A House of Beautiful Business – Episode 1 Transcript

The following is a transcript of the first episode of This Human Business, a new podcast that represents the growing movement seeking to re-assert the value of humanity in business. You can listen to the podcast on Castos, iTunes, or Stitcher.

Jonathan Cook: I’m a researcher who specializes in exploring the culture of commerce. In my work, I study the myths and rituals, the metaphors and emotions that drive the behavior of consumption, and corporate life as well.

I interview and observe consumers, and I work with people in business, and something I’ve noticed is that in recent years, there’s been an increasing focus on what’s going wrong, on the ways that businesses are failing to connect to their customers on a human level.

Throughout the first season of this podcast, I’ll be exploring this growing gap between human experience and business practice, and seeing what we can do about it. But what does that mean? What do I mean when I talk about a business being human? What is the essence of a human enterprise?

It isn’t just our ability to think logically. Our computers can do that. I think that if I had to choose just one word to describe what people are aiming for in the new movement for human business, that word would be “beautiful”.

This episode considers an annual event in Lisbon, Portugal called the House of Beautiful Business. Yes, you heard that right – “beautiful business”. It’s a phrase that strikes many people as strange. Consider, as an example, the reaction of Scott Dawson, a designer working in the financial services industry.

Scott Dawson: “I’d like to find out where that is, a beautiful business. I think a few things come to mind. I think one is that a beautiful business is a place where it doesn’t feel like work in the way that we define work. The way I define work in my mind is that work is not play. Work is not fun. It’s called work.

I certainly have types of work that I do that I am fulfilled by. If I work in the garden, I can step back and see tangible results in something that I did. It’s not unpleasant. If I get into, and we can talk forever about flow, if I get into a concept of flow, that means I am really in tune with the work that I’m doing. If I’m solving a design problem, and I can work uninterrupted on that for a really large swath of time, there is something that is really pleasurable that comes out of that process, and you’re not being interrupted by phone calls and instant messages and emails and all that.

There are times when work doesn’t feel like work, but they’re somewhat rare, so one part is from the perspective of the worker, beautiful business. I think the other is on the side of the consumer, who the business benefits, who it’s established for. Is that business operating in the best interests of who they serve, or is it a self serving business? I think in a lot of cases, it’s a self-serving business, and I think that businesses that operate that way spend an awful lot of time and money to convince that it’s not that they’re for the people that are using them.”

Jonathan Cook: Work is the opposite of play for Scott Dawson, and I think a lot of us feel that way, but that is not at all what art historian Johan Huizinga thought. He called us not Homo sapiens, or the thinking human, but called us Homo ludens, the playing people. It’s at the heart of who we are, as he saw it.

But, for Scott, work is not play, work is not fun, Dawson tells us, and to tell the truth, his perception of the playless dreariness of business is right in line with the opinion of most people. If we take Johan Huizinga’s idea that a state of play is at the heart of what it means to be human, then Dawson’s diagnosis of the state of business suggests that our very humanity is being taken away from us when we enter the business world, because our cultural expectations of work lead human experience to be systematically stripped out of business processes, as if it’s some kind of contaminant.

The result has been an alienation of business from the cultural wellsprings that build sustainable social connections. Quantitative instruments such as the Edelman Trust Barometer regularly report that even as we consume their products, people are deeply suspicious of the motivations of commercial corporations. Even on the inside of business organizations, corporate employee engagement is at astonishingly low levels.

As Scott discusses, the problem isn’t that people are lazy. Human beings actually like to do work that’s meaningful to them, such as gardening, and feel deprived when their ability to do that kind of work is taken away from them. Businesses can provide us with the chance to do that kind of joyful, playful work, but in practice, they tend to strip all the fun out of our work. What’s more, he tells us, the linear thinking of traditional business models takes the beauty out of our consumer experiences as well. Rather than enrapturing us, businesses often enrage us.

Does it have to be this way? Is ugliness an unavoidable byproduct of business? To further explore these questions, I spoke with a longtime professional associate of mine.

Tania Rodamilans: My name is Tania Rodamilans, and I’m originally from Barcelona, but I’ve been living in Chicago now for more than ten years now. If I have to describe what I do today and what got me here, probably I would have to start by telling you that I studied journalism in Spain. I believe what I’m doing today is a bit of a mix between my natural curiosity and my fascination for wanting to know more about people and what people do and how they do it, and why they do it.

I guess journalism was the way to get to talk to people and, honestly, an excuse to physically sneak in behind the scenes and learn what people do why they do it. So, I think that’s what got me started in this path of interviewing, and possibly research.

