What Counts as a Human Business?
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to the second season of the podcast This Human Business, an exploration of the movement to reform business and bring some sense of humanity into commerce.
What does it really mean, though, for a business to be human?
My name is Jonathan Cook, and I make a living by studying the odd quirks of commercial culture. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed that’s changed since the end of the first season of this podcast last year. Business leaders have begun to catch on to the idea that people outside of Silicon Valley don’t think of being human as some kind of pesky relic of an outdated biological past, a burden that should be transcended with technology. They’re beginning to understand that human qualities are cherished. So, businesses have begun using “human” as a buzzword, a term that they add to their mission statements and promotional materials, though often, it’s pretty clear that they don’t have much of an idea about what being a human business is really all about.
Earlier this year, I attended a marketing insights conference in Brooklyn, where the first presentation, by a senior vice president of insights and strategy, had the title, “The Human Approach in the Age of Big Data”. I was looking forward to the talk, but it turned out that the so-called human approach being advocated by the presenter was the use of automated digital eye movement tracking software.
The next morning, the director of insights at Microsoft got a little bit more personal. In her presentation, called “The Future of Insights is Human”, she acknowledged that the culture of data-driven business is running people ragged. She explained how she wants her team to serve as storytellers within Microsoft, but they end up being used as mere conduits for reporting quantitative data. The rapid pace at which requests for these reports came in, she said, prevented her team from engaging in much storytelling, or providing any substantial human analysis at all. She was frustrated at the lack of time her staff had for any reflection on the significance of the data they were reporting.
As she spoke to the conference, the director’s voice quavered with exhaustion. She clearly wanted the future of business insights to be human, but Microsoft wouldn’t give her the resources she needed to make space for humanity in her department’s work. She longed for human business, but without a human process in place, humanity was forced to stand aside for the sake of efficiency.
False humanity is all too common in business.
JetBlue claims that its mission is “to inspire humanity”, but when was the last time you were really inspired by JetBlue? Look for news about JetBlue, and most of what you’ll find will be promotions of the airline’s low prices.
Starbucks says that its mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit”. In action, Starbucks offers mediocre coffee, overpowered by sugar and fat, sourced from plantations that devastate the environment while using abusive labor practices, served in cookie-cutter shops that seem impervious to the influence local culture.
Just the other day, a colleague forwarded me an article written by the Data Science Director of Kantar, an international market research network. The headline of the article promised “More Human Market Research Through AI”. The medium the author suggested for this more human research was chatbots. Who has ever felt more human interacting with a chatbot?
Let’s get real about this. It’s easy for a company to say that it’s a human business. Actually running business in a human way is something else.
We need to learn to tell the difference. How can we tell the authentically human business from a business that simply claims to be human?
When I spoke with Chuck Welch, the founder and chief strategy officer of Rupture Studio, he emphasized the essential role of the human perspective in business, but acknowledged that for many businesses, the human approach is just a pose.
Chuck Welch:
There’s other organizations who aspire to have a belief system that they’re working towards and or some who had the appearance in the guise of authenticity, or the guise of believing in things but it’s just a means to an end. We continue to work with organizations across the spectrum but when they hire us they know that we are going to challenge their assumptions. We’re going to challenge their orthodoxy, and try to get them to act and behave in the best interest of their audience and in the best interests of society.
Jonathan Cook:
Chuck’s work strikes a delicate balance that gives us a good example of how to proceed with businesses that talk about their human values: We need to approach with skepticism, and challenge the businesses that boast about their humanity to follow through with concrete action.
Chuck is a veteran in this effort. He has made a career from helping corporations to understand people as more than mere points of data. He works with culture, the system of shared understandings about the world that drives community identity. Culture isn’t something that can be understood through simple data mining. To understand cultural factors, you’ve got to come into contact with how people see things, how they feel, beyond the facts.
To grasp the way a culture works, you need to be immersed in it. That requires being present in the physical world.
Chuck Welch:
You can never lose the human hand. I think so many brands and organizations have so data heavy and technology heavy that they’re out of bounds. I think brands and organizations are kind of waking up to the fact that you can never lose the human perspective and that’s something that we always emphasize with our clients. Not to say culture is nice to have. It’s a must have, and it drives business. It drives meaning. It drives value.
Jonathan Cook:
As Chuck says, culture is a must have for a human business. Humans can’t live meaningful lives without culture. It’s at the core of who we are, the thing that distinguishes us from the automatons that technological innovators keep trying to offer as alternatives.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there have been engineers trying to convince us that human beings are nothing more than complicated machines. The fanciful assertions of transhumanists who believe that the human essence can be uploaded to a computer and survive there intact are merely the latest iteration of the same old meme that’s been around for hundreds of years. These ideas are not about rational scientific progress. They’re a form of mythology.
You don’t need to believe in supernatural beings to conclude that human experience exists on an order of complexity that’s far beyond any machine, digital or otherwise. Comparisons of raw intelligence don’t capture this difference, because humans are much more than just thinking machines. We are fully integrated organisms of emergent consciousness.
Any business that hopes to escape the predictable dead-ends computed through artificial intelligence needs to join humanity where it stands, to transcend computation and emerge onto the level of human complexity.
Jordan Wright, a senior designer at LPK in Cincinnati, warns businesses away from the reflex of responding to every challenge with something digital.
Jordan Wright:
Especially on the business side we’re like, we have to move to digital, everything needs to be digital, which I agree, it needs to be digital, but we can’t forget that at the end of the day we are humans and we need to interact and see people and touch people.
Jonathan Cook:
Jordan identifies an important first step in establishing a human business: Take care to remember that people exist, and remain at the heart of all commercial activity. It sounds like a simple thing to do, but many businesses these days aren’t taking this simple step. They get lost deep within the labyrinth of their products’ technical intricacies, traveling down ever more obscure pathways of their internal architecture until the outside world and the people who inhabit it are forgotten.
The outside world does still exist. I was sitting there one Sunday last November, on a bench surrounded by a beautiful flowering vine, overlooking a cobblestone alleyway in Lisbon with Peter Coerper, talking about this very subject. Peter is a lawyer who helps business clients see beyond their self-centered view, resolving conflicts through mutual human understanding.
One of the big lessons Peter shared with me is that human business pays attention to the human perspective first, rather than starting with machinery and code.
Peter Coerper:
I’m Peter. I’m from Heidelberg. Where do I come from? Well, professionally I have a legal education and I worked in corporate environments for many years with major international companies usually German based, Germany based, and also German companies who are mostly who are internationally oriented. I am working as a business mediator conflict manager, and coach since maybe seven, eight years.
Humanism is what it is and it is in the face of technology and in the face of everything else. It’s to have the human being in the center of all beliefs. What is good for a human? Now, this is of course individually sometimes. But is it good for an individual human to be exploited and to be led, to buy this or to perceive a kind of reality that somebody else displays on them? Is that good for a human being? I would say not, no. It might be good for a corporation, because they could make money out of it, or it might be good for a government maybe to, you know, lead their people, instead of the people being the people and being the government. But it’s not good for the individual human.
Jonathan Cook:
Is your business practice good for human beings? It’s a simple question that too often has an unfortunate answer. Plenty of businesses claim to be human-centric, but talk is cheap. Following through and building a business that’s centered on humanity, even when it’s inconvenient, is where the real work begins.
Human centricity is just the first step toward human business, not the destination itself. A truly human business needs to be able to work with the strange cultural materials that form the irrational structures that make for a worthwhile human existence.
Meike Ziegler discovered the difference between the kind of problem solving that designers and engineers usually focus on, and the deeper, richer veins of humanity that can be found by digging around in culture.
Meike Ziegler:
My name is Meike Ziegler, Meike Justine Ziegler. I am Dutch. Both parents are Dutch but I was born in London.
When I was 12, my mother said the children should stay in one place. I had been to seven different schools. I met many different kids and friends in these different cultures, so they brought me home and I was always wondered of culture and tradition and religion. I wasn’t educated religious myself but I was fascinated, and my mother was a storyteller herself, studying philosophy and anthropology, so all this triggered me.
So, this all together, and then history of art, and then I went to art school and I did a design course in graphic design, and from there I started working very commercially in designing identities, web sites in different countries as creative director.
I worked in a very commercial dot com company designing websites and identities, and I felt something was lacking. It was all about targets, money. I was very deluded sometimes because of, the speed of everything.
Jonathan Cook:
In this early experience in business, Meike felt that there was something missing. The insight she gained by examining this vacuum was that, to feel human, we need to feel complete. A human business works with all aspects of our humanity, not by reducing us to a few quickly measured metrics.
It was through traumatic loss that Meike came to understand what had been missing in her work.
Meike Ziegler:
My career, and especially America, had quite an influence on me. I tried to be this creative director. I wanted to be successful, and then when the Twin Towers came down and when I went, we were, the company went bankrupt. I was bought with my team. We were on a big account for Harley-Davidson. It felt so unnatural. It felt so wrong. There was this anger in me. So I went back to Europe and I had a big crash down. I lost a child with eight months pregnancy and somehow, my whole world sort of collapsed around me and my then boyfriend took me by the hand and set me on the right path, and said go back to your youth. Do what you would which you feel happy about. And then I sort of plugged in these two worlds the commercial mindset and this natural girl running through the forest and having all these fantasies and somehow I didn’t even think about it whether it was ritual or what it was. I just felt good about it.
Jonathan Cook:
We often equate business with success, and certainly, Meike had been successful. Yet, who could anticipate a terrorist attack or a miscarriage?
The typical experience people have with business is not one of consistent, soaring success. We don’t like to think about it, but the most frequent outcome of all our efforts in business is for things to come crashing down.
What Meike experienced, though, was the opportunity to shift from calamity into transformation. She had begun to grasp the power of ritual.
Meike Ziegler:
I actually figured I had been doing it all my life. And then, I sort of gave it a name and I hold its creative rituals: Creatuals. This is then the name that I gave it, and as a ritual, it is of course something we repeat. There’s the religious rituals the secular rituals. I started thinking I wanted to break patterns and move minds, and I wanted to break through.
I provoke, definitely sometimes, but you need to provoke here and there to break people open to to get them into the mindset or emotional. It’s all about emotion really. It’s to get people out of this daily work, numbers and targets.
It’s always the surprise element that I think is important to take people out of their comfort zone and to actually connect with one another. That’s the moment of destruction, or the surprise moment. There’s always a surprise moment.
Jonathan Cook:
Rituals are about breaking through divisions. Rituals integrate all aspects of human experience, situated with precision in chronological time, yet moving beyond it, enabled by social structures, but eluding their restrictions.
It’s easy to think that a business can change human behavior by identifying problems, and then developing solutions for those problems. In practice, people often reject solutions that seem engineered perfectly for them. That’s because part of being human is to find meaning in our struggles, and to form emotional attachments that endure. Solutions that are merely practical cannot undo such attachments.
Humans are cultural beings after all, not machines, not information processing systems, not problems to be solved or systems to be optimized. We demand that our experience be acknowledged as valid on its own terms, and not just exploited as an opportunity for another round of targeted advertisements.
Meike had discovered that business, as much as it loves to depict itself as cool and detached, is not a creation that’s separate from humanity. Every business is a manifestation of human culture, mired in its own irrational beliefs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. It’s a source of relevance. A human business accepts the inherent subjectivity of its work, rather than attempting to deny it.
Meike Ziegler:
Business, for me, I like to look at human beings and not separate private and business. I see a person in front of me in a meeting room in the setting of a business and I look right through this person, because if I speak to a CEO or to a manager, I touch this person just as much as I touch someone that I meet in the streets. My aim is to not differentiate those worlds. We are human beings. And what I’m really trying to do is put the mirror in front of people and put the responsibility in them of what they’re doing, what they’re selling, how they earn their money.
I think if as human beings we become better, the business will become better. So it’s at a whole different level that I’m trying to work. A lot of companies are really trying to do better, to change, to transform, taking people out of the cubicles and working much more fluid together creating new and finding new solutions.
Jonathan Cook:
Meike came to the realization that we can’t allow the street and the C-suite to operate according to different rules. Executives can’t be given an exemption from the need to behave in grounded, decently human ways, just because they have a lot of money and power at their disposal.
Vasco Gaspar is a facilitator who works to open business leaders to the potential of full human flourishing. He has discovered that building business solutions with human beings is incongruent with pushing people to work at their maximum capacity. Humans are more complex than machines. We don’t have uniform, replaceable parts. Despite the simplistic dreams of the posthuman believers at Singularity University, our minds aren’t software packages that can be transported from body to body. Our consciousness is integrated into our bodies, and so, when we’re worked too long, when we get stressed out, our physical and mental health declines. Our productivity goes down along with our health.
Let’s listen to what Vasco has to say about this.
Vasco Gaspar:
One thing that happens with stress is that you release a lot of hormones, and one of those hormones is cortisol, and cortisol doesn’t allow you, for instance to learn so quickly because you don’t produce new neurons in some parts of the brain that are related with new memories. So in a world that is changing all the time, if you are, if you don’t have tools to manage your wellbeing and be more balanced, more centered and so on, you cannot learn so well, and so therefore you kind of you cannot follow the others, you cannot make good decisions. You become a toxic person. You enter into what is called a dissonant state where you kind of become angry, and you close yourself and so on. You see a lot of this in companies, people that they are pressed by the top to achieve results, then they press the others. It’s completely toxic because no one is, not only happy, but no one is healthy, because several people are having heart attacks, strokes, cancers, so it’s completely insane.
Jonathan Cook:
Over the last year, Tesla has gone from an inspiration for entrepreneurs to a cautionary tale. The erratic behavior of Tesla’s leader, Elon Musk, has come out into the open as he celebrates a professional culture of overwork, where his employees are expected to work exceptionally long hours while suffering from sleep deprivation. At Tesla, the staff is asked to live for nothing but their jobs, divorcing themselves from the human world outside the corporate campus.
This extreme isolation has led to occasional success, but also has resulted in unnecessary conflicts and preventable failures. Tesla’s management has become out of touch, unable to establish reasonable expectations. Recently, in order to meet top-down demands for an accelerated manufacturing pace, large numbers of Tesla cars were assembled with essential parts missing. At Tesla, quantitative metrics of success have drowned out basic common sense.
In the last few weeks, Musk has declared plans to physically implant chips into customers’ heads. These chips will be designed to integrate customers’ brains into Tesla computer networks. With Tesla’s pattern of manic delusions followed by sloppy, hurried work, it doesn’t take a vivid imagination to come up with scenarios about how this interface between the corporation and human minds could go terribly wrong.
Vasco Gaspar:
I think it’s much more than numbers. It’s really about basic sanity. It’s really about it’s so obvious that if we want to healthier society, we need to have healthier businesses. We need healthier people, because otherwise, what’s the point? Just to make money to have the biggest graveyard in the cemetery? It doesn’t make any sense.
Jonathan Cook:
The inhuman obsessions of corporations like Tesla have made them inhuman places to work. Rather than using technology to elevate the human experience, they sacrifice humanity in order to elevate technology.
It isn’t just the people who work at these corporations who are in danger. Unhinged corporations, bent on their own interests to the detriment of everyone else, are dragging the entire world down with them. They’ve forgotten that humans are biological beings that live on a planet, the only home that’s available to them. Devouring resources at a terrifying pace, these companies have entered into a delusion that they are abstract beings living in an infinitely expandable economy. Their re-entry into reality may be painful for us all.
Vasco Gaspar:
If we continue the pace that we are doing kind of business now, and kind of taking the resources from the Earth, I don’t think that we humans have more than 10 years to live in this at least with this kind of society as we have because they so we are consuming now, I think it was one point five Earths. So in terms of resources we are not allowing the earth to renew itself.
It’s almost schizophrenic because for one side we know that this is not sustainable and we need to make changes and on and on, but at the other level kind of the more mundane level, I don’t know, I need to pay my bills and I need to achieve my results and I need to, oh, my neighbor has a new iPhone, so I need to have kind of the same model, because otherwise socially I am not going to feel so my status is not going to be the same.
Jonathan Cook:
If these descriptions of the inhuman state of business are dire and harsh, that’s because they match the situation we all face. There’s a tradition of unrealistic happy talk in business culture, with an exaggeration of achievements and a minimization of challenges. A belief that confidence itself will lead to success, with a kind of fake-it-til-you-make-it attitude, has turned business into a confidence game. The urgent need to appear successful, whether or not one truly is successful, has led to rampant fraud and abuse.
As political and economic power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very small number of business elites, everyone else is forced to work harder for their sake, desperately holding on to scraps of faith in the promise of opportunity for all. Huge numbers of lives are being destroyed by the resulting social distortions. So, when we ask how business might be made a bit more human, it isn’t an abstract, theoretical question. If we allow human business to become nothing more than an entertaining subject for an endless series of roundtable discussions that go nowhere at conferences in places like Davos, with participants pretending that they’re somehow saving the world only to return to their offices to resume playing the system for their own interest, we’ll never get the human business we talk about.
Human business will require us not just to think differently, but to work differently. The push for human business is a struggle for the survival of human creativity. In a world where titanic systems of digital automation are converting artistic expression into a commodity trade, human vision is being sold at a steep discount.
I met Matthew Burgess earlier this year, in the midst of a powerfully dark and frigid winter. He was working on a project to communicate one-on-one with creatively unorthodox professionals around the world, to learn how they are learning to get by in these challenging times.
Matthew Burgess:
My name is Matthew Burgess and as you can hear from my voice like I’m from England. I came from television with probably my main industry and with a side order of deejaying. Those are my artistic backgrounds. I also consult on how to design workspaces that facilitate creativity. It’s also personal, that everyone’s creative processes are combinations of processes again and the mix and the way that these involve interactions with others is very personal, and also that creativity is fluid, that as soon as something starts to become fixed it starts to become routine. And, in one way of looking at it, creativity is the opposite of routine, because creativity is about summoning the new.
Jonathan Cook:
It struck me, listening to Matthew, that as we struggle to create a new vision of true human business, we need to cultivate the power to summon the new through the exercise of the creative process. To counter the formulaic approach of the algorithmic giants, we need nimble, flexible minds, capable of working in ambiguous contexts. One such mind is possessed by Mykel Dixon, a playful facilitator of new business thinking.
Mykel Dixon:
I am Mykel Dixon, and I am a musician by trade. Gypsy by nature relentless relentless I mean a relentless pursuit of discovery, and that just covers just about everything for me. Now I design, facilitate, advise businesses, corporates, large scale organizations, leadership teams on artistry, something I call artisan thinking, or enterprise artistry, how to bring a sensory aesthetic emotive intuitive intelligence to their leadership, to their organization, to their customer experience, to their talent acquisition strategy, this whole overarching, it’s the same as the human approach or a beautiful approach. I just call it an artisan approach.
Jazz was where I came from, and that has served me well in an accidental twist of fortune in that the modern landscape that we’re dealing with is all improv, but it’s all built upon structure. And knowing the language and also being aware of a lineage of where certain elements you know where jazz has come from in this history and all of these things all of these subtleties and these nuances of what jazz has taught me has really prepared me in other markets or other spheres of life that I draw on.
Jonathan Cook:
The improvisational legacy of jazz is a potent inspiration for a new, more human mindset in business. We can’t harness this inspiration, however, by just playing the old, comfortable standards. Here in the 21st century, it’s easy to forget how unsettling jazz was when it first came on the scene.
When it’s at its best, jazz isn’t easy listening. It comes from the unpredictable source of human emotion, a dangerous place where regret and fury are as likely to be found as joy and contentment. Jazz is about risk, just the sort of risk that huge numbers of freelancers are now being asked to take on every day, working without guarantees of business or benefits.
Human business isn’t a glib elevator pitch. It’s vulnerable, and often, it’s in pain. You wouldn’t know it from reading the popular business publications that trade in the fairy tales of entrepreneurial accomplishment, but the truth is that most businesses struggle and fail. In the age of digital business, even survivors have shorter lifespans than they used to. Business isn’t typically an arena of victory, profit, and glory. It’s more often an experience of despair and defeat.
The inhuman approach is to pretend that nothing’s wrong and deny the pain. People in business are afraid of allowing others to see our struggles, because we don’t want to be seen as failures. Who wants to do business with a failure, after all?
Here’s what this narrative forgets: It’s a much better idea to do business with a failure than with a fraud. The worship of business success has led to huge numbers of businesses that hide their problems from view, only admitting what’s going wrong after they’re caught.
A human business is comfortable acknowledging that not everything is okay. Telling the truth about what it can and cannot do, it makes more authentic connections possible than an upbeat sales pitch ever could.
Matthew Burgess urges us to become comfortable with this uncomfortable truth of struggle in business.
Matthew Burgess:
The notion of being comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is you know something that’s been, is a kind of buzz phrase that’s been bandied around, isn’t it, now I’m understanding what it means. Actually, I know what it’s like to feel totally disconnected from the possibility of seeing a life that matters, if that’s not too melodramatic. But I know what it feels like and it physically feels like.
Jonathan Cook:
If you feel rotten in the world of business, that doesn’t make you an outsider. Join the crowd. Nonetheless, these kind of difficult feelings are much more than mere complaints. They’re diagnostic. The isolated, disconnected feelings of a life in business, like the ones Matthew Burgess identifies, point to the heart of the greatest opportunity for human business.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl knew about suffering, and he knew about the difference between suffering and despair. His famous emotional equation was that despair = suffering minus meaning.
What does that mean? Suffering doesn’t have to lead us into despair. As I explained in the first season of this podcast, within the meaningful framework of rituals, suffering can actually lead to more intense feelings of happiness than what we can feel when we haven’t gone through the pain.
Meaning is the difference. If we suffer with a sense of meaning, we can endure the suffering, and even thrive with it. If we suffer without a sense of meaning, however, we despair, because there is no reason to believe that things will ever get better, or that our sacrifices are contributing to some kind of larger goal.
Francine Stevens, an innovation expert who works in the insurance industry, has discovered that people need passion more than profit.
Francine Stevens:
To me, that’s all so important, with the intrinsic drivers and motivation, and so all of that comes together around purpose. Something greater than making money, and something that people get excited and passionate about being a part of.
Jonathan Cook:
A human business exists for a larger purpose that its customers and workers truly believe in. Suffering is unavoidable, but when people in a human business must suffer, they benefit from the opportunity to be a part of something truly remarkable.
The tricky thing, as Mykel Dixon explains, is that the creative ability that’s required to find and express meaning has been suppressed by the mechanistic framework that’s dominant in business.
Mykel Dixon:
Everyone is so innately creative and innately expressive and sensory and intuitive, and we’ve obviously had that suppressed and pushed out of us through an industrial mindset and our institutionalized education system, all of these things.
Jonathan Cook:
So, what do you do if you’re just an employee in a business, not one of the few people who gets to set direction? It isn’t easy, but if you want to avoid despair, you can’t wait around for your company’s leaders to realize that there needs to be a purpose for your work. You’re going to have to do the hard work of finding meaning for yourself. As Matthew Burgess explains, meaningful work comes more often when we resist the short-term vision of the C-suite than when we go with the flow.
Mathew Burgess:
The corporation or the work ethic, it’s just lots of words, words now that make it seem a bit more benign, but it wants you. It wants you to go along with it. There’s great benefits in not giving it all of you, and having a little bit for you that says, I will not go along with that. I will do as I choose for this point in time.
Jonathan Cook:
If your company won’t give a meaning to your work, take your own agency. Work to find meaning within the bounds of what you have to do in your job. The business as a larger entity may not be human, but you still can be.
The thing about human interactions is that they’re more subtle than the winner-take-all model of conventional business culture. Peter Coerper, the German lawyer who met me on the bench at the closing of last year, told me how his career changed when he realized the shortcomings of winning.
Peter Coerper:
I realized that the way that usually things are handled in the legal field. This is just positioning yourself against something and whoever has the best, maybe, arguments or is the most persuasive or the strongest kind of wins. So, that’s not the idea of a fair, good way to treat conflict, and that’s where I evolved on a way of how can we deal with conflicts in a better way, on a better level.
I found out very interestingly that conflict wears me out although I was working in that field and to deal with the conflict in a way that it does not wear me out, it may be exhaustive but it’s kind of, if you look at it that way kind of nurtures if you do it in a constructive way. That was after some research when I came to business mediation as a tool and that’s why I’m into that and that might be why I strongly believe that handling conflicts in a productive way in a consensus way makes us as human beings stronger and makes if we want to use the big word makes the world a better place.
Jonathan Cook:
If you want a human business, follow Peter’s example, and learn to work with people by understanding what they really need. Find a way to meet your business goals while meeting their human needs. A human business can’t merely dictate terms. It needs to come to a consensus with its customers, building a community of mutual service.
This idea was made clear to me by Chantal Woltring, a coach who explained that her clients need to learn to move beyond the extrinsic motivators that provide only a limited measure of professional accomplishment.
Chantal Woltring:
The funny thing is with external motivations like bonuses like stock price or options, packages or status or things like that, it’ll get you somewhere, but only to a certain point, and then no further. If you talk about why do people lose vitality, why do they lose energy, I think it’s because we’ve been extrinsically motivating seeing so many people and not allowing them to have the autonomy to choose where they feel they can contribute best.
Many of my clients, they talk about they feel a lack of connectedness. They feel isolated and alone with a lot of pressure on their shoulders and feel often very dutiful, and I don’t feel they can allow themselves to take a break, to have fun. They would escape a dinner with friends because a new project came up. And if we do this consistently, we sort of hollow ourselves out.
Jonathan Cook:
As Chantal explains, success in business can be a curse. When success is defined as being the best, it isolates people from each other, destroying connections even as, in the abstract, the game is won.
Chantal Woltring:
Make sure you find yourself a unique niche, be clear on your unique selling points, know what you deliver and how you differ from others. This differing, this is sort of a movement towards singleness or an individual or an isolation, so even be clear in your broadcast. Hello, here I am if you’re looking for me. This is what I look like here, and here I am. That’s totally understandable, and I appreciate it, but at the same time I feel we might have gone a bit overboard in that direction. And that in so many aspects, everybody seems to be striving for excellence or to be the best in their niche. If you have two niches, you’ll have two people who can be that and the rest not, or two businesses who can be that and the rest not. So what did people do? They defined their niche in such a way that they could be the most excellent in that particular niche and which means you get a huge amount of niches, more and more. And I feel that this contributes to the idea of not being related to each other.
Excellence isn’t everything. It is beautiful and lovely if it comes from intrinsic motivation, if you’re going for it because you just know you have it in you and you want to get it out of you and you want to enjoy the accomplishment, that you feel that’s there. That’s intrinsic energy giving, but if everyone wants to be excellent that’s not possible because it’s a relative term. So if everybody’s excellent, everybody’s average and there is no excellence. And I feel we push out so much beautiful people, business, ideas, concepts, possibilities towards not valuable because not excellent, and that’s just a waste.
Jonathan Cook:
Not everyone is going to achieve true excellence in their professional lives, and the truth is that it often isn’t even their fault. Studies of financial success have demonstrated that the one factor that best explains the distribution of wealth is pure dumb luck. Not everyone can be in the right place at the right time.
Most businesses fail! Business is about struggle, not about success. So, if you’re going to fail, why not fail as a human being, doing business that’s worthwhile, something that speaks to your heart?
If you can’t achieve excellence, you can achieve connection, and the best way to do that is to work with the ambiguity of the world, rather than against it. Chuck Welch explains that, although this ambiguity is at first confusing, those who take the time to immerse themselves in it will find enduring meaning there.
Chuck Welch:
We live in a world that’s ambiguous. We live in a world that’s multitextured. We live in a world that’s amorphous and evolving, and our job as strategists is to make sense, first of all, to make sense out of that world, to give a client context.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s all too easy for businesses to slap “human” into their missions as a catchphrase.
An authentically human business works with the complex reality of what it is to be human:
To be human is to be biological, with basic needs that can’t be sustainably compromised.
To be human is to be emotional, with a rich diversity of subjective feelings that transcend our rational interests.
To be human is to be cultural, with traditions of myth, ritual, and belief.
To be human is to be subjective, a consciousness with its own perspective, real in its own terms that cannot be reduced to the measurements of the physical framework that makes it possible.
To be human is to be flawed, and not in the sense of needing to be fixed.
To be human is to be vulnerable, and thus to be prepared for the opportunity of transformation.
To be human is to be fluid and ambiguous, evading quick and easy assessments that aim to pin us down.
To be human is to be bizarre. If a person isn’t a bit weird, that’s what makes them weird.
Most importantly, to be human is to be present. A human being can’t be in more than one place at a time, not even using digital technology.
If a business can’t summon these qualities, it isn’t human.
We have reached the end of this episode of This Human Business, but a week from now, we’ll pick up the thread of humanity again. The subject of next week’s podcast is our relationship with technology, in which I’ll let you know about how my personal experiment of a year without a smartphone is going.
In the meantime, you can find the transcript to this podcast episode, as well as the transcripts and recordings of all the previous episodes from Season 1, here at ThisHumanBusiness.com.