Philosophers, when they give up the halls of academia and go live in the everyday world, might start irking very focus-oriented people, like businessmen, with basic questions. Take, for example, the philosopher Yisrael Sorek, a former dean of fellows at the Mandel Leadership Institute and a university lecturer, who five years ago established the B'Mahshava T'hila (Think First) institute for applied philosophy.
He and his colleagues provide philosophical consulting for people, public institutions and organizations, such as the Israel Prisons Service and the education system. A few months ago, they decided to move into a new field and help businesses deal with ethical dilemmas. This decision was preceded by Sorek's habit of approaching businessmen and asking them to think about the ethical logic in measuring a business's success exclusively based on profit.
"'Earn less,' I told whomever agreed to listen me," recalls Sorek. "I said: 'Win, win' doesn't work. It's not that if you pay more to the cleaners and the guards and reduce the wage gaps, then the company will be perceived as fairer - maybe you'll lose money, but you'll know that you're fair.' Then they told me, 'Okay, we'll hear you out; let's have a coffee. We won't pay you for such an idea.'"
Sorek says such reactions discouraged him for a long time and even made members of the institute question whether "it is even possible to challenge basic tenets in the business world," and to ask, "who'd pay for such a service?"
This service, according to Sorek, includes picking apart cliches "that protect individuals and organizations, and in the end, obscure, create dogma, narrow-mindedness and a lack of passion and interest."
He adds, "The story of philosophy as creating passion is close to our hearts. Kibbutznikim worked during the day and argued at night. Where did they get the strength for that? Because they really were striving to understand, and in our opinion, something of this passion has been lost. The passion for money and consumer products somewhat silenced other, no less human, passions: the passion for meaning, for truth, for learning and for challenges."
The conscience cleanser
Sorek grew up in Ramat Aviv and studied at the "industrial alliance, where they directed people to study something that would bring in money, lots of it." For him, philosophy was a form of rebellion. "My father had his own accounting firm," he says, "and he told me, 'when you sober up, there's an office waiting for you.'" Sorek, who says he is a "doctoral refusenik" because he's been working on his doctorate for more than 10 years, in the end set up the institute in the office his father prepared for him in his own Ramat Aviv home.
In the pinkish room, furnished with tattered and comfortable couches, he lectures enthusiastically on the principles of his faith and occasionally opens a book, for example, "The Prince" by Machiavelli, and reads a sentence that emphasizes what he has been saying. He has another tiny office in Jerusalem, and there, as befits a true philosopher, who is meant to think for no specific purpose, the wall clock has stopped at 2:05. Along with his colleagues at the institute, including Gadi Prodovsky, a doctor of philosophy who was one of the founders of Alma College in Tel Aviv, and Ran Shehori, a former member of the security forces, he is a firm believer in the power of philosophy to create a meaningful ethical dialogue, even in the business world.
Prodovsky, for example, says you can find many "philosophical scandals" in the business world. One of the most notable is employee empowerment. "The employer's rationale is that the employees become more efficient if they feel they are being respected," he says. But this is a serious flaw in understanding the concept of respect.
"The concept of respect is not dependent on anything," he says. "To make someone feel satisfied in order to obtain something else is one of the clearest examples of a disrespectful attitude, because it contains something untransparent and nonreciprocal."
Prodovsky is planning to set up an "ethical hotline" for the institute's clients. "An employer can give every employee an ID number and an e-mail address to inquire about issues of ethics and professional identity. Employees will not be required to report this to superiors, because the communication will be confidential. An employee's query can also end in a meeting and philosophical work."
Sorek says some of the institute members think appealing to businessmen is naive. "They are not against the ideological objective, but they don't want us to be a conscience cleanser for a four-day and X-shekel investment," he says.
An ethical code is an evasion
How can philosophical debate help companies?
"We offer workshops and forums for businesspeople. These mediums each foster a different message challenging a worldview, if it really exists. We attribute great importance to grasping a worldview: the good and the bad, the permissible and the forbidden. The absence of compasses creates indifference to and an inability to listen to suffering. If everything depends on perspective and every behavior can be justified, there is no meaning to truth, justice, what is right and what is appropriate, to the statement that fair people don't do something."
"After we looked into whether there is a worldview, we wanted to offer a non-dogmatic worldview, to challenge the main principles at a given firm. Take, for example, an organization that refers to itself as a family. That's a falsehood and a smokescreen, because in a family (so I hope), if someone isn't helpful, we don't exile him. We say, if you want to use the concept of family, take it seriously, and see what it means.
"Other examples of cliches include professional concepts - streamlining, competition, service, quality. We build dialogues in workshops on these concepts. If it turns out that there is more than one legitimate meaning, a decision is needed. For example, the term streamlining. Is its only meaning to generate a greater yield and invest less in resources? Or is there another possible meaning, of building more stable links to the organization? Does efficiency refer only to profit, or is it survival or stability over time, or perhaps a meaning the organization created for day-to-day practices? We try to understand possible meanings for every concept, even if it comes from standard conversation."
What philosophy guides you?
"The philosopher we relate to in order to reestablish a continuum between good and bad is Aristotle; Aristotle, with the great optimism that lies in his ethics, assumes that everything can be learned; even personal characteristics and habits. He says that good is the habit of doing good. It's not an abstract concept. Anyone who does a single courageous act is not courageous; courage means the habit of being courageous, the optimism that almost borders on naivete, which can challenge individuals. From this point, it is possible to talk about organizations."
Why would someone want to enter a dialogue that undermines his basic assumptions?
"We think that people need meaning and don't believe that people only want to earn money and have fun. Are humans curious enough and courageous enough to test basic assumptions? Not always, but if we create a place that enables this to happen, it will happen."
"In the case of dialogue about ethical questions, our success is not connected to the audience being satisfied. On the contrary, we have to ask questions and create a shakeup and existential shock. We say that the test of success is when they leave troubled, and don't sleep well at night. If we don't manage to create moods of distress and tension, we haven't succeeded in connecting philosophy and experience."
What is the difference between you and companies that offer to build an ethical code for business organizations?
"In our view, 'an ethical code' is an elegant and trendy evasion for ethical dilemmas. In addition to an ethical code, you need ethical forums that constantly discuss dilemmas in the organization's everyday operations. We are concerned about the slogans in ethical codes (such as striving for excellence, quality, reliability). Instead of the ethical code being a living platform for organizational identity and for deepening the relation between speech and action, what happens in practice is the opposite."
And what's the difference between you and what organizational psychology can offer?
"Its mandate is to expose conscious and unconscious organizational ailments. To identify a problem and then based on a standard and an ideal, try to resolve it. We want to question what is perceived as the standard and the desired. Nevertheless, the diagnostic tool and the solution can be identical to ours, if they are interested in investigating the organizational language."
According to Sorek, entering the business world entails a financial gamble, but "if we prove our hypothesis, that people are yearning for meaning, we won't lose." At the moment, in any event, one company that is not interested in being divulged has already taken upon itself to investigate its basic assumptions in the hope of creating a stronger ethical basis.
