Image by Hugh McLeod, the most influential Web 2.0 artist (Not sure if he likes that characterization.)

‘Up in the air’ premiered at an inflection point in the history of corporations. The brightest minds in academia and in the business world have caused terrible suffering in the last two years (and beyond), destabilized the economy and the whole world and sped up the demise of the capitalism as we know it. I don’t believe businesses and their executives had any evil intentions but the fact is that most corporations and big institutions are deeply mistrusted, yes, even despised by most people. If this is not a failure, I don’t know anymore what counts as a failure.

Watching ‘Up in the air’ almost felt like an obituary, remembering the worst excesses of corporate dehumanizing strategies. For people that didn’t see the movie: George Clooney works for an agency that helps corporations fire their employees, and escape the messy situation of having to do it themselves. His job keeps him on the road, rather “up in the air” for more than 90% of the year. The agency hires a recent Cornell grad that proposes the money saving, highly efficient, zero travel requiring idea of firing people over the Internet. Making one of the most humiliating and dehumanizing moments in a person’s life even more dehumanizing.

According to the 2009 Financial Trust Index, only 10% of Americans trust large corporations. In the mid-50s this numbers was around 80%. Corporations now stand for cutting costs, outsourcing, off-shoring, downsizing. It’s pretty obvious that corporations need to salvage what’s valuable in their business practices and models and focus all their energies into a new model: New foundation, new rules, new game:

1) Change your perspective:

Businesses used to look at the world from their perspective: How does it benefit me? How does it benefit the shareholders? How does it benefit the overall organization? Corporate darwinism at its best. And people followed along, slaving away to increase shareholder value. Not anymore. Now, it’s about the needs and desires of individuals. Who can help people to solve their problems, help them with their challenges? Organizations that stay behind the corporate wall will fail. Organizations that step outside, connecting with real people trying to help them will prosper.

2) Stop competing, start collaborating

Yes, C-level executives, you better start talking and co-creating with your competitors or you will fail. New networks will arise that will be more powerful than just one corporate entity. The power of networks will severely diminish the power of corporate organizations. Start building networks with partners that share your vision, values and valuation of transparency and trust. Individuals don’t care about your corporation, they care about their problems.

3) Employees are not resources. They are humans.

While companies should focus on the new consumer, the best way to start is with your own employees. In most industries, they are really all you have. They make or break your company. Cherish them by listening to them. Don’t just buy another piece of social technology because everybody is talking about Enterprise 2.0. Listen to their needs. How can we help them not giving in to Email bankruptcy? How can we make their work life more valuable, exciting and energizing?

The last few years have been tough for many people and businesses. And I’m not diminishing the effect the Great Recession had on so many lives. In order to move forward, we need to experience this inflection point as the biggest opportunity companies ever had. We’re in unchartered territory. No GPS, no Org-Chart will guide us through this messy new world. But, we all feel the current strategies and rules don’t apply anymore. Let’s build this new GPS together. And one day the idea of outsourcing the termination of your own employees will feel like the Berlin Wall: What were we thinking?

Frankly, I have problems coping with the constant information overload. I’m pretty sure that most of us have the same problem. Not only in 2009; this has been a primal, human problem. I’m convinced that this feeling of being overloaded, swamped, barely making it is the real engine behind human progress. But only if we approach this challenge in a constructive way.

Since human beings started to communicate, the speed and enormity of societal changes have caused people to bitch and moan. The oldest known example is Plato in his “Pheadros”-Dialogue. He’s complaining about the invention of letters, claiming they will eliminate the necessity to memorize things. And this was 2,400 years ago.

At the core of this discussion is cultural pessimism: Old men decked out in Snuggies sitting in front of a fireplace, agreeing that things used to be better. Well, not everything is bad now, at least I can enjoy my HD but all this busy stuff and social garbage is just a waste of time.

This common rejection of cultural changes is understandable. Highly educated people believed for the longest time that we are able to control society around us. Besides some natural disasters, we have pretty much tamed nature and conquered its forces. However, we fight a constant battle against an institution we created centuries ago: Civilization. We still have a spear in our hand to fight dragons. It’s just a Dragons 99.0 fight against spears 101.0.

In 2009, we feel that our spear is not the right weapon against the dragon anymore. I would argue, the belief of being able to control your social environment was always an illusion. Propped up by executives, politicians and corporations. And the loss of control is felt more dramatically in C-level suites because their power has diminished dramatically.

