Next week is the start of our year-long business course after a break last year when we didn’t run it following difficulty running it in the covid year.
It’s full and we’re really excited about getting people back into this and it’s been completely redesigned and reworked because we’re a completely different organisation.
It’s easy to produce something again and again if people will still turn up to get it but everything has a ‘product lifecycle’ and I love to reinvent things but there’s work involved in that.
As part of the work for my first days speaking on the business course, I was looking for some material on ‘what is your business for?’ and so I searched this up and was just trying to research a little bit behind it and I found an article which was exactly what I was looking for in the Harvard Business Review from 2002 and you can read it here.
I read the article and I thought ‘this has to be in the business course because it encompasses everything I think about what this should be’ and then I searched a bit more and then I found another article which had a similar title only published somewhere else and I realised that the second article was written by Charles Handy.
And then I realised that I read the first article in the Harvard Business Review without reading the author and it was Charles Handy.
And then I remembered it was Charles Handy who I discovered way back then who changed my view of the world and my view of business.
I was introduced to Charles Handy by Tom’s Dad, Shaun, and he had been to see him speak in London.
He’s often listed as one of the greatest thinkers the business world has ever seen and he’s now 90.
When searching round this stuff on a Sunday afternoon I realised his wife had died 4 years ago after being involved in a road traffic accident and I was sad because throughout his books and his ‘teachings’ he always involves stories of his wife.
I think Charles Handy’s memoir ‘Myself and Other More Important Matters’ is one of the most important business books and just any book I’ve ever read.
It was the title that I used that I paraphrased for my GDC case ‘my GDC case and other more important matters’ when I did that lecture in Manchester in 2016 which pretty much changed my life.
But, get to the point Colin, Handy taught me that businesses are communities designed to serve communities.
In 2002 he wrote about how faith in business had been eroded by the shareholder value model and how this had generated leaders in business who were just so self-centred that they didn’t actually care about the shareholders anymore and everyone was out for themselves.
He wrote in the article a quote from Keynes “capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
And then I remembered that Handy studied classics at Oxford University on a scholarship and how he thought that everyone should have to study classics and philosophy.
I remember that Handy questioned why we don’t teach our children philosophy at school from the early stages so they can begin to understand themselves better and remembered that I thought that ever since he said it.
And then I looked up on that Sunday afternoon and realised that it seems to me that less and less people give a sh*t about anybody.
I realised that in 10 days times I would be starting the presentation of another business course to a group of people and it’s hard for me to get past the fact that I just believe that business is so much more than making a profit.
In thinking about these things (you wouldn’t want to live in my head) my thoughts turned to Newcastle United and Manchester City and PSG and I wondered when it was ok to start letting countries own football clubs and why the performance of your football club that you supported and loved since you were a boy was far more important than who actually owned it or was in charge of it or could do what they want with it.
We used football to allow ethics to hide in plain sight, we allowed politicians to complicate systems to a point where we’re too busy and can’t be arsed to pay attention to it anymore and we’re sold a story if we made our businesses successful enough, we might just about make it over the finish line with enough money to cruise around the world for the rest of our lives.
I think it’s perhaps true that less and less people want to talk about this stuff now and more and more people just want to make as much money as they can to be able to afford a Deliveroo and their favourite streaming service on TV but for some of us, at least a few of us, ethics and the philosophical approach to what we do is still important and will continue to be important until we’re finished.
It’s in that space, right there, that you will find me if you need me.
Blog Post Number - 3194
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