It’s difficult to imagine how a multi-million dollar business could just disappear overnight. But this is what happened time and again through the early thirties as frightened depositors made runs on banks. They believed the business wouldn’t succeed, so it failed. As our current recession confronts us with the possibility of new runs and waves of collapse - like dream or bubbles in the mind of the market - we would do well to consider just what disappears when a business ends.

The danger is that if we don’t know what businesses are, then we won’t be able to hold onto them when they start running away or transform them when they become a nightmare. We must know what a business is in order to do anything with it. And the problem is that our efforts to know are like grasping at water. 

Consider. A business is not its assets, for these can always be switched out. Buildings can be bought and sold along with equipment. And it is not the people who work in it, for even the best of these are interchangeable. Nor is a business its structure, for most of us know entrepreneurs who have merely registered an idea, while more established business structures will often change. Whatever their essence, businesses are far more intangible than we tend to believe.

The mystery is no more easily solved when searching for the self. If it’s always changing, and no part or aspect is enough to sustain it, then who are we really? Our will, intentions, and patterns of action? Or should we apply the metaphor back to business and say the mission, strategy, culture, and procedures? These are not static phenomena. They are tied the core of what comprises agency and individuality in both businesses and selves. The problem is these things too will change as learning and development bring transformations previously undreamed. There is no constancy, only fluctuation. But more to the point, missions and intentions, strategies and willpower, are all located in the nexus of environmental conditions - correlated and coordinated with with the world of contingencies. Individuals and businesses are not constant, because they are constantly in relation.

The Buddhists have concluded the self is an idea - with various themes on this notion running through the sects. The self has its karma and consciousness, intentions and actions, to be sure. But what sustains it is an idea that these attributes cohere, and the karma which is created as we act on that idea. Perhaps businesses are the same - sustained by the ideas of where they have been, what they are, and where they’re going. Perhaps businesses are just crystallized ideas.

If only my own wishing would have made it so, of course, I would still be involved in many a failed enterprise. But if enough of us believe or cease to believe, inside and outside of the business, everything necessary for a business to succeed will be there - the vision, mission, procedures, productivity, sales, markets, customers, and more. The “secret” is getting everybody on board. And this takes much more than visualizations and affirmations. I am not advocating the concretization of flakiness.  

What I am suggesting rather, is a recognition of the insubstantiality of business and the importance of our mental powers over it. An economy can collapse when people cease to believe in it, after all. If 75% of the population believes we are in a recession, as they currently do, they will spend and invest less, and all businesses will stagnate accordingly. But there is more. If we believe that businesses can put an end to global climate change through its innovations, then they will put their resources into innovating alternative energy sources and perhaps succeed. If we believe businesses are communities and it is the job of these communities to support the personal development of their members, the nature of how we work will be transformed. And if we believe that sustained profits are not enough to justify the continuation of a business - that a greater contribution is necessary - then many enterprises will find themselves struggling to justify their existence.

That businesses are ideas does not mean every idea about business will be crystallized in deed. But it does mean that everything about business can be trans-mutated through mind. And without our minds no business would exist. Perhaps the power business holds over our society is largely the result of our own failure to recognize the power we hold over business. Business will change with our ideas of it.