What does your business say about you?

Is it who you are? (Republished from 2018) (still good.)

…Commercial enterprises are curious things, they can be very personal to the founder and creator. Look at Elon Musk and his crazy enterprises, SpaceX and Tesla, moonshots and world changers. A bit manic, but clearly an expression of himself.

Look at Facebook, a strangely disfunctional system, a robot trying to be human, exploitative without meaning to be, discordant with humanity whilst trying to be part of it. Is that you, Mark?

Our businesses are expressions of ourselves. Be they one man bands, small enterprises, or tech giants. Apple was built by Steve Jobs converting his belief system and principles into a commercial and design ideology.

This is, if you like, the art of business, the giving of it soul. Permitting the personal, the individual, the true and the good, the humanity and even the divinity of the person, or people, at the core of it, to describe the form and shape and function of the enterprise. Thus the business becomes the externalised expression of the artist. Using commerce as the paint and clay, the artist builds a business not simply to ‘make money’ , but to serve a function of his or her own intent. The aim then, is what? What is the function of the business? How is this an expression of the purpose of the founder? What is it the business is really doing?

Photo by Jonathan Meyer on Unsplash