What Does It Take to Shift to a Human-to-Human Way of Doing Business?

I find myself interested and caring for the human. So the following slogan caught my attention: “There is no more b2b or b2c: It’s human to human”. This got me wondering: What does it take for us to show up and operate as ‘human to human’?

If we are to do business in a ‘human to human’ way then it helps to have a good grasp of what the defining characteristic of human is. In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that ‘Care (Sorge) is the being of dasein’. For the purposes of this conversation dasein = human being. What does Heidegger mean by this? I take it to mean that I do not find myself indifferent: to myself and my experience of living, to the world in which I find myself, to my fellow human beings. It matters (to me) how I live and how my life turns out. It matters (to me) how my fellow human beings live and how their lives turn out. And it matters (to me) how this world is and is not. I care as I am aware that I am being-in-the-world-with-others-towards death.

If we are going to show up and operate from a ‘human to human’ way of doing business then we must genuinely care for ourselves, the people we work with, the people we sell to, the people we buy from, the people whose lives are touched by us and our way of showing up and operating in the world. How best to illustrate this? Allow me to share the following story with you (bolding is my work):

Harry is an emergency physician …. One evening on his shift in a busy emergency room, a woman was brought in about to give birth…….. Harry was going to deliver this baby himself. He likes delivering babies, and he was pleased…… The baby was born almost immediately.

Whilst the little girl was still attached to her mother, Harry laid her along his left arm. Holding the back of her head in his left hand, he took a suction bulb in his right and began to clear her mouth and nose of mucus. Suddenly, the baby opened her eyes and looked directly at him. In that moment, Harry stepped past his technical role and realised a very simple thing: that he was the very first human being this baby girl had ever seen. He felt his heart to go out to her in welcome ….

Harry has delivered hundreds of babies. He has always enjoyed the challenges of delivery, the excitement of making rapid decisions and feeling his own competency, but he says that he had never let himself experience the meaning of what he was doing before. He feels that in a certain sense this was the first baby he ever delivered. He’s says that in the past he would have been so preoccupied with the technical aspects of delivery, assessing and responding to needs and dangers, the he doubts he would have noticed the baby open her eyes or have registered what her look meant. He would have been there as a physician but not as a human being. It was possible, now, to be both…

-Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

This is what I notice about the whole Customer thing: the focus is almost exclusively on the technical stuff (metrics, data, analytics, technology, processes) and almost no recognition of the human. Does this matter? Yes. Why? I leave you with these words of wisdom:

Quality matters when quantity is an inadequate substitute. If a building contractor finds that her two-ton truck is on another job, she may easily substitute two one-ton trucks to carry the landfill. On the other hand, if a three-star chef is ill, no number of short-order cooks is an adequate replacement. One hundred mediocre singers are not the equal of one top-notch singer…

– Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy

We may not be able to define-measure-calculate quality. Yet we are present to it when we experience it. The quality that you/i/we experience from the people we interact with, work with, sell to, buy from, makes a huge difference to our experience of living. This quality of caring cannot be faked, though many folks make the attempt to fake it.

Interestingly, in our age, it is easier to build this caring into the ‘product’ itself (Apple) or the digital interface (Apple) than it is in human-to-human conversation-encounters. Why? Because we have become so wrapped up in the technical that we have lost touch with the human – including our own humanity. Yet, it is possible to get in touch with this humanity and give it expression: to show up as a CEO and as a human being; to show up as a CMO and as a human being; to show up as CFO and as a human being; a sales person and as a human being; to show up as call-centre agent and as a human being……

Please note: I am about to go on vacation and will be out of touch for several weeks. I wish you well and look forward to being in communication after the holiday.