It’s back to the future at PeopleMetrics. Lately, we've been talking a lot about our ‘why’ – the reason our business exists. And through our reflections, conversations, and musings we stumbled on the first ever issue of Fast Company that was released close to twenty years ago.
If you don't recall this edition of the magazine, its cover was emblazoned in bold red and black letters forming the phrase “Work is Personal”.
And between the covers was one of its inaugural articles, The Fad that Forgot People, which discussed how the Business Reengineering trend had failed to produce the results everyone expected. The author, Thomas H Davenport explained the failure:
Business had ceased to be human.
Fast Forward to the 2010s…
A lot has happened since 1995. We survived Y2K and dispensed with AOL’s “You’ve got mail” calling. The fax machine is all but obsolete. We are Googling, texting, tweeting, Skyping, relying on Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp to become cleverer consumers and business people. We have immediate access to information on our SmartPhones and tablets. We are able to communicate to vast networks of people – sharing our joys and complaints – in a matter of seconds.
As we contemplated how the world has evolved since the mid-90s it struck us that one thing remains constant: businesses are human and it’s our life’s work to help them become more so.
Humanized businesses have three things in common. They believe that:
- People matter
- To listen is to understand
- Business (not just work) is personal
In our next post we’ll talk more about what these beliefs really mean and what businesses who are successfully humanizing themselves are doing to act in accordance with these beliefs.
–Kate Feather
