What is customary is right, what is normal is fair, do we have to fear what is different?
These were the questions that Alejandro Moreno Salamanca posed to us at the end of his talk, discussion paper, last Wednesday at IESE in Madrid. And there was no better way to open a workshop on "Innovation from the corporate purpose " than by meditating on the vital purpose of people: to be happy.
It is in the way to reach this state, where we human beings are often mistaken. We conceive happiness as the ultimate goal only attainable through the absence of effort (product of relating work, difficulty and sacrifice with certain misfortune), when in fact it is the opposite, happiness is a consequence of working and persevering in what we believe in.
Thus, Alexander provided us with two valuable levers to approach purpose:
-To ask ourselves more fundamental questions. And for this we have to deal with two great dangers: relativism and populism. The former starts from an absolute to deny everything absolute, which leads us to renounce our certainties instead of questioning them, preventing us from reflecting on what is right; the latter leads us to oversimplify, making it difficult for us to understand nuances and causing us to provide superficial solutions to fundamental questions.
-Validating (and wanting) difference. And do it as resource for the development staff , authenticity and the search for a meaningful life.
Both ideas are more useful than ever in the context in which we live, where business has become the most important social institution, due to the number of hours we spend at work or interacting with people from that sphere.
As a consequence, society demands organizations with purpose, which promote a free market where the person is placed at the center. Thus, it is no coincidence that the three fundamental characteristics that make a good leader are: respect for dignity, the human attention and genuine love (wanting the good of others).
Only on the basis of these premises can business be conceived as what it really is: "A community of persons, a school of virtues".
Therefore, if we pay attention to the notions on which Alejandro wanted to focus his intervention, work and human capital, and we understand that we are moving towards a humanist free market, which inevitably involves ordering society in order to make it fairer, we will understand that in order to work in companies with purpose we must live life with purpose.
