FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 51

ON TOPIC
O
THE BUSINESS
THINKING
OF
Applying philosophy to business can
improve decision making. But how can we
make practical use of this theoretical tool?
Y
ou don’t often hear talk of Socrates or
Aristotle in the boardroom (nor
Chomsky or de Beauvoir), but if
Brennan Jacoby has his way,
philosophy will soon be a key part of
strategic discussions at every level
of business.
“I’m in the business of helping
companies and their people think the
best ,” says Jacoby, founder of
Philosophy at Work, a consultancy that
helps people in the corporate world
use philosophical tools to make better
decisions. “Thinking is basically doing
stuff with knowledge. We live in the
| David Baker
information age and businesses that
can do better things with information
will have a real leg up.”
A little research reveals that a
surprising number of leading CEOs
have studied philosophy, including
Flickr co-founder and Slack CEO
Stewart Butterfield (who has both a
Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the
subject), LinkedIn co-founder Reid
Hoffman (a philosophy graduate of
Oxford University) and former HP
CEO Carly Fiorina (who majored in
medieval history and philosophy at
Stanford University).
However, Jacoby is careful not
to scare off those chief executives who
don’t know their Heidegger from
their Hegel.
“It’s not intellectual, ivory-tower
stuff,” he pledges. “It’s about the quality
of the thinking we do every day.”
But he does argue that the insights of
philosophy, developed, in the West,
over 2,000 years of discussion and
debate, can transform the quality
of the business decisions we make –
many of which, though few executives
will admit it publicly, are based
on intuition (frequently dressed up
as “experience”).
He advises: “First, we need to ask
ourselves: ‘What assumptions are we
making about the options we have?
Are they correct?’ Often people think in
terms of ‘what we have always done’,
which closes off the possibility that other
options may be just as valid.”
Then, he continues, with a nod to
Sar tre, executives need to ask
themselves how free they are to follow
a different route. After this, they need
to explore what those other possibilities
are. As an example of this in action, he
cites budgetary meetings, which often
begin with allocations that stay fixed
from year to year.
“Maybe people have been told that
research and development (R&D)
always has a certain budget in an
organisation, which then leaves a certain
amount to be divided between other
activities,” he explains.
“A more thoughtful approach would
be asking whether the world has shifted,
if the efficiency of a company’s R&D has
changed and whether or not the budget
could be changed with it. That way, we
can test assumptions that sometimes
feel set in stone and discover that,
actually, there are alternatives.”
T
he idea that philosophy helps
organisations to challenge
the status quo and to see
things differently is hardly
new: after all, ‘the man who invented
management’, Peter Drucker, was
November – January 2019 // 51