Where Human Connection Meets Human Capital
is where the flywheel of life happens
Do you proudly wear the logo of your company on your chest?
I remember hearing that phrase many years ago as a comment about the significance of a brand. Be it the company you work for, the company you support, or perhaps your own personal brand. While, not a scientific measure of success, wearing a logo represents an emotional commitment. A statement. A conscious decision.
When I work with companies, I have observed the causal nature of wearing a logo vs. the required wearing of company ware as a uniform at a trade show or conference. I call that the pride factor.
When I work at my winery on the weekends, I converse with people about their life, work, and love of food and wine. I always pay attention to logo ware. It is a jump-off point for a conversation. That happened today in two completely different conversations about brands and what a brand meant to these people.
This brings me to the point of today’s newsletter - “Where human connection meets human capital”. I had a moment of clarity over the last few weeks, that this intersection is where the flywheel of life happens. And, that I want to be a catalyst for change at this intersection.
I see several structural shifts in the market dramatically reshaping the intersection of human connection and human capital.
The Loneliness Factor
The Fracturing of Human Connection
The Refactoring of Human Capital
The Loneliness Factor.
This phenomenon has been on my radar for a while now. I see this issue through the lens of work with worktech companies who believe technology is the answer. I see this issue through a company reframing the caregiving economy by focusing on the “sandwich generation” dealing with elder care for their parents and safety care for their children and themselves.
I see this issue through my daughters (on the Millennial/Gen Z generation borderline) and their peer groups struggling to meet their co-workers as well as each other, all impacted by COVID, and now post-COVID workplace volatility. It was a period when my generation met most of their lifelong friends.
I see young men just graduating who are now living with their parents in what is known as a failure to launch. Scott Galloway has spoken on this subject repeatedly over the last several years.
It pains me to see how lonely we have become. I want to take this on with the companies and executives I choose to do business with. I believe a root solution to loneliness is designing for clarity and to help executives with their self-expression, so we build stronger relationships.
The Fracturing of Human Connection.
I am fortunate. I get to work with many different kinds of companies and executives. Each offers unique challenges to solve and opportunities to amplify. Every time I take on a new client, I gain an additive layer of knowledge to add to my cookbook of thinking and activation.
My most recent client - Shared Studios taught me about Human Connection. Their founder Amar Bakshi had a vision based on real-life experiences traveling the world and creating video journalism of people, places, and life moments. His creation touched me deeply. For 10 years, Shared Studios collapsed the distance between cultures via a portal concept that enabled people to talk, eat, and perform with each other like they were in the same room.
They produced a new spin-out company - Noro - that took that knowledge and created a lifesized screen designed for the workplace. A new concept that took from the roots of old teleconferencing systems, the explosive of Zoom, and the dramatic improvements of cloud-based technology to deliver a full-screen, full-body live video experience that has no latency and allows distributed workforces to collaborate like they are in the same room.
Tommaso Trionfi, CEO, is now working with clients and experts in network optimization, neurosciences, and psychology to understand the impact of human connection across the workplace.
Carbon footprint reduction is now possible. The issue of remote work, hybrid work, and RTO decisions can now be optimized for flow, collaboration, and innovation in a scenario that did not exist economically until now.
I believe it is possible to improve human connection. It starts at the root of understanding how we operate as individuals, so others can know how best to work with us. This has wide-reaching implications at an individual, work, and societal level.
The Refactoring of Human Capital.
The biggest cost to most companies is human capital. Through my work with several worktech companies, I gained a deeper understanding of where humans stand in both work terms, skill terms, and valuation terms.
My corporate and start-up management lives led me to view Human Resources as more compliance people, than a true lookout for career success. My observation of living and working in Silicon Valley has witnessed the insane scaling at all costs, which led to accordion-like decisions on headcounts and build-outs.
Playing in the cracks of what one executive called “The Human Supply Chain” on multiple occasions took me deep into the value of a human contributor as an FTE, vs. an SEM (subject matter expert) contractor, a fractional contractor, and a bot or AI as a role replacement. Who and how a job got done, came down to the most profitable way, not necessarily the most human way.
The question I had to answer for one of my clients was “Would a human hire a bot?”. That answer got complicated. From the angles of where a human fits on the balance sheet, to where a human is accounted for versus how technology is acquired, licensed, or subscribed to - the notion of “hiring” a bot was not possible by today’s GAAP rules. Yet, consulting firms were purchasing bots, giving them “human names” and sticking them in the Slack Channel as if they were an FTE.
Dr. Solange Charas and Stela Lupushor wrote a seminal book “Humanizing Human Capital”, that lays out a better way to value human capital. A modernized view to effectively measure human capital that ties to workplace design and flow of work outcomes.
Samara Jaffe created the HR Transform conference several years before COVID-19 as a place for HR, HRTech, and workplace experts to come together to discuss the future of work. The post-COVID version of Samara’s conference - evolved to become Transform. Transform has taken on an even broader aspect of the people business. It is a conference whose timing could not be more Future of Work. It is how work is transforming before our very eyes.
Roles have evolved from Heads of HR to Chief People Officers. HR Tech has evolved to WorkTech, compliments of the work George LaRorcque is doing as an analyst transforming the world of work technologies.
The role of “People” has now made its way into the SEC filings as one of the five most important executives in the company. The Rise of Human Resource executives on these SEC filings migrated from less than 1% pre-COVID to a high of 20% in COVID, to now settling in at the mid-teens today. This shift is in a great report from Mert Akan and Nick Bloom, entitled The Rise of Human Resources.
What does all of this have to do with Strategic Narrative and You?
I believe it's “everything”. It is your playing field. As a Leader of a company. As an executive trying to shape and project a personal narrative. Your ability to enhance human connection will shape the value of your human capital.
And, more importantly, how we measure for human capital in a “human supply chain world” will set the tone for how this spatial shift will play out across five active generations.
It can begin here with a special offer to my subscribers - build your own User Manual. I call it a Je suis.
NOW (How you are realizing this today)
How do you overcome your sense of loneliness?
What are you doing to address Human Connection in your life?
Do you understand your value and how others see your value?
NEW (How you will realize this tomorrow)
I will design my personal narrative and gain perspective on my value by the end of June.
I will design a User Manual and share how I operate by the end of June.
I will reach out to 15 people between now and the end of April to set up IRL catch-ups.
NEXT (I see a world in which)
I see a world in which understanding the intersection of Human Connection and Human Capital will become one of the biggest needs of the 21st century.
THE PAYOFF
“We want somebody to understand how we feel - our mother, our teacher, our wife, our boss. Humans often fail to understand our experience - because they are too busy with their own experiences. ~ Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Leasson for the 21st Century.
From Ready Player One, real life "it's the only place where you can get a decent meal." It's also the only place you can give or receive a handshake, a pat on the back, a bandaid, a hug, or a kiss. To the extent that all the technology brings us together IRL it is aligned with millions of years of evolution. The rest -- after one takes away all the flashing lights, buzzwords, shiny hardware, imaginary expressions of wealth, and janky connections -- is the generator of loneliness we are trying to overcome. I'm going outside for a walk IRL.