What’s the Role of Freedom in Business?

Freedom and business may seem like the odd couple. And yet, paradoxically, it is being free from old habits of mind and free from “business as usual” that will give leaders a new vantage point from which to direct their company. Business as usual can include not only old habits of mind, but also accustomed responses, conditioned ways of thinking, and even so called “best practice.” Once any of these is identified as out-moded thinking which no longer serves, it’s important to let it go. It’s from this vantage point that you have a lot more space in your thinking to address new ways of thinking and being. We are fond of quoting business leader Tom Peters who says this, for example, about business practice: “If it worked for you last year, you should probably stop doing that.”

Once we have experienced freedom from our perceptions which are no longer serving us, we can turn a new, more flexible perspective toward what we could do to be both prosperous and more in tune with life, aligned with life, if you will. That is the direction for our future. The direction we need to take to get ourselves out of the jam the world is in. (To go deeper, see the link to the piece accepted for publication in AMBA Magazine, the Association of MBAs, called, “Cultivating Freedom.”)

Freedom to now explore your unique signature, that which makes your company unique in your domain. What are your highest aspirations for your company? When we don’t leave life out of the vision, when we co-create with life, we experience the pull of the future instead of the push of the past. Profit plus goodness. An unbeatable combination for a new kind of CEO. What would it mean to change our habits of thinking?