I work therefore I am: why businesses are hiring philosophers

Who should a business leader turn to in times of crisis? You might presume a lawyer or a coach – but how about a philosopher?

Busy executives in Silicon Valley and beyond are enlisting the services of “practical philosophers” to help them work through difficult decisions.

“This is a generation of pioneering philosophers, if you like, entrepreneurial philosophers,” says Prof Lou Marinoff, who has been advocating philosophy with businesses since 2000, and has worked with organisations such as the World Economic Forum in Geneva and Davos and the Comisión Federal de Electricidad in Mexico.

He doesn’t offer solutions; he asks questions that help the client gain fresh perspectives and insight. There’s a focus on critical thinking and examining values to explore what’s right and fair.

“These are very intelligent people, who are also overworked, more so than most of us. And they don’t have enough time to reflect. A lot of what we do is to create reflective space,” says Marinoff, professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author of Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems. Marinoff is also president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which has trained 400 philosophers to practise this kind of service.

In the UK, Joe Garner, chief executive of building society Nationwide, formerly of BT Openreach and HSBC, has worked over a number of years with Prof Roger Steare, philosopher in residence at Cass Business School and author of the book Ethicability. When Garner spoke to the New City Agenda group in Westminster last October about decision-making, he insisted that values – the mutual’s social conscience – must be part of the process. “It’s about logic, it’s about the law, but it’s also about love.”

Steare has also consulted for large multinationals, including BP following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. One can quite see why big corporates – whose failings have wreaked devastation – might want to interrogate their principles.

But what use, in truth, is a philosopher – whose focus is on ethics – to a businessperson or entrepreneur, whose overriding purpose is to make a profit?

“There’s an assumption there that profits and philosophy are incompatible,” says Steare. “The tension is not between philosophy and profit, but between deep wisdom and short-term profit maximisation, instead of long-term sustainable value creation.”

In sectors such as technology, where businesses can grow at breakneck speed, it’s perhaps a way of holding leaders to account: are their founding principles holding fast, or being subsumed by a race towards profit at any cost? A philosopher can “direct a business toward innovation that combines a good purpose and a real business opportunity”, says Christian Vögtlin, associate professor in corporate social responsibility at Audencia Business School in France. “Philosophical thinking can also guide technology [entrepreneurs] to define boundaries; this can range from questions about privacy rights to teaching virtual intelligence systems about humanistic values,” he adds.

Marinoff works with senior leadership teams and managers, as well as CEOs. This might take the form of creating a mission statement, implementing a code of ethics in an organisation or working on corporate responsibility.

But why would a company choose a philosopher over another type of business coach?

A philosopher can nudge and question, take leaders on uncomfortable journeys, even be a disruptive force – and they should, suggests US-based Andrew Taggart, who consults for organisations in Silicon Valley on how to use philosophy in a practical context.

“Doing philosophy as a way of life is inherently challenging and can, at times, be deeply puzzling,” he says. “I see it as my responsibility to push you to think harder and much more clearly about yourself and the world.”

In the midst of business pressures, are you someone who will pursue the truth, even if it means discovering painful things about yourself? A tough question, especially when shareholders and HMRC are banging on the door for your quarterly accounts.

Short-term financial accounting requirements, are, says Steare, one of the underlying problems facing leaders who wish to be ethical, because what benefits people and the planet in the long term is not usually going to be what’s required to turn a profit in the short term.

Bringing a philosopher on board is not for the faint-hearted: the practical application of philosophical thinking, Taggart explains, demands that business leaders interrogate the role played by their product or service in the global scheme of things, “not only to see whether something makes sense in the marketplace, but also to see whether its existence is actually justified”.

Practical philosophers tend to be employed as consultants at the moment, and it’s still quite niche, but Marinoff says he would love to see corporates employ their own in-house “chief philosophy officer”, or “philosopher in residence”.

“We’re not that expensive compared to other professionals,” he laughs. “There are composers in residence, poets in residence and artists in residence – why not a philosopher in residence?”