Sunday Contemplation # 37 Why Businesses Fail. A Wisdom Perspective.

It's The Humans, Not The Money

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

• This Week’s Quote

• A G’day

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

Business is all about people… Always has been, always will be.

Richard Branson

A G’day

Hello Everyone: I hope that you are doing well. I hope that you have a place of peace within that you have had a chance to spend time in.

Today’s contemplation has a business focus, but for those of you looking for things spiritual please don’t stop at the heading.

I think that living our wisdom asks us to balance the stillness required for our inner discovery with the movement of our everyday life. For most of us, work is a significant part of that movement in everyday life. That work is so often an environment where we struggle to find a way to express the essential part of us found in stillness, is a big issue. It is not just about adding wellness activities or meditations to work environments, it is about creating environments that are safe containers for us to turn up with our authentic selves.

I offer today’s contemplation on this matter for your consideration.

I hope you go well this week.

Peace and blessings to each of you.

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Why Businesses Fail. A Wisdom Perspective.

In Australia, 20% of new businesses fail within their first year. 60% fail within the first three years.* In the US the first year figures are similar and around 50% fail within five years.**

The literature on the reasons for these high rates of failure focus on financial challenges, poor market research, management inexperience, economic factors, poor strategy and a host of other well argued and statistically supportable factors.

I am not here to debunk those observations. But I am here to say that the primary factor in most of the failures is often hiding in plain sight…the quality of the relationships in the founding teams.

I am certainly not the only person to focus on the role of culture and the human interactions in the success or failures of businesses. That list is long and distinguished. Include here Simon Sinek, Patrick Lencioni, Dale Carnegie,Peter Drucker, and many many more.

But I would like to suggest that there are some factors connected to the human side of business success and failure that are not focused on anywhere near enough. We have, and will, ignore them at our peril. I call them wisdom factors.

Wisdom

Centuries of insight and debate surround the concept of wisdom. If I wander down the roads of epistemology, ontology, theology and a few other “ologies”, I will lose every one of you who thought this article was supposed to be about business! Let me just get to the guts of it.

Here is my view. Wisdom arises in two parts:

1. Our recognition of our deep attunement with nature, the interconnectedness of all life, and our direct experience of the Field Of Consciousness from which all life arises. (Who we are).

2. Our capacity to treat each other and all things consistent with that recognition and experience. (What we do).

It is most often a profound misunderstanding of who we really are, and the consequent way we treat each other that is at the heart of why so many businesses fail. It is these wisdom factors that require our attention.

Before I go on. Please understand that I do not mean here that only businesses run by monks, nuns or saints can succeed. Clearly this is not the case. In fact I can think of a couple of monks I know who I would not let anywhere near a spreadsheet or a marketing team.

But I am saying that the quality of the human relationships and the skills to build in teams, trust, authenticity and egoless accountability, requires wisdom…lived wisdom. Knowing who we really are and how to treat each other are not spiritual questions divorced from everyday life or business. They are foundational. We fail, in much more than just business because, as a culture, we do not address these questions with the care and focus they call for.

Wisdom Factors In Business

Let me dot point some of the key insights that taking the wisdom perspective seriously can look like in a business: (note- I realise that dot points do not do justice to the topic, but it is a Sunday Contemplation, not War And Peace).

Teams Not Heroes.

• We finally let go the myth of the hero founder or CEO and recognise that humans are profoundly interconnected, and succeed in ventures, business or otherwise, only in teams.

  The Inner World Is Most Important

• We spend the appropriate energy on the inner infrastructure or environment of each of the humans in a business to equip them with the support they need to take on the challenges of a business.

  Why do we think that people in a business need not focus on the questions central to a life well lived? Who loves you? Who do you feel you can give love to? Who is your teacher and mentor? Do you have real friends? What is your essential purpose in your life? What understanding of life guides your daily action?

  Business fail primarily in the halls of these unanswered questions, not on the spreadsheets.

