Love

A lawyer once asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment of the law?” (Matthew 22:36) To which Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

What is this love to which Jesus directs us? His is a concept of love that precedes St. Paul’s interpretation of sacrificial love exemplified in the crucifixion. This is a Jewish concept of love not yet fused with Platonic mysticism by St. Augustine. The life of love taught by Jesus was not burdened with medieval chivalry, or Victorian romanticism, or post-Freudian doubt. Yet it is also a love that goes far beyond simple obedience to narrowly defined legalism.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” You shall understand your neighbor to be as real as yourself. You shall not reduce your neighbor to something less than an individual with a full claim to righteousness. You shall be in relationship with your neighbor. You shall empathize with your neighbor. You shall avoid categorizing your neighbor into convenient and illusory stereotypes and caricatures. You shall seek the tsedaq of your neighbor as assiduously as your own.

Love is primarily a sense of shared identity and ongoing relationship. Whether we are psychologically healthy or not – whether we like ourselves or not – we are engaged in our self-identity. Jesus tells us we should engage our neighbors as fully as we engage ourselves.

He goes even further. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

When I meet with senior colleagues our informal conversations usually revolve around those individuals and organizations perceived as threatening. It is an interesting contrast with the official agenda that is almost always focused on purposes, objectives, and more positive opportunities. Over coffee, at dinner, between planes, there is an ongoing effort to make sense of those who threaten us.

Overtime as we learn more and more about those who threaten us a narrative begins to emerge. We know about their early origins, typical behavior, apparent goals, weaknesses, and strengths. Individually or institutionally these “enemies” become very real to us. The more we know, usually the more we respect the enemy. In some cases as we come to better understand the other, we learn they are not as threatening as it seemed. In a few cases, we have been able to transform an enemy into a partner.

I have not encouraged my senior colleagues to love our enemies. But I have certainly talked about “getting inside their head" and "understanding their motivations.” I have always mistrusted a threat analysis that seems to disrespect the origin or capabilities of the threat. I have always felt most capable defending myself or my organization when I most empathized with the nature of the threat. I have been least able to manage risk when I did not understand how the threat – an individual or organization – understood itself.

A case can even be made that very seldom is your toughest competitor actually your enemy.

Emerging industries have the highest concentration of potential competitors. But at this stage the firms are engaged in a shared process of creating a market. More is often better, and the failure of a firm in an emerging market is more often self-inflicted than the result of direct competition.

In mature industries competition for market-share can become intense, but even here it is the give-and-take between tough competitors that spurs innovation in pricing and differentiation which generates value. Mature markets also generate buy-outs, mergers, and alliances, through which increased value is generated for the entire industry. These are often the exit strategies-of-choice for many entrepreneurs who are effective in an emerging industry, but less so in a mature industry.

It is primarily in a declining industry that a competitor may directly threaten the simple demise of a firm, and this usually reflects a failure on the part of the weaker firm to find or keep its tsedaq that creates differentiated value.

Business is mostly about being creative. Being part of a challenging community of other creators is helpful to each firm and the industry. Respecting and fully engaging your competitor is not inconsistent with pursuing your own business objectives.

In business we too often use analogies from war and sports where one wins and the other loses. The world of business is much more involved with creating new opportunities, new products, new relationships, and new value. Loving and creating are complementary.