Excerpt:  Strategy and Philosophy, part one

Philosophy.  The love of wisdom.  I mean, what strategist doesn’t love wisdom?  What strategist isn’t, in some form or another, a philosopher?  Most of us don’t point at a company or an organisation or a community and say that they have a unique philosophy.  We might say they have a mission, or a vision, or a set of values that guide their decision-making and strategy.  And yet.

Every company, every organisation, and every community was founded by and continues to be led by individuals who learned, some more, some less, about philosophy.  They have built a world of ideas around what they’ve learned and their explicit and implicit decision-making is influenced greatly by this world.  Suffice it to say, we could devote this entire book to the study of strategy and philosophy.  Instead, we will highlight a series of interesting insights into strategy from the field, encompassing major concepts such as consciousness and understanding, free will, morality and ethics, happiness, trust and justice, and value.  We’ll get our hands dirty by looking in more detail at a few specialised topics such as dialectics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and utilitarianism.  And, in the spirit of comparative philosophy, we’ll examine a couple of the most well-known ancient philosophers (Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), rounding it all out with the purpose of philosophy.

But, before we do all that, we can’t escape the same fundamental problem we discussed at the heart of science, the problem of measurement.  That the act of measuring, the act of observing, introduces subjectivity to what we intend to be an objective intellectual exercise.  And when we are talking about consciousness, being, and what it means to be alive (which all philosophers have to address at some point in their careers), it is impossible to achieve true objectivity.  This is the dilemma of the philosopher - how to know something with complete certainty when you are the “being”.

Therefore, one thread throughout this chapter will be to ask, “What strategies have philosophers used to deal with subjectivity?”  Can these strategies be used elsewhere - in quantum measurement, for example?  Or, in recommending ways to become happier?...