It’s an argument that resonates strongly in the post-liberal culture of our consumerized society. It envisions workers as autonomous agents with fixed preferences and jobs as a simple cash-for-time exchanges—sources of income, not sites of moral or civic transformation. Employees appear as rational contractors, whose desires are inherently valid and sufficient, while businesses should merely satisfy what is already there rather than presume to develop what might be. At its heart, it represents the mindset of an era shaped by consent, individual choice, and the careful avoidance of shared responsibility. It assumes organizations hold no societal or ethical duty to form communities, reducing the role of business to allegedly neutral service providers—a machinery for efficiency stripped of deeper purpose.
Compelling though it sounds, this logic collapses utterly in practice. Adults in Western societies devote over 50% of their meaningful waking hours to work. Family, civic, educational, and spiritual life together account for barely more than a third of available time. To pretend that growth can happen "outside" work, even when work itself is indifferent or hostile to development, is nothing but wishful thinking.
Workplaces inevitably mold people. Structures, routines, and cultures quietly shape ambition, attitudes, ethics, and imagination—whether intended or not. Choosing "not to develop" employees does not keep business neutral; it entrenches the status quo. Every firm embodies values, visible or invisible. Organizations that deny their embeddedness in society and their intrinsically formative role still drive conformity, individualism, or instrumental rationality. The question is not whether businesses influence human growth, but toward what ends: flourishing or exploitation, greater agency or passive compliance.
Therefore, if businesses wish to serve both their own future and that of society, they must accept and own their formative power. The responsibility to cultivate character, agency, and shared purpose cannot be abdicated without consequence. To deny this is to deny the reality of organizational life itself.
Ultimately, businesses must develop themselves and their people not as an imposition, but because, by their very nature, they already do. The health of any organization is inseparable from the growth of its people; as the well-being of any society is inseparable from the development of its citizens. There is no flourishing without formation, and no responsible business that shirks its role in making human lives better.