The Meaning of our Journey

I suppose the great message or takeaway from this week's assignments was: there is more to life than making money. This might sound trite, but it actually means more than that. It really comes down to a simple question---"Why?" Why are we staring a business? Why are we making money?

A simple, yet still true, answer would be "to feed my family". And while that is one of the primary reasons we work at all, it is certainly not the only one, or in the case of business, the most crucial one. Because the fact is, doing work "digging ditches" could also earn money and feed one's family. The real question is: "Why start a business?" The answer must, of course, be deeper than "To make money."

Much of the material we went over had to do with answering this question, and the answer seemed to be that a business or freelancer must have a goal or a purpose. For me personally, I feel like my desire to tell stories through word and image puts me in a good position to create wholesome media that is also entertaining. I love certain types of fantasy and sci-fi stories, but more often than it should be, that media contains some elements that are less than wholesome. And thus the reasoning behind my hope of creating entertaining, wholesome media.

This question is one that seems to have become a major issue for larger businesses today. An article by Charles Handy titled “What’s a Business For?” explores the degradation and loss of real purpose in modern companies.

He says, “The purpose of a business, in other words, is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make a profit so that the business can do something more or better. That ‘something’ becomes the real justification for the business.”

When a company has a purpose beyond making money, such as Facebook’s early mission (as related by Sheryl Sandberg in a presentation to Stanford students in 2009), which was to make available the “information that matters to you”—that is, information about your friends and associates whom you care about. This kind of “higher purpose” provides the energy in a company to rise above the base goal of making money.

It is when companies (and individuals, for that matter) lose sight of this goal, and focus only on making money, that corruption and far too fluid morals begin to creep in.

In his article, Handy describes the loss of public faith in the average company: “A Gallup poll conducted early this year found that 90% of Americans felt that people running corporations could not be trusted to look after the interests of their employees, and only 18% thought that corporations looked after their shareholders a great deal. Forty-three percent, in fact, believed that senior executives were only in it for themselves.”  

One thing that Handy describes as helping in these issues would be changing the self-identity to fit that of a money-making community, with the employees informed and included as much as is reasonable in the performance and finances of the company as a whole. This, one would hope, would help the whole company gain a community-like feel, and employees would be more invested in the good performance of the company as a whole, and their department in particular.