The Business Romantic

Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself

Tim Leberecht

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780062302519
• eBook ISBN: 9780062302526
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: History

 In this smart, playful, and provocative book, one of today’s most original business thinkers argues that we underestimate the importance of romance in our lives and that we can find it in and through business—by designing products, services, and experiences that connect us with something greater than ourselves.

Against the backdrop of eroding trust in capitalism, pervasive technology, big data, and the desire to quantify all of our behaviors, The Business Romantic makes a compelling case that we must meld the pursuit of success and achievement with romance if we want to create an economy that serves our entire selves.

A rising star in data analytics who is in love with the intrinsic beauty of spreadsheets; the mastermind behind a brand built on absence; an Argentinian couple who revolutionize shoelaces; the founder of a foodie-oriented start-up that creates intimate conversation spaces; a performance artist who offers fake corporate seminars for real professionals—these are some of the innovators readers will meet in this witty, deeply personal, and rousing ramble through the world of Business Romanticism.

The Business Romantic not only provides surprising insights into the emotional and social aspects of business but also presents “Rules of Enchantment” that will help both individuals and organizations construct more meaningful experiences for themselves and others.

The Business Romantic offers a radically different view of the good life and outlines how to better meet one’s own desires as well as those of customers, employees, and society. It encourages readers to expect more from companies, to give more of themselves, and to fall back in love with their work and their lives.  

PART ONE

Kindling

CHAPTER 1

The New Desire for Romance

MARKET SOCIETY IN CONFUSION

According to a 2013 Gallup poll conducted in 140 countries, only 13 percent of employees worldwide are fully involved in and enthusiastic about their jobs. Sixty-three percent are “not engaged” and “lack motivation.” About 24 percent are “actively disengaged,” meaning “they are unhappy and unproductive at work, and liable to spread negativity to coworkers.”¹

Things look even more grim for leadership in business: Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer reveals that academics, technical experts, and members of midlevel management are nearly twice as trusted as chief executives.² In its Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014, a survey of more than 1,500 leaders from the public and private sectors, the World Economic Forum identified “a lack of values in leadership,” “diminishing confidence in economic policies,” and “widening income disparities” as three major trends affecting societies worldwide.³

In the same vein, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that social inequality in most industrialized nations has grown significantly since the global economic crisis broke out in 2008, with the wealthiest 10 percent of the population increasing their wealth 9.5 times as much as the poorest 10 percent in 2010.⁴ In his much discussed book, Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty contends that we have regressed to a “patrimonial capitalism” that resembles nineteenth-century levels of wealth distribution, concentrated among family dynasties.⁵ In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped us frame the growing income gap as the difference between the 99 and 1 percent. But research shows that this relationship is even more tilted toward the super-rich, the 0.1 percent. While the top 1 percent of American households take in about 22 percent of income (including capital gains), 0.1 percent of households own one-fifth of the country’s wealth.⁶ A 2013 report by the Aspen Institute concludes we may be shifting to a “Power-Curve Society” in which prosperity no longer follows a bell-curve distribution but instead accumulates at the top strata of winner-take-all societies.⁷

The innovations of the digital economy accentuate this trend. It is not only the future that is unevenly distributed, to paraphrase William Gibson’s famous quote—so is the creation of value. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2013, it paid a price equal to $345 million for each of the fifty-five employees.⁸ In his book Who Owns the Future? Jaron Lanier points to the implications for the workforce: “Kodak employed 140,000 people, Instagram 13.”⁹ We have entered a binary age, where software not only “eats the world,” as Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed,¹⁰ but apparently also the middle class. Every day brings another newspaper report on social inequality, whether it is the disappearance of the market for middle-class consumer goods¹¹ or President Obama calling income disparity the “defining challenge of our time.”¹² Wall Street has taken note: although investment bankers still receive exorbitant bonuses, they have lost much of their masters-of-the-universe appeal. In fact, the current environment has brought forth entirely new types of Wall Street characters. Suddenly the media is rife with confessionals such as “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”¹³ and stories of former financiers seeking redemption for money addiction by working in the not-for-profit world.¹⁴

