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Business Defined: The Philosophy of Business

James Lemoine
Harbinger Publishing (2008)
ISBN 9780615198897
Reviewed by Dr. Michael Philliber for RebeccasReads (12/08)

To define your words helps to steady and sharpen your mental aim; it will keep you from spending your energy on distractions and false steps. But taking the time to clearly define your terms is hard to do in a rambunctious corporate world. The hurried business leader will therefore find James Lemoine’s “Business Defined: The Philosophy of Business” a handy help in this regard. Lemoine has authored a fine, short, 203 page paperback manual that many corporate leaders and executives will find beneficial to clarifying their terms and launching out towards a more solid success.

In “Business Defined,” Lemoine takes 25 important words, and works each one of them over until he has pulled together a workable, applicable and usable definition. He covers “Business,” “Communication,” “Customer Service,” “Ethics,” “Marketing,” and a host of other words. Each segment is short enough to be comprehensively covered in a quick ten minutes, and is placed in alphabetical order for speedy reference.

“Business Defined” stays on target: creating an understanding on the central business concepts with the goal of greater success, effectiveness, profit, and mission accomplishment. Each division faces the common misconceptions and poor a priori assumptions leaders have, clears them away and replaces them with healthier designations.

If there was a weak point in “Business Defined” it came out under “Ethics.”  Part of the problem has little to do with the author and more to do with the present pluralistic era, where there is barely any agreed on standard of right or wrong. When once the Protestant work ethic was the reigning paradigm, it has now been replaced by an ever-changing, ever-growing imposition of governmental regulation. But Lemoine wants to avoid a definition of “the ethical is what you do to stay out of trouble” and to move toward something more positive. That leaves him with his only option, defining ethics in the most subjective terms: doing right by your customer. The reader who will give any thought to that statement for more than five minutes will see the moral minefield and ethical quagmire that is waiting to entrap a business.

If you’re looking for a quick, but solid book to guide your fledgling business, or to reorient your older establishment and steer it back on track, or f your company has a monthly leadership reading group, then I highly recommend “Business Defined.”

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