NEWS & UPDATES

January 17, 2008 In By Advent

Aristotelean Business Sense

I recently exam­ined a case study of a map-producing com­pany that thought it was in the map busi­ness.  Sounds rea­son­able, right?  Rea­son­able, yes, but in real­ity it was a case of mis­taken iden­tity. Let′s try to fig­ure out what busi­ness they were actu­ally in.  

Artis­to­tle, the rock star of the philo­soph­i­cal ancient world, can help shed some light on this mod­ern prob­lem.  Let me para­phrase a pas­sage from the dusty pages of his Nico­machean Ethics: 

Every action or art is aimed at some good.  Most actions achieve an end which is sub­or­di­nate to a higher end.  It is only the high­est ends that are ends in them­selves.  For exam­ple, the art of bridle-making falls under the art of rid­ing; the art of rid­ing as a mil­i­tary action under that of strat­egy.  Strat­egy, in turn would be pur­sued for the sake of vic­tory and the process con­tin­ues.  In this, and in all cases the higher good is pre­ferred to the sub­or­di­nate end.

Erro­neously, the map­mak­ers toiled under the assump­tion that their maps were the end goal when, in fact, nobody buys a map to have a map.  Peo­ple buy maps because they want to get some­where.  Help­ing peo­ple get places; that was their real busi­ness.  With the advent of GPS nav­i­ga­tion tech­nol­ogy and inter­net sites such as Mapquest, sales plum­meted and the com­pany floun­dered.  By not under­stand­ing the nature of their busi­ness, it was the map com­pany that ended up lost and search­ing for direc­tion.  

Whether you are sell­ing maps, bri­dles, or wid­gets, it is vital to remem­ber that unless you are sell­ing indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged boxes of pure hap­pi­ness, then your prod­uct is not an end in itself but rather a means to some­thing else.  Just think how help­ful Aristotle′s insights must have been to clas­si­cal bri­dle mak­ers as they sought to map out engag­ing mar­ket­ing strate­gies directed at ancient eques­tri­ans!  In all seri­ous­ness, for­get the sub­or­di­nate ends and try to deter­mine the higher good that you are help­ing your cus­tomers to achieve.  That is the busi­ness you are in.

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