
5 levels to re-introduce the “more than material dimension” to business
Recently, I came across videos from events we organized with Nexense at Solvay Business School back in the days and I really enjoyed watching again this talk given by Habib Lesevic. So I decided to gather in this post some of the key ideas he shared with us.
Habib is an educator (CASS, ESCP), an entrepreneur and a coach (J2C, Institute of Integral Entrepreneurship).
He has been contributing to the holistic development of individuals and organisations for over a decade. He works with corporations and governments to develop a more conscious and authentic business culture.

5 levels to re-introduce the “more than material dimension” by Habib Lesevic
(Check the video of the full intervention HERE)
I don’t like the term CSR (corporate social responsibility) because it sounds like if environment awareness is always going to be a cost, never an opportunity.
“ Because we lost the essence of business, we are destroying more value than we are creating “
Business is profoundly spiritual because it is about exchange between two persons that need to relate. This more than material dimension needs to be RE-introduced in today’s business culture.

1) Re-establish and reframe business around the 3 aspects of truth
1. True (science) — 2. Good (philosophy) — 3. Beautiful (art)
Is the purpose of business to make money? “If you want to have a business, down the line, you need someone to take what you offer” (Peter Drucker). To achieve this, you need to create value and this is how profit became the metric of value creation.
“ The purpose of business is to create value ”
We think the purpose of business is making profit because of an assumption from the industrial age : if your costs are lower than the final price on the market, there is a profit and you must have created value somewhere ! (Even if you don’t understand the concept of value).
But who will buy something from you just because the selling price is above your costs?
“ Externalities create imperfect measurement of value ”
Business doesn’t need to make profit but to be economically sustainable — which is what money does by measuring inputs and outputs — unfortunately it measures it imperfectly because of externalities that don’t affect our balance sheet (long term impact on the planet, for example).
“ Business is the act of action, interaction, transaction for the social benefit of all participants”
Trade is to culture what sex is to biology. Trade is the essence of business that allows development, growth. Business fits into society as a server, in the Buddhist meaning : I am here to contribute.
2) The organisation and its external environment
Businesses today are egocentric because they perceive them selves as separated from the world around us.
- Cosmos = presence of order
- Chaos = absence of order

Eros (love) turns chaos into cosmos (connexion between things) (Plato). This is what business is about, about connecting, about love ! But human beings have the power to disconnect from the world : DEMON means “disconnection” in Greek. So a demonic business is one that ignores its environment, that is disconnected from it.
As a system theorist, I ask you : where does your body stops? is the air in your body part of your body ? What about the tree that is cleaning it for you ? What are you going to do with all the money in the world without fresh air ? The environment is part of the system !
If we want to have a thriving system and thriving businesses we must tend to our environment. The fact that we’ve been ignoring it for the last hundred years doesn’t mean we don’t have an impact on it.
It is essential not to survive but to thrive as individuals and as a business. That makes a big difference regarding opportunities you can turn into businesses.
We need to shift from being EGO-centric (I am THE center of the universe), to ECO centric (I am ONE center in the universe) : there are many others and we are all interconnected.
3) Organisation and its internal environment
The way we organize ourselves is a reminiscence of the industrial age. The steam machine helped us to extend the limits of our body and conquer nature.
And this became the guiding principles of human evolution and progress and we organized our corporations accordingly (vertical hierarchy, linear processes, control, emphasis on assets, closed circuits and KPI’s).

4) The individual
You need to know what you can do, what you want to do and what should be done. We think the purpose of life is getting what we want but the real challenge is knowing what we want.
This process of continuous individual reflection, and self discovery, understanding yourself, your own potential and developing it, cannot be disconnected from your approach of spirituality in business. Nothing will happen without you doing your homework.
5) The new understanding of the concept of VALUE
Value creation and value capture are different. One is baking the cake, the other one is cutting the cake and making sure you get the biggest piece (ex : entrepreneur vs manager / Jesus vs the pope).
It’s difficult to define value but we can say where it comes from : Materialism (Marxism) states that “the value is in the object itself” but at the same time we are cutting down the forest !
Value is appreciated subjectively — with your internal formula / your own perspective. But value appreciation is not subjective nor objective, it is contextual.
Value emerges from the relationship between the object and the subject, it emerges from relationship
If you want to create value as a business, you need to create relationships between people, people and objects, people and systems, systems and systems.

We destroy value by destroying relationships and as Schumpeter stated with creative destruction : some relationships needs to be destroyed in order to create new ones. We need to check the creation/destruction balance for everyone involved in our system.
The aim is to have business reintegrate into society and serve us all for our benefit. To have a business that makes you live your life well, in a way that you don’t have to struggle between what you do and who you are.
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Book recommendations from Habib :
- Otto Scharmer — Theory U
- Journal for Integral Theory and Practice — Integral Coaching Canada special issue
- Erick Fromm — “Man for Himself” (a classic) OR “Revolution of hope”


This event has been organized by Nexense, the Solvay Social Business Club that invited more than 30 pioneers of the economic transition at the Solvay Business School since 2013.


