In my graduate experiences, especially in the philosophy of technology, I saw that far too much philosophy is designed to be consumed by other philosophers. As a pragmatist, I am always interested in the utility of philosophy.
How can I take useful philosophy, especially philosophy of technology, and export useful ideas and actions from it?
It is difficult to answer this in a generic context. However, any commercial technological activity must be restrained with critique of technology and its structure be molded in accordance with the ethics of technology. Any commercial activity, technological or otherwise, unrestrained by these values shall fail for want of cultural acceptability*. Hence, essential is the scope of philosophy in any commercial activity.
In most corporate houses, as I can tell from my own experience, decisions are made not on the basis of personal influence and valid logical arguments are ignored. If the leader so decides, logic can be promoted as means of assertion in the decision making, policy development and other corporate processes.
It is recommendable that you look into the welfare economics as proposed by Noble laureate Dr. Amartya Sen.
From those actions, how can I convince non-philosophers of their utility and promote their adoption?
The only way to convince people, in general, of the utility and scope of philosophy is to show them that the same is more profitable and efficacious.
*In exceptional cases, what's unethical may be culturally acceptable and thus commercially successful up to a certain extent. However, this will always be limited by virtue of intellectual criticism, subject to appropriate lobbying by new age media.
In business we are doing several things:
Socializing
Through understand on ethics we can make a better socializing.
Decision making
Through thinking correctly, we can see the essence of the purpose in business and we can't be easily to be manipulated by someone.
Managing resources
Through managing our thinking, we can learn to identify priorities and put it at the correct places.
Getting profit
Through understanding closer to the essence, we can learn how to share and how to get profit closer to fairly, in appropriate ways.
Expanding,
Through understanding boundaries, we can learn to identify possibilities and use it to expand to the possible extent
and many more ...
The points are:
We can use philosophical behavior to slice something to the essence or closer to it (helped by any fields of knowledge),
Further directing what we found to support our purpose to get better fairness that typical for ourselves.
And this typical behavior can be adapted to support our business activities and generally for our life.
I understand why J. Paul Getty would only hire classicists. If you understand why, then you would understand why it may be good also to hire philosophers. (For one thing Getty said the classicists sold more oil).
