Season 2 of This Human Business Arrives in One Week
A week from now, the second season of the podcast This Human Business will begin.
So, what’s new?
New is what it’s all about. People will be quick to tell you that innovation is the thing that drives business these days. If it’s not new, it’s irrelevant, obsolete and vulnerable to disruption, the process through which innovative businesses invade the territories of those who have failed to innovate, pin them down and take them apart piece by piece until they die.
The catch is that within the category of things that the business cult of innovation deems insufficiently innovative… is humanity.
People do innovative things, of course, but not at the pace and scale that digital technology, with its algorithms of machine learning, is capable of. In this new context, slow innovation or innovation at a small scale is no innovation at all.
So, we see businesses doing crazy things to try to keep up. At Tesla, we have Elon Musk celebrating a work culture where his employees don’t sleep much or have a life outside their jobs, while people in Tesla’s factories have been forced to assemble cars that are missing parts in order to keep in line with the pace of production that Musk has demanded. Meanwhile, Musk is arguing that his customers should expect to have Tesla computer chips implanted in their heads, so that Tesla products can interact with people’s brains.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
The cult of innovation has brought us some amazing advances, but it’s also brought about some astonishing business disasters, like the fake blood testing technology of Theranos, the bendable breakable smartphone from Samsung, and the very special data analytics innovations of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. People’s private lives are being hacked and exploited at a rate that’s beyond comprehension.
We have to do better than this.
This Human Business is a podcast that represents the growing movement of professionals who are working to build a different mode of commerce, one that places people back at the center.
What does a human business look like? That’s the question the first episode of this new season of the podcast will try to answer.
Among the voices you’ll hear from will be an artisan of creative rituals in business, a coach who learns that excellence isn’t everything, a jazz musician who brings improvisation into the world of commerce, and a lawyer who decides to stop trying to win legal battles at all costs.
The new season of This Human Business begins on August 5 – one week from today.