Here’s a short and hopefully sweet post to end the chapter (and eight previous posts) on human flourishing. Please do provide me with feedback on this one, which includes questions on the whole chapter. It would be much appreciated!
Joe
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At the Heart of the Spheres
Fostering human flourishing, lying at the heart of the spheres of transformation, is the true purpose of business, it’s raison d’être. Each sphere contributes to the flourishing of human beings in unique ways as well as in ways that overlap, flow, and merge together. This is true even when an enterprise sells to other businesses, for that business, or the one sold to after that, or the one after that, eventually reaches individual human beings who deserve to flourish, and to a great degree do so via the purchases they make to enhance their lives and that of their families. The Swedes have it exactly right: “näringsliv, the Swedish word for enterprise, literally means nurturing life”.[i]
Fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business
I wrote above how each business should uncover its own, unique meaningful purpose, and that purpose should absolutely be centered in how the business uniquely contributes to human flourishing. (More on that in Chapter 6.) Fostering human flourishing is not a social responsibility; it’s a business imperative. It is core to why businesses exist at all, from time immemorial. Customers exchange their money for an economic offering precisely because they believe they will be better off with the offering than with money they have. This is of course true not just for transformations, but for all the five genres of economic offerings. The four spheres are as much spheres of flourishing as they are spheres of transformations.
Profits are the measure of how well you contribute to the flourishing of your customers
Customers buy offerings to flourish. As a business you therefore sell offerings so that your customers flourish, with profits again the measure of how well you contribute to the flourishing of your customers. As my friend and colleague Stan Hustad puts it, “If a business doesn’t help people flourish, it’s a racket.”
Joe Pine
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II
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Please do fill out this form to provide me with feedback on the close of this chapter on Fostering Human Flourishing: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehcrbYNLdNqd9ffqg16I-kiH-lgtQXCnfZiln10B1iXYnupg/viewform
[i] Mark Drewell and Björn Larsson, The Rise of the Meaningful Economy (The Foresight Group, 2017), p. 35.
[ii] Milton Friedman, “A Friedman doctrine – The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, The New York Times, September 13, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html.