Seth Godin: Why being human is the only way to win

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Bestselling author and MIX Maverick Seth Godin describes the fork in the road that every worker and company faces today. Are you racing to the bottom or exerting your humanity?

Comments

Wouter de Valk

December 3, 2011 at 1:04am

May I argue for a nuance when it comes to "automitized" or standardized tasks: It's not necessarily jobs that are fully standardised. We make them so.

Lessons from LEAN teach us that even them most standardized jobs improve when given the "humane" opportunity to consider improvements.

However, the writer Atul Gawande in his book "The checklist manifesto" argues for more standardization of completely or mostly autonomous jobs, like doctors.

It comes down to our awareness of where standardisation is useful, and where our "humanity". Hall and Johnson (2009) made the distinction between processes that are run on scientific basis, i.e. standardization and art, i.e. judgment-based.

I would argue: As soon as a task can be standardized, do that fully, by exploiting our collective mechanisation and automation capabilities. The process of recognition and standardisation itself is humane. It will help us establish a wedge supporting our improvements in the upward pressure of human development.

Bernd Nurnberger

December 4, 2011 at 5:13pm

Agree on one hand, the polarization may become more obvious between organizations and between regions. Agree on the other hand, in business it is often about finding and maintaining, then questioning all over again, dynamic balance. Standardized routine, coordinated improvement, open space self-organization, and blue ocean creativity, all have their place in between and connecting the extremes.

Being human about it to win is my takeaway today. Looking forward to the next ten years. Let's review in 2022.

Luc Galoppin

December 3, 2011 at 4:20am

I second that nuance.
We have to be careful not to throw out everything that smells like automation and standardization. We just need to be smarter in the process of recognition and standardization.

Thanks for that nuance.
Luc

Greg Stevenson

December 2, 2011 at 2:03pm

If you try to think of one word to describe what it means to be Human I would think that "LOVE" would be right up there.

Love is really hard to define. We tend to use things like the opposite of Love is Hate, or the opposite of Love is indifference.

I put it to you that the opposite of Love is Fear. To do what Seth describes, we need to bring Love to Work, and to enable that to happen we must drive out Fear. Actually we need to do both simultaneously in one system. To create this system we need to look to the "Symptoms of Love".