Philosophy within corporations: an interesting perspective. Fernando Salvetti, LKN-Logos Knowledge Network
Why philosophy in business? Speed, interconnection, immateriality, net-economy, the global world and local worlds. Increasingly local and localised diversifications join together with increasingly global interconnections: differences in consumer styles, tastes, fashions and style codes, just as in models of behaviour and social action. We look at things from angles and scales that perhaps almost touch but which belong to different worlds. In our organisational contexts we live on different plains of reality as if we were inside the famous lithograph of Escher’s stairs: each occupied with climbing or going down their own staircase as if it were the only one in the correct perspective. But there are numerous perspectives and the levels do not always intersect in an intelligible way. In the office we are part of work groups in which the conceptions of service, team-work, hierarchy, time and product quality are the most different. Every day we find ourselves having to bring into account cognitive paradigms, relational models and reference values that are often extremely variable. Out of the office, looking at our worlds in general (both global and local at the same time), we live within societies of ‘multiplicity’, often very different among themselves but with some converging trends: the junctions of communication and transport or shopping centres as ‘non-place places’ that tend to be everywhere (starting from the ‘fringes’ of poverty right up to the centres of the metropolis), the rejection of the ‘sense horizons’ centred on stability and duration, the river of time dried up into a sporadic multiplicity of puddles, the absolute fungibility of ‘goods’, health trendily transformed into ‘fitness’, the progressive ‘fluidisation’ of socio-productive processes (just as consumer goods, increasingly ‘experiential’, not lasting and immaterial lose the typical characteristics of ‘Fordism’ – rigidity, standardisation, mass production – to take on the fundamental traits of ‘postFordism’, or rather flexibility, innovation, personalisation). We live in a universe of sense (perhaps not always so sensible…) that is rather shaky, inhabited by emblematic figures such as the player (in the exchange or the lottery), the tourist, the rootless person, the sensations-collector and, above all, the ‘foreigner’. A universe in which it is difficult for people to orientate themselves and, for this very reason, a universe where it is important to have the courage to be enlighteners, to bring a little ‘logos’ for categorisation and to light up the ‘chaos’ of complexity. What is enlightenment? “Having the courage to use your cosmopolite glance, or rather to adhere to your multiple identities, uniting to the life-forms linked to language, skin colour, nationality or religion the knowledge that in the world’s radical insecurity we are all equal and each is different”. This is the cosmopolite perspective of Ulrich Bech, who I find particularly interesting for our lives of today, given that an entire conceptual universe, based on some strong constitutive factors such as the ‘national glance’, is disillusioned, that is de-ontologicalised, historicised, stripped of its intrinsic necessity. The national state is increasingly besieged by a planetary interdependence, by ecological, economic and terrorist risks that link the separate worlds of underdeveloped and developed countries. And in the measure in which this situation is
reflected in the plan of global public opinion emerges an element that has never been seen before in history: a cosmopolite glance (sceptical, auto-critical, disillusioned) in which human beings consider themselves both part of a world at risk as well as part of their own personal history and their own local condition.
Philosophy, anthropology and epistemology: the company as a context for dynamic management knowledge What we need – in universities and business schools, but especially at that level of managing executives in private and public organisations, active both in profit and non-profit markets – are new ways of thinking, able to frequent peculiarities, individualities, strangeness, discontinuity, contrasts and singularities. Ways of thinking that are able to understand the variety, plurality of belonging and ways of being of many local worlds in which we live, study and work. Inhabitants of technologically-evolved town and country areas, habitués of increasingly interconnected urban and rural landscapes, electronic navigators and travellers for tourism and work; we need sufficiently fluid categories to understand the versatile realities of the worlds in which we live – just like exploring the expressive, cognitive and imaginative possibilities of our times. In universities and business schools, just like in boards of directors, executive committees and the control rooms of our organisations, we risk living like ancient knights – simplistic simplifiers (and decision-makers) – the challenges of an era in which it is pressing to practice methods aimed at making us see the links, articulations, solidarities, implications, connections, interdependencies, complexities. We need to frequent the junctions with philosophy and, in particular, with anthropology and epistemology. We need to think and see the world through the lenses of an anthropologist of the knowledge that would allow us, as Montaigne used to say, to “rub our brain against that of others”. We need to learn how to learn a sufficiently realist way of thinking (in the sense of critical realism as thematised by my master Karl Popper) that is also potentially relativist, but not destructive and nihilistic: a thought that is a good judge of itself, its own suppositions and unsaid things. A thought that is able to consider the cognitive constraints that make it up, that sometimes command and control it in a blind and fideistic way. A thought that is aware that knowledge is a mix of subsequent limited rationality and rationalisation, of true and false intuitions, inductions, syllogisms and