One hint that control was always an illusion is the silly image that world knowledge is increasing at an unprecedented pace. There are stories that the world’s knowledge captured in books could reach the moon. Nice image, but we always had too much information to cope with. The library of Alexandria, the original Google, consisted of 500,000 papyrus scrolls. If you assume a length of 20 feet per scroll, the length of all scrolls would total 1,900 miles. Assuming a reading speed of 1 feet of scroll per 2 minutes and reading time of 12 hours daily, it would take one person around 75 years to read everything.

Sure, the mountain of information has dramatically increased since Alexandria – its insurmountability was always a fact. That’s why we invented filter mechanisms. Until the end of the 20^th century, this function was performed by the editors of mass media: A hierarchical structure making decisions in a non-transparent way to determine what the public should be interested in. Basically, editors decided how we should experience reality. A very powerful position, indeed. The editorial department as the gatekeeper has been challenged in the 21^st century. Most people will say it’s a technological challenge. I would argue it’s a social challenge.

Different rules apply to the virtual space of the digital realm. A few moments ago, editors decided what should be important us. Now, the web services play to the wisdom of crowds and let people decide what they are really interested in. The editorial edict of relevance is being supplemented  by the crowdsourced edict of “Do I find this interesting?” A new filter is challenging the power base of editorial departments. By utilizing the ancient tool of recommendations, the crowd decides what should be spread and what is not interesting enough to share. All Social Networks are based on the concept of “Look, I found/created something interesting.”

This doesn’t mean editorial departments will disappear. Professional journalism is more important than ever, even though all publishing companies face the monetization challenge. It’s just a fact that journalists aren’t the only game in town anymore, their competition is anybody with a camera and/or laptop.

The editorial department faces off against the crowd, not a machine. It’s a misconception to believe that Google’s algorithm decides what we should experience and read. Google understood from the beginning that algorithms alone won’t determine relevancy. Each and every individual has to make that determination – good technology helps us with that task. Google dominates the digital world because they were always the best in mimicking the way the human mind works. The holy grail of relevance is linking sites through human action. Google even fights a brave fight against automated machine relevance. Whole divisions are trying to ensure that human relevancy (defined by links created by humans) always trumps machine relevancy.

The Internet has conquered the consciousness of the young generation. And in different ways than we ever imagined when we started our digital journey. I would argue that the consequences of the digital revolution are much more severe and revolutionary, as if Print, Telephone and TV were invented at the same time. I’ve heard teenagers ask their parents how human beings joined the Internet. Can you better describe the intimate relationship young adults have to the digital reality? The virtual world can’t be separated from our carbon existence. This is so profound that people change the way they live, work and love. Yes, even love can be rooted in digital. Ask the millions of people who fell in love and grieved for Princess Diana (without ever meeting her) if they were deeply affected by an almost virtual person.

The predictable stories about the demise of our culture and consequences for our society completely dismisses the rise of written information, caused by the advent of digital and social technologies. Sure, some of them are grammatically challenged and need solid spell checks. But, think back 20 years: How many students wrote anything outside of their school and homework? Maybe a diary page. Nothing more. Compare this to the flood of written content just from the Millenials alone. A step in the right direction.

What remains is the nagging feeling that the machine is starting to control us. So, let’s step down from a throne of arrogance and level with the older generation. Fact is, the digital world is still too complicated and complex. The younger generation might not feel that way because their socialization process occurred during the advent of digital technologies. Technological progress is only a positive force for society when the majority feels positive about it. And this is mostly a question of coping with overload. The older people are the more pronounced is their fear not to be relevant anymore. We need to deal with this through support systems and the power of empathy.

This overload and fear of not being relevant anymore plays out each and every day in offices, cubicles and homes throughout the world. Staring at the screen, anxiety sets in and the fear that the digital life might pass you by. We need to explain to non-native digital nomads why we put weird images on our Social Network pages while we expect that our future employers don’t sniff around our private networks to find incriminating content. Would a respectable corporation ever sift through the garbage of a prospective employee even though the garbage container is easily accessible for anyone? We should explain that multi-tasking is just a symptom of the scattering media landscape – the generation before us left the TV for hours while reading books and newspapers. Let’s explain to them the difference of publishing your own data and institutional regulations as the difference between being ‘locking myself in the bathroom’ and ‘being locked in the bathroom