EA Voices

ArchiMate is an open standard for Enterprise Architecture that is used by many organiations invarious industries worldwide. It is an elaborate and complete standard for architecture descriptions, aligned with TOGAF. In another recording we have outlin…

The business does not exist.

Do people in your org use the term “the business”? yep same here. Please can we ban the use of this term?

The term, ‘the business’ is often used in the following scenario:

“Yeah, well we tried to do this really cool thing but ‘the business’ stopped us”

The hilarious thing about this is this usage is often circuitous! You have people in business unit X referring to the people in business unit Y as ‘the business’, meanwhile people in business unit Y referring to business unit X as ‘the business’.

Let’s try and clear this mess up:

1) Unless you are some sort of corporate stowaway that has secreted yourself into an organisation just for shits and giggles, you are part of ‘the business’ and therefore part of whatever problem you are having that makes you to resort to generalisations

2) There is no gigantic creature called ‘The business’ sitting in your stationery cupboard saying “no!” and stopping you from doing what you want. There are only individuals with opinions, aspirations, power and influence.

3) Referring to ‘the business’ is a sign of laziness. It is a sign that you can’t be arsed to put the effort into thinking about your context to the level of detail required to solve your problem. So you create a large intangible barrier, you give it a label and you divest yourself of the responsibility to do anything constructive about it.

Next time someone says “the business” stop them and say “who?” I bet they won’t know.
If you find yourself using the word (and I do from time to time) stop yourself and think “who?”

Maybe then you can stop hiding behind the imaginary constructs of your own creation and start solving your problem.