paralogisms, ways of saying and doing things, personal opinions and shared beliefs (à la Morin). Like saying that we do not see things as they are, but rather how we are – this is why we need to ‘rub’ our thought against that of others, therefore to frequent places of philosophy to develop a plurality of ways of thought that can help us to understand the variety, the plurality of belonging and of the ways of being of the many worlds (both global and local) in which we work. In short: the philosophy of exploring different ways of seeing and rebuilding the world, new ways to act, produce, plan. A philosophy intended in this way has little to do with the approach normally taken by ‘Professors’, while it has many points of contact wit that ambit that we can define as dynamic management knowledge. Today’s basic economic resources – even more than yesterday’s - are no longer (only) financial capital or work and even less so natural resources, but relationships, knowledge and human and intellectual capital. Peter Drucker spoke of work knowledge in the early Sixties (I could say ‘of the last Millennium’ to add even more emphasis), but only in recent years have ‘managers’ started to see knowledge and skills as strategic resources that they should manage in the same way in which they
manage till flow, human resources or prime materials. And especially for those organisations that aim to be learning organisations, or rather ‘cognitive systems’ able to structure knowledge and behaviour of those who are part of it, knowledge governance is a strategic objective. In fact, the knowledge economy requires flexible models of organisational functioning aimed at continual interaction with clients and quality control, based on an intense use of knowledge resources. An accentuated capacity of interaction with the outside is needed, along with that of creation and re-elaboration of knowledge, of a relationship between cognitive and behavioural dimensions in the actions of individuals and groups in operative situations. The knowledge economy seems to favour those organisations that are structured with a reticular model, able to anticipate the mutability of the external environment with high creativity and flexibility. One of the most important factors of competitive differentiation among the organisations is made up by the ability to cultivate and grow the (by now famous, but not necessarily widespread) intangible assets: intelligence in its various forms, experience, imagination and, more generally, soft skills, as well as specialist and transversal skills, know-how and know-what. Especially in scenarios characterised by often nondurable products, by instable consumer needs, by increasingly ‘glo-cal’ (global and local) markets, competition is comparable to a war of movement in which the competitive advantage depends on the ability to anticipate market trends and to quickly answer the clients’ evolving needs. There are no single and certainly effective organisational recipes, usable in every context. Above all, there are no ideal organisations. However, there are efficient organisations able to elaborate and put into practice strategies for success in environments that are complex and continuously changing. Organisations that are increasingly less ‘managed’ by a vertex with functions of complete control over the strategic direction and, then, on organisational and productive processes that are increasingly ‘led’ by leaders able to influence and direct activities and processes not only in the internal workgroups but also outside of the traditional organisational boundaries to integrate – with various cooperative strategies – the operative teams of other structures connected to them and with which they normally share interests and goals. Organisations aimed at feeding the entrepreneurial spirit, continual innovation and internal cultures characterised by the inclination to change: therefore, organisations that have much to gain from frequenting the territories of philosophy.
Philosophers in business Being a philosopher consists in solving some of life’s problems, not in theory but in practice (Henry David Thoreau). That is to say: there is nothing more practical than a good theory! Philosophy is the art of shaping, inventing, constructing concepts. Uninterruptedly, or almost. Philosophers look for wisdom, but they do not own it forever. And at the same time they are searching for truth, beauty, good policy or the right direction….staying, above all, on the territory of the question, much more than not moving towards that of the answer. As Bertrand Russel used to say, philosophy should be practiced not for the love of precise answers to the questions that it asks, as we cannot really know any precise answer, but rather for love of the questions themselves. As questions widen our conception of what is possible, enrich our imagination and corrode the dogmatic arrogance that precludes the mind to speculation. Knowing ourselves, learning to think – acting as if nothing were obvious – surprise ourselves…. These and many other determinations of philosophy shape interesting, though tiring, attitudes (in business as well): as stated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, two
