It is not often that one hears
these days about The Greatest Happiness
Principle when one discusses the purposes and pathways for entrepreneurship.
Ignorance in this case, may only result in a lost opportunity for aspiring
entrepreneurs!
The year was 1789. A designer
and philosopher called Jeremy Bentham was desirous of designing and implementing
a model prison, which he named the Panoptican.
To accomplish this he postulated the following:
- Nature has placed human beings to serve two masters – pain and pleasure.
- The happiness of a community is the sum total of interests of its members.
- Individual happiness depends on seven pleasure or pain features – intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (time-lag), fecundity (decline due to repetition) purity and extent (impact on others).
- Quantification of these features necessitate in three sets of calculations (calculus) – felicific calculus (promoting increased use), utility calculus (contributing to overall usefulness) and hedonic calculus (aggregating consequences pleasure and pain).
The goal behind these
postulates was to design the most optimal legislative decisions prison systems
using the calculus for arriving at the greatest happiness quotient.
Today’s business leaders and entrepreneurs can take a leaf or two from these postulates and review the business logic of their strategies and operations. The modified postulates may focus on how the product or service:
- improves or alleviates the seven pain and pleasure features of not just individual customers but also others in the community who are linked to the direct customers.
- are reviewed and the necessary changes in features made based on the felicifc, the utility and the hedonic calculus of the impacts in their usage.
- strive to deliver the greatest happiness quotient.
No entrepreneur must ever
design his products and service which will make the customer a resident of a
Panoptocan.
