Introduction: David Wertheim Aymes is CEO of the Bosun Group in Johannesburg. Bosun is the market leader in paving, kerbing and retaining walls and has worked increasingly over the past 30 years in this precast concrete business that is more and more inspired by Anthroposophy. In this interview David describes the structure of Bosun along with his entrepreneurial and spiritual experiences in South Africa. He proclaims the necessity of "Liberty in Business" as a central element in all business today.
Michael Werner: How did the Liberty in Business Group come about?
As a businessman one of the most important concepts that became a reality in my own thinking out of the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s books and lectures, where he distils out the Threefold Societal Order, is that ‘Business is not Nature’. In the Natural world are minerals, plants and animals; and then there is the Human Being gifted with human capacities. Businesses do not appear in the natural world. Businesses only appear where human individuals gather. Therefore, businesses are founded out of a human capacity that is not present in animals. Anthroposophy places its emphasis on identifying this Humanity in us. Many Anthroposophists, and other searching streams, blame businesspeople and governments for the World’s social problems today. This is a patently false and misguided view. The failure is from the lack of true self-awareness in society in general and from this our education systems; or vice versa. Our education has not been able to build a relationship or link between individuals and their own higher nature on the one side, and what the world around them looks like on the other side.
As an Anthroposophist, when one discovers these realities and they work practically in one’s own challenging economic environment then one wants to give back to others.
Andrea Valdinoci, director at the World Goetheanum Association (WGA), was one of the few people that heard this reality in his heart and was warmed by it. He recognised the potential that this could unleash in businesses if correctly understood. Andrea also saw inwardly how this could add value to the economic organisations already connected to the WGA. Andrea and I were aware of a few other people in the world who were working carefully in the spiritual conceptual world of the individual and the reality of the problems being faced in the world today. From this the LiB core group formed. (They are Andrea Valdinoci, Louisa Barnum, Omri Elad, Sarit, Michael Werner and Chandre’ Wertheim Aymes.)
MW: How would you describe the task of the LiB Group, what is central to it for you?
DWA: The task of the LiB (Liberty in Business) Group is to try to distil out of the general noise of modern business the exact ‘location’, presence and influence of the human being in this activity of doing business. If one can do this, one can then possibly learn to develop it, focus it, encourage it, and so on. If one cannot identify quite specifically the existence and reality of the human being in all economic activities, then one cannot work with it. The LiB Group is striving to understand this issue and grasp it consciously so that it can be shared and used by others.
MW: Why is it so important now for the future for businesses to become aware of human capacity and unfold this potential?
DWA: We live in the reality of an evolving human consciousness. This is often not easy to see and work with. Currently we are leaving the fourth Post Atlantean Epoch and moving ever deeper into the fifth Post Atlantean Epoch (PAE). We carry within us the momentum of the fourth PAE. This is our ability to reason with logic of the material world. This ‘historical’ power of the human soul has been at the base of what our societal structure is today. It is the foundation of modern material wealth through economy. One could say that economy to date has been easy because massive needs for material things opened up in the human soul and the human soul had the capacity to fulfil these with the abundance of nature products and the power of nature reproducing most of these. However, while this was all happening, the human soul was becoming disconnected from itself as a spiritual reality and force. The religious movements and education became servants to this intellectual and materialistic logic behind power and material wealth. The real human being lost itself.
The fifth PAE, dedicated to the development of the consciousness soul, is the only way out of this trap that we find ourselves in. It is quite right that we are in this trap. The healthy development of the consciousness soul requires this degree of difficulty to be able to develop correctly. Business, and other areas of life, is no longer as easy as it was. Businesses used to live off a more coherent and balanced soul life of its staff that came from the circumstances of the past. Today businesses are battling with souls that are not inherently healthy and do not know where their soul health comes from. The schooling and religious movements are not really able to help. Societies are hanging onto the status quo because they cannot see the right next steps. Anthroposophy offers these quite clearly if one is willing to be very dedicated to spiritual scientific concepts.
MW: What do you mean by this?