When I started to work in journalism for a news station, what would happen was you would only have a certain amount of time to talk to people and you would have to rush back, write a little something about my interaction, and kind of the basic facts, and what happened, who did what, when, and then it was edited and aired that same day, and that was it. So, it was not a lot of depth, at least not in that part of the news reporting, and so I was reporting purely what happened and finding out what people did, but what I really wanted was to spend more time with them and really understand what they were doing and who they were.

I kind of wanted to talk to other people that maybe had gone through the same experience and done the same things, but that was not how that world worked, at least for me, in that particular experience. So, I would get sucked into the story and I would never be able to get any further. So, it’s kind of like changing channels mid-movie, you know. So, I think when I found research, particularly the kind of research that I’m doing today, this qualitative research based on one-on-one interviewing, I found that it was out giving me the depth and the understanding that I was looking for. That’s, I think, what brought me in to doing this kind of this kind of work.

Jonathan Cook: Since way back in the 1990s, I’ve worked with Tania to hone a research technique called Emotional Immersion, which guides people to articulate the deeper sense of emotional meaning that’s at work underneath the simple, rationalist explanations for their behavior that businesses typically rely upon. Adapting her background in journalism, Tania has become an expert in helping business leaders uncover their human purpose, seeing how that purpose is shared in common with their customers.

Tania has an appreciation for the human connections business can create. However, like Scott Dawson, she is concerned that, too often, businesses fail to take advantage of the opportunity. When business could create something beautiful, they tend to slouch into the merely functional, following the path of efficiency to create organizational cultures that are minimally viable, doing for their customers and workers the least that they can get away with.

Tania Rodamilans: I would say any time that the human element is not being accounted for, that’s when I encounter things that I don’t like or I’m not comfortable with. The human element is often seen as only human interaction, as interactions between humans, but I think that the interactions that we have with some of the actual physical spaces we work in are equally as important.

I never understood why are some of those spaces designed for visual torture? What makes us think that people would like and would work better when they have fluorescent lighting, beige colors all around, no visual stimulation whatsoever, no open windows to feel the breeze in your face, no time for breaks or to go out to eat? What is the logic and the reasoning behind all that ugliness? And, by ugliness, I mean not just visual ugliness, but mental and emotional ugliness. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be enjoying a workspace.

In the same way, there is no reason why you should be forced to be in a place with no windows. Why is that okay? Why is that something that we all seem to be now accustomed to in a lot of our work spaces? They don’t treat people like people. The human element has been sometimes removed from some of our work spaces, that seem to be only designed to accommodate what’s inside our heads while completely ignoring the body that just so happens to be hosting the company’s intellectual property and soft assets.

I think most companies treat people as a means to an end. I think when you do that you are basically viewing the people who work for you not as a human being. It kind of seems odd to me that in the name of economic efficiencies, you ignore the humanity of your own people in the hopes that you’ll appeal to other human beings, in the hopes to appeal to other human beings, that are supposed to care enough about you to buy your products repeatedly over time. That’s just crazy.

Jonathan Cook: So far, the case for beautiful business isn’t looking very good. But, beauty, as the old saying tells us, is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty transcends objective measurements and formulas of aesthetic worth. It’s subjective.

It’s easy to dismiss business as irredeemable, but I fear that when people accept the idea that commerce is inherently corrupted and inhuman, they provide an excuse for low standards. When people believe that business cannot be beautiful, they become indifferent to their work. That’s the kind of attitude that leads to the epidemic of distrust and disengagement that currently afflicts the business world.

Business can do better. So, instead of settling for the vision of the minimally viable, let’s listen to the arguments that can be made for the proposition that business doesn’t have to be as ugly as it often is.

Let’s meet Tim.

Tim Leberecht: So, my name is Tim Leberecht. I am the founder and CEO, let’s start there, the founder and CEO of the Business Romantic Society, which is a company that I founded last year, actually incorporated last year, together with my partner Till Grusche, and our mission is to humanize business by making it more beautiful in the age of machines. So, I also write. I really enjoy speaking and giving talks about the topic of the humanization of work and beautiful business. I wrote a book called The Business Romantic that came out in 2015, and professionally, my home turf is marketing and communications. I’m a really passionate storyteller and marketer.

Jonathan Cook: If you haven’t read The Business Romantic, go out and pick yourself up a copy of the book. Don’t go to Kindle, either. Do the Romantic thing, and buy a physical copy that you can hold in your hands. The book traces the roots of the current crisis of emotional disconnection in business back to the Great Disenchantment of the Industrial Revolution. It was in response to that earlier crisis that the Romantic movement was born, and Tim proposes that, with the tremendous disruption resulting from Silicon Valley’s reflex to automate everything that it can, we need a new Romantic movement to reinvigorate business culture with attention to the unquantifiable aspects of the human experience.

The House of Beautiful Business takes this abstract goal and gives it physical reality, in the form of a week-long intimate salon, during which residents from all over the world gather to trade insights about the global movement to balance technological developments in business with psychological and cultural countermeasures. Tim recognizes the apparent contradiction in the phrase “beautiful business” expressed by Tania and Scott, but encourages business people to explore the mystery at the heart of that conflict.

Tim Leberecht: ‘Beautiful business’ is a term we chose because it has this inherent tension, very much like ‘business’ and ‘romantic’, the title of my book as well. And actually just today I spoke with a woman, Anne Scott, a coach and facilitator who was also an attendee of the House, and she actually told me something that I hadn’t known which is that business, that the word ‘business’ comes from the old British word that actually means anxiety among other things, being occupied with something, but not in a necessarily positive way, just being really anxious about something.

I thought that was kind of interesting and then if you look at the Portuguese and the Spanish language, (Sorry, I’m just really obsessed with semantics and language and the meaning of language) but ‘negocios’, which is the Spanish term for business, actually means the opposite of pleasure. So, it’s kind of like a negation, as the absence of pleasure is business.

I thought it was really interesting. I hadn’t known this before, and I think that that ties the common understanding of business where a lot of people say well it’s not pleasure, it’s not fun, it’s not personal, it’s business, right? You compartmentalize these two areas into different buckets. Here’s your personal life, here’s the fulfillment and meaning, and there is business, and business is about numbers, logic, rationality, and all these other things.

I think, since the birth of scientific rationality and management theory, which is very much shaped by scientific rationality and the belief in logic and reasoning we’ve really shut out or excluded those parts of our humanity that were more in the pleasure camp and the meaning camp. That’s a real pity, because we spend so much time at work: 70 to 75 percent of our waking hours. So, why do we divorce really important, profound aspects of our humanity, of our thriving and striving in life from that?

So, a beautiful business is a business that is human in the sense that it creates a space for all aspects of our being human – by the way not just the positive ones, which is why I believe that the notion of happiness or purpose alone is not enough. It’s also the negative emotions, whatever that might be. That’s a questionable term maybe to begin with, but the whole continuum of emotions, anger, grief, sorrow, melancholia, all of that has a place in business and by acknowledging that, the bottom of the iceberg that often makes or breaks our projects, the emotions the dreams and the desires, and creating a space for that, either visibly or invisibly, tacitly, I think that is a hallmark of a beautiful business.

And then, I think, the other piece of a beautiful business is just an alignment between purpose and experience. Thirdly, I think it’s a matter of, I mean maybe it’s the rubric above all of that, it’s the culture, of course. It’s being values driven, and having the guts, the courage as a leader, as an organization, not just to comply with a regime of efficiency, which is of course very often the default mode, especially when in dire or more challenging times, but a beautiful business always has the guts to say, ‘OK these are the numbers. This is what we would do if we simply followed the rules of efficiency, but a culture of values, of purpose, is so important for us that in this case we compromise. We decide against efficiency. We go with culture. We go with quality. We go with humanity,’ and that’s a decision that every leader, every organization has to make either at a small scale or a larger scale, I mean probably several times every day.

What we want to do with the House of Beautiful Business is to create a space where leaders are experiencing a different way of doing business and feeling their way through this experience that encourages them to act in a way when they may have to make these decisions, that they’re not just defaulting towards efficiency, but that they’re seeing the benefits and, yeah, the beauty of actually sticking with your values and creating experiences that create meaning and that are not just about the bottom line, but really understand business as such a great, maybe the most powerful vehicle for bringing meaning to the world and projecting yourself and your impact into the marketplace, as in the world at large.

Jonathan Cook: As Tim says, business may be the most powerful social organization that exists in our time, transcending even the power of nations. If we can’t make these organizations more human, and more beautiful, a frightening future awaits us all.

Another staff member at the House of Beautiful Business, Jaimie Stettin, points out that aligning organizational purpose isn’t enough to restore balance to business. There’s a contradiction in the practice of business: The cultivation of powerful commercial organizations is only made possible through the contribution of exceptional individuals. So, even as there is a collective esprit de corps, business cultures also recognize the value of people who go their own way.

Before Jaimie joined the House of Beautiful Business, she cultivated her own creative skills as an individual, and like many others, has found that the most useful skills she brings to her work in business come from other fields.

Jaimie Stettin: I definitely do not have a background in business or communications or marketing. I am much more a student of the liberal arts and the humanities, literature, film, writing. It’s great, I think I like the perspective it gives me, it’s very much an outsider perspective when it comes to business consultant communication, I guess, from a traditional academic professional version of that. It’s clear that it also really works very well with those perspectives too, but I definitely think I come at all of the issues that we deal with from a little bit of a different angle.

Generally, I think it’s an advantage for me personally, and for us as a team, to have that kind of other way of looking at things. Maybe wherever I would be, I would have an outsider insider perspective, mostly because I think I have carved a unique path through life and haven’t done so much traditional, professional, linear pathtaking, I think. Even in university, I created my own major, there was always some other route I wanted to take. I feel like within the House of Beautiful Business, or outside of it, that will always be sort of my angle.

Jonathan Cook: Jaimie’s ideosyncratic path is echoed in the rhythm of events at the House of Beautiful Business. The House is a place to live and work in prolonged contact with other residents. Residents don’t simply sit in an audience listening to experts provide insights. They interact in week-long conversations and collaborations, and even in the quiet moments, there’s something important going on.

Jaimie Stettin: I think things happen rather than you taking in information or content. You, as the guest of the House, in a down moment, in a non-programmed moment, maybe you’re more empowered to make things happen, or you can start conversations. It’s more like output, rather than input, and I guess the point is that you don’t know what can happen in those moments, whether in a workshop, or a talk, or whatever, I mean there are some variables, where we don’t know what will happen, but in those non-programmed moments, there are even more and greater unknowns, and therefore more potential for greater question marks and exclamation points and maybe more fruitful conversations, or more spontaneous conversations.

Jonathan Cook: Jaimie, who worked on an alternative travel magazine early in her career, emphasizes the importance of physical presence at the House of Beautiful Business. These ideas of travel and physical presence will come up again and again in this podcast. Somehow, they’re at the core of what it means for a person, and a business, to be human. Unlike at conferences like TED, where the main events are informative and entertaining lectures, the greatest value of the House comes from actually being there, interacting with other residents in person.

Jaimie Stettin: I think there is just sort of an untold magic when people are together in the same space that cannot happen in any other way. I work remotely, so I am definitely someone appreciates the ability to get stuff done remotely, over a distance, with computers, the phone, online, the Internet. All that stuff is amazing, and it’s a huge tool, and you can get a lot of things done in sort of a quantitative fashion, and even things of quality. I’m not saying that you miss out on quality when you work remotely, but there are also some things, or conversations, or feelings, that just can’t happen unless people are in the same place at the same time.

I don’t know if it’s a question of making eye contact, or allowing natural silences to happen, or just, I don’t know, there’s just a magic to being in the same place at the same time. I think no matter how far technology goes, and no matter how easy it is to do stuff remotely, and to work on projects and to bring things to light, I mean I made my magazine with my partner primarily remotely. We worked together on the project together remotely, and it was great, but there were some parts of the process that were just infinitely easier and a whole lot more fruitful working on them together in the same place at the same time. I think no matter what, being together in real life can bring things to life that would never come to fruition otherwise.

Jonathan Cook: The experience that Jaimie, Tim, their colleagues, and contributors provide at the House of Beautiful Business stands in stark contrast with the dominant way of thinking about business today. Jaimie and Tim both emphasize the value of moments of serendipity, interactions that cannot be predicted. Conventional business practice regards unpredictability as a source of risk, however. It’s hoped that other businesses will be the ones that have to experience disruption.

The strategic consultant David Altschul has encountered this conventional approach to business over the years, and makes some sharp observations about its consequences.

David Altschul: I think that people who are running businesses and particularly people on the marketing side would love to believe that it’s some kind of science, some kind of social science, and if you’re in that science realm, then what you’re trying to do is solve problems. If the brand is a solution to the consumers’ problem and you’re the scientist or the engineer, you know, looking to solve it, then you expect that success will come from simply providing a better solution or the same solution at a lower cost or something like that, and that’s true in a way, but you can’t build a relationship around solving somebody’s problem.

And so, brands fall all over themselves to try to define finer and finer slicings of consumers’ problems and then solve those problems for their consumers and then look around a little forlorn that people don’t love them for it. But, the reality, of course, is that people don’t love you for solving their problems. They may be grateful in the moment, but the next time somebody comes along with a better solution for the same money or a similar solution for less money, they’ll get the business the next time. So, the relationship piece depends on a different point of view.

Jonathan Cook: We’ll find out more about David in the next episode, which focuses on the craft of storytelling in business. For now, let’s pay attention to what he has to say about the impact of treating business like a science, rather than like a work of beauty, as Tim and Jaimie suggest. Science, like traditional business, seeks reliable process leading to interchangeable results. In commerce, however, this same attitude leads toward commodification, in which one product has exactly the same value as another, regardless of who makes it. Commodification smothers passion in both consumers and producers. Commodification kills brands.

No one loves a commodity, and no one has a strong attachment to the producers of commodities, either. One source is as good as another. Business isn’t just a well-regulated process, though. It’s a human behavior, involving human beings both as producers and consumers. The trouble is that, when businesses begin to treat their products as commodities, they often begin to treat their employees and customers in the same way.

David Altschul: In the science metaphor, clearly the customers are the lab rats or, you know, if you want to be more politically correct, the experimental subjects. You’re trying to figure out what you need to do and say to get them to run through the maze in the right way and ultimately press the button for your product.

Once again, that’s not, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with looking at marketing through the lens of science, but you can’t pretend that you have a human relationship with those customers. In fact if you did have a relationship with those customers, you wouldn’t be a good scientist because you would have lost your objectivity.

Jonathan Cook: As disengaging as it is, this cold, passionless approach to business isn’t the worst manifestation of dehumanized business. Even more heartless is the metaphor of business as war.

David Altschul: In the war metaphor, the only relationship that has any real juice, any real dynamic energy, is the relationship between you and your competition. It’s I get that it’s an antagonistic relationship but it’s a real relationship. In the war metaphor, the customers are the markers of that territory that you’re battling over. You count them up at the end to see who won. So that’s a perfectly legitimate business objective, but you can’t pretend that you have a human relationship with them. You’re just trying to win them like they were property.

Jonathan Cook: The movement for a truly human-centered vision of business is seeking to establish a new metaphor of business. If we genuinely care about the people who meet in acts of commerce, business can’t be a science, and it can’t be waged as a war. But what can the new metaphor be?

There are many contenders. The one that the House of Beautiful Business suggests is business as a work of art. Someone else I met there in Lisbon last year might have a different idea.

Reinhard Lanner: I am Reinhard. I come from Salzburg, and I have been working in the tourism and hospitality business my whole life, so after university, I started working for a destination management company in a very small village, and the job practically is to create products for visitors, and also to do tourism marketing.

Jonathan Cook: Reinhard was a patient fellow traveler with me and a group of about 20 other residents of the House of Beautiful Business, as we trekked up and down the cobbled streets of Lisbon last November, following in the footsteps of Portugal’s poet of business, Fernando Pessoa. It was a long walk. It was a good walk, and we arrived at a palace, an honest-to-goodness palace, at the end.

Reinhard Lanner: What brought me there is that together with a friend from university, we were organizing a conference in Salzburg, and the topic was new business models. The audience was people who run businesses around Salzburg, small, medium sized businesses, and one of the speakers we invited was Tim Leberecht, and that’s how I learned about him and the ideas he had, and also the event, and that’s what brought me there. I had no expectations at all.

I just thought I would go there and wait and see what comes to me. I liked a lot the setup, how it is delivered. The stages they developed that people can come together, it’s a mix of living in a house, and also the conference, the big conference location, so that’s what I liked a lot. The second thing I liked was the kind of people I met. Usually, when I go to conferences, I meet people and experts about tourism. I met people and experts about digital technology. Now, in Lisbon, I was surrounded by a variety of cultures, a variety of personalities, and also a variety of expertise in terms of soft skills, and artists, and people who are changing their lives and how they are doing it.

Jonathan Cook: When I hear Reinhard describe the House of Beautiful Business in this way, it seems to me that he’s using a new kind of metaphor: The metaphor of business as a pilgrimage. It’s apt for Reinhard, given that he works in the business of tourism.

This idea of business as a pilgrimage isn’t new. In fact, it’s as old as the practice of commerce itself. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the god of commerce was also the god of travelers – named Hermes in Greece, Mercury in Rome. That’s because the first businessmen were international traders, who crossed borders bringing goods from here to there, a highly controversial act at the time. In fact, the word commerce is simply a Latin word that means with Mercury.

It’s a big idea Reinhard has introduced us to, a story we’ll return to before the end of the podcast. For now, let it remind us that the roots of business are anything but rational or mechanical. Business has grown in sacred ground.

Reinhard talks about the practical benefits of business as a pilgrimage as well. When we personally participate in business, trekking to the special locations where it takes place, we don’t just make an exchange. We go through a change ourselves in the process, and we meet other people who are going through their own versions of transformation along the way.

The thing about a pilgrimage is that it’s purposeful. To start out, you have to know where you’re going. When I sat down with Nina Kruschwitz, a researcher from the United States who helps businesses with strategy and insights, and edits the Journal of Beautiful Business, she explained to me the importance of the kind of destination that was offered in Lisbon: A House of Beautiful Business.

Nina Kruschwitz: My name is Nina Kruschwitz and I am from Ipswich, Massachusetts. This is my first House of Beautiful Business experience, and I hope there are more. I think when I first saw the, I think it was a press release or announcement that Martin Reeves at BCG sent out, the first thing that caught my eye and snagged my attention was just the simple juxtaposition of ‘beautiful’ and ‘business’.

Those two things, I just had never seen those two words together before. It’s such an inherent contradiction that I just felt like I needed to come see how those two things lived together, and how or if they can be resolved, in musical terms, like resolved to a higher octave, and also ‘house’. There is something so warm, and generous, and inviting about ‘house’. They couldn’t call it home, but house is good enough in that way.

Jonathan Cook: If business is a pilgrimage, then it’s significant that the destination provided for us in Lisbon wasn’t a hotel, or a convention center, or a corporate meeting room. We came together to meet in a house. The message could not have been more clear: Business is personal. It’s about more than just money or data or infrastructure. All that is important, but the purpose of gathering all that together to make a business is bring human beings together. Nina told me this:

Nina Kruschwitz: I think that when a company, just like a person, is the more conscious and aware of what its noble purpose is, the better things go, the more inspiring it is, and the more grounding it is, and the more effective you can be.

Business the way it is, and has evolved to be, for the most part no matter how you dress it up, the place we are now, it basically seems to come down to money. It’s activity driven by money, which seems to be so limited, and sad, and small, and really it’s kind of tawdry. So, no, I don’t think of most business as beautiful.

It’s just like business isn’t able to be beautiful because it’s so hampered by the systems in which it is embedded and is reinforcing. It’s really awkward, and uncomfortable, and inefficient and hard. It’s like working against yourself. It’s like trying swim with both your legs tied together. You can barely take advantage of the medium that you’re in because you’re not free to experience it, to play in it, to work with the power it offers you. Basically, business is taking place in the medium of humanity, of a shared, collective human endeavor which is still only barely conscious of itself.

There are a lot of creative aspects to what people are doing and looking at which I think have some liberation built into them. I haven’t yet seen a business which was beautiful in and of itself, but there are little glimmers all around, I think. The thing that we have more in common here in the House seems to be a shift of priorities and focus and perspective. Most people here seem to take for granted the uniqueness and loveliness and importance of being human, and they want to elevate that, rather than just subsume it for the sake of money or efficiency. So, it’s like a big experimental playground of people coming together and talking about what matters and what works, and that can truly spark some change.

Jonathan Cook: There’s that idea again: Play. If we are, as Johan Huizinga taught, Homo ludens, if playing is at the heart of humanity, and business is a human experience, then it follows that in order to be sustainably successful, business needs to learn to play.

Kristian Aloma, the founder and CEO of Threadline Strategies, hinted at this possibility when I spoke to him recently.

Kristian Aloma: Anyone can come out and produce a product, and if there is nothing else out on the market, and you’re the only one that provides X widget, then yeah, you’re probably going to get great sales. A lot of companies are built on products, but when you get into, on a real basis, competition and options and alternatives, and when you get into today’s society, where there are so many options, and everything is at the touch of our fingers, knowing whether one is technically better than another is at the touch of our fingers, you build the brands by layering, and providing opportunities for consumers to find meaning and make meaning, or to see the meaning in your product more than others, and that to me is where you have a brand, rather than just a product.

Jonathan Cook: What’s interesting to me about what Kristian had to say here is that there is something authentically playful to the cultural practice of business. When we see children play, we watch them take ordinary objects, and transform them, through acts of shared imagination, into other objects. Grains of sand become a castle. Sticks become magic wands. Kristian describes the same kind of thing happening in business, a layering of meaning into the products that they sell, using playful imagination in collaboration between corporations and consumers, to make objects that would otherwise be mere commodities into something special, something enchanted.

I will introduce you to Kristian more formally in the next episode of this podcast. Right now, I want to point out that this metaphor of business as play might be something more than just a human gloss on top of a cold machine. What if play is essential to the proper functioning of business in the first place?

Reinhard Lanner, my fellow pilgrim from the tourism industry, suggested as much to me.

Reinhard Lanner: The role of serendipity, many realities we have today are realities which have not been planned that way by the ones who invented something. They tried to solve a problem, and found out something else, or sometimes they tried to solve a problem a special way, and then they went for a walk or had a shower and saw something going on there, and that gave them the answer to solve their problem.

Jonathan Cook: If business were just a practical, problem-solving affair, then we could simply use algorithms to get us to the solutions that we need. Reinhard reminds us that it’s something more than that. Sometimes, when we’re faced with a difficult business problem, we need to walk away, and get out of the professional environment. We need to enter into the playful realm of serendipity, where, through mysterious processes we don’t understand, we find answers in the places where we least expect them.

Reinhard shows us that the metaphors of business as play and business as pilgrimage don’t have to be in conflict. That’s the wonderful thing about metaphors – they stretch our minds to new possibilities that linear thinking won’t allow. A pilgrimage, after all, isn’t really just about going through a predictable and well-planned journey to a concrete destination. It’s also about the unpredictable, unplanned things that happen to us along the way, and the more abstract destination of meaning those experiences provide to us.

Listening to these kinds of ideas, we leave behind the despair that business is irredeemably corrupt and inhuman. Once we start to play with metaphors of what business can be, we come up with new ways of thinking that bring us hope. Business can be better. Business can be beautiful.

Do you remember Scott Dawson, from the beginning of this episode, the designer who struggled with the idea that business could be beautiful? It’s actually not that simple for him. As our conversation moved forward, he spoke in terms of hope for business as well as fear and distrust of it.

As Nina suggested, there’s something powerful in the metaphor of business as a kind of home, or at least as something that feels close to home. In Scott’s case, a beautiful business is found in the form of a community farm just up the road from his house.

Scott Dawson: I would use a really hyper-local example of community-supported agriculture, which is kind of a collective farm. We belong to Sweet Land Farm here in Trumansburg. I don’t think that farm is completely in it for the money. They’re in it to provide a service to the community, and I don’t think they have to work very hard to convince people that the farm is theirs.

Paul is super passionate about what he does, and genuinely enjoys providing a service to people. It is by every definition non-corporate, so to me, that’s kind of a beautiful business. A lot of the businesses around here seem like beautiful businesses, because they genuinely seem to have empathy for and care for the people that cross their doorstep.

Jonathan Cook: Scott brings us back to the idea that businesses become beautiful when they build connections with people, establishing empathy for their human qualities, beyond what data could measure.

Kristian Aloma supports this idea, making the assertion that business is personal, and businesses need to take a stand.

Kristian Aloma: For me, I think the thing that I’ve been thinking about and maybe it’s been nagging me in he sense of I wish more was being done, is the sense that businesses feel, there’s the saying: It’s business, it’s not personal. I do think we’re moving toward an economy that recognizes it is more personal, and why you see more and more organizations coming out to declare what they believe in and what their values are, and take stance on issues that in the past organizations wouldn’t touch with a ten foot broom.

Some may say that this is sort of a sign of the times and our issues about being politically correct or not, but I think it’s an inevitable movement towards recognizing that these things are part of our lives, that the organizations we choose to endorse and choose to vote with our dollar with, they reflect on what we value. They reflect on what we care about, and I think I am seeing some organizations move there, and perhaps move there trepidatiously, and perhaps make some missteps on the way, and other organizations very stubbornly stick to no comment.

Jonathan Cook: We’ve gone from businesses being cold, ugly, inhuman machines to businesses recognizing our personal values, and becoming a part of our lives. This may not be what most businesses are actually doing right now, but it’s something they can aspire to. Business can become more human.

With that spirit, people are once again preparing to attend the House of Beautiful Business this year. There will be many familiar faces, but also many new faces, as word of the movement for human business spreads. Tania Rodamilans will be there.

Tania Rodamilans: The words that were being used to describe the House of Beautiful Business as a concept, and what it does, they were like trigger words for me. I mean, it was beauty, humanizing business, romantic ideals, appealing to the senses, aesthetic sensibility. I’m like, ‘Yes! Yes! I’m in. Sign me up!’

The way that I would describe what the House of Beautiful Business sounded like at the time when I decided to sign up, I thought they were kind of like the Alexander McQueen of the business world. Alexander McQueen as a clothing designer, as a clothing designer, was somebody that I would say was imaginative and provocative, and very creative, a visionary, but also somebody that challenged the expectations and expanded the conventions of what fashion was supposed to be or do.

So, to me it was a very similar idea. Here’s a group of people that have a very similar point of view about what business should be like, and want to do something about it to change the status quo, or at least they want to start a conversation that should ideally resonate with like-minded people that should ideally be able to effect change in their own organizations. So, I thought, being there when it’s happening, that would be great, and then of course the opportunity to actually go to the conference in Portugal, I don’t know if I should call it a conference or event, I guess I don’t really know exactly what it is, and that’s also even more exciting, but it’s exciting because it feels like I’m going to be swimming in creative primordial soup. I’m going to be at the place where things are happening or being created.

Jonathan Cook: The great thing about the House of Beautiful Business is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of all talk and no walk. The House of Beautiful Business promotes the idea of beauty in business while embodying it in practice. That’s the reaction Doug Grant shared with me recently. Doug is the founder and CEO of InquiResearch, and will be one of the new faces at the House of Beautiful Business this November.

Doug Grant: There’s something going on there that’s interesting and is going to make you feel uncomfortable, in a good way. The imagery that has come from this event is beautiful. It’s absolutely, I looked at some of these photos and some of the spaces and video. The video they produced of everyone there, I’m just oh my god this is just a beautiful place with a really interesting energy. And it’s like wow, this is drawing some people that are, you know, it will just be interesting to spend time in that environment with people I find interesting and see what happens.

