The Role of Wisdom in Business

The role of wisdom in business reveals itself as a huge subject once we realize the real meaning of philosophy. For one, philosophy means “how we do things”. A philosopher can get away with never founding a company or leading a team, but not entrepreneur or leader can escape the need to have a philosophy of business, a philosophy of leadership, a philosophy of family and friendship, and more. No business, no team, no family can function without ways of doing things that people think of as the right ways of doing things.
 
Put another way, no one would ever claim that they want to found a company, lead a team, or take care of friends and family on the basis of ignorance. Imagine going to a bank, VC pitch, or board meeting and saying, “We have a set of profoundly ignorant ideas. Can we have some money?” And yet, only philosophy itself teaches us wisdom—not business school, and not even the school of hard knocks (which can make us more clever, but rarely more wise in the fullest sense). It’s why we refer to the ancient lineages as “wisdom traditions”.
 
Rob Kalwarowsky has taken a keen interest in the personal, cultural, economic, and ecological problems we face here. Rob points out that the average person becomes a supervisor at age 30, and yet those same people don’t receive leadership training until age 42. Moreover, any training they receive may have no real connection with wisdom.
 
This contributes to a tremendous amount of suffering and loss—loss of profit, loss of innovation, loss of opportunity. Some of that suffering and loss is obvious, while much of it may remain subtle and even hidden from us such that we don’t see it for what it is. How often do we even suggest that we want our leaders and team members to become wiser, and to make wise decisions? Rob suggests that as many as 2/3 of people groan under the yoke of destructive leaders who harm their people and their companies, and in truth the problem is even broader than that. We have a crisis of ignorance on a global scale.
 
So Rob invited me for some dialogue about the place of real philosophy in business—not the stuff we get exposed to in the university system, but serious philosophy that leads to measurable results. As Thoreau put it over a century ago: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”
 
Instead, Rob and I tried to talk about elements of a wisdom-based leadership, and what it would mean to create an effective curriculum to empower leaders, entrepreneurs, and everyone else to realize genuine wisdom, love, and beauty in their work, in their life, and in the world we share.

To check out the podcast episodes, you can start with part 1 of 2:

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zNDkwNDdkMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode