Abstract
For Heidegger, thinking focuses on what is most taken for granted in any domain and in its focus transforms the domain. In business, such thinking develops cultural innovations that change the factors of competition. This chapter introduces Heideggerian thinking for business transformation. We look at the concerns managers face in adopting such thinking, explain Heidegger’s two breakthroughs: the turn to practice and the uncovering of radically different understandings of being. We show how to cultivate the thinker’s mood of wonder and set out the five movements in Heideggerian thinking including bridging radically different ways of handling what is most taken for granted. We then propose that transforming mine into yours in exchange is the most taken for granted aspect of business and show how thinking about that transformation in cement (CEMEX) and commercial insurance (RSA) leads to cultural innovations that improve exchange for both buyers and sellers. We conclude by noting that such thinking tends to blend older practices like friendship with newer ones like networking.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The tradition of specifically Heideggerian consulting started shortly after the 1987 publication of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ Understanding Computers and Cognition and the establishment of Fernando Flores’ Business Design Associates. A series of publications have followed including Disclosing New Worlds (Spinosa et al. 1997), “Taking an expanded view of customers” (Spinosa et al. 2001), “Developing productive customers in emerging markets” (Flores et al. 2003), “Promise-based management (Sull and Spinosa 2007), “Transforming crippling company politics” (Spinosa et al. 2014), and “Coping with time in organizations” (Spinosa et al. 2017). In the meantime, the field of Heideggerian Consulting has grown with VISION Consulting, Pluralistic Networks, STRATAM, Matthew Hancocks Strategic Thinking, Achieve Breakthrough, The Institute for Generative Leadership, and ReD Associates. ReD Associate’s Christian Madsbjerg has published Sensemaking (Madsbjerg 2017) and The Moment of Clarity (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen 2014).
- 3.
We would make a similar argument for Christensen and Bower’s disruptions (Christiansen and Bower 1995).
- 4.
We note that Steve Jobs also could transform markets as a Heideggerian thinker and did so when he saved Pixar and made its films part of our diet (Spinosa et al. 2017).
- 5.
In the 1960s, Heidegger comes to think that the matter of thinking is the concealing aspect of making things intelligible or Ereignis, and not being. However, the other elements of thinking remain largely the same. The one other difference is that thinking focuses more on saying (poetry) than on dealing with things (Heidegger 1972, pp. 22–23 & 70–71). See Wrathall (forthcoming) on mystery.
- 6.
Note that in calling attention to the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian traditions, Nietzsche calls our attention to practices we still participate in, justice and redemption. (Hence, the bridging practice does not supersede (and replace) past practices in the Hegelian sense. Rather, it shows how the different practices belong together.)
- 7.
We surmise this origin of Nietzsche’s thought experiment because Nietzsche very clearly read Seneca. Heidegger does not give this detail.
- 8.
“Blending” is cross-appropriation from Disclosing New Worlds (Spinosa et al. 1997).
- 9.
Nietzsche calls his experiment his “heaviest thought” (Heidegger 1968, p. 109).
- 10.
Would Heidegger countenance the claim that genuine thinking could be called by the taken-for-granted of a particular domain of activity such as business? In his “Origin of the Work of Art,” (1971, pp. 32–37), Heidegger claims that art and thinking are essentially both versions of establishing a regime of truth and that works of art can manifest what is essential to a particular domain (reliability for equipment). Thinking can do the same. Hubert Dreyfus brilliantly illuminates Heidegger’s distinction between the widely shared public world, with which thinkers are concerned when they think being, and special or subworlds like business, where thinkers think what is most taken for granted in the subworld (Dreyfus 1991, pp. 89–91).
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Spinosa, C., Hancocks, M., Glennon, B. (2018). What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher. In: Neesham, C., Segal, S. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_2-2
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What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher- Published:
- 27 August 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_2-2
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What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher- Published:
- 18 July 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_2-1