rather interesting authors to follow or beat/debate around the question qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? The philosopher is an expert in concepts, tries to understand which are badly put, arbitrary or inconsistent, those that would not last but a few moments in a ‘reality’ exam, and which, on the other hand, seem to work, to be sufficiently explicative and useful to illuminate one or more levels/aspects of the realities in which we live. Even before that, the philosopher creates concepts: “Philosophers must not limit themselves to receiving, purifying and illuminating concepts, but must start with making them, creating them, submitting them” (Friedrich Nietzsche). At the same time, it is concepts themselves that the philosopher cannot trust, knowing that they are not ‘bodies of reason but fruit of an effort of abstraction and, often, generalisation starting with a very concrete, limited and limiting qui ed ora (hic et nunc) under the profile of their explicative profile. The concept is never ‘a given’, but initially ‘created’, and earlier still, ‘to be created’. Creation (and critical, attentive use) of concepts: to what end? To live without the automatic pilot constantly set. Generally, we tend to live as if we were on automatic pilot for most of the time, conforming, except for some small changes, to the opinions of ourselves and the objectives that we obtained much, much earlier. As said by Robert Nozick. Philosophy represents a good alternative to the automatic pilot, also in work contests. Every so often it allows us to turn it off and examine the realities in which we live from another point of view. Sometimes it allows us to say ‘let’s start over’, opening ourselves to new prospective and to the consideration of new levels of reality. And it allows us to be a little epicurean and to search for pleasure via logos and reasonableness: “Only reason makes life pleasurable, destroying all the false concepts and erroneous opinions that are able to trouble our mind in so many ways”. Personally, I try to be a rationalist as Karl Popper taught me: I mean a person who “wishes to understand the world and learn by talking with others” – criticising them, provoking their criticism and trying to learn from this (while knowing full well that people are not predominantly rational). In other words: if there had never been the Tower of Babel we would have had to build one, seeing as difference makes a critical discussion fruitful. Discussion and critical confrontation which are the base for building and distributing the capacity to not take too much for granted, to know how to interrogate and confront oneself, to confront life as thinking subjects able to learn and act with a good level of awareness (and responsibility). For me, consequently, practicing philosophy in organisations means following some key paths: epistemology and knowledge management, ethics and managing by values, anthropology and cross-cultural intelligence, dialogue meetings and cross-fertilisation with people from other professional, geo-political and cultural contexts (both near and far). I have gained a lot of experience in my main reference markets, Switzerland and central and north-western European countries, but almost none at all in south-western Europe and specifically in Italy. But I believe that it is also time for Italy to open itself up to a dimension of sure, practical use such as philosophy in business. For example, in a ‘hard’ ambit such as the ‘productive’ one that I summarise below starting from a real professional experience.
Knowledge sharing + Networking = Product innovation (x 2… x 3… ∞). An apparently complex formula, but easily read and applicable in practically every industry: sharing knowledge and networking allows a growth, even in a very important way, in product innovation. Product innovation is indispensable for the company’s good health in the mid- and longterm, especially for companies that are occupied in the international markets. And I am not referring to the ‘usually noted’ such as Xerox, 3M, Levi Strauss, HP, Häagen Dazs… but to the majority of organisations active in both the global and local worlds of today. But innovation is difficult: around 80% of new products fail after their introduction onto the market and another 10% disappear within 5 years. Today, many companies, to create business, are learning to develop new products and services incredibly quickly. How? By making sure that people work together and simultaneously in a certain project rather that in sequence. In the knowledge society the peak of efficiency and effectiveness are registered by the organisations that work on the basis of net models, able to anticipate the mutability and new needs of the external environment with high creativity and flexibility. In a predominantly immaterial economy, centred on knowledge and information, among the most high performance models of organisation we find set ups that bring back the idea of collages, patchworks or networks, which reduce hierarchy as a form of organisation and control, and where, on the other hand, decentred integration and the network become the main organisational drivers. The probability of success in the development of new products is directly linked to the capacity of effectively carrying out the activities of gathering, storing, distribution and use (especially through its exchange: knowledge sharing) of information. While knowing full well that the technologies of knowledge management alone are not enough and that the most important key element for full use of knowledge and ability is made up by the reinforcement of an organisational culture that is aimed at encouraging and supporting knowledge and skills sharing (where, therefore, the stimuli coming from a coherent philosophical practice are of an important specific weight). Basically, learning to share! For example, some companies in the last few years have introduced rather important internal campaigns for communication and sensitisation with slogans such as ‘knowledge becomes power only when it is shared’ (Nokia). While Texas Instruments started the company ‘I-didn’t-invent-it-but-I-did-it-anyway’ award to encourage people to share knowledge. The organisation that is based on knowledge is an area (possibly physical, definitely cultural) where people – through networking and knowledge sharing – activate vicious circles of experience-knowledge sharing-experience, in which knowledge that is shared at an organisational level becomes the basis for new applications and new products. The knowledge driven working organisation is therefore set up as a cognitive and social dimension characterised by constantly evolving processes, where ‘to know’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘to recognise’, that is to say to learn something that is a given and ‘external to us’, rather to follow the numerous ways of worldmaking that can allow us to create and build not only new products but new ways of thinking and acting.