Can Business Be Human?
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast that explores the opportunities for the reform of conventional business culture. What if there was an alternative to the cold machine of digital algorithms and automation that dominate business culture today? What if business could replace the mechanical metaphor that has been the engine of commercial ideology since the Industrial Revolution with the warmth of human culture?
It’s questions like these that this podcast has been asking over the last couple of years, but with this episode we have reached the end of the second season of This Human Business. It’s time to ask the most important question of all: Is a human business even possible?
I’m not asking this question as an outsider. I’ve spent a quarter of a century working to help people in business who want to bring something beyond the mundane, formulaic, standard business school approach into the world of commerce.
I know from personal experience that there are good people in business, trying to do the right thing, trying to bring their companies back into alignment with the values of human experience. I also have worked with some truly awful people in business, of course. I will never forget the day I watched a banking executive literally rub his hands together in glee while snickering as he came up with a new way to use people’s instinctive mathematical misconceptions to sap them of their wealth while making a hefty profit for his company. He was like a cartoon of evil, so extreme that it was difficult to believe he was being serious.
There are good people and bad people in business, and a lot of people somewhere in between, but the morality of individuals isn’t the point. Business is a system, not a collection of individuals. So, the important question is whether business as a system can work in a way that values our humanity.
Good people in a bad system do terrible things. Can business match our human values, as a system?
The people I’ve interviewed over the last couple of years are working to create better business systems. Can their efforts succeed?
As a lawyer, Peter Coerper works with business clients to help them overcome conflict, guiding negotiations that craft arrangements that are worthwhile to both sides in an argument. Through this process, Peter has learned to be patient.
Peter Coerper
It’s a drop in the bucket and I hope to be one of those drops and eventually the droplet will spill over and everything will flow everywhere but only in 10 square meters. The rest of the world may be not affected by that but, I mean, it’s the same idea and the concept of voting. Taking part in the democratic process. I mean, I don’t really matter. My vote doesn’t really matter, but if I would give that up, you know nothing would work because if everybody would do it this way the entire concept would collapse.
We are spending so much time in our businesses, so why not be the best of ourselves in that time as well and not only when we are together with family and friends and whatever?
Jonathan Cook:
Peter says that we have to try. If we’re working in business, we have the responsibility to bring our humanity to that work.
The question I’m struggling with, however, is whether business itself is the framework that’s most productive for our work. Not everyone who works, after all, is in business. There are nonprofit organizations. There are democratic governments. There are public institutions.
Can business actually humanize itself, reform itself to the point that it serves our human needs instead of exploiting them?
Chantal Woltring, a leadership coach, sees developing potential.
Chantal Woltring:
I have a sense and I am optimistic, or maybe I choose to be optimistic and am naive. It could be. I don’t know, but for me, to feel that I can contribute in this world I need to see the opportunities where I think it can change. And I think the fact that so many people are right now looking for ways to do it differently and are just completely dissatisfied and even angry about it, I see that as a very positive signal. Because anger mobilizes. Anger can be very destructive, but anger is also a sign of I value something and I’m standing up to value this value, and even if I don’t know how, I am now going to protect it.
What I noticed the last year or two is that more and more, regular business is becoming more open minded, willing, or even enthusiastic about meditation techniques, about mindfulness, and where once, like 20 years ago, when I was still working in consultancy and management that was totally not accepted at all as a viable idea, and dismissed.
Jonathan Cook:
Chantal has perceived a shift in business culture. Concepts that acknowledge human need have gained some acceptance among business leaders.
Are we angry with business? Have business leaders let us down? If so, Chantal says, it’s a sign that people are ready to hold businesses to account and demand that business culture put an end to its manipulations and exploitations.
Francine Stevens, a specialist in business innovation, is willing to put forth the effort, to work toward a business culture where beauty and purpose are at the center of enterprise.
Francine Stevens:
Is it a challenge? Absolutely. Just like any art, sometimes it takes a while to craft something that is beautiful, and I don’t think it’s a challenge, even if it’s a hard one, that it’s a challenge that I wouldn’t want to give up.
