I'm here to talk about the
mysterious disappearance
or absence, of what one could
call the psychological
within the world of
modern business, education
and life more broadly, but with
a particular emphasis on
business because that's partly
what we're here for. I want to begin
my story in ancient Greece
fourth century BC, Aristotle
the Greeks used to do some things very
good,
very accomplished, and one of the things
they were very good at was philosophy
and Aristotle famously
defined the goal of every
human being as that of acquiring
two kinds of knowledge
The first kind of knowledge he defined
as 'techne', that's where we get our word
technical from, and that's
all the sort of things that
make an economy work, in
his day it was ship building, silver
mining, you know, archery
that sort of thing, and the other
form of knowledge that he believed
we very much, all of us need
is what he termed 'sophia'
or wisdom, and that's of course
where we get the word philosophy from
philo, love, sophia, wisdom
He believed that all of us need to
spend a considerable part of our
lives in the pursuit of
sophia, and through
pursuing wisdom, we will
reach a stage of what he
called 'eudaimonia', another
complicated Greek word that is often
translated as fulfilment
we could translate it as happiness
but it's a deeper form of satisfaction
it's a way of fully exploiting
everything that makes us distinctively
human. It's a form of happiness
in line with our rational
natures and eudaimonia
is achieved through self-knowledge
Aristotle tells us, and it's connected
up with knowing who to be friends
with, knowing what your purpose
in life should be, being part
of a community to which you're properly
contributing, and other sorts
of ingredients like that. So a
very important part of
the meaning life at the beginning
of the Western journey
the Western experience, the meaning
of life is the pursuit of
wisdom. We might also nowadays
call it the pursuit of the psychological
the psyche of course another Greek
word, the interior, the soul
the bit of us that is most
closely connected up with our emotions
and our rational natures
Now I want to argue that
oddly, despite our accomplishments
in so many areas, we've become
very bad at the sophia
bit of the economy
and our human pursuits
A lot of the blame has to do with religion
because when Christianity descends
upon Europe, it sucks
up all the interest
in the soul, the
very word soul starts to become
a religious word, and
the whole study of the psyche
gets imported into
religion, and it's not really until
the middle of the nineteenth century
that suddenly people start
to reconsider the
psychological, and concepts
like wisdom apart
from a religious structure
So we're still very much in the early
days of knowing how to
think about ourselves
and our interior lives
without the particular
cast that Christianity
gave to the Western mind's
exploration of its own
processes. Part of
the really big problem, part of the reason
why we're not so good
at reason, we're not so good at
the psychological, is this movement
that also strikes Western Europe
in the 19th century known as
'romanticism', and romanticism's
number one concern
is the worship of what we
would call instinct. Now
if there's anybody in the room who's made
an unfortunate marriage
anyone who's unhappily married
picked the wrong person to marry
put up your hand, we'll talk about it
okay, yes thank you very much.
Anyone here who's fallen into
the wrong job, who feels
they've just fallen in love, as it
were, with the wrong job? Okay, we'll come
back with that later, but the reason I
mention these two things is because love
and work are the two constituents
of contemporary happiness, also
ancient Greek happiness, but they're
also the two things that we
imagine we can get right
simply by instinct. It
would be considered very rude to stop
anyone and say, 'Why are you getting married
to that person?' or, 'Why are you
going for that job?' We believe
that people's best chances
of finding fulfilment comes
from not thinking too hard
about why they're doing it. We
worship instinct
and impulse in the two
areas where they actually have catastrophic
results, which is in relationships
and in the pursuit of
our talents and our exploitation
of our talents within the workplace
so romanticism has a lot to blame
So what I'm trying to create for
you is a picture of how
at the dawn of Western civilisation
we have this tremendously exciting
mission, we can learn to be happy
by understanding the mind
the psychological part of our minds
we can pursue wisdom and that
should be the highest goal of
human beings. That disappears
for a long time and we are left
with this romanticisation of instinct
Now let me come to the modern
world of business, a lot
of the reason why business is
incredibly unpopular
and has come under a lot of suspicion despite
the recent conservative government
win, the crisis of capitalism is
not over. A lot of the suspicion
a lot of the reason why businesses routinely
become under suspicion, is because
they stand accused of selling
us bullshit, in other words
they stand accused of not
selling people the things
that they really need
in order to have a good life
so the phenomenon we know as consumerism
is attacked for
generating vain desires
exciting passions in
people which the products
that are associated and that
are being sold, cannot properly
deliver on, and that's a major
underlying-, there are other underlying
complaints around capitalism including
exploitation, environmentalism etc.
but if you want to look as it were at the core
intellectual complaint
it is that we are not buying
and selling those things which
actually lead to a flourishing
life. That if Aristotle walked
into the market place as
it were, he would not see us
spending our energies
devoting our energies to those things
that really could stand a chance
of delivering on happiness
These issues have a horrible
habit of coming to the fore, I'm
sorry if there are people here in the world
of advertising but let's go for
it, these issues have a horrible
habit of coming to the fore around
advertising. Think of the concept
of brand, much revered
within the industry, much maligned
outside of the industry
What a brand promise is
often pegged to are
all those things, those
higher needs, that are associated
with wisdom, with flourishing
with the good life, but the actual
product that is often being
sold is very far
removed from the actual
promises which are being engaged
in order to sell you that product
Let me give you a more concrete example
remember that famous Campari
advert of years ago? It
would show, it really struck me, this was my
teenage years, Campari were running
a massive campaign which would
show people hugging, holding
hands, hanging out with groups of friendly
looking people in beautiful locations
and the tagline was always the
same, 'Campari and
friends', and it was a lovely
idea. The problem is, and the reason
why people hate consumerism, is
that you will end up buying a crate of Campari
get it delivered to your flat, sit
alone at home and you wouldn't
have any friends, and the
purchase of those drinks
would not in any way have
advanced the cause that
was really motivating you when
you were buying that, which is the pursuit
of friendship, which Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics devotes
an entire chapter to, as one
of the root pillars on which
happiness rests. In other words
Campari was exciting
was scratching a desire
for something, and it was then not
delivering on it, and that's why people
sometimes get angry. Remember that advert for
Dove soap? There was always a woman
lying in a bath looking extremely
relaxed and the tagline was something
like, 'The road to calm starts
here'. Again you buy a crate
of Dove soap, get it delivered to your house
but actually you're still wracked with anxiety
you've still married the wrong person, you're still
in the wrong job, the bar of soap
is lying unused next
to the bath, and you haven't made any
progress with one of the major
problems of existence, but
the soap has been
exploiting this, and you know, think of
those lovely adverts by Patek
Philippe which always show a father
and his son and they're hugging
and it's so poignant and so
moving but it's got nothing to do with
buying a $30,000 time
piece, but the problem is you
might, because of the power and
the intelligence, the psychological
intelligence, of that advert, be
lead to buy an unnecessary
time piece, and this is why
people don't like capitalism. Okay
because capitalism too often
stands accused of sucking
out the best energies
of workers and consumers
in the name of things which do not
deliver on the ultimate promise
which what we might in ordinary
language call customer satisfaction
and in fancy philosophical language
call eudaimonia, it does
not deliver on this
Now, I want to paint a much more exciting
future, I believe we're going to get
the hang of this, currently capitalism
if you think back to Abraham Maslow's
famous pyramid of needs, I
know it's been measured a few times, but
most of the economy is down at
the bottom of that pyramid, right, most
of the way in which fortunes
are built up is through trading
through buying and selling things
which are at the bottom of that pyramid
So it's food, it's shelter, it's
transport, it's communication, not
psychological communication, I
mean Apple, it does wonderful things in
the world of communication, it doesn't
help you actually to have a proper
conversation with another human being
it merely facilitates the act
the promise of conversation. So a
lot of what the world's
largest companies are doing is still
remarkably at the bottom of
the pyramid, it's my belief
that over the course of this century we're
going to move up that pyramid and the
great fortunes are going
start to be made up that pyramid
where there are those things
that Aristotle was talking about
the longing for friendship, for connection
for proper understanding of oneself
for wisdom, if you like
These things are going
to be the sources of the great
fortunes of the future. Yes, we've
made money from lumber, and cement
and selling Coca-Cola, and that's got
capitalism into lots of trouble
It's been accused of selling us
nonsense, that's going to change
Some of these ideas crystallised
for me a few months ago when I was
sitting in my ivory tower looking
unperturbed at the landscape
below me, when the phone rang and a
man was there called Brian
Chesky, I've never heard of him, and
Brian said, 'I run a company
called Airbnb.' I'd never
heard of it,
I had heard of it but I'd never stayed in
it, I was very suspicious of it
because I've got a terrible phobia
around germs, and anyway
he says to me, 'I'm having a crisis
and I think you can help me. I'd like you
to come to San Francisco next Thursday.'
I said, 'I'm really sorry, I've got, you
know, my kids to pick up etc.' He said
'I'm just going to make it worth it, come
to San Francisco,' so he made me
an offer I couldn't refuse, I flew to San Francisco
it was a fantastic 24
hours in which we had a philosophical
conversation and Brian said
to me,
'I've realised I'm not in the business
of selling rooms to other
customers, I'm not in the business of
trading apartments
I thought that was what I was doing
I thought that was my mission, but I've now
realised I'm in a completely different
business, and that business is
happy travel, that's really
what I'm after. I realise
that my true mission in life is
to deliver on the underlying
promise of travel, which is that travel
is going to go well. Not that you're just going to find
a cheap room or a nice apartment
but that everything about the journey
is going to go well.'
Now
this is a classic
move to which Aristotle
can be credited, because really
what's happening there, is that someone
a CEO of one our major corporations
in the world today, is climbing
up the pyramid of needs
towards the psychological
towards the pursuit of
wisdom and a deeper satisfaction
associated with that word eudaimonia
because when we travel
right, yes, a lot of travel
is about finding the right room
at the right price etc., but the
underlying promise of travel
is much deeper, it is that we
will be satisfied through journeying
abroad, and the reason why
Brian was in such crisis
about what he was doing
with his life, is that he had strapped
miniature cameras to a range
of customers,
and he did a project in which he was
trying to study what people
actually get out of their journeys
and the extraordinary thing, or not
so extraordinary thing, is that he discovered
that up to 75% of people are disappointed
by their journeys. Not that the room
wasn't nice, not that the breakfast
wasn't nice, but the deeper promises
of travel. So he's been stripping
down what the deeper promises of travel
are. One of them is that our
relationships will go better
when we travel with someone, so we travel
in order to revive our relationships
major motive of travel
Another major motive of travel
is that we're going to travel and connect
with another culture, okay, another
thing is that we're going to travel and we're going
to sort out our heads, about
our careers and our futures
that travel will give us that all important
thing, perspective. Okay, now if
you actually analyse
how an average journey delivers
on that, on these higher
promises, it's pathetic
Most couples who go abroad
the things that bring a couple down
are not going to be solved by
a luxury soap, or by a scented
candle, or by a more attractive
view over the skyline of Rome
This does not solve
the problems of relationships because that's
not where the problems of relationships arose
from. Ditto with the problems of career
and also, we can't connect
properly with people when we travel
so we end up going to museums
you know a journey's gone wrong
when you're ending up in a museum because
it's not really tapping
into what you really wanted which was a
proper connection. Anyway, Brian looks
at this and says, 'I want to go into
these areas, that's what I
want my company to be doing
on a 15 year time horizon
I want to be making my money
not just from
delivering people rooms, but
from solving some of their
higher order psychological
needs.' So what he was
doing, and I think this is a fascinating
move, is he was reframing
what Airbnb was. So the ordinary
common garden definition of what
Airbnb is, which is a platform
to exchange properties. Okay
that's the simple thing, but if you want
to describe it in a Aristotelian
way, if you want to tease out
what you might call the eudaimonic promise
of Airbnb, it is to
deliver satisfaction in travel
to make you happy while you travel
and when you recast
the mission of a company that
way, you instantly find
and there are about 25 new things
you need to go into right now, it
totally reorders
what the company is about, and
oddly we had this fascinating conversation
and then he said, 'You should go and talk to my friend
Reid Hoffman over at LinkedIn
he's one of our own investors, go and talk
to him.' Anyway, went to talk to him, interestingly
Reid had done his MA thesis
on Aristotle, so we had lots to talk
about, we talked about Aristotle, the disappearance
of the psychological in the economy
and we had a fascinating dinner in
which we talked about
what LinkedIn really is
Now, again, the common and garden definition
of what LinkedIn is, is a platform
which allows employers and employees
to trade their CVs. Okay
but if you step back and take
an Aristotelian eudaimonic redefinition
of the company, it is much deeper
What it really is, is
a tool that will enable
every worker to tease
out of themselves, their latent
capacities and connect
these capacities to the modern economy
which a huge and very
different mission. It's connected
but it's a much bigger mission, and
once you define your mission like this
well there are again 25 things
you need to start doing, including you
need to start to understand who
everybody on the platform really
is, you need to get very psychological
about who's using the platform
you need to get to know people better
You know, one of the great tragedies of the modern
world is 'career counselling'
Okay, we don't properly
enough understand how human
beings work, and therefore
people routinely get put into the wrong
jobs and their talents are
not properly exploited because
the psychological has not
been properly studied and
connected up with the economy. Once
you start to see that something like
LinkedIn could be in the business
of properly connecting up people's
latent capacities with the
economy, well you need to do all sorts of things
You need to get involved in artificial
intelligence, come back to that in a
minute, you need to start getting involved
in properly training people
which is precisely what LinkedIn has recently
done, and a whole host of other things
What I'm trying to help you to
see is how you can re-categorise
a business, and the new things
that emerge when you do that
You can do this experiment, this sort of
Aristotelean experiment with anything
Let's imagine that I were to meet
the head of a news channel, and
I said to the head of the news channel, 'Okay, what are you
doing?' you know, 'What's the purpose of your news
channel?' They'd say, you know, come out with a normal
clichéd answer like, 'I'm trying to get
the most important information really
quickly without bias, you know, from
around the world, etc.' Okay,
let's step back and re-categorise
what Aristotle would say
the news is for. The news
is really for equipping
each individual with that
information which is most important
to their flourishing and the flourishing
of their community. Now if
you redefine the mission of news
like this, you will be starting
to do lots of things differently. Okay
so if you go up to a banker
and you say, 'What's your bank or wealth management
firm for?' they say, 'Well, we're trying to
grow, you know, we'd like to get above 10%
per annum, we're doing well etc.,' and you
say, 'No, Aristotle would say you're
really in the business-, the eudainomic
promise of your business
is to teach people to
live well around money
and
if that's the purpose of your business, the true
psychological purpose of the business
yes you'll be trying to grow the portfolio
but you may be trying to do a whole host
of other things besides.'
