FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 52

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ON TOPIC
known to draw on his interests in
j o u r n a l i s m , a r t a p p re c i a t i o n ,
m o u nt a i n e e r i n g a n d re a d i n g
(particularly the novels of Jane Austen)
to inform his thinking. He was described
as “the modern Aristotle of the
business community” in a 2011 paper
p u b l i s h e d i n t h e J o u r n a l of
Management History.
However, in today’s complex times,
the perceived value of philosophy in
business appears to be growing. As
business consultant and former
philosophy lecturer Robert Rowland
Smith explains: “Clients used to look
upon my expertise in philosophy as
something arcane or irrelevant. These
days, they are confronting questions
of such a fundamental nature that they
call me for help.”
Ben Wilberforce-Ritchie, a project
manager at BAE Systems in Glasgow
(and philosophy graduate), sees huge
opportunities around embedding
philosophical thinking in business
decisions. Philosophy, he argues, is
fundamentally about stepping back
and seeing the bigger picture, then
coherently expressing arguments to
come to a conclusion.
“These are skills that are so
lacking today in business, with people
focused purely on, say, the financial or
communications aspects – pieces
that, in the past, have really driven
business, but which cannot sustain a
modern business in the long term,”
he says.
“If you look at a lot of the big
FTSE-100 companies, they’re getting
to the 60- to 70-year mark and are
starting to decline because they don’t
understand how to sustain their
businesses. They don’t know how to
help people see the interconnected
opportunities around the globe.”
What’s more, he argues, philosophy
gives people the skills to work more
effectively in teams. “In business, we’re
often very good at focusing on our
task, but not on the importance of that
within other people’s tasks. That’s
where philosophy comes in: it gives
people a chance to lift themselves out
of their role and ask where it fits within
the bigger picture.”
W h i l e W i l b e r fo rc e - R i t c h i e
acknowledges that decision making
and innovative thinking are already
staples of HR training programmes,
he maintains that philosophy brings
something extra to the table.
52 // Future Talent
“If you have a group of individuals
in a room who are all thinking the same
thing, you won’t get a difference of
opinion or of ideas. What I bring, as a
philosopher, to a room of experts in
H R , e n g i n e e r i n g o r p ro j e c t
management is the ability to question,
‘why are we doing that? What’s the
motive? What’s the purpose? Does
this have an environmental spin, a
cultural spin?’.
“Businesses have to be more than
just ways of making money, but without
a philosopher on board, without
someone who’s thinking about the
wider aspect, you lose sight of a
business’s place in the world and that’s
I think why so many businesses are
going under at the moment.”
F
or many in business, the
idea that organisations
need to identify their wider
purp ose c an feel
counterintuitive; it certainly goes
against Milton Friedman’s belief that
the only role of a company is to deliver
shareholder return. However, it is
gaining traction.
Larry Fink, chairman of Blackrock,
the world’s largest asset manager, has
been very public in insisting that
successful companies in the future will
be the ones that understand what, in
a very philosophical turn of phrase, he
calls their “fundamental reason for
being”. And that, says Colin Mayer,
P e t e r M o o re s p ro fe s s o r o f
m a n a g e m e nt s t u d i e s a t t h e