But we don’t need the media to show us what is right in front of our faces every day. The most powerful proof of confusion and disenchantment is the mood of the culture all around us: on the streets, in our subways, at our universities and schools, and in our very own offices. We survived the financial crisis, and we’ve now landed in the brave new world of the current recovery: between ever-changing arguments about quantitative easing, the slowing of growth in China, and the emergence of possible technology and real-estate bubbles, is it any wonder that we have a sense of whiplash about traditional business and economic models? Many of us feel that we are giving more and more for less and less in return. We are working longer hours (in fact, Americans work approximately eight weeks longer per year than in 1969, but for roughly the same, inflation-adjusted income¹⁵), accumulating greater debt, and watching middle-class promises such as home ownership and a solid education for our children erode. Millennials, the age group between eighteen and thirty-three, have higher levels of student loan debt, unemployment, and poverty, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles.¹⁶ For the first time on record, a generation is economically regressing, rather than progressing.

In Silicon Valley—a culture indoctrinated in the edicts of tech-optimism—new forms of social technology promise to close the gaps left by diminished governments, civic structures, and media organizations still struggling to find their bearings in the wake of the 2008 crisis. But do we really think software companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and all of their younger offspring can address our most important social and ethical questions? A growing cadre of cultural commentators and philosophers is voicing concerns about supplanting the responsibilities of citizenship with a myopic belief in technology. Evgeny Morozov, one of the most prolific and sharp-tongued in this group of critics, scoffs at such “solutionism,” describing it as “an intellectual pathology” that recognizes problems “based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.”¹⁷

Moreover, the speed of technological advances is outpacing our institutions and moral capacities. We live in an age where we make science-fiction movies to catch up with reality. On any given day, we need to develop cogent opinions on developments ranging from surveillance—by both companies and our own government—to cyberwarfare, bioterrorism, genetic engineering, and political uprisings amplified by tools of social media. And that’s just the morning news! Before we can fully process the pace of change, much less develop a moral and ethical perspective on it, innovations on the cusp of science and technology have already begun to transform us as individuals and as societies.

As these technological innovations create economic disruptions, they also destabilize our value systems. Pope Francis, Time’s “Person of the Year 2013,” lashed out against the “tyranny of unfettered capitalism,” denouncing “trickle-down” economic policies, financial greed, and consumerism. The head of the Catholic Church made it clear that we are in grave danger of losing our moorings, bowing only before the gods of money.¹⁸ A business mindset has infiltrated the most private aspects of our lives, bit by bit, tit for tat. We out-schedule each other to assure ourselves of our success, and the only ecstasy we can still find lies in a state of constant overwhelm.¹⁹

Even our friendships are starting to suffer. A group called Lifeboat, which describes itself as a movement “celebrating deep friendships,” recently conducted a full-scale study on the state of friendship in the United States.²⁰ The report was the first of its kind, and its results were sobering. Only a quarter of adults are truly satisfied with their friendships. Despite the rise of social networking sites and increasing opportunities to connect online, most Americans told Lifeboat that they would rather have fewer, more meaningful connections than a greater quantity of friends. According to the study, friendship in the United States is in a state of “crisis.”

This sense of isolation is playing out like a house of mirrors against our developing digital landscapes. Facebook and other social media tools were designed to make us feel more connected, but our current anxieties of income inequality and work dissatisfaction are only amplified in the digital commons. There is always someone else in our network having more fun, making more money, or getting more psychic value out of those connections. Millennials retreat to individualism and a growing detachment from institutions such as religion, marriage, or political parties. A 2014 Pew survey²¹ showed that the social capital of these “digital natives” is mainly generated through social media networks. The need for self-expression and connection is high (55 percent of Millennials have posted a “selfie” online), but trust in others is low: just 19 percent of them say most people can be trusted, compared with 31 percent of Gen Xers and 40 percent of Boomers.

