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Wednesday, 22 January 2020

5 keys for a Business that doesn’t bury the Humans

5 Keys To Building

A  Business That Doesn’t

Bury The Humans

At Its Core



As business leaders speak of the “Human Age” and claim that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism”–defined as access to talent as a key resource and differentiator–many companies have embarked on initiatives to “unleash their human potential.” Those are big words and noble ambitions, and naturally they seem worth striving for. But as one of the hosts of a hackathon in San Francisco this weekend, which invites developers, designers, and other creative minds to “reinvent business,” I have been wondering: What is a “human” business, anyway?

You might argue that the notion of a human business is a category error. Organizations are bureaucracies at their core, and it is hard to think of any formalized collective human endeavor, and especially any business, as being free of rules, structures, and processes. After all, these factors are what ultimately makes corporations (and nonprofits alike) reliable and trustworthy, and grants them their authority. Consequently, there appears to be a fundamental chasm between individual human behavior–which is expansive and multifaceted, ranging from the rational to the wildly irrational, sentimental, and unpredictable–and the design of organizations: rational, practical, results oriented, and engineered to perform consistently.And yet, companies are made up of people who are loving, caring, generous, forgiving, and wildly creative at their best, and incoherent, inconsistent, moody, selfish, arrogant, aggressive–and yes, even violent at their worst (not coincidentally, the corporation, when contextualized as a “person,” has been diagnosed a psychopath in a popular 2004documentary film). Inarguably, every corporation under the sun (well, maybe except for Foxconn’s robot-powered manufacturing lines) is made of and run by humans, and quintessentially based on human relationships. So how can any enterprise not be human?

I prefer the term humanist business. “Human” describes what we are, “humanist” signifies what we want to be. A business might be human because it best caters to the actual, realistic human needs (articulated, for example, by Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, but it becomes humanist only by aspiring to a greater purpose that enables the ideal human condition through its very pursuit.


Empathy is the ability to put oneself into someone else’s mind, to truly feel with and for them. And indeed, if we humans are neurologically as Dev Patnaik asserts, then organizations need to be wired to care, too. This requires an emotional understanding of the sentiments, dreams, desires, and ambitions of their employees and customers. Amidst a flood of explicit “big data” and confronted with the constant urge to quantify human relationships, empathetic enterprises preserve and refine their intuition–an appreciation for the implicit and the opaque.






Humans create–not only positive things like ideas, things, relationships, and stories, but also confusion and chaos. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior. But as most process efficiencies have been exploited over the past decades, variation trumps standardization. To counteract boredom, the “new work stress,” as CNN defines it, successful creative businesses constantly reinvent themselves.




This can be characterized as the quest to work toward a unique mission, whether it is individual advancement, spiritual enlightenment, or social progress. The prerequisite of aspiration is imagination, and its immediate product is hope. Only an organization with vivid imagination, both individual and collective, can envision a bigger and brighter future–and thus provide a sense of hope, the lifeblood of any human endeavor. Aspirational businesses are constantly changing, and they treat their employees as entrepreneurs or “social intrapreneurs,” as autonomous decision-makers and leaders who are inspired (and not just motivated) to act as changemakers across all levels of the organization. (I always ask job candidates: “What is it that you want to change?”) This requires a different kind of alignment–not the traditional one between goals and execution, but one between organizational aspiration and employee passions. At Frog, we have established loosely structured “centers of passion,” wary that a too formal setup might stifle the very informality in which passions thrive.


[Images: Art History Resources, Janaka Dharmasena, and Janaka Dharmasena via Shutterstock]


Tim Leberecht is the chief marketing officer of the global design and innovation firm frog. He is a co-host of the “Reinvent Business” hackathon (June 9-10, .


Why Faking Enthusiasm

Is The Latest Job Requirement

Increasingly, companies want loving the job to be part of the job

(though they’re less eager to pay for it).

But when our required professional persona is at odds with our selves,

we all suffer. Is there a solution?

“Important to smile. Don’t forget smile.”

Sooner or later, most jobs require us to exhibit some emotion that we don’t necessarily feel. Flight attendants and waiters are supposed to smile when they hand you a drink; bill collectors are supposed to scare you into coming across with the cash. Nurses and preschool teachers are supposed to be comforting, even loving. When your job requires playing a part, though, it’s hard to figure out where you begin and your job ends. The experience can be alienating, even dehumanizing.

Award-winning UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her book The Managed Heart, coined the term “emotional labor” to describe the curious situation where “seeming to love the job becomes part of the job.”

This concept has been in the air lately. Josh Eidelson wrote in The Nation about D.C.-area Starbucks baristas exhorted to support a corporate pro-austerity campaign by physically writing a slogan on cups. “CEOs hawking ’shared sacrifice’ are a dime a dozen,” Eidelson noted. “A working-class seal of approval is much more valuable, even if–like so much in the American workplace–it’s coerced.”


If you have to love the job to do it well, the logic goes, then we don’t want people to be in it for the money.Usually we only think of emotional labor as belonging to the low-wage service economy. In fact, economist Nancy Folbre argued in her great book The Invisible Heart that the reason that jobs like preschool teacher and social worker are so low-paid and devalued is precisely because they require so much emotional labor. If you have to love the job to do it well, the logic goes, then we don’t want people to be in it for the money.But as Hochschild wrote, “most of us have jobs that require some handling of other peoples’ feelings and our own, and in that sense we are all partly flight attendants.” Emotional labor exists even in the startup world, which is supposed to prize authenticity and pure technical skill. Lauren Bacon, a web developer, technology entrepreneur, and author, wrote in the Huffington Post last week about technology and “empathy work”–the unpaid, not-part-of-the-job description stuff that (usually) women do in the startup world, by, for example, bringing the team together, projecting a positive image in their spare time on social media, or reminding everyone to eat lunch.

