Organizations worldwide continually deal with issues related to one aspect that is common to each one of them: their people. While many leaders are exceptionally knowledgeable in their area of domain expertise, a large portion struggle with the decisions related to appropriately selecting, developing, and effectively working with the people that are so crucial to their organization’s success. It is exactly this issue that has lacked a rigorous and well-structured approach that meets and addresses the profound complexity of the topic. This is precisely the area of focus that Ashkan Tashvir’s expanding body of work addresses.
Ashkan Tashvir is a philosopher and two times best-selling author, with a background as a technologist, venture builder, and investor. He is best known for developing the Being Framework; an ontological framework for how humans are Being in the world that a considerable and growing number of leaders, teams, consultants, coaches, investors, and entrepreneurs have leveraged to impact thousands of lives across the globe.
An Original Body of Work
Published subsequently in 2021 and 2022, his books BEING, an over 640-page critically-acclaimed and substantial body of work, and his latest over 340-page book, Human Being are his main published works that focus on the study of human consciousness, transformation, and Being. It casts light on our collective lack of understanding and misconceptions of human beings and how this leads to making ineffective, expensive, and damaging decisions in our lives, the source of great pain and suffering, individually and collectively. It paints a vivid picture of how we are being and how others are being, with the ultimate goal of creating a world in which everyone is a better version of themselves. Ashkan’s work has also been featured in Transforming Public and Private Sector Organizations: Implementing Sustainable Purpose, Travelling Organization and Connectivity for Resilience, published by Springer in 2022, which links the transformation of human beings to the broader transformation critical to an organization’s market expansion, creation of new income streams, innovation, and continued relevance.
Impact on the Business World
Ashkan was born in Iran and built and launched the first of several businesses from the age of fifteen with several business partners and subsequently led a series of businesses to become thriving and successful enterprises across a number of different industries. In Australia, he also gained insight into the corporate world, undertaking technology leadership roles across a few high-profile enterprises. Through his exposure to these environments, he saw the dysfunction, wastage, and toxicity of office politics and how many teams suffered from a widespread lack of effectiveness. These observations later influenced an emphasis on awareness, performance, effectiveness, and leadership within his body of work.
Over the years, his interest in how people experience and interact in the economy, business, and entrepreneurship continued to evolve. He led or advised several startups and SMEs to become sustainable, wide-reaching ventures before establishing Engenesis and scaling up operations to become an investor and venture builder himself. As a parallel entrepreneur, commonly known as a venture builder, Tashvir regards entrepreneurship as a vehicle that can contribute to humanity far beyond its ability to generate and distribute surplus value, but also is “uniquely positioned to make a huge difference in solving the world’s and particularly human beings’ problems”. It is this view that led him to establish one of the major subsidiaries of Engenesis, Engenesis Ventures, with Ariya Chittasy who now heads the company as its director. In addition, Tashvir’s body of work underpins another major subsidiary, the Engenesis Coach Academy (ECA), headed by its Managing Director and Coach Principal, John Smallwood, which trains leadership and executive coaches that work with organizations to build high-performing and effective culture.
A Thinker, Researcher, and Philosopher of Our Time
In addition to his business experience and qualifications as a systems engineer, Ashkan is a thinker, researcher, and philosopher. As a philosopher, he is particularly obsessed with human beings from the viewpoints of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, economics, analysis and ethics. The unique combination of his knowledge of each of these fields and his experience as an engineer, technologist, entrepreneur, and active investor, can clearly be seen in his body of work, where he goes beyond abstract theory alone and moves into the application of philosophy to the economy, particularly in entrepreneurial, business, organizational and leadership contexts.
Over the course of ten years, he embarked on a journey of discovery where he analyzed and studied over 300 entrepreneurs, leaders, and investors, including many exceptionally high achievers, to discover the behavioral patterns and qualities that, in great part, determine the success or failure of individuals, teams, and organizations. Ashkan’s work connects the dots between multiple domains and brings a structured and comprehensive approach to the study of human consciousness, leadership, transformation, and Being that led him to formulate what is known today as the Being Framework.
As founder and CEO of Engenesis, Ashkan continues to lead a business movement dedicated to personal and organizational transformation, through a community of coaches, venture builders, professional investors, business management consultants, and advisors. He is extending his body of work through a series of books that are currently in production, within his multi-generational 500-year vision to transform our approach to entrepreneurship and the effectiveness of human beings.