Against this backdrop of confusion and insecurity, Millennials are looking for a greater sense of meaning and community through work. But they are not the only ones. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, the economist Jeffrey Sachs coined this moment in time—following the overleveraged glut of our most recent Gilded Age—“New Progressivism.”²² As a result of these shifts in the zeitgeist, alternative forms of doing business are popping up everywhere. Companies are getting certified as “B Corps,” for-profit corporations with a mandate to solve social and environmental problems;²³ nonprofit organizations such as Ashoka are teaming up with Fortune 500 corporations to promote Corporate Change Makers;²⁴ the Maker Movement is finding its greatest source of institutional support from the big-box stores;²⁵ capitalist visionaries such as Sir Richard Branson and the former CEO of sportswear maker Puma, Jochen Zeitz, are launching the B Team, a coalition aiming to connect business leaders in delivering on social and environmental goals;²⁶ Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey is evangelizing the idea of “Conscious Capitalism;”²⁷ and journalist and consultant Tony Schwartz’s Energy Project is promoting more purposeful employee engagement based on the concept of an individual’s “energy.”²⁸

What is happening?

In 2001, Aaron Hurst, a serial social innovator who started his first venture at the University of Michigan at the ripe old age of sixteen, founded the Taproot Foundation. The idea was simple but revolutionary for its time: linking business professionals with opportunities to do pro bono work. During his many years with Taproot, Hurst received more than twenty-five thousand letters written from business practitioners all over the world. They all described to him what they hoped to gain from a pro bono experience. Why in the world would otherwise successful business professionals seek out opportunities to give away their time for free?

Of course, if we posed such a question within a civic or religious sphere, it would sound absurd. Service to others and a desire for deeper connections are in the very DNA of these domains. In business, however, we are taught to think of ourselves as machines: agents of optimization, efficiency, and productivity. Hurst, on the other hand, identified four distinctly human drivers behind the strong demand for pro bono opportunities: (1) meeting new people; (2) craft building; (3) finding problems worth solving; and (4) connecting with people in the community.

He went on to shape his argument into a book and platform he calls The Purpose Economy²⁹ and subsequently merged with social design firm Imperative to promote “purposeful business.” The Purpose Economy, Hurst argues, is the next paradigm after the decline of the Information Economy. Purpose, in his words, is “empowering people to have rich and fulfilling careers and lives by creating meaningful value for themselves and others.” This may seem like a radical transition—moving away from information into something even more vague and, arguably, more esoteric—but Hurst is certain that purpose will be the major driver for the next generation.

His ideas, of course, are indebted to the management guru Peter Drucker, who, decades ago, established the concept of “purpose-driven business,” arguing that companies needed a raison d’être, a higher mission, to outlast the competition. But the ideas are also completely of the moment.³⁰ Shifts in demographics—more women in the workplace, more immigrants, and, most important of all, the presence of Millennials, which will represent 50 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2020³¹—are creating a more progressive labor force. As Hurst said, “Gen X has always been invested in social values, but, for Gen Y, it is an imperative.”

Michael Norton, a professor of management at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of the book Happy Money,³² told me: “The job of human resources used to be bonuses and raises, hiring and firing and selecting new employees. Today, human resources has been tasked with ‘wellness’ or ‘How do we make our employees happier?’ People are happy with more money, but it’s less clear that hard economic incentives are really the way to go.”

Norton and his colleagues are currently working out experiments that investigate some of these alternative incentives. In one of the experiments, employees at an Australian bank, given an opportunity to donate money to a charity, reported significantly more satisfaction and happiness at work. In another experiment, employees at a pharmaceutical firm in Belgium performed better a...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: The Flame
• Part I: Kindling
• Part II: Rules of Enchantment
• Part III: Into the Fire
• Appendix: The Business Romantic Starter Kit
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher