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Reinventing Business To Be More Human

A group of young people who “reinvented business” in an event this summer has clearly signalled that the old, distant way of treating customers and employees can’t last. Ever wonder why most businesses operate as they do — the same old things in the same old way? People will tell you that it’s because it’s “more efficient,” “easier to manage,” “creates profitability,” blah, blah, blah.

By Tony Wanless /

Cheque presentation | BCBusiness
Businesses must re-examine how they interact with employees and customers — and no number of giant cheque presentations will fill the widening gap.

A group of young people who “reinvented business” in an event this summer has clearly signalled that the old, distant way of treating customers and employees can’t last.


Ever wonder why most businesses operate as they do — the same old things in the same old way? People will tell you that it’s because it’s “more efficient,” “easier to manage,” “creates profitability,” blah, blah, blah.

I believe it’s largely because of plain old inertia — It’s been done that way forever, so we’ll keep doing it that way.

Whatever the reason, this do-it-the-same-old-way thinking is resulting in an increasing gap between businesses and their employees and customers, and no amount of photo-op cheque presentations to charities is going to narrow it.

Today, as the world becomes more social, business has to integrate itself better into society by doing business in a different way. After all, “commerce” comes from the same Latin root as “community.”

To that end, this summer the San Francisco design company Frog held a weekend “business hackathon” to redesign business for this century and make it more cognizant of the humans involved.  

People came from all over North America and abroad to collectively dream up new-style businesses, many of them addressing the crumbling employer-employee relationships. The top three “winners” were:

  1. Decision Icon, which created Skill Cloud, a web-based platform that connects companies with the “complete selves” of their people and helps them form (innovation) teams based on personal interests and abilities that may not be captured in resumes and restrictive job descriptions. Skill Cloud operates on the theory that people have many more skills than we see at work.
  2. The Incredibles, who created Loopool, software that aims to reinvent customer relations management (CRM) by giving consumers a platform for providing product feedback in a way that would be shared not just with the company that makes the product, but with a larger community and in a manner that would elicit a public response. Instead of managing customers as an abstract, Loopool will reinsert the human and social into the equation.
  3. PSY-M, which asked the simple question: “How do you measure the happiness of employees?” It answered with Sentimetrics, a new system that allows employers to track the way employees are feeling about their workplace and respond proactively, boosting happiness and retention. PSY-M called Sentimetrics the “Google Analytics for emotion.”

Many people will see this exercise as, at worst, a touch-feely exercise in coddling employees and at best a company run by the Human Resource department.

But I think the overall tone is clear: The operative word is “human,” and these people, most of them young, are signaling that there is something broken in the way businesses operate.

The way of the future in an increasingly knowledge-based business world, they are saying, is to leverage your employees skills and emotions to create a stronger and more successful business.