Tim Leberecht is the German–American co-CEO of the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community of over 50,000 people that aims to make humans more human and business more beautiful. His 2015 book The Business Romantic was an international bestseller. He speaks to The Beautiful Truth about how businesses – and humans – can thrive in a world on the cusp of a new epoch defined by artificial intelligence.

This article first appeared in Issue 04 of The Beautiful Truth. Get your copy here.

Your mission is to make business more beautiful. What does that mean?

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa said: “Beauty is the name of something that does not exist.” In other words, it can be aspirational, stimulating our imagination to envision everything we want business to be – but isn’t yet.

Recently, we’ve been using the term ‘life-centred economy’. It’s the successor of the human-centred economy. Previously, putting humanity at the centre led to the issues we currently face in our late-capitalist system. Instead, we look to truly honour interspecies life, planetary boundaries and all forms of intelligence, including AI – the life around us and within us – all working against the toxic ‘Silicon Valley’ culture we’ve grown accustomed to.

AI is polarising and often viewed as either humanity’s doom or saviour, but you’re suggesting a more nuanced perspective.

Yes, all types of intelligence are crucial to decision-making. We need emotional, somatic, spiritual and cognitive intelligence. Artificial intelligence plays a role – it’s our new strange companion that we must learn to coexist with. Combining all these notions of intelligence will create a new form of confronting and shaping reality, moving beyond the narrow slice offered by purely rational, post-industrialist management mindsets of the past.

According to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, there’s a point of disruption every 80 years, and it seems we’re on the cusp of one now. AI’s rise will likely provoke a significant replacement of knowledge work. Tasks that can be handled by machines will remain. What remains for humans is complexity, nuance, relationships, art, imagination and eccentric, counterintuitive thinking. We excel at surprise and being unpredictable. This is the work that will remain uniquely human and beautiful.

Interestingly, many of the skills that are uniquely human are not easily quantifiable. Do you think business will move beyond caring primarily about measurable outcomes?

There will always be a need for quantifiable outcomes. However, we believe that how people feel is much more important. Some may ask about impact and actionable outcomes, but I’m a big believer in ideas. Watching a 90-minute movie can change your life and lead to more action than weeks of workshops – because it’s stories that matter. And so, at the House of Beautiful Business, all of the connections, work and projects are self-organised by our community. We offer the garden, but the farming is done by them.

Take us through your principles for a beautiful business.

Firstly, embrace the unnecessary. It’s an antidote to efficiency: what might be considered surplus from an efficiency standpoint is crucial for creating a beautiful life and organisational culture. Those little extra gestures, the investments in the invisible and immeasurable, truly make a difference. For instance, Steve Jobs would insist on designing the interior of his computers with the same rigour and love as the exterior.

Watching a 90-minute movie can change your life and lead to more action than weeks of workshops – because it’s stories that matter.

Another is intimacy: create moments of awe and attachment as an antidote to loneliness and isolation. That also means being vulnerable and recognising suffering, both in oneself and in others. It’s crucial for curing some of the illnesses of our time, yet we often lack it and fear it.

We must embrace being ugly. Being beautiful means being ugly and authentic, showing the unpolished, unstaged, unscripted, raw sides of yourself without the need for consistency in performance.

Lastly, there is the principle of remaining incomplete. We must recognise that every organisation and project is an ongoing story. It’s akin to playing an infinite rather than a finite game, as Simon Sinek popularised. We need more businesses that play to play, not just to win, and find pleasure and meaning in that.