Jonathan Cook: The House of Beautiful Business isn’t just conceptually beautiful. It’s visually, physically beautiful as well. The physical beauty of Lisbon supports the feeling of Romance in the event, and leads Doug to hope for a creative transformation, elevating his work in the business world.

Doug Grant: Actually, I did this project once that has always been fond in my memory and in some ways I’m hoping to recreate it in some way. I had actually gone to Brooklyn about a decade ago actually, to this place called Media Storm, and it’s a place where they take long form photo journalists and they were teaching them how to make little videos and put in a video for them, and somehow or other I got accepted with my little photography portfolio, and you know I was working with a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer was on my team.

I was like, what the heck? But, we went off and we spent the week telling a person’s story and were off at Coney Island and we’re doing interviews. I was in charge of the interview part, and also shooting and created a little, like a three minute film based on it, and it’s one of these these memories I cherish forever that changed me in some ways, actually influenced what I do, and I kind of have that little hope for Lisbon that it might do something like that for me.

Jonathan Cook: The House of Beautiful Business is a destination of a new kind of business pilgrimage, in which professionals are able to temporarily escape the dreary, mechanistic pressures of efficiency in the business world, to experience the possibility of a practice of commerce that enriches our hearts as well as our bank accounts.

Of course, the people at the House of Beautiful Business aren’t changing things overnight. The other, conventional perspective of business remains, with Silicon Valley’s obsession with all things algorithmic, automated, and artificial. In fact, the House of Beautiful Business is taking place at the very same time as Web Summit, and in the very same city.

This isn’t happenstance, of course. It’s by design. Tim Leberecht explains that he and his colleagues have chosen to host their salon in the shadow of Web Summit in order to make the contrast especially clear.

Tim Leberecht: The House is very much the opposite of Web Summit, and I say this with the greatest respect for what Web Summit, which is by now the world’s largest technology conference, has accomplished. I mean, they have done an amazing job growing this, and really delivering on their promise which is to be a great marketplace for ideas, for technology, for 60,000 people attending.

We are very much the opposite. We have 250 people. We are on the other side of town. We are not a marketplace. We are a living room. We are a salon. We’re a house where people feel at home, where we are trying to create a very warm mood, where people are willing to be vulnerable and show up with themselves, where titles and business cards don’t matter, where business, however, still very much matters. All the core challenges that CEOs and other people in business face are part of our agenda, but we try to approach them in a very different way, both in terms of the content of the conversation, and the talks, and the dialogues, and the workshops that we host, but also in the way that we design those experiences.

So, for example, we do a lot of dinners. We really believe in dinners as a powerful format for having meaningful conversations. We do 15 Toasts dinners where people have to share stories from business. We do even silent parties where silence or omitting one sense is just enhancing the overall experience. We do scented dinners where we play with all senses, especially smell. We use play. We create very immersive experiences.

We consider the term performance in businesses, we take it very literally and look at what that means actually in terms of like performing and acting and embodying your vision as a leader, and your purpose of an organization. But we also really try to have a lot of fun, so there’ll be musical performances. We have sessions where people are asked, for example, about what they really felt when they posted their Instagram, their oh so polished, glamorous Instagram photo document of their life, and many many many other things.

So think of it as a mix of Sleep No More, so very participatory, theatrical, immersive experiences meets, I don’t know, literature salon meets startup garage incubator. So, it’s all of that with various disciplines: Poets, philosophers, CEOs present and hopefully with, you know, just the right degree of warmth and meaning and intimacy that is needed to spur really interesting conversations, conversations you might not you may not have anywhere else.

Jonathan Cook: The conversations people will be having at the House of Beautiful Business will be enabled by the special sense of place there, in an event that’s as much a ritual of community as a gathering of ideas. From that place, however, ripples are spreading across the globe, sparking other transformations, leading to other conversations that just may have the power to change the way the world does business.

That’s what this podcast, This Human Business, is all about. It’s time to spread the word of the power of human business, because the evidence is all around us that the traditional, mechanistic approach to commerce is broken.

Businesses spend huge amounts of money promoting themselves and their products, because they want to be loved. They want to be seen as beautiful, but most people, even people working in business, consider business to be inherently ugly. The people at the House of Beautiful Business dare to imagine a world in which this doesn’t have to be true, in which businesses can learn to be more successful by being more human.

Is their vision possible, or is it just a fairy tale? Well, what if it is a fairy tale? What if fairy tales were taken more seriously in business?

The first episode of this podcast is now complete, but in the next episode of This Human Business, we will be considering these questions as I speak with business people who work with the power of story.

Join us.