Over the past few months, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the realization that philosophy – an old interest of mine – and management – an entirely new subject matter to me – needn’t be as far apart as one might think.

Maria João Podgorny

It was a Coursera seminar on ‘What managers can learn from philosophy’ that first caught my eye. It was taught by a BCG consultant and focused on managing change – a CEO’s number one task, the consultant said. His main message was, paraphrasing Francis Bacon, a British philosopher from the 16th century, that if you want to be better at change, you have to obey the laws of change. And that there’s a great deal of insights that you can gain about the ways in which change takes place by becoming familiar with the works of great philosophers, from Plato to Machiavel and Kant.

A few weeks later I stumbled upon an article published in the Wall Street Journal on ‘Why some MBAs are reading Plato’. The author explained that, following the financial crisis, business schools have incorporated into their MBA programs classes that aim at equipping students with concepts and tools that address issues beyond the bottom line. It is also a response to “a common complaint of employers, who say recent graduates are trained to solve single problems but often miss the big picture.”

And finally, I’ve just finished reading an essay on “Economy, Moral Values and Politics” (available here in Portuguese) by the recently appointed CEO of Novo Banco (the bank that has just been created following the debacle of the group that owns Banco Espírito Santo). In a beautifully written essay, Vítor Bento explains how the maximization of wealth, rather than honesty or humility, became the dominant value in our modern societies and what this implies from a moral standpoint. In particular, Bento argues that this change has created a new paradigm where the behavior that leads to accumulation of wealth comes second to the accumulation of wealth per se. In other words, he says society attaches more value to the accumulation of wealth in itself than to the means used to attain the result – which, I say, runs against Immanuel Kant‘s moral imperative that compels us to “act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Turns out philosophy has a great deal to teach us management students about how to address today’s most pressing issues: change, impact and ethics. Millennials’ quest for meaning plus the ethical questioning that ensued from the financial crisis contributed to bringing tearing down the ivory tower that separated philosophers from managers – and, in my view, that’s to everybody’s benefit.