Principled entrepreneurship and the essential role of reward in business

“… Signal the right value in your business and you will attract the right audience. There are people who will not only buy on price.”- Andreas Widmer

Andreas Widmer, who is an entrepreneur, author and philanthropist, spoke at the LBS-CKRLE conference titled “Principled Entrepreneurship and the Essential Role of Reward in Business.” From his presentation, many ideas were communicated and seen as valuable. One of the things that struck me was his simplicity and openness in talking about the effect of his religious beliefs on his success as a business man and a person as a whole. He has been in business for over thirty years and a question he always asks himself is “how my business decisions should be influenced by my faith in God or Catholicity?”

In running a business, there is always an aim or a goal and something he asked us to bear in mind is the ‘Why’ behind the decisions we make in business and what they are supposed to lead to or what we are trying to achieve. In 1990, while working as a business strategist, He was approached by a company who wanted to revive a city’s economy in Jamaica by making small rum bottles available at a cheap price since they might not be able to afford the normal sized rum at the normal price.

Andreas however, asked himself if rum is what the people really needed? Or if rum is the best product to do this project with? Another innovation he was approached with was a speech recognition software like Alexa. He saw this as good because those who could not physically type for whatever reason, now had a means. The downside however, was that these machines always listen and respond when commanded, which means that they can carry out unprecedented surveillance across the world. He was also approached to get involved in a business idea of gene prediction.

This is a technology that allows you to know if having a child with a particular partner might result in the child having a genetic disease. The promise was that it would reduce the amount of diseases in the world, but it would also give unprecedented power over existence and shape our attitudes towards people who have diseases or disabilities or human life and sexuality. He didn’t accept any of these jobs because he didn’t believe in the value in them. This doesn’t mean that these projects didn’t go through, they did. He however stood by his beliefs and conscience and made a business decision not to partake in these projects.

Our actions need to be probed by a repeated ‘why’ like children ask. According to Andreas, businesses nowadays ask ‘what?’ instead of ‘why?’ We need to ask why we do what we do. We should not primarily work or innovate for money; there should be other driving reasons. A true entrepreneur does not start a business simply to make money as there are much easier ways to make money. From his experience, these businesses are started to provide a solution to a problem, to satisfy a demand perceived or provide a fixed link in a process. Business is inherently OTHER-DIRECTED. It asks how I may help you. When running a business, we are called to give everybody the opportunity to flourish towards their ultimate destiny. For Andreas, this ultimate destiny is Heaven. To him, this is the great and ultimate why of business. His focus is on the human person for the Glory of God.

Business is made for man and not man for business. We all have a hungry heart and the fulfillment of this hunger is happiness. So, we need to ask, what does my heart need? As human beings, we tend to Worth-ship one thing out of these major five-pleasures, power, God, honour and money. For Andreas, his worth-ship’s God and that is his main altar. Unlike God, the other four altars are a kind of slavery because that is what you live for and when the thrill dies down, which happens quickly, you have to go back to prove yourself all over again. This is not happiness but a ‘contingent transient pleasure.’ Faith filled entrepreneurs are called to worship at the altar of God and it shows in how their companies run.

He created an alternate CSR that he applies to his business. CSR stands for a business that Creates, Supports and Rewards. A business is to create goods that are truly good and provide services that truly serve. To support human flourishing by pursuing human excellence and support its employees by using their excellence to create. To reward participants physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially through good profit. What you do and what you have does not make you human. Being human establishes your dignity and human dignity is never a means to an end.

The questions we should ask ourselves as entrepreneurs are – Do I promote the dignity of my employees in the tasks that I ask them to do? Is it just? Do I let the employees make their own decisions or do I force them? Does my work environment and policies promote the common good? The common good according to Andreas is the social conditions that allow people to reach their full human potential and realise their human dignity. Do the rewards I create go beyond the material rewards? Are they adequate to their contributions, risks and the dignity of everyone involved? Rewards don’t have to be financial or public praises. It can be granting decision making rights, more training, allowing people to work on projects that interest them. And so on.

For Andreas, he looks at his decisions as saying yes rather than no. when he says no, he is saying yes to something more important to him, “we say no to profit all the time, we make moral decisions every day. I just ask that we be consistent in them. If we act because the law says so, then we make the law our morality and that is an abdication of personal morality. That is treating morality as a limitation to our freedom rather than a liberation of our potential. In the long run, true happiness eludes such choices.”

At the end of the seminar, he referenced two great people. According to Fulton Sheen, “work done for the love of God makes a man happier and gives him an inner peace the world cannot take away.” These are ways of thinking and not a list of dos and don’ts. Saint Pope John Paul II said, “You have to decide, I cannot want for you, you get to decide.”

Okafor, an undergraduate at the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos and Volunteer at Christopher Kolade Centre for Research in Leadership and Ethics, Lagos Business School. Ekene Okafor can be reached at [email protected]