Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data

Businesses great and small, from old-fashioned bricks-and-mortars to cutting-edge startups, are moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to most effectively move from an analog past to a digital future. How can you make sure not to leave human instinct behind?

Businesses are increasingly leaving behind traditional meetings in favor of virtual ones, transitioning from surveys and studies to analytics and algorithms. But here is a startling and often unacknowledged truth: the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with the promise of people. In the end, it’s people and dreams that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them.

Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization can and should implement, and challenges readers to move forward with the kind of balance that catalyzes transformation and produces one great success after another:

• Understand how to unleash the significant benefit that can by realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital.
• Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies: cold cultures with little human interaction, poor innovation stemming from stifled employees not encouraged to contribute ideas or insights, and poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes that cause frustration and hurt the brand.
• Explore how organizations of various sizes and from different industries, from Walmart and IBM to Starbucks and Domino’s to Netflix and Google, have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity.
• Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology, between succeeding today and thriving tomorrow, and between leveraging networks and creating new ideas and approaches.

Everyone working in an organization will find penetrating observations and guidance about how and why establishing the proper balance between human intuition and creativity and data-driven insights can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention—and even joy—in their careers and business.