I’m in the middle of producing the second season of my podcast, This Human Business, and I’ve got mixed feelings about how it’s going. On the one hand, I feel confident that I’m covering important issues. On the other hand, I’m concerned that with the first half of this new season, I’m focusing on the negative. Will this approach turn off listeners?
Part of the difficulty I’m having is that, in business culture, there’s a bias toward unjustified positive claims. Entrepreneurs are in the habit of claiming that they’re giving a 110% effort, when such a thing is obviously impossible. People in sales exaggerate the capabilities of the products and services they’re hawking, and business professionals are advised to “fake it ’til you make it”. As a result, honest assessments of business performance are hard to come by. In this context, frank assessments of what’s actually going on in business can sound harsh.
On the other hand, the constant hype out of the business world has bred a thorough lack of trust amongst consumers. Even business professionals presume out of habit that most of the claims they hear from their colleagues are vastly exaggerated.
We’re told to accentuate the positive, but often, a focus on the positive in business culture is a convenient mask that covers up serious problems, including outright dishonesty. Management at Enron emphasized the positive by engaging in massive accounting fraud. Wall Street firms gave small investors wonderful, positive advice about investment opportunities that they warned their more substantial clients against.
On a social scale, admonishments to maintain a positive attitude are tools of suppression of justified dissent. On an individual level, positive thinking can be used to thwart necessary changes in a similar way. People engage in denial of the serious problems in their lives, using mantras of affirmation to insist that, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” when it should be obvious things are getting worse and worse.
In the psychology of emotion, you’ll often hear the distinction between positive emotions and negative emotions referred to as “valence”. The rough idea is to distinguish between emotions that are “good” or appealing (positive emotions), and emotions that are “bad” or unappealing (negative emotions).
Among those who advocate this perspective of valence, there’s often a facile distinction between these two groups, but a little more reflection reveals the relativity of these assessments. When someone categorizes an emotion as “good” or appealing, it’s important to follow up with some critical questions, such as: In what situations is this emotion appealing, and what exactly is it good for? A supposedly “bad” emotion, like anger, is actually good for accomplishing a lot of things. Negative emotions can be quite appealing to those people who are feeling them. It’s those people who are the targets of negative feelings who don’t appreciate them so much.
When someone feels negative, what they’re feeling isn’t inherently bad or good, appealing or unappealing. They are immersed in a feeling of negation. They are feeling the desire to say no to something, refusing to go along with it. They’re seeking to change something. They want to move away from where they have been, to begin a journey toward something else, even if they don’t know what or where their destination is.
In contrast, a positive emotion is all about staying put. It’s about liking where you are and not wanting things to change. Positivity is committed to a position. It’s the stance of someone who posits something, believes in it, and is sticking to their guns. Positivity is against movement (unless, if you want to split hairs, someone has a positive feeling about change itself).
When someone chides you, “Don’t be so negative”, what they’re really telling you is not to change, or not to expect anyone else to change. The power of positive thinking is the power of maintaining the status quo.
Feeling positive means feeling good about where you are, but that’s not the same thing as actually being good. What someone asks you to think positively about torture, chemical warfare, or air pollution? What if they ask you to see the positive side of Nazi Germany, or cannibalism?
A negative emotion can provoke a person to take a stand to end an abusive relationship, or to join a protest against a tyrannical government. If we negate the validity of negative feelings, we thwart a significant force in both personal and social progress. Sometimes, the right thing to do is not to say with appreciation, “Thank you, everything’s great, but I have a few suggestions for improvement.”
In the second half of the second season of This Human Business, I’m turning to more positive notions of what can be lovely dimensions of the business process, such as commercial poetry, alternative notions of time, and the experience of pilgrimages of consumption. These episodes will be less challenging to listeners than what has gone before, but that doesn’t make them more valuable than the negative material that came before.
For the final podcast episode of this season, I’ll be considering both positive and negative factors to answer the question: Can business actually become more human, or is it a lost cause?
I don’t know the answer to that question yet, but that’s another emotion… ambivalence.
