case. But (at least) some (if not most) businesses are examples of a small clique of people grafting purpose onto a collection of natural resources.

I.e. There are at least some businesses (I'd argue most of them) whose job it is to turn people into tools, ends into means.... to bend others to their will.

Kant's universality test for ethical behavior asks: If this behavior were universal (everyone behaved that way), would the result be sustainable? (Yes, I'm paraphrasing shamelessly.)

It seems to me the question to pose is: What if every business was acquired and executed its purpose in this (intrinsic motivation) way? What would result? Would the result work? Would we have made the scientific and technical progress we've made so far? Sure, it's a no-brainer to admit that if some businesses operate this way, they'll work and the system in which they sit will sustain. (And they get to take the sanctimonious high road in comparison to their fellows.) But what if ALL of them did it or attempted to do it?

When I hear talks like this, I have what I think is the typical reaction... something like "Yeah! What he said!" But, in the end, my skeptical homunculus wrests the wheel back from the gullible one and puts me back on course. Although the two homunculi are equal brothers, co-CEOs if you will, only the skeptical one has a driver's license for this class of machine.