A purpose-driven business

"There's more fruit in a rich man's shampoo than in a poor man's plate," reads a photo campaign that's currently circulating on Facebook which shows a boy who's just a hairline to becoming a skeleton because of acute malnutrition. I usually shun such kind of pictures not because they make me feel emotional, but because they make me feel the cruelty of this world that I eventually question my faith. They enrage me more than they draw my sense of charity that I want to affirm that Marx was right about revolution if only to dismantle the layers of social inequity that man built for himself for the pleasure of his own ego and the upkeep of his superficial needs.

Abraham Lincoln was wrong when he said that "God must have loved the poor that he made so many of them." I do not believe that God delights in seeing his own creation in abject deprivation; to see his own children steal for food or for medicine. The ills of society are sired by man's insatiable need to possess more than he could take. And God has nothing to do with them. Hence, Gandhi was right. "There is more than enough for everyone's need but not enough for a man's greed."

All these ranting about inequality and the unfortunate human condition the world is going through bring us back to our previous column as to how we define our business in terms of its “business philosophy” and its “philosophy of business.”

If I may add to it, most if not all businesses are built on our motive for profit and I believe that our view about profit affects the way we conduct ourselves in attaining it and the role it plays in relation to the people that interacts with our business on a regular basis.

Profit is important for business to thrive and succeed. However, profit can also be a source of evil and moral decadence. Thus, we begin to inquire as to when and how profit becomes evil. First, profit can become evil when the ways to achieve it is evil. Say a company engages in misleading advertising to make a sale is evil. Second, profit can become evil when it serves to satisfy a whim or when it seeks to demand praise and respect from others or as a means to show off or to grandstand. Third, profit can be woefully evil when it seeks to gain more without restraint and at the expense of others and is probably the worst among the three because it is driven by greed as if profit is the only thing that matters in the business.

Greed wreaks the most casualties because it kills more people than the worst criminals we read on the papers. It is greed that makes medicines and healthcare so expensive that millions of people die each year because ordinary people simply can’t afford it. It is greed that established the sweatshops employing overworked- underpaid workers in harsh and unsafe work environments. It is greed that raped our forests, polluted our rivers and seas, and caused the looming threat of climate change including threat of extinction to many of our marine and terrestrial life. 

And because much of the world’s suffering is caused by man’s never-ending desire for more profit, we can only hope that we will be able to reach that stage of “global awakening” before the irreversible self-destruction comes on a massive scale. Poverty, the widening economic disparity and other social ills, are but just the early symptoms. We need to abandon the old mindset that profit is all there is to achieve prosperity. Prosperity when enjoyed alone is not prosperity but indulgence. We therefore need to embrace more humane and all-inclusive paradigms of doing business. Paradigms of shared rewards; and of commitment to what’s good not just what is required by law. By embracing such paradigms, a company begins to understand the philosophy of its business in light of its true purpose and meaning of existence as well as its responsibility to people, to society, and the environment.

If you’re starting out a business, the crucial questions that you should ask yourself should be: Why am I putting this business up? Am I doing this for myself or for others? Am I willing to sacrifice my profit for the sake of conscience and moral upkeep, and for the sake and welfare of my workforce? Which is more meaningful to me in the course of my business affairs, the attainment of wealth or the fulfillment of making a difference to society and people?

Send emails to [email protected]