- Henry Ford

I can't wait for you to hear the next podcast episode. A well-known comedian I've followed for over 20 years has been thinking a lot about philosophy lately. It should be out next week. But first:

I’ve been thinking recently about business ethics.

In a Harvard Business Review study, employees reported that the most important factor for their job was not a promotion, not better working conditions, not even how much money they make. I’ll say that again: salary was not #1. Meaning took the top spot for the most important factor in their job.

Workers need their work to mean something.

If you’re a boss of any kind, you have an important question to answer: how do you give your employees more meaning*?

A study of young people showed:

A sense of mission and purpose** can boost a young person’s mental health. But even more surprising, it can even boost their physical health and their ethical health.

Purpose and mission can help older people, too. A paper from the University of Michigan shows that for people over 50, purpose can positively affect their longevity (how long they live). And another study of over 13,000 people age 45 and over found that those who had a sense of purpose were less likely to develop cognitive impairment later in life.

For anyone who oversees or owns a company or business, instilling a sense of mission, purpose, and meaning in your employees seems like a no-brainer. As more and more work gets outsourced to AI, the work that remains will tend to skew more to higher-level, conceptual tools and skills: the level where philosophy lives, 24/7. Philosophy eats, sleeps, and breathes conceptual skills, tools, and analysis, including concepts like mission, meaning, purpose, and values.

And mission-driven companies are trending: think of companies like Bombas, or Whole Foods, or half of the businesses who make pitches on Shark Tank.

But most companies have no idea how to connect what they do to the bigger picture of why they do it. No sense of integrated business ethics as part of the work culture. HR compliance? Yes. Legal? Yes. Character, values, purpose, meaning? Nope.

The character gap at the individual level gets magnified at the corporate level. But if things like meaning and purpose positively affect at least the bottom line for a business, maybe it's possible to motivate some companies to think a little more deeply about their working culture. And getting people to think a little more deeply about meaning, character, and ethics could be a great onramp for cultivating more critical thinking, deeper ideas, and conversations about things that matter.

So I’m going to start thinking about how to make this happen, experimenting with some ideas over the long-term. If you have any, I’d love to hear.

Until next time.

Jared

*Especially since meaning isn't physical.

**And purpose isn't physical either.

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