The Oxford Dictionary defines business as the state of being busy. Most of us assume that the state of 'busyness' has the intended outcome of making money - the creation of wealth. If we are to look at the soul of business we must first clarify our definitions.
What is a soul? One of the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world, Vedanta, looks at the soul as living, evolving system comprised of meanings, contexts, relationships, archetypal patterns, memories, and desires. It is sustained by habitual patterns and it evolves through opposing tendencies. The habitual patterns are a result of conditioning (karma in the eastern traditions) and create the tendency for stability.
But if stability becomes too stable, inertia takes over. Therefore, the opposing tendencies are necessary for its evolution. These include uncertainty, chaos, complexity, emergent properties, and creative leaps. Therefore, a living system is a constant interplay between entropy and renewal, inertia and creativity, chaos and disorder.
When the information and energy in a system accumulate to the point that the system (the soul) cannot contain it in an organised manner, the forces of entropy, aging, stagnation, and death take over. Survival then depends on reincarnation.
In other words, the soul must go into incubation until it takes a quantum, creative, non-algorithmic, discontinuous leap into new contexts and meanings that can not only contain the accumulated information and potential energy (karma) of the previous incarnation, but also process that information and continue its evolution into emergent expressions, new forms, and phenomena.
Death, therefore, is a necessary punctuation mark in the creative evolutionary process. Evolution, therefore, goes through phases. First there is adaptation to a challenging situation. Adaptation leads to stability. Stability leads to stagnation, stagnation to entropy, entropy to death (incubation) from which emerges the new context that expresses the new manifestation of the soul. This new life of the soul organises information and energy to create a new body, a new mind, and a new life span.
If a business has a soul, and if a business is a living system, then it too must follow these cycles and rhythms and patterns of life.
As we look at the evolution of human activity over the last 6000 years, we can observe the evolution of business and wealth creation in parallel. During the age of the hunter, bows and arrows, the instruments of hunting were the sources of wealth (even today for the predatory nations, weapons of destruction are enormous sources of wealth). In the age of agriculture, the sources of wealth became agricultural products and animal husbandry. The hymns of the Rig Veda speak of cows and male progeny as providing wealth, and in the Old Testament, wealth is measured by the number of camel and sheep and hoarded as grain by the pharaohs of Egypt.
In the last three hundred years of the industrial age, natural resources, minerals, oil, metals, became the sources of wealth. They were required to both make the machines and run them. In our mechanistic world view, the universe was a clock work machine and we were cogs in that gigantic machine.
In the age of information, the source of wealth has become a microchip, a piece of dust with information stored and stockpiled in it. Silicon Valley's are the El Dorado's of today's explorers. These are the entrepreneurs who are willing to risk all to step into the unknown with a dream.
As we move from the age of information into a knowledge-based society and ultimately a wisdom-based culture that has the best interests of the both the individual and the ecosystem that sustains the individual, the dominant sources of wealth will shift once again. A wisdom-based society must nurture the needs of the human spirit, along with material needs. The human spirit is nourished through inspiration, imagination, intuition, and understanding the mechanics of intention, free will, creativity, knowingness, meaning, purpose, and decision-making.
In view of this new perspective on the evolution of business, I would like to redefine the purpose of a business. If business is to evolve, it must have its primary goal as fulfilling the needs of the human spirit and also facilitating and enhancing its evolution.
In the wisdom tradition of Vedanta, there are four basic aspirations of the human spirit. These are artha, which is defined as economic freedom and wealth creation, kama, which is defined as the desire for fulfilling relationships, love, belongingness, sensual and sexual gratification, recreation, and play, dharma, which is defined as the unique talents of an individual and also the unique relationship of the individual and his or her talents to the ecosystem (of which the individual is a part), and finally, moksha, which is defined as freedom from all conditioning and therefore the experience of pure potentiality and pure creativity.
A person who can achieve these four goals of life is said to be enlightened. The concept of dharma is uniquely eastern. It relates human experience to ecology. Ecology is that brand of biology that deals with organisms' relations to one another and the physical environment in which they live. There is a growing perception amongst human beings that we are part of a larger and ever expanding web of relationships.
As our ecological instincts evolve, we begin to have a clearer perception of how we are inextricably interwoven with the patterns of elements and forces that structure the fabric of the universe. The enlightened Buddha stated, "We are inter-beings that inter-arise in the inter-is-ness." Ecology, therefore, is the ever-expanding perception of the inter-is-ness. It is ironic that the most successful business of our times, the Internet, interweaves, inter-explores, and inter-connects this inter-is-ness. Ecology is the interdependence of interbeings in the inter-is-ness.
Information technology is bringing a transformation in our evolution as a human species. Darwinian evolution was about survival of the fittest. Metabiological evolution (meta = beyond) will be about survival of the wisest and it may come about through information technology. The word information means to give rise to form (in-form-ation) and the word transformation means to convert one form to another.
It is my belief that information technology is going to take us beyond the mere stockpiling of raw, meaningless data into the interweaving of this data to give rise to new forms and phenomena, resulting in emerging properties and quantum leaps in creativity. In other words, information technology is going to help us evolve as a human species.
The key lies in connecting information to ecology. Today's technology allows for the stockpiling of dada that can be stored and exchanged electronically and digitally around the planet. And in the future data that will be stored and exchanged electronically and digitally inter-planetarily and inter-galactically. If information technology is to be our salvation we need to make some important choices. And our business models must include the fact that our actions are part of a web of cascading relationships that are inextricably woven into the warp and weft of life. We must think of the interpenetration of our individual and collective actions with a sense of reverence, depth and responsibility.
And business must not only serve the needs of the human family, but also nurture the ecosystem and participate in its continued evolution. Such a business model will be able to generate wealth and abundance in all its forms, because it will become obvious that consciousness is the source of all wealth, because consciousness is the source of all there is.
In this context, I would like to offer new definitions for wisdom, knowledge, information, data, consciousness and wealth. Wisdom is knowledge that nurtures the ecosystem and its ongoing evolution into emergent properties, new forms, and phenomena. Knowledge is information that is organized around contexts, meanings, and purpose. Information is data organized around intended outcomes. Data is a collection of indivisible units of information. It is the raw material of the universe. Information and energy come together. Information without energy is useless and energy without information has no purpose. The two are one and the same. An atom which is the basic unit of all material reality is not a solid entity but a hierarchy of states of information and energy.
It is these hierarchies of information and energy that structure the material universe as they move up the scale from raw data to wisdom. Wealth, therefore, is abundance in all its forms and is information and energy organized and structured in consciousness. Consciousness, in turn, is the potential for all experience. It is the potential, therefore, for the experiencer, the process of experience, and that which is experienced. They are all part of a tangled hierarchy in that they inter-arise and co-create each other.
In our business model, consciousness creates the businessperson; it creates the business, and creates the product of business. Without the businessperson there is no business, without the business, there is no product. Without the product, there is no businessperson ad infinitum (tangled hierarchy).
Let us then redefine the purpose of a business. A business must fulfil the needs of the human spirit. These include survival, safety, play, celebration, love, belongingness, self- esteem, self actualisation (Abraham Mallow's hierarchy of needs). It must also, as mentioned previously, nurture the ecosystem and participate in its continued evolution. If it does so the creation of wealth and profit will be a natural by-product.
I would like to therefore suggest the qualities of the enlightened businessperson of the future.
Such are the emerging patterns and paradigms in our world view that are going to challenge our customary assumptions, models, maps, theoretical frameworks, values, interpretations, beliefs, and behaviors. When we make that quantum leap, we will have resurrected the soul of business. For what does it profit a business if it can buy or sell the world but loses its soul?
