What is a Business?
Road to Conscious Finance
In my last essay, “You’re Wrong Milton Friedman,” I examined Milton Friedman's views on profit maximisation as the sole purpose of a business. He may be entirely wrong, as his view that business should maximise profits alone is not supported by science or logic; his arguments are highly biased and not rooted in reality or philosophy about why businesses exist. It motivates me to understand further the role of business and what business is. Dr. Tilman Bauer has been advancing a work he defines as “Business for Peace.” I had the privilege of meeting him in 2024 and 2025. His work is fascinating and pushes the boundaries of our current understanding of business, trade, finance, and commerce. He even questions the most fundamental question: what is business? And to my surprise, the answer is not profit maximisation, the answer is peace, and business is entangled, just as electrons are entangled at the quantum level, we can’t separate the two, they are fundamentally intertwined.
Drawing on David Bohm’s theories, as discussed by Paavo Pylkkänen in his groundbreaking work, Mind, Matter and Implicate Order1, the Business Peace Index (proposed by Tilman Bauer) measures impact within a "new paradigm" that recognizes the interrelatedness of all phenomena. It evaluates whether a business understands its role within the holomovement—the undivided flowing movement of existence—where business activities are seen as "projections" that can either foster harmony or cause fragmentation in the global social fabric. In a separate essay, I examine the disconnect between the real world and the current financial system.
We, as business owners and investors, argue that the role of business is to maximise shareholder returns, which leads to short-sightedness and blurs our lens on how to build companies for the real world that have real-world impacts on people, society, and nature.
Also deriving from Bohm’s and Paavo’s work, I come to the immediate conclusion that money and capital are not merely for the exchange of value; there is something beyond them: interconnectedness. It compels stakeholders and shareholders to recognize the interconnected reality.
To achieve that, we need a new monetary ontology2 and a new understanding of money, grounded in quantum economics. Financial actors are never truly independent; they are defined by the reciprocal entanglement of money, as a medium of exchange, with an active social and environmental relationship.
We need to regain sovereignty over domestic financial systems; the race to the bottom has left many systems too vulnerable, and decentralisation is key.
Linking shareholder interest to societal and environmental interest - finance can’t exist in isolation.
We need to disincentivize scale, complexity, and leverage - make it structurally impossible for corporations or organisations to become too big to fail.
It is consistent with the Gapponism proposed by Eiichi Shibusawa. He believed that businesses should not exist solely for the benefit of shareholders but should serve a broader purpose that includes the well-being of all stakeholders—employees, customers, society, and the environment. In a sense, he was a strong proponent of prioritizing the interests of society over self-interest, and these principles are deeply rooted in Confucian values of fairness, integrity, and responsibility to the community.
As we enter the new year, I urge all of us to think critically about how we want to redefine the roles of business, finance, government, money, and capitalist structures.
Happy New Year and Holidays!
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If you are building something in the Nordics, Singapore, or Japan, I’d love to learn more from you. Please get in touch with me at nobody@firstfollowers.co.
Peace out!
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Who am I?
Nobody.
And that is everything.
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My life purpose is to challenge the prevailing narrative about capitalism and to build a system people see as a system of hope, not extraction and abuse. Where gender, race, ethnicity, and identity don’t matter - where the compassion and empathy circle is extended to nature, to sentient beings, and non-sentient things - finance that is rooted in kindness. I don’t want to approach finance from fear to lose or be rich, but see it as a tool to allocate resources - I don’t know if I will fail or be successful, but I am content, and I always come back to the fundamentals - to the values and to the morality questions.
The book “Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order” by Paavo Pylkkänen explores David Bohm’s philosophical and physical perspectives on the relationship between mind and matter.
A set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them: “what’s new about our ontology is that it is created automatically from large datasets”“we’re using ontologies to capture and analyse some of the knowledge in our department.”
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