Philosophy in Business

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Philosophy in Business

by Barbara Bertagni and Fernando Salvetti

Living within the organization requires sharing goals and values, confrontation between cultures and action strategy and reflections on our personal role and professional identity.Philosophical counseling is one of the most effective methods to bring out and explore the personal tacit assumptions which heavily condition the life of organizations, opening a space for confrontation and query on what is the basis of individual behavior and of organizational praxis.

Philosophy is neither a subject to be taught nor a discipline like many others. It is an approach to life and to situations, a “meta” level to be dealt with in order to view every day life through different categories.

Philosophizing implies exploring the space of questions, and listening to both ourselves and others. Making philosophy means questioning ourselves on well-known propositions, trying to observe what we do, what we are and what we say, from a different perspective.

Philosophical questions allow us to explore the tacit assumptions which guide our actions, opening spaces to reflect over them and to question them. Philosophical counseling, reflections on epistemology and theory of knowledge, cultural and organizational anthropology, dialogues on ethics and professional codes of conduct, sessions of practical philosophy in businesses and labor organizations are among the most effective actions in terms of soft strategies for organizational development, to explore new ways of doing things, producing and planning.

Businesses use philosophy to give a perspective to things, in order to try to understand what is happening within the company and in the outside context, or to share new strategies of thought and action, rather than redefining their identity in periods of heavy change or to intervene in the organizational wealth.

For some organizations, philosophy is a random intervention, for others a recurring engagement. In both cases it is always a way to invest in human potential and to work on knowledge management.

1. A case of philosophical counseling Given the delicate problem we are being faced with, for privacy reasons, we will re-name the client company “Zed.” Zed is a very dynamic multinational company which is growing quickly. The great expansion it has been subject to over the past years, and the opening of new plants in South East Asia and Eastern Europe, has generated a series of problems in terms of local microcultures and peaks of tension within the organization, as well as an effect on public opinion. An analysis of the work atmosphere conducted at the end of 2002 indicated uneasiness within the management due to the difficulties faced in accepting the accusations made to the business by the local press. This moved the attention of the managers to themes of corporate social responsibility.

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In 2003 the interest for working on corporate values arose. Until then, these values had only been partially codified in a corporate card and lived as being in contradiction with the results of the primary production processes, at both a personal and a social level. Specifically, many people within the business felt an increasing discomfort towards the social problems generated in some local contexts, where the company was present with its manufacture plants. In March 2003 we, that is Centro Studi Logos, were contacted with the objective to carry out an intervention in order to improve the atmosphere within the organization and favor the confrontation on the key values of the business.

We proposed an intervention of philosophical counseling focused on: -

Helping to identify and giving space to the exploration of the uneasiness.

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Providing keys of interpretation to understand the local systems of thought: on one side by reconstructing the local systems of belief, thought and values which characterize the social micro contexts where the business operates, and on the other, by investigating and distinguishing the main principles, in terms of values, of the company’s vision.

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Creating spaces for cultural mediation between the principle values of the business and the local cultural values of reference.

The group of managers met for three days of confrontation in a hotel and Spa in Switzerland, in the Engadina Mountains, and a month later, for two more days, in a hotel in the Marche region countryside, on the hills surrounding Urbino.

These were two very evocative locations in two contexts which favor a good contact with nature and which provide very comfortable arrangements.

Two full immersions were conducted using methodology of philosophical counseling, searching together for the strategies which can help identify the main axis of the problem examined.

Specifically, the groups of Zed had the goal of intertwining two levels of reason: -

On one hand, the level of external survival of the company with a declined mission, strategy, objectives, means and processes.

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On the other hand, the more profound propositions: the relation between the organization and its environment, the nature of human relations and responsibility and cultural homogeneity versus diversity.

Facing the problem in philosophical terms means maintaining the confrontation on crucial focuses such as that of power and submission, of global and local and of utilitarian and altruistic. The thought process was ignited by a particularly significant statement made by one of the participants: “Those who come from a superior culture are morally obliged to help those who come from a more backward culture!” This was how the thought process started and was aimed neither at confronting different theoretical knowledge, nor trying to change the person’s mind, but at exploring the meaning of the words used in the question: “Are there really superior cultures?” “What is the moral? Is there only one moral or are there many?” “What makes us feel we are part of a superior culture?”

The questions were not brought up by the philosopher, but by the participants. The philosopher facilitates the dialogue, shifts the level of conversation, suggests strategies to explore problems, but never provides answers to solve them.