Enterprise Virtues

14 virtues to practice

1. 1
   Honesty — Describe what you offer without relying on a customer's likely misunderstanding.
2. 2
   Fairness — Examine whether an agreement takes advantage of the other party's lack of options.
3. 3
   Prudence — Consider a loss others could suffer before committing them to your optimistic forecast.
4. 4
   Temperance — Refuse an unnecessary gain when the appetite for more is distorting your judgment.
5. 5
   Contrition — Acknowledge the harm caused by your offering without using commercial pressure to excuse your part in it.
6. 6
   Diligence — Correct an overlooked problem even when the sale is already complete.
7. 7
   Humility — Let evidence of a failed assumption change the way you proceed.
8. 8
   Generosity — Share useful knowledge without treating every exchange as an opportunity to extract value.
9. 9
   Candor — Make a material limitation easy to understand instead of hiding it in technically accurate wording.
10. 10
    Magnanimity — Acknowledge a competitor's better solution without inventing reasons to diminish it.
11. 11
    Perseverance — Continue an honest improvement when a misleading shortcut would produce faster results.
12. 12
    Exactitude — Preserve the scope of an agreement when a convenient paraphrase would favor you.
13. 13
    Self-Command — Resist making a pressured promise that your considered judgment cannot support.
14. 14
    Integrity — Keep an ethical limit when a profitable opportunity makes an exception tempting.

Useful work, dependable exchange

At the repair stall, your display promises a remarkable range of services. A customer puts down a wobbly stool and asks whether it could simply stop wobbling. You clear a place on the bench. The grand offering has found its first specific customer.

An enterprise earns its practical shape through encounters like this. Someone explains a need; someone proposes useful work; materials, skill and time meet in an offering. The work becomes dependable when people can understand what is promised and see how the promise is fulfilled.

These fourteen virtues follow different parts of that effort. Honesty and Candor make the offering intelligible. Fairness and Exactitude help people agree on terms. Prudence and Self-Command keep commitments connected to capacity. Diligence follows delivery through to use, while Humility and Perseverance make improvement possible.

Generosity shares some of what practitioners learn. Magnanimity recognizes worthwhile work from a rival. Temperance keeps gain in proportion to the purpose it serves; Integrity keeps ethical limits in actual decisions. When your work causes a wrong, Contrition makes acknowledgment and repair part of the work ahead.

Enterprise in ordinary life

A small shop

Match an offering to a customer’s real use, including the detail that could make it unsuitable.

Independent services

Agree what will be delivered, give a realistic account of timing and follow a correction through.

A team inside a company

Bring a customer’s difficulty to the people who can resolve it, and check whether the changed offering works.

A cooperative venture

Hear the people who will deliver the promise before committing their time or materials.

Quotations and further reading

An opening selection for this collection.

1. That is to say, he has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY I. / THE ROOTS OF HONOUR.; paragraph beginning “Observe, the merchant's function (or manufacturer's, for in the broad sense in which it is…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin develops the merchant’s providing function: understand the offering, obtain it well and bring it where needed. The surrounding argument demands extreme sacrifice; the catalog takes the service insight without prescribing that demand. The antecedent is the merchant/manufacturer.

An optional rhythm

Read in order or choose the page that fits a present question. A complete sequence would take fourteen weeks at one virtue per week; four cycles would take fifty-six weeks. Notice, practise, practise under ordinary pressure, then reflect on what changed. These durations describe the sequence; an optional practice program is available.

Make the practice your own

The scenes are invented illustrations. Practices can begin in a shared task, a modest exchange or a private reflection; they require neither business ownership nor investment. Work within your responsibilities and resources. Commercial success and a person’s worth are different questions.

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.