DWA: The basics of business came about and flourished without the requirement for conscious involvement of the consciousness soul. It has led us to where we are with all the inequality, waste and damage. If we want a new societal structure based on different ideas, then we need to learn how to engage ourselves differently. We need to work out the difference between using the content of textbooks versus the content of the ‘All knowing’. I will address some of the detail here in further questions I am sure.
MW: Let’s put the focus on Bosun and what you implement there: What does this awareness work look like at Bosun?
DWA: At Bosun we understand that all economic activity comes about amongst human beings as I have said above. This means that where there is only nature, there is no economic activity. When one then looks as to why economy comes about amongst human beings, one must conclude that it has something to do with the significance of the human soul and the human ‘I’. We therefore work with people to assist them to become self-aware, aware of their soul and I competence relative to that of animals. We use the conceptual building blocks of spiritual science to achieve this. We use the body, soul, spirit concept to assist people to understand themselves and their interface with the world and with others. This awakens the connection of their souls to the reality of their humanity. Their thinking becomes a force when it is consciously connected to bigger truths like body, soul and spirit. They experience this when we show them how their thinking is changing because they incorporate these concepts and how this can be seen in the change in their environment. From this they become engaged in wanting to know what they are allowing to live in them. We say that “what lives in us appears around us”.
We use many small steps to get here. Examples of these steps are how we look for staff, how we induct them, how we do reviews with them, what their staff files look like, how we run meetings, how we measure things and more. We have all sorts of imaginations and games that we use to assist core concepts to be palatable, yet implicitly correct, to colleagues so that they can resurrect these out of their own I forces more easily in the future. This empowers their inner lives and they get to be able to use more or less of these imaginations depending on their individual soul.
At Bosun we have identified, using phenomenology, that Bosun would simply not exist if it were not for the ‘human’ element in its people. All living things are seeded. The question then becomes, ‘What seeds a business?’ People are the seeds of businesses. So how does this seeding work? I have mentioned some aspects of where this seeding comes from, above.
MW: Your management structure is three-folded and includes a Head of Liberty; what is his role?
DWA: The Head of Liberty has the role of bringing consciousness to the organisation of what we have answered in the first two questions above. This person sits in on all the different threefold meetings and watches for shortfalls in Liberty competence and devises ways to try to empower people through growth and capacity of their own self-awareness. They offer training, personal development plans, different ways of reporting that would get deeper into people and so on. They work with problem people, inductions and finding better ways to communicate in meetings.
The head of Liberty has the central task of holding the consciousness that the human being is the nourisher and rejuvenator of the entire threefold societal organism, just as the digestive system is for our physical threefoldness of head-nervous, cardiovascular, and digestive systems.
MW: What does "economy" mean to you, and how do you implement it in your company?
DWA: Economy is defined as “Providing for the material needs of others.” We have added two words to this and say, “Providing relevant products for the material needs of others efficiently.” These words just sharpen the definition a bit and make it easier to work with. We have discovered this definition is a spirit power in itself, just as a circle has a spirit power behind it. When we look at a physical circle, we can see whether it is obeying this spiritual force, the concept circle, or not. We have a sympathy response if it is a circle and an antipathy response if it is egg shaped. If one considers the definition of economy in the same light, we can see that we have to be producing something RELEVANT for the MATERIAL needs of OTHERS EFFICIENTLY. When I think of my earlier years, I did not take on a job to support this spiritual force. I took it on for my needs. My needs got in the way of the spiritual being behind economy. I was never told that by taking on this job, I was committing to this being of economy. I was not aware that I had to support this being by doing everything I could to provide relevant products for the material needs of others efficiently. Now that I have become aware of this, I feel so much more empowered because I can clearly see what I should be supporting. One can easily sense now that a good business is one that supports this being of economy. And, just for the doubters and sceptics, the definition implicitly steers one away from self-indulgence, greed, falsity and harm to nature and others. At Bosun we are making people aware of this from the very beginning of their joining this economic activity. We are also exposing this to those already at Bosun. They get a much bigger perspective and can once again align to it from a real truthful perspective, a spiritual scientific idea. This enables their inner life to connect to something more real than just a job, and from this their inner lives become much more powerful and influential in their role and contribution; and of course they take this all home with them also. They feel their seeding power as a reality.
