The Unbusinesslike Nature of Business

As I have previously shared here, a couple of days ago, I received a surprising email notifying me that I had been nominated to be the Vice President of a major college in Boston, Massachusetts. An enclosed “leadership profile” in the letter of invitation revealed more: as Vice President in charge of ensuring equity and social justice, I would be on the President’s Council, guide the institution and its campuses through structural changes as its ‘chief diversity officer’, and offer “thought leadership, experience, and effective practices in advancing diversity, equity, anti-racism, inclusion, and social justice goals.”

I already knew what my response was going to be – even before I shared the email with EJ. It wasn’t even an act of courage when I eventually replied, politely declining their offer: “…libidinal flows in the world…urge me towards unprecedented ways of organizing and acting and thinking-with-the-world. My place is in the ‘elsewheres’ that have no name yet.”

It was easy. I didn’t hesitate. However, I was tempted.

Now, here’s what I mean by that. For me, ‘temptation’ is a dynamic ecosystem of unique influences and challenges that are cosmic and microbial, archetypal, and ancestral – always present, never static. You might think of ‘temptation’ as a ‘halo’ around you (but which does not centralize you), except this ‘halo’ is populated with daemons and whispers, an ancestrome of volatile agencies and polyvocal entities whose secretions form a cartographical project, a condition of possibility and prophecy that ‘maps’ what one might do with the world. The idea of temptation I am drawn to – a field of enticement, a localized arrangement of agencies that is the condition for my acting with/in the world – shirks troubling concepts like predeterminism and the anthropocentricity indicated in a phrase like ‘personal destiny’. The Yorubas might think of this rich concept as one’s ‘orí’, often translated into English as one’s head or ‘destiny’.

So, when I say I was tempted, I mean something stirred, a rippling effect bouncing off the riverbank and eddied back into the cacophonous middle: a frequency I could pick up. It materialized as a question, a sense of what I could try, a trance served upon a floating blanket filled with ungodly things. An opening that made sense in light of another invitation to queer alliances that I had previously said yes to.

Last year, along with my wonderful team and community of siblings and crip-explorers, I hosted the fifth iteration of We Will Dance with Mountains, a postactivist course for troubling moments. More than a thousand people came together to make sanctuary for the fugitive new, to create an unprecedented animist festival at the edges of safety. We began with a blessing from Joanna Macy and ended with naked Brazilian performers from a theatre group in Rio de Janeiro enacting the sacred story of Osun becoming water. Though a community of inquiry and numerous pods of continuous fugitive study have emerged from the course, “Mountains” will not run this year. It will most likely resume in 2023.

For now, I want to try something different: apart from writing my new book on postactivism, blackness, and the sticky centrality of the slave ship, I will be partnering with a network of thinkers called the House of Beautiful Business, which is exploring what leadership, business and organizations might look like in these bizarre moments. Recently, they invited me to be their ‘philosopher-in-residence’ (an interesting designation that has inspired me to grow out my beard!), and – along with a small team of my friends – produced a platform for me to share and teach. As such, in a 5-weekend arrangement called ‘The Unbusinesslike Nature of Business’, I will teach about leadership, explore the shocking ways even our best attempts at framing response-ability to the incalculable losses of our times fail to address these crises, and invite organizations small and large into research with me. Into strange study.

I hardly think through the prisms of business and/or leadership – at least not in conventional senses of those terms. This is risky, but I want to try. Something about this offer stirred the denizens in ‘my’ temptation halo but warned that I bring in a small community of artists and dear siblings from the “Mountains” to carefully create and navigate the pedagogy for this meaningful but charged exploration.

If you’d like to be the next Vice President of a major college in Boston, if you feel called to that, let me know – and I will recommend you to the team. If you would like to join me and my friends in this exploration of deconstructing business (as usual), then visit the link below. Either way, I hope to see you dancing with Mountains next year, dancing with the secretions of our collective temptations.

Bayo Akomolafe

https://houseofbeautifulbusiness.com/the-unbusinesslike-nature-of-business