Bacon sees women in tech companies often being marginalized to “”people” roles like HR, communications, project management, admin, and user experience. “One could almost–if one were feeling cheeky–rename these roles employee empathy, customer empathy, team empathy, user empathy, and boss empathy: all of them require deep skills in emotional intelligence, verbal and written communications, and putting oneself in the shoes of others,” she says. All this work is crucial to a company’s success, but valued at a lower level than the hard-core coding.

Is there any way to make peace with the emotional heavy lifting that our jobs may require? Bacon suggests that employers and job candidates do a better job of talking about and adequately valuing people skills and not offloading all the emotional labor to a few people. For individuals, choosing a job that’s a good fit for your natural temperament is important. But so is spending enough time away from work to find out how you really feel.


.                                                                                                       .


Feeling Your Consumer:

What Marketers Are Missing

About Making Emotional Connections

















Read some of Van Praet’s previous columns on neuroscience and marketing.

[Monkey Icecream: Byelikova Oksana via Shutterstock]

Douglas Van Praet

November 25, 2013 | 7:27 AM

Douglas Van Praet discusses the neurological nature of empathy and how marketers often focus on competition at the expense of real connections.


Brands, It’s Time To Get Moving: Why Action-Oriented Marketing Is The Way Forward


Despite our continued homage to the almighty 30-second spot and the much heralded promise of the virtual and digital realm, as Marvin Gaye sang in his 1968 hit “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.”


That’s because our brains exist for movement. As neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert states: “I would argue that we have a brain for one reason and one reason only. And that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement…Things like sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they are only important to drive movement.”



Brands are expectations of outcomes based on memories–heuristics or mental shortcuts to easier choices and better lives. Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman indicates, when it comes to making decisions it is the “remembering self” that decides, not the “experiencing self.” How we feel largely depends upon our memory, not what actually happened.

Marketing models hold that attitudes precede behavior, that we must first shift beliefs and imagery to get sales. But as psychologist Timothy Wilson explains, “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitudes and feelings.”






1) Interrupt the Pattern
2) Create Comfort
3) Lead the Imagination
4) Shift the Feeling
5) Satisfy the Critical Mind
6) Change the Associations
7) Take Action


When company founder Dietrich Mateschitz hired a market research firm to test the concept, the survey yielded catastrophic results. Mateschitz recalls, “People didn’t believe the taste, the logo, the brand name. I’d never before experienced such a disaster.” He ignored the research introducing Red Bull in 1987.


As Mateschitz puts it, “We don’t bring the product to the consumer, we bring the consumer to the product.” The strategy was to create the best parties, not the best drink. As the brand grew so did the parties, with Red Bull becoming synonymous with high-octane fun that perfectly matched the attributes of the product and the sensibilities of their high-energy customers.



This is a textbook case of what Kahneman calls the “peak end rule.” Brand impressions are not based on the reality of the experiences but almost entirely on the peak moments and the concluding impression—whether positive or negative. In other words, we need to create powerful, positive, peak physical and emotional experiences that leave the audience on a high note.

As Harvard business professor Nancy F. Koehn observes, “In terms of attracting new customers and enhancing consumer loyalty, Red Bull has a more effective branding campaign than Coke or Pepsi…Perhaps the indispensable tools of marketing aren’t so indispensable after all.”





Pubblicato in * CULTURA ECONOMICA e FINANZIARIA, * INTELLIGENZA e le INTELLIGENZE, * TECNOLOGIA, INFORMATICA, ENERGIA, Attualità e News, Europa e USA, GLOBALITA', il "Nuovo Mondo" Eco-Geo-Politico, IL LAVORO, The Job, Lavoro in Italia   3 commenti »

Saturday, 11 January 2020

Un tram giallo

Si fa, non si fa…quello di rincontrare i vecchi amanti ?

Non lo so

Non lo so ancora

Digiti, magari per scherzo mentre sei con amici, un nome su Google ed ecco che ti compare Lui.

Caspita. Ma come è cambiato !

Sì, ecco, ora è – finalmente – presidente di banca

La cosa non mi stupisce, la sua carriera era proiettata in quel senso.

E’ che ti fermi a pensare a certe cose.

Ad esempio, al valore dei soldi.

No, non nel senso di semplice venalità, ma di quanto sono effettivamente utili i soldi…

I soldi che necessitano per acquistare un’auto “come si deve” e poi quell’auto, mentre noi si rideva e chiacchierava felici, alle 3 del mattino in una Milano deserta, lanciata in una corsa un po’ folle, quell’auto che “grazie ai suoi potenti mezzi” riesce a non impattare con un Tram, proprio un vecchio Tram che Non dovrebbe essere sui binari …

…alle 3 del mattino i Tram non dovrebbero circolare in quel di Milano – e neppure arrivare così  sornionamente silenziosi  da sinistra…




Foto rubata a El Eternauta

ma tranquilli, NO, Non è Lui il mio vecchio amante…

Pubblicato in - Genio,Talento, Creatività, Letture canzoni racconti poesie, Parole per farlo, VITA in ITALIA   10 commenti »

Ayaan Hirsi Ali


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