So what I'm saying is we're going
to start to see companies
go headlong into
questions which were previously
abandoned as either too difficult
or left as the preserve of the
odd philosopher, but not properly
monetised, or institutionalised
or put on an industrial footing
which is after all what modern capitalism
does so well, and we're partly
going to be able to do this because technology
will enable us to create
businesses around needs
which were previously outside
of the capitalist enterprise. Think of Facebook
Facebook is the first billion
dollar plus company that is really latching
on to a psychological
need to solve loneliness
Right, it's an attempt to take
that thing which Aristotle wrote very
eloquently about, the need for connection
with others, and it's building
a platform around that
Sometimes people say, 'Well capitalism's
coming to an end because we've got everything
we've got enough fridges, we've got
enough cars, so it's all a waste.'
This is the left-wing green argument
People who believe in capitalism
need to fight back by saying
'We're only at the dawn of capitalism
because we've only begun to scratch
at the true needs of human beings
the true psychological needs
that are at the top of that pyramid,'
and this is going to be the task of
the 21st century, to monetise
those higher needs. Now you
might say, 'How do I know? Where
are those higher needs?' Very
simple thought experiment, take
an average day and think about
everything that has frustrated
or made you unhappy in an average
day,
write down what those things might
be and also note where things
are not frustrating. So I get up in the
morning, I go down to the kitchen
and I'm thinking, 'Okay, I'm a little hungry,'
so I've got a need for hunger, and
I open the cupboard and fortunately there are eighteen
packets of cereal there, and
I've got absolutely, a modern industry
has satisfied the need for breakfast
cereal just beautifully, there is almost
nothing more that one can do in the
area of breakfast cereal, but
then my wife comes to the room
and we have a little tetchy exchange
she's a little off and she goes, 'Mmm,'
when I say I'm a little anxious but anyway, of one
of those tetchy exchanges which some
of you, particularly the man over there who put his
hand up with the unhappy marriage will
know about. So-, but the problem is
where do I call? Kellogg's, no
assistance, Weetabix
no assistance. Right, there is nothing
in that area because the
closest thing that modern humanity has
developed to deal with tetchiness
in the kitchen around our psychological
needs is psychotherapy, which is
run by five Hungarian psychoanalysts
in Hampstead and it's not
really on an industrial footing
yet. It will be. So
curiously, and you run right
through the day, and we lose our
keys, we get frustrated, we
feel lost, we feel in the wrong job
we feel a little hungry for lunch etc.
and at every step, large and
small, sometimes the
need is very well catered
to, and at other times
the need for direction
the need for calm, the need
for psychological orientation
the need for better relationships
this is a desert. So if anyone
is looking to start a business, there's mass
opportunities in these areas
because these lie outside
the purview of modern capitalism
To come back to Demis and his
fantastic inventions with
A.I., we're of course going to move towards
not just A.I. in the robotic
frightening sense that people get very
het up about, but we're going to end
up with A.E.I., what I call A.E.I.
which is artificial, emotional
intelligence, which is the promise
of Aristotle. Part of the reason
why we've been so bad in
the psychological area is
that it's extremely hard
to know ourselves, and let's
remember the temple of Delphi
in ancient Greece, written over the
temple of Delphi was 'Know
yourself'. Only by knowing
ourselves, our needs, understanding
our passions will we properly know
ourselves. Knowing yourself is a nightmare
it's a real pain, it's
very hard to do, it's getting a
lot easier by the day
with the help of computer
technology. So a huge promise
and already, you know, why does Facebook
exist? Partly it's a psychological
need meeting a technological platform
we're going to see a whole lot more
of that. So the future is
bright because the future is going
to be based on fulfilling the true
promise of capitalism which is
the satisfaction of the consumer
no longer at that Campari
level where it's just a promise
which isn't properly delivered on
We won't any more have brands
that are over here in that beautiful
space of fulfilment and love
and tenderness, and then the product
over there that's just selling us
soap and watches. We're going to
have actually the marriage of
the brand and the promise
and part of what's going to enable us to
do this is the proper and adequate
marriage of ancient Greek philosophy
and modern technology. Thank you
very much.