Ancient wisdom for modern business leaders

How would a philosopher like Aristotle or Nietzsche run a modern business? Sadly, traditional management practice suggests many firms wouldn’t even consider it.

The reason is because management today is rooted in economics and psychology. It is focused on numbers and productivity rather than the people who make those numbers happen.

In contrast, a philosopher’s life’s work explores what it means to be human. Aristotle (384-322BC) and Nietzsche (1844-1900) might not have known how to navigate a spreadsheet but they would have something to say about people. Today, modern organisations often miss that which matters the most - their people.

Aristotle and Nietzsche developed radically different yet complementary approaches to life that are both urgently needed; to restore trust in business and to help answer pressing organisational questions around empowering and engaging workers, leadership, values and performance. So, where do we start? 

In search of balance

In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle asks what distinguishes a person – a fully-fledged human being – from an animal or a slave. Animals are driven by raw passion and appetite; slaves are simply driven by others, with no power of their own. Neither of these two conditions allow for happiness and flourishing.

The slave has no freedom to make choices; animals live a hand-to-mouth and suffer greatly in consequence. A flourishing person, by contrast, is someone who learns what is good and has the freedom to choose accordingly.

The distinguishing human quality, Aristotle observed, is this capacity to reason. Animals don’t have it and slaves cannot use it. Reason is the ‘good-maker’, which guides us through the challenges and opportunities that life brings us.

Aristotle took the view that ‘virtues’ – which make for a life well lived – are pretty obvious. For him, they included friendship, generosity, courage and resilience. It still makes intuitive sense today. But without context, they are meaningless.

Courage sounds good, but is only a word unless we know what it means in a given situation. Here Aristotle urges us to discover what he calls ‘the middle way’. This is the middle way between the ‘vice’ of excess or deficiency; going too far or not far enough. So, the virtue of courage lies somewhere between the vice of excess – rashness – and the vice of deficiency, which is cowardice.

But how do we discover that sweet spot? Aristotle’s answer is that we discover it by using our reason, honed by education: exploring how we and others might act in given situations, carrying out experiments, reflecting on the outcome and trying again.

Aristotle’s ideal workplace would be one in which we develop our humanity through opportunity and training to use our reason.

Slaves at work

Aristotle would have liked the contemporary language of ‘empowerment’ but would then have had second thoughts on how that actually unfolds in many of our workplaces. One of us worked with a CEO who memorably said that for him “the best managers are those in their late 30s with a large mortgage and several children”.

Aristotle would see this as modern slavery; reasoned judgement shut down. And that can be infectious. Irving Janis, a leading scholar at Yale University, coined the term ‘groupthink’ to describe a situation in which all members of a group go along with a course of action with which they all privately disagree, but never voice their disagreement.