My life has to have meaning. We all have to enjoy what we do. It’s a challenge that, no matter how hard it is, we shouldn’t give up on that, because we need to get fulfillment out of our lives, and what we do, and I think there need to be some, I guess, some challenge around, it’s not around efficiency. Also, around meaning and purpose, because that’s the intrinsic motivation, people don’t get excited around being more efficient. People certainly get excited about fulfillment and joy and beauty in their day to day lives and in business.
Jonathan Cook:
Francine’s outlook is encouraging. On the other hand, there’s a trick to progress in business. Businesses are always claiming to be improving, getting better, entering into a new and improved cultural outlook that values people, meeting them where they are, giving them what they need.
It’s a sales pitch. That’s what businesses are good at. They are always boosting themselves, claiming not only to have wonderful things to sell, but offer wonderful organizations to work in, too.
We all know that the reality of business rarely even comes close to the business hype. That’s why, when corporations claim to really understand human needs, it often just comes off as creepy. Matthew Burgess, who works to enhance processes of creativity in commercial organizations, has seen this spooky gap between business promise and business reality.
Matthew Burgess:
I think that in the Pandora’s Box metaphor that people often talk about when they’re unleashing AI on the world, or looking at that, whenever you let a technology out, and it’s seen as going out of control, that in Pandora’s Box there was always hope.
I don’t think that something which is purely efficient can get you all the way. There’s something that’s frightening and inhuman about efficiency, because I think for me efficiency is based on knowing what has happened in the past thinking that the future will happen like that, and then executing that as quickly as possible, and that works in some situations but that produces the uncanny valley for me, which is the same place that those they are the Amazon recommendations on the things you might like or the targeted ads that pop up in your feed. That you know every once in a while they get some it was spookily accurate but for the rest of the time you know it feels like someone who doesn’t know you very well has out their arm around you at a party and bought you a gift and it’s just like what, who are you and why are you giving me this?
Jonathan Cook:
Matthew notes that even when businesses begin campaigns to humanize themselves, they end up using inhuman methods to do so efficiently. They just can’t help themselves.
In this podcast, we’ve covered a wide range of different ideas for making business culture more human. We’ve discussed the role of beauty and culture, rituals and fairy tales, new frames of time. We’ve confronted racism and gender inequity in business, and proposed the reimagination of business as a garden.
Where is this all going? Mykel Dixon, jazz musician and business presenter, observes the same bewildering mystery of the future of business, but perceives it as a challenge, rather than a barrier.
Mykel Dixon
I think what we’re dealing with is a crisis of imagination. What we require when we speak about bringing soft skills and the impact that that will have when we speak about bringing empathy and and all of these beautiful qualities to our life, our leadership, our work, and that’s what we hope for and strive for in business. We also need to embody them with the strength and hardness of all the other skills. So we need to bring rigor to our imagination, and we need to keep dreaming and keep fueling the vision and the desire.
It’s a game. We’re playing a game. I tend to look at this whole magical wonderful gift that is life as a story. It’s Joseph Campbell. It’s Disney. It is Pixar.
Yes, we have some major challenges. Yes, we have a world that still demonstrates archaic unsustainable practices, mindsets, behaviors. So what are we going to do about it? Let’s use that imagination that we’re so desperately demanding that business uses. Let’s us use it. Let’s get more creative. Let’s think more artisan. Let’s be artists about this.
Stand for the dream. Stand for imagination. Stand for creativity. Stand for love. Stand for beauty. Stand for the complexity of the human spirit and embrace it and be bold, and powerful, and soft.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s inspiring, what Mykel has to say. He’s right. Yes, let’s stand for the dream, and be bold!
But then, I thought, how well has this project for standing up for creativity and imagination actually been working? I can’t help but remember all of the talk back in the 1990s about how the Internet was going to liberate us all at work… and freelancing… and open office plans… and ping pong tables… and the sharing economy… and blockchain, somehow, blockchain was going to finally set us free…
Mykel Dixon, and all the other people I’ve interviewed for this podcast, are wonderful optimists who are earnestly trying to reform the culture of business, to make it less ugly, to reduce its exploitation of people and its destruction of the planet. I respect their earnest efforts to bring imagination and warm feeling into business. For decades, I’ve been working alongside them to make things better.
