Love and Business

Profit is just the fuel

I have great faith in all things not yet spoken….
What no one yet has dared to risk and warrant
-Rilke

Daring to risk

Business is productively wielding risk to bring about reward. It is about orchestrating conditions that produce valuable outcomes for clients. Outcomes they will pay for at levels that eclipse the cost of the orchestration. This is profit, the fuel of business.

It is an uncontroversial claim to suggest that profit is the fuel of business. Those even marginally competent in such matters understand this. Without profits there are no resources for the business to create and bring its goods to market. Some would even, in an offhanded way, say that profit is the heart of business. This then is where we will begin.

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.
-Rilke

The inexpressibility of things (and their manifestation)

Things are not easily understood. No truer sentence has been penned. This is the problem with most content being produced on the topics of business and leadership: it presupposes that things are, and should be, easily understood and expressible. The business trade press wants to be smart and memorable, certainly, counter-intuitive even if that can be made to serve the bestseller mission, but never among the rising tide of would-be thought leaders’ “game changing” ideas does anything hint at the inexpressibility of things. It takes a poet to drive home the point: things happen from a deeper place.

Too often we presume direct agency over things. A mastery that we will neither learn to wield nor to forego. We take things to be easily understood and expressible in such a way as to benefit us. We make things clever and convenient when what is called for is abandon to the inexpressibility of things that demand we be implicated in their manifestation. That we use our lives in the messiness of creation.

Though most happenings are not easily expressed, this is not to say that we cannot attend to their conditions. The gestation of something can be described, catalyzed, measured, and reflected upon, even if it cannot be controlled. The sequencing of creation’s unfolding is only partially under our purview and tangentially within our control. We work with conditions, with capacities, and together with them manifest realities. This is the inexpressibility of things: that passage from womb to world—from potentials to actualities.

For one human being to love another is
perhaps the most difficult task of all,
the epitome, the ultimate test.
It is that striving for which all other striving
is merely preparation.
-Rilke

The most difficult task of all: the ultimate test

I am going to suggest something simple and off-putting: Everything you have built is not yet a success if the striving that has achieved it is anything short of one human being acting out of love for another. This is not hyperbole. Your business operations, your client relationships, the products and services you sell to them, all of it is not yet achieved if these things are not the product of love. This is, of course, the case not only (or even primarily) for your business. This is true for everything in your life. Our propensity for exception making signals just how difficult this “most difficult task of all” really is. This is the ultimate test.

For whatever duration and at whatever level of intimacy, love is always an all-in proposition. It is being awakened to and present for the singularly intersubjective way that what it is you are bringing about is taking place. Love is the work of devotion materially inscribed in our collective acts and words, our practices and attitudes. It is a pattern: a feedback loop.

In business, as in life, there is always a “we”. We is how new businesses are imagined, it is how consensus is built, partners influenced, and first deals closed. We always functions as the fusion of intentional horizons, and this, I will suggest, is the mutual embodiment of love that is the heart of business. Love is at the center of the work we do together. It is why we are here in the first place. Love is the motivation for the best things we have brought about. It is the very mechanism of our capacity to come together with a common goal.

Love, as the fusion of horizons, is about the trajectory that is formed in our common pursuits. Whether that pursuit is imagining our company’s next product, establishing the engineering pipeline to build it, or the client relationships that ensure its delivery to new markets: there is a future that is being manifested through the pursuits we aim toward together. These common pursuits, when optimally undertaken (that is, when we have moved beyond the strivings of mere preparation, to again cite Rilke), involve a fusion of horizons evidenced by the ways that we habitually take up the perspectives and goals of others. Our customers, our partners, our employees all have part with us in some creative We that has at its adaptive core a capacity to see together: Not perfectly, but productively. As one of my beautiful, old teachers would say, “Trajectively!” The trajectory we are on together is born out of our mutual enfolding of the other’s point of view such that the materials now habitually at work in our future’s manifestation are as much the outlook and goals of the other as our own past and future. Our intentional horizons now fused, we navigate together through time toward those things we prize.

I can only wish that you trustingly and patiently allow that grand solitude to work in you. It is no longer possible to be erased from your life. It shall be immanent in all that you experience and all that you do. It will act as an anonymous influence… It is gently decisive at each crossroad of our life.
-Rilke

It is the fundamental thing that is too often left unattended to. The grand solitude that guides so well, the indelible attunements that build up like sedimentary layers over the course of a life, and, yes, the way in which love roots our work in the world and for its benefit.

When you presume the world to be easily understood, in business and in life, you stagger about, haltingly doing one thing and then another, never realizing that it is in and through the fundamental things that you become the person and leader you have set out to be. That it is through these recurring and unavoidable happenings that you find the truth of your life. That you come into the inner workshop, and begin to flourish as these fundamental things are attended to and allowed to form in you. As you welcome the pain and opportunity of re-attunements and new alignments that are the hidden sources of those things so long sought directly. These fundamental things, not easily understood nor as expressible as people would like us to believe, are the means and the end. The greatest of these?

Love.

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Rilke’s poetry, novel, and correspondence are widely available. His letters are a good place to begin. For a broader collection of his work consider this compendium.

Moving forward a hundred years or so, one of my favorite songs from the Cloud Cult album, Love, may also be apropos.
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Grandma said it don’t matter where we go to or come from. She said, “Worry about what you’re made to do not what you’re made of.”
They say we’re made of chaos. I say we’re made of love.
And that means our show starts now.