Humane Entrepreneurship

Consumers are starting to recognize the value of being able to expend their resources while concurrently awakening to the troubles that small businesses globally face. As for businesses, many have also reflected on their values and practices, deciding where to make cuts and how to demonstrate employee value. At large, we have all been influenced by this global reset.

This re-establishment places many in the space of simultaneous suffering and structuring. This is where the principles of humane entrepreneurship can be applied in practice. Detailed in their original publication, humane enterprises share four categorizations for business, those being ideal, moderate, negative, and harmful. Working as types of standards for the business community, these qualify businesses not only in their transition towards just practices but also in their ability to apply these grades of practice as individuals and through cultural business diffusion.

Ideal Humane Entrepreneurship can be found in companies where their top management and administration embody the cultural values of empathy, equity, empowerment, and enablement for their employees. As the leadership guides appropriately and humanely, a culture of these values will help generate innovation, appropriate risk-taking, and decisive actions that produce activities creating quality job creation and company wealth, which helps continue the cycle of these qualities. Although these qualifiers need markers to measure these standards, companies might create evaluation and assessment phases to calculate their business’s standard of Humane Entrepreneurship. Additionally, national leaders can use these principles as they reconsider current policies surrounding enterprises, aiding in the need to bring a Culture of Ideal Humane Entrepreneurship to the forefront of both consumers’ and producers’ understanding of their role in entrepreneurship.

Moderate Humane Entrepreneurship can be portrayed in companies where leadership is committed to one aspect of generating a Culture of Humane Entrepreneurship. This will inevitably lead to an imbalance between managing the human and strategy within the organization. Resulting in varied outcomes for wealth and job creation, this cycle will, unfortunately, not continue the cycle of positive performance seen in the Ideal standard.

Regrettably, negative Humane Entrepreneurship is depicted in many companies worldwide, where the organization’s leadership forgets the importance of the “human” component to entrepreneurial orientation. This will thus create dissatisfaction among employees and disempower high-level performance, innovation, and risk-taking. This sterile ecosystem will cause depletion and discontinuation of wealth cycles. There remains the possibility for an organization of this Negative nature to recover the humane element of the business.

Lastly, Harmful Humane Entrepreneurship is seen in leaders who purposely and directly harm their employees and, thus, the capital. The Culture of Humane Entrepreneurship is not visible in this environment, leading to a decline in performance and wealth, which is often impossible to resolve and look forward to.

Humane Entrepreneurship necessitates that companies either transition immediately or begin their business plan based on a humane orientation to entrepreneurship, allowing leadership and staff to understand their value while working as a cohesive team. This company will demonstrate its belief that “respect for human dignity demands respect for human freedom,” thus leveraging its company to further the ideals of empathy and equity beyond the walls of its business to broadcast this Cultural value to and for the greater world.

Article by: Dr. Ayman ElTarabishy, President and CEO, ICSB