MW: What approach have you developed in production and sales, and how do these two areas connect?
DWA: Our management structure is set up to ‘discover’ what the market perceives as relevant. This means that we have to be really good listeners, not good story tellers. This is a pivotal difference. We stay away from selling. We try to meet the objective of the customers – what do they need! They make the choice.
We also to try to excel at being efficient. Efficient means no waste of any kind, no damage, no excess and, best layout from a flow perspective, best methods, machine people balance, and so on. This drives costs down without having to compete with others. The better the human capacity in both relevance and efficiency, the better the relevance and efficiency. We let the Equality sphere make sure that everything is connected and coherent in all this and that it feeds back objectively what is actually happening.
MW: What do you look for when you take on new people at Bosun, and what is the process?
DWA: In essence we look for people who have soul qualities of interest, reverence and courage. Skills and experience are next. One can always teach sound human souls, many Waldorf graduates for example, skills. Experience they can also get over time. When a soul has no interest, reverence or courage, one is taking on a very big task.
We word our advertisements to attract such people. We ask questions at the interviews that could shed light on these qualities. We give the candidates a chance to ask questions themselves and always prompt them for more. This entire process assists us to establish what lives inside them. We then try to connect what they have inside them to what is specifically required by their role – the concepts required by the role versus what the individual carries implicitly as concepts. The better the alignment, the better the chance of mutual value.
I could go on a lot here, but in brief, we do a Handshake agreement which is an agreement outside of the legal sphere where we promise each other from the heart what our promises are to the other. We do very careful induction in great detail and are patient in this. We do reviews with them twice a year where the review looks at who they were versus who they are and the inner development that has taken place over the past six months. What I say above is all very abbreviated, but we are willing to share all the details with anyone interested.
MW: You are currently in the process of transferring the company into responsible ownership; how do you use surpluses today?
DWA: We have only recently got into a position of surpluses. Economic activities require a long time to become a close representation of what lives as the idea initially. This can take decades. It is only once the idea and the outward manifestation are closely aligned and in harmony with the essence of economy itself that surplus arises sustainably. We are also in a process of handing over the business to a younger generation. They need a challenge more than what we are currently doing. For this reason, we/they will use the surpluses for the next 5 years at least to fund several expansion plans that we have conceived together. We are using quite a bit of the current ‘surpluses’ to fund the training and development of our staff. We are building our Liberty capacities and seeing how this manifests in what we are able to be.
MW: A central aspect of being human is the ability to continually reconnect with one's own inner source. How do you do that, and what questions are you currently working on?
DWA: What nourishes me is my own deeper understanding of myself and the world as I learn to live. We should be able to say of those that die “They knew how to live!” I want to be such a person. This nurtures me, this challenge. Spiritual Science on its way to becoming Anthroposophy, along with the Christ in me, are the guides to this path as to knowing how to live. These we must be able to find in the detailed aspects of life; even to where they are when one washes dishes.
I am currently busy working on refining my own insights into how one can link the inherent capacity of materialistic thinking, that is present in all modern souls, to carry us over the ‘abyss’ of disbelief and scepticism about the world of ideas and spirit and into the world of the consciousness soul. There is implicit logic in the material sciences. If one takes this implicit logic and adds a few of the core spiritual scientific concepts to this way of thinking, then a few steps are added to our perspective on life. A simple example would be that if one is wanting to build a new factory of house with only material thinking, then costs and size and materials and form are completely determinant of the structure that will appear. If one holds in ones thinking the essential nature of the mineral kingdom when one goes about a new structure, then one knows that the mineral kingdom, the bricks and mortar, will stay in the form conceived as well and as long as our thinking has given it a chance to do this. This allows for ideas around the structure to assume a much more holistic end result. Such a small shift and such a big change in our relationship to the end form and to ourselves. We need to be able to find an accessible way, within ordinary living, to gain access to the consciousness soul while developing it.
Thank you, David.
Thank you, Michael.
