A Business' Purpose

Victor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be pursued; it ensues: it is the outcome of living a life of meaning and purpose. That comes from three things: doing work that matters, loving without condition, and finding meaning in our suffering.

If we wanted to rewrite that for a business, we may have to start with changing the outcome of happiness. People can be happy, but a corporation is not a person and can't be happy. I believe it can create happiness in others. Not every company would necessarily have happiness as a desired outcome, although perhaps every organization we have would make someone happy or else it would not exist. That may be part of the key - it is not that we would pursue something other than happiness but rather we need to ask who is this company supposed to make happy?

A related question may be whether it is possible to make people happy as a win-win or if happiness is a zero-sum game. Is one person's happiness at the expense of someone else's? In many sporting events, if one team wins by 5 points, the other team loses by 5 points. Most races work a little bit differently, where you'll have the first, second, and third place finishers receive medals - one overall winner but top finishers are acknowledged as well. Someone is still going to end up in last place, but finisher medals go to everyone who completes the race, knowing that finishing a marathon is still a fantastic achievement in and of itself. The Fan Favorite, Miss Congeniality, or Most Improved awards are other ways of letting more people win a little, because we recognize that more winners is better.

Golf is a little different in that a handicap can be calculated, which shows how close to par a golfer scores on average. This allows golfers of different skill levels to be ranked based on how they perform relative to their own average instead of directly head to head. As a golfer gets better, their handicap changes, forcing them to have to continue to improve. You still have one overall winner, just a different mathematical formula to end up with the final ranking. This means that if you modify the algorithm, even though everyone performs the same, the top to bottom ranking changes.

At some point, someone has to make the decision which algorithm is better, affecting who wins and who loses. A systemic conflict is created, where the winners believe the algorithm is good and the losers believe the algorithm is not good. It is said that an election is more about convincing the loser that they lost than it is about convincing the winner that they won. The winner always believes the election was fair. The loser needs to be convinced the results are fair so that they and their followers will not have reason to revolt. The U.S. has had a couple of elections where the electoral college algorithm gave the win to someone other than the winner of the popular vote, but that algorithm has survived as it provides a balance that the straight popular vote does not. Perhaps we need to take it even further and design a new system whereby everyone can win together.

Some board or card games are cooperative instead of competitive. An example of this is the board game Pandemic (which seems particularly appropriate these days). Everyone who plays either wins together or loses together. That's nice for a game, but the company who sells a cooperative board game vs. a competitive board game is trying to make money at the end of the day. There's an opportunity cost to buying their game - you can't use that cash to buy something else if you used it to buy the game.

A few years ago, Google changed its well-known motto from Do No Evil to Do The Right Thing. Just not doing something bad is different than doing something good. One kind of implies the other, but why not be explicit about wanting to do good?

It is sometimes said that integrity is what you do when no one is looking. But what about what you do when people are looking? If your proverbial mom is looking, you'll want to do the right thing, so this statement is that if you have integrity, you'll still do what makes your mom proud even if there was no way she would find out (someone has never lived in a small town, apparently). The part of this that has always bothered me is negative peer pressure or imbalanced power relationships. If you have integrity, you'll still do the right thing when people are looking - in particular those who may want to tempt you to do the wrong thing. Are you willing to stand against your so-called friends and do what is right in the face of temptation or danger? Integrity is doing what is right, period. It doesn't matter if no one is looking or if you're trying not to look silly doing the right thing when everyone is looking. We see photos of white people (students and adults) being out of control racists when the Little Rock Nine showed up to go to school. So what about those who were privately pro-integration? How willing were they to stand up to their racist friends? There are stories but too few and too far between.

I recently learned of an upgrade to the Golden Rule. The original aphorism states that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. The Platinum Rule takes this to the next level, which is that we should treat others as they would like to be treated. Not everyone is the same, so we need to adjust our responses to treat people in the way that is best for them. We need to take time to get to know them and work side by side to the point that we can give them something personally meaningful. Even this doesn't fully take into account that not everyone knows what is best for them. Adjustments still must be made when what is best for someone is not what the person wants.

Back to Frankl, if an individual can become happy by doing work that matters, loving without condition, and finding meaning in our suffering, then what is the equivalent for a company? There may be other principles that could be added, but my proposal follows a parallel structure to the original.

A company maximizes happiness within their sphere of influence by doing work that matters, treating everyone with respect, and reducing suffering.

A company has to start by choosing their sphere of influence. We can't fix every injustice in the world or provide products and services that everyone will want, but we can focus on a place where we feel like we can make an impact and choose work that will result in more good than bad. The important principle is that once we have set our sphere of influence, we have to treat everyone within that sphere with respect. This goes back to the Platinum Rule. It doesn't matter if it is customers, employees, suppliers, competitors, animals, government regulators, or people we encounter but have no official relationship with - we should cooperate with them all. We should do no evil. It is difficult to eliminate all negative externalities, but no one said this process would be easy. For the third principle, we take it one more step and not only do we not hurt others but we specifically reach out to do the right thing or the best thing. We actively work to reduce suffering. We promote building at the same time that we tear down destructive elements.