Actually, let’s think about how we can change the world. This unpredicted and unprecedented time we're all in right now gives us the possibility of a big restart, a massive reset in our attitudes and outcomes around business.
Years ago, I often lamented that sport had become a business, that even law had turned into the same, that healthcare of all things had transformed itself in too many ways as well from profession to profit machine. And actually, that's the precise problem. It isn't that everything has become about business, but that we misunderstand what business is supposed to be.
Business is supposed to be about human flourishing, building a better world for us all. It's meant to be about collaboration and partnership, about giving people structures and processes for discovering their talents, developing those talents, and deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as themselves. It's not about money or power or status at all. We've turned it into that. None of those side effects of work done well are to be the essence of enterprise. It should be seen as our greatest creative engine for attaining and encouraging human well being across all groups, and healing our divides rather than increasing them. Understood properly, business can save the world, not destroy it. But it's up to us to use this disruptive moment to re-engineer our worldviews to make business what it should and can be, and to save it from what it's devolved into, so that it can then return the favor.
As we're all seeing by absence as well as occasional presence, even the best business community can't replace the legitimate roles of good government, done well. And bad governance can make good business practically impossible. There are some things that can be done only by all of us acting in concert through our freely chosen representatives, and the specialists and experts they can marshal through broad reaching distinctive structures and processes. There are things so big and comprehensive that only government at each of its ascending levels can get the job done right, when it's been itself made right. But that's a part of our challenge now. If we don't understand business properly, we won't understand government properly either. The same lens of human flourishing should be used to view and assess them both.
We're all in a position to approach our work more wisely, and vote with our energies and dollars to encourage those running businesses who do so, as well. In that way, we can help business to change the world, and governance to facilitate the process in the best ways, rather than serving as an obstruction or a warped booster of all that's wrong, which comes to the same thing.
