A Desperate Love Letter To Business

This is going to be fun, I think. 

I’m excited to announce the upcoming release of a new podcast. It’s called This Human Business, and as the name suggests, it’s about the strange crossroads where business and humanity meet.

I’ve always been fascinated by the confluence of opposites.

My name is Jonathan Cook, and you might call me an amateur professional, or maybe a professional amateur. A professional is someone with recognized skill and credibility, someone who really seems to know what they’re talking about. An amateur, on the other hand, is a newbie, someone who’s just begun, who does what they do out of love for the subject, rather than working from a platform of prestigious qualifications.

My work as a researcher is performed with a blend of experienced professionalism and clumsy amateurish zeal for the subjects I study, and you’re going to hear both sides of my voice in this podcast. I’ve been working as a researcher of commercial culture since the 1990s, but I begin every project with a beginner’s mind ready to encounter new ideas from a fresh perspective.

I’m an experienced interviewer, but completely new to the technical side of podcasting. I admit that I’m an amateur at this, and the audio production isn’t quite up to the standards of National Public Radio or the BBC.

My principle effort has been to produce something new, so this podcast won’t follow the conventions of business communications. What’s more, This Human Business is a quest for truly unconventional thinking, featuring material from interviews with independents, mavericks, contrarians, heretics, and inhabitants of some of the more unusual nooks and crannies of the business world. 

If you want a voice of authority, you can go listen to the Harvard Business Review, like everyone else. If you’re longing for something different, well, maybe you’ll find it here.

In This Human Business, you can expect a podcast that’s put together as a kind of love letter to business, in the tradition of love as expressed through fado, the traditional Portuguese style of music that blends imprecision with passion to communicate a mood of desperate longing, without care for dignity or restraint. If this podcast will be a love letter to business, it will express frustration, shameless longing without much cause for hope, and unrequited affection as much as simple admiration.

If this isn’t for you, that’s okay, but if you’re one of the growing number of people working in business who is searching for a new way of work that fits with the value of simply being human, listen in.

This Human Business begins in August 2018.