  Businesses have financial and sales goals, as they must. But to separate these activities from the health, stability, resilience, purposefulness and the inner landscape of the humans involved, is a mistake. If I hear one more person say we can focus on those “soft” issues when we get the numbers up, I may pull out the remaining three hairs I have left on my head. Wise businesses prioritise these factors as part of the central journey of the business, not as an afterthought or ‘team building’ weekend. The almost constant challenges that being in business throws up, are the very adaptive environment where the inner resilience of each person is challenged, and where this inner growth and support can take place.

  No business worth its salt would undertake any activity without a measures of the financial cost and potential financial benefit of that activity. The financial calculus is not seen as something separate and or only tangential to the work, it is part of the framework. So too the inner capacity of each person to function fully as a human in an environment that demands of almost all of them more time and energy than they give their families, is not tangential…it is foundational. This is a wisdom perspective.

  Teams Sans Ego

• We can honour the importance of the teams we create to succeed in the business, by forming then in ways that focus on aligned purpose and an eyes open assessment of the qualities and skills each person brings to the table.

  This requires humans on teams who function from an essential centre where their purpose is nurtured and attuned and impacts their decisions. Teams built on the foundation of aligned purposes function best. This is not some distant removed ivory tower activity, it is simply an environment where people are free, safe and supported to ask each other…”what’s important to you?” It is not some extended hand wringing sessions, it is simply a place, an environment where I get to be my authentic self. To think that this is somehow not central to business is, frankly, ridiculous.

  Most businesses place key decision making in the hands of hierarchically organised structures. Inevitably…yes I said inevitably…there comes an ego attachment to title, role and expected behaviours, on almost everyone’s behalf. In every business or organisation I have been in, and that is quite a few now, the challenges and requirements of fast moving markets or the population being served, always outstrip the capacity of hierarchies to meet them effectively.

  That is not a criticism of hierarchy per se. It seems we human’s function well when we know who's who in the zoo and what they are responsible for. The trouble is, very often the gorilla in the zoo gets more attached to their big muscles than appreciating the incredible flexibility of the gazelles or the winged prowess of the birds. If you know what I mean.

  Letting go of the zoo analogy, the point is, it takes wisdom to tackle the challenges of businesses and to design teams that in a clear eyed way assess the skills required to best face the challenge and decide who is best suited to be on the team and what their role is. Not based on their title, but based on the mindset and skills they bring to the table, to the challenge. For most of us, our ego over values the trappings of our self perceptions, and creates fear around honestly recognising our limitations.

  There lies the rub. There lies the reason we need focus on the inner environment and growth of each person. We need to, and can, build teams where egos are not required to attend. Most businesses fail because in the profound heat and stress that accompanies many business activities they fail to build teams, sans egos, that have the capacity and skills to resolved the challenges.

Join The Threads Of Wisdom

Let me end by joining these threads.

Wisdom has its roots in the profound interconnectedness of all things, and the experience of the Consciousness from which all things arise.

Humanity faces profound challenges because the predominant cultural perspective of materialism, misses the main point…we are not primarily material, we are primarily consciousness.

Consequently we build structures and environments, including businesses, that anchor the sense of value and contribution on the external and the material. Our egos, which are the thoughts and ideas about who we think we are, cling to the mistaken materialistic paradigm, and the external measures of value it creates.

The wisdom we need to bring to the world, including business, is clear sight about who humans really are. The lack of this clear sight, and the way that blindness shows itself in how we create, structure, measure and run the activities of business, is central to why so many fail. The miracle is that some succeed, but it is most often a success measured in financial terms, not human.

I created this channel on substack in the hope that we can find a way to link the important spiritual inner work of our lives with all the activities we do, including business. The stillness of our inner life and the movement of our day to day lives must find the way to live together. We can live our wisdom…we must. It is existential.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

*Lawpath **Shopify business analysis article

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation coming in a couple of days is called Wisdom Lived.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

Today I am grateful for James Taylor, the American singer songwriter. I have loved his music all of my life. Today I spent a couple of hours listening to a whole live concert he performed recently. I still smiled and cried.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

Has work been a place you felt you could like your full self?

Do you think it is possible to join the essence of our spiritual life with our work?

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.