What makes something “enterprise-grade”? What does it mean to be professional? Nominally, these words are about payments and premiums. Under this definition, it’s easy to think of these things as having a special status. They seemingly correspond to a special category of activity, separate and distinct from non-professional pursuits; they encompass a set of things with the almost magical quality of generating money.

As against this, there are many activities that people routinely do both professionally and also as a hobby. For example, I write articles for a trade publication professionally but also occasionally write posts for this blog, just because. What distinguishes these pursuits? For the one, there are templates, deadlines, and research resources. It’s characterized by performance, reliability, competence, and polish. The other is malleable at will, undisciplined, and the results are somewhat irregular.

This raises the question: what is the essence of business? As Michael Gerber suggests, it seems to be institutionally anchored practices and procedures. Businesses and professionals are not characterized by the types of things they engage in or by some metaphysically separate status. A company is rather a custom institution designed to produce certain results with maximum efficiency and appropriate guarantees and safeguards. In essence, it’s nothing more than a group of people doing things in a very well-organized way. Thus, enterprise-grade software has security and back-up features because work should to be protected against theft and loss. Similarly, it allows you to create templates to iterate quickly and avoid duplicate work. Follow-up dates are set because professionals commit to a schedule and because the work has to be done at a predetermined time.

When people do something for a living, they naturally behave like this. What as a hobby would be done haphazardly becomes structured when pursued as a livelihood. The monetary incentive is, however, only a catalyst. As I wrote in an earlier post, the principles of business can be fruitfully applied to our personal lives. This isn’t about letting your work life subsume your personal life and become everything; it’s about applying to personal affairs some of the organization and prudence of the businessperson. Obviously, this could carried too far and lead to a thoroughly stressful, monotonous, or unimaginative existence. Still, there’s often room for more thoughtful and effective structures in personal affairs.