The Hero's Journey

What’s a Business For?

Integrity and virtue are incredibly important to an economy because without them, there will be a lack of trust.  When participants in an economy cannot rely on the words and actions of others, the system breaks down.  People will be unwilling to engage in commerce with each other.  The fraud of the recent years (Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, etc.) has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, and the root cause of these cases was a lack of integrity and virtue.  People in positions of power abused the trust they had been given in an effort to obtain short-term profits—all at the expense of long-term viability and their own spiritual welfare.

According to Charles Handy, the purpose of a business is not to make a profit.  It is to make a profit in order to be able to do something more or better.  In other words, the wealth generated by a company is simply a means to doing great things for others; it is not the end in and of itself.  This greater good, this noble purpose, is the real justification for the existence of businesses.

Handy recommends greater honesty in the reporting of financial results as well as a reduction in weighting of stock options in the compensation packages of executives.  I definitely agree with his first suggestion; I believe that the only reliable and usable financial information is that which is transparent and honest.  Financial information which is not this way is essentially a fabrication and inherently useless.  As for the second suggestion, I’m not sure how I feel about it.  I can see the point that he is making, but I’m not sure it makes sense, on the other hand, to not provide performance-based incentives to people who are responsible for the financial performance of their companies.  However, there needs to be a way to ensure that the decisions they make are in the long-term interest of the company.  I would suggest that the options simply vest over a longer period of time—some vest right away, and some vest in twenty years, with a percentage of the options vesting throughout this time, so that the executives so compensated are getting financial rewards that are appropriate for long-term planning.

Reflection on Lessons Learned This Week

The biggest source of learning for me this week was the time I spent reading The Hero’s Journey.  I thought that this book was a monumentally helpful piece of literature, and I really enjoyed the way it was structured.  I liked getting little snippets of larger texts, poems, and scriptures in the context of what I should be looking to learn from them.  This format is easily digestible and it’s easy to pick it up and put it down as needed, all whilst learning nuggets of knowledge along the way.  I think that the thing that I learned from this book that was most meaningful to me was learning how to overcome the Giant of Despair when I am faced with serious adversity in my pursuit of a great goal.  Struggles and challenges will inevitably come as I try to do great things.  I have to steel my resolve and dive right into the tasks in front of me.  It is better to face my challenges head on and trust that God’s plan for me will work out if I am in motion.