The Philosophy of Business
On The Critical Relevance of Better Philosophy to Good Business
This post positions disruption as the new normal and challenges the idea that ‘business’ can continue operating without radical reorientation. It argues that business has become the dominant force shaping society, and without integrated wisdom, it will be unable to respond meaningfully or survive what is coming. The core argument is that philosophy, more than decisive leadership or performance alone, will determine whether business accelerates a collapse or becomes a vehicle for coherent, adaptive response.
This post and all my work are committed to a cause that exposes and denounces the indiscriminate use of AI. #LetsRaiseTheStandard
Why should anyone wonder about the Philosophy of Business? Why should businesses care about Philosophy?
There are two monolithically unignorable reasons.
The first is that everything operates like a business in one way or another. From the Hospitals we are born in and prenatal industries that support that most fundamental of human necessities, to funeral homes, cemeteries and life insurance industries that we associate with the other bookend of life and everything between, it all runs on the operating system of business. The logic and context of business has become the dominant operating model of our age.
Secondly, if there is any arena with the structural capacity, reach, and resources to influence how we organise ourselves as a society, how we respond to change, and how we navigate crises, it is business. Business holds the infrastructure, the distribution channels, and the cultural influence to either accelerate collapse or steward transformation.
The other reason worth including is that our present reality is one best defined by the word ‘disruption’. We are facing a polycrisis. From my earlier essay titled Polycrisis and Metacrisis:
A Polycrisis is when lots of things are going wrong, in such a way that overwhelms the normal ways we have of dealing with each problem individually and also compounds to render the impact of each individual problem worse or at least harder to address, or both.
On the world stage, our polycrisis includes our mental health crisis, our housing crisis, our economic crisis, the geopolitical crisis, our climate crisis, our technofeudal crisis and our AI explosion crisis.
Global war is imminent, the economy is critically unstable, and AI is set to change the reality of business, including employment. Disruption is now the norm we must expect.
Not only are things going to change at a pace we are not prepared for, but they are going to occur simultaneously and at a scale that we do not have the ability to process in traditional ways.
Until recently, disruption was a word that was usually net positive. In the age of the tech startup, disruption took on an exciting connotation, whereby perhaps a sector of an industry was negatively affected or outcompeted, but the market as a whole would benefit from some new trend or technology. Similarly, sometimes an entire market might be disrupted, or disappear altogether, such as when lead was removed from petroleum, and aside from the group affected the rest of the world counted that as net positive.
The type of disruption we are facing now is nothing so negligible.
We have reached an inflection point where the technological advancements alone and the rate of change they are driving, and the scale of the impact, are converging. Consider the escalation of any of the other mounting crises, and the compounding effect of their convergence, and we have a serious existential concern on our hands.
The inevitable repercussions of this convergence can only overwhelm our existing playbook of responses, meaning our social order and the global market cannot survive in their current configuration.
How can we survive much let alone flourish, as they continue to destabilise further?
For the most part, business as a collective is still waking up to this understanding.
We do not have the core competencies, the necessary protocols or the leadership experience to respond to any of this. We don’t even have the language to have the necessary conversations in.
“Our language itself is too small for the territory we have already entered.”
That said, for better or worse, business is the leading modality of human enterprise where abstract ideals can meet material consequence.
Let us consider some facts:
Fact 1: Every other way, besides business itself, that human beings have of organising themselves and responding to change, including governments and their militaries, science, politics and religion, all run as businesses. Business is the fundamental operating model of our modern world.
Fact 2: Our largest executive social operating models are national governments. Our mounting crises are such that they transcend the bounds of what governments can respond to. Further to that, national governments are proving to be too cumbersome to respond effectively or efficiently to change. They are varied combinations of outdated, corrupt and bureaucratic, gridlocked by politics, and increasingly mistrusted by their citizens. The culture and conventions of governments and politics produce more rulers than they do leaders.
Fact 3: Given the realities of our modern world, the only way that human beings organise themselves that can respond adequately to the scale and rate of change implied by a polycrisis is business.
Fact 4: Never in the history of mankind has business been more empowered than it is now, and never has true leadership been more critical.
The Role of the Civic Philosopher
In Ancient Greece, the civic philosopher was a profession to the welfare and actualisation of the city-state. The Civic Philosopher was nothing like the confused expressions of the same name that people call themselves today.
Among the people who consider themselves philosophers today are armchair enthusiasts who read Marcus Aurelius, pedantic scholars who argue over Hegel and Kant, and Instagram influencers who endlessly recycle quotes from anyone dead who ever uttered anything witty or wise.
There is nothing inherently wrong about any of these pursuits. Ideally, we do not want to begrudge anyone their interests and Instagram proclivities, but the distinction still needs to be made. Because relative to the profession of Philosopher and the role I am referring to, these projects are not only relatively small and pedantic, but more so because they cloud the field for everyone else. They obscure the public understanding of what Philosophy is for, and in doing so, they diminish the seriousness and relevance of the philosophical project.
The Civic philosopher, in the days of ancient Greece, was the one who would engage directly with the affairs of the polis, applying reason and discernment to public life, governance, and the cultivation of virtue within the community.
Polis is the ancient Greek term for a city-state—a self-governing urban centre and its surrounding territory that functioned as the fundamental political, social, and cultural unit of Greek life. The polis was more than just a city; it was a structured community with its own laws, institutions, economy, and identity, where citizens actively participated in governance and public affairs.
These city-states are not unlike modern organisations. They collaborated with others toward shared interests, yet also competed for prestige, dominance, and survival. Some of that competition was economic or symbolic, namely bragging rights, status, reputation and cultural leadership, but some of it was downright existential.
Each city-state defined its own vision of success and excellence, its own sense of ethics, civic duty, its own legacy, and its own philosophical commitments. How well it applied wisdom in reading and adapting to the emergent reality, how well it assessed and responded to opportunities and risks, was critical to the success and legacy it actually achieved. This was not only confined to the wisdom about how opportunities and risks should be perceived, or responded to in order to optimise said success or excellence, but just as critically, about what should constitute success and excellence in the first place.
In modern business, this is a dispersed function distributed among senior executives and shareholders, thought leaders and consultants. The obvious problem is that incumbent members of leadership are not necessarily good thought leaders for every kind of risk or opportunity. Good thought leaders are not necessarily aware of the relevant business context, and consultants, due to their incentive structure, are often optimised for short-term deliverables, trend adoption, or the sale of pre-packaged solutions rather than long-range coherence, cultural integration, or systemic wisdom.
In modern business, the function once held by the Civic Philosopher has become fragmented, dispersed across executives, advisors, consultants, and commentators. But this dispersion creates a vacuum of integrative thinking. Senior leaders are embedded in operational pressures and power dynamics that often limit their perspective. Thought leaders may offer insight, but rarely bear consequence for the outcomes of their ideas. Consultants provide expertise, but their value is measured by billing cycles, not by enduring alignment or legacy.
What is missing is a role that is adjacent to power but not beholden to it. A role that is structurally positioned to ask better questions, steward organisational meaning, and safeguard coherence across timescales and domains. In other words, what is missing is the Civic Philosopher.
To pick up the example of the Greek city-states again, such considerations mattered most in periods of extreme disruption. In times of pestilence, war, famine and other existential threats, how the city-state organised itself, responded to crisis, took care of its young and its old, its rich and its poor mattered. The efficiency and decisiveness of their decision-making directly determined how rapidly they could respond to a crisis.
The quality of that decision-making was another matter. This is where philosophy came in. Speed and decisiveness have their merits, but neither is a substitute for wisdom.
Just like modern organisations, not everything was down to executive decision-making and optimisation of productivity. Those things are always critical, but so much of the welfare and competitive advantage had more to do with the mindset and practices of the people and the way the decision makers and the populace were integrated and aligned to a common cause and an authentic common identity.
Civic philosophers were therefore highly regarded and gainfully employed. Their work was patronised in the best possible meaning of the word. The civic philosopher was the one who sat a degree apart from the hustle and granularity of everyday life. They critically observed the people, their leaders and the ways they organised themselves.
Rather than retreating into purely theoretical speculation, the civic philosopher would participate in dialogue, debate, and practical action, seeking to align individual and collective conduct with principles of justice, prudence, and the common good. This was a vocation that required a very specific sense of calling and an application of craft.
In times of disruption, nothing could be more relevant to good business than better philosophy.
A Call to Wisdom
To share even part of this intuition, about the scale of disruption we are facing, the structural failure of our institutions, and the unique positioning of business to respond, is to appreciate what is at stake.
As the kind of philosopher I have referred to throughout this piece, it is my civic duty to state that the only businesses that are going to survive the disruption and possibly thrive are the ones that recognise the sense of civic responsibility and the necessity of philosophy to business.
Business is no longer just one sector of a well-oiled society. It is the only dominant organising framework for how we leverage power, resources and vision and unarguably, therefore, the only force in society that can affect meaningful coherence and societal change.
We are so far past the point where we can afford to continue regarding profit separate from consequence, leadership from philosophy, or strategy from ethics. The failure to integrate these domains is already compounding into systemic collapse. It is precisely a lack of wisdom in market-leading companies that are prioritising vestigial metrics of success and excellence over critical human and environmental consequences, that is accelerating the disruption which is threatening to crash the entire system around us.
This is not a question of whether business can lead. It already is leading, just not with great foresight and wisdom. The only real question is whether it can lead well. And for that, it needs more than capital, efficiency, or innovation. It needs better philosophy.
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