Functional Business

The move toward root-cause resolution of medical problems is fuelling the growth of Functional Medicine. At last we are returning to a common sense approach to healthy living, where when we nurture a supportive environment the body naturally heals itself. Functional medicine is about promoting health rather than treating disease. It’s a short step to appreciate that the same philosophy will hold true in every other sector of our lives. By creating supportive environments we nurture healthy families, healthy communities and healthy businesses. In fact, they grow as a natural response. For many people this is a metaphor too far. They are unable to accept a linkage of ideas and focus instead on dissection and component analysis. Our entire education system is based around individuation, distinction, and us and them tribalism. This leads to excessive competition instead of collaboration, of winners and losers in a ‘might is right’ exploitation of world resources. Enough already! Mankind has reached ’11:57’. Our very survival as a species requires that we now realise our interdependence with nature and that we realign our lifestyles accordingly. There is a danger that single elements will consider their situation unique and independent of the bigger system. By doing so we avoid the opportunity to revise our practice and look systemically at the best outcomes for all. Instead, it is now essential that we redesign our business practices around sustainability and true systemic interconnection. Heretofore our attention has been drawn to how to ‘play the business game’ with a hideous ‘He who dies with the most toys wins’ mentality. It may yet be possible to avert disaster by restructuring our business objectives around sustainable practice and nurturing community. We must now find a grown up way of ‘sharing the sandpit’ that puts a smile on everyone’s face. As always, I revert to the healthy human body as a template for holistic health and systemic healing. I offer the concept of ‘Functional Business’ as the means by which we will achieve healthy wealth generation that benefits entire communities rather than simply swelling the pockets of shareholders. It is important to avoid the traditional political labels that might be applied to such ideas. They tend to polarise and divide people around prejudicial bias rather than encouraging full participation in building our shared future. The intention now is business health promotion. It is a departure from the conventional target of profit maximisation. It is also a departure from a mechanistic perspective of departmental activities that work as do so many medical specialists, whose learning is increasingly focussed until they know everything about nothing. Instead the ‘Triple Bottom Line’, espoused by John Elkington and others, now takes precedence and success is measured in terms of the wellbeing, not only of our businesses, but of our societies, wider humanity and of the planet as a whole.