Nonetheless, when I look at how business has been changing since I began my work, I don’t see progress. I see things getting worse. I see exploitation of human beings and our planet becoming more efficient in its ruthlessness. I see digital technologies concentrating power in the hands of a tiny number of people, and stringing everyone else along. I see corporate cultures shrinking their human projects and placing technological screens between people, both in the corporate workplace and in the marketplace.
I watch this happening, almost always with a promise: This time it’s going to be different. This time, we’ll share the wealth. This time, business will lead the way into a happy, healthy, human future. Just imagine, they tell us, what we can achieve. Only later do we learn that the promise was just a sales pitch, and the revolutionary new technology was just another machine for extracting wealth while giving as little in return as possible.
This is a lean, sprinting, disrupted world that design thinking and its minimally viable products has brought us, fully of hype and elevator pitches and unicorns that turn out to be nothing but donkeys with party hats on, always with the earnest message that somehow, it’s all dedicated to a higher purpose.
Are we going to keep falling for this?
Business is infecting imagination, and turning it into a scam. Look at the MIT Media Labs machine learning, internet-connected AI “personal food computer” that turned out to be a complete fraud. Consider the scam of Theranos, the recycled real estate hype of WeWork, the stingy sharing economy of Uber, the cold and unfeeling emotion machines of Affectiva.
These projects are just a few examples of how the efficient engines of profit are more than happy to wear humanity as a mask, even as it works to remove humanity from our world. They use our dreams to implement their nightmares.
A few months ago, I met the man who is charge of developing Google’s artificial intelligence services for education. In our discussion, he told me that the trouble with education is that teachers are too expensive. Google’s solution, he told me, was to replace human teachers with artificial intelligence interfaces, to put children in chairs in front of screens all day to learn from machines instead of having human contact.
He hadn’t considered the possibility that, rather than human teachers being too expensive, we treat the work of teachers too cheaply. What does it say about our society that coders with plans to end human-to-human contact are well paid, while human teachers are regarded as an intolerable luxury? When I talk about businesses turning our dreams into nightmares, Google’s plan to disrupt the classroom experience is particularly haunting.
Year after year, decade after decade, the speakers on the big stage have been urging us to think different, think big, not pay attention to the troubling details, but to follow their dreams. It’s time for us to look at the world around us and ask ourselves: Is this really what we were dreaming of?
We do need to dream. We do need to pursue a life of imagination, creativity, purpose, and humanity. The question is whether we can follow this path in business.
Mykel Dixon calls upon us to exercise our imaginations. If we are truly creative in our thinking, though, how can we follow the same old model of a business-centered society that’s been leading us in the wrong direction for generations?
Mykel Dixon:
It is the dreamers. It is the artisans. It is the Lennons and McCartneys. This is what we require more than ever. If we cannot break out of, yes but it’s this way, and it’s you know how do we change this, well, you’ve got to dream something else.
Jonathan Cook:
I think Mykel is right.
Business betrays us. It breaks our hearts, but business is also the arena in which we make our most honest declarations of value, where, despite whatever pretty words we have to say about the world we claim to want to live in, we put our money down in sacrifice to foster the world we are actually willing to create. If business creates a world that we find faulty and unfair, it does so as a manifestation of our own dark desires.
We cannot escape this unsettling truth. We don’t have the choice of walking away from the world of business. It’s the warp and woof of our culture. If we want to make a world that’s better than what we have now, we have to reform the culture of business. It’s often frustrating, but I will be keeping up my work contributing in my way to the humanization of business.
This podcast, however, has run its course. The episodes that are currently available form a kind of core framework of the issues that must be addressed before business can become truly human. I’ll be continuing on in my research and consulting work.
When it comes to this podcast, over the last two years I have spoken to remarkable people who are doing the work, who are trying to make business accountable to human beings, and not just another ruthless machine of profit. The humanization of business is not something that we can simply accomplish. It’s not a goal to reach. It’s not a number that we can attain. It’s something that we’re always going to have to struggle with, because what we’re really struggling with is the flawed nature of what it is to be human.
Thank you for listening over the last couple of years and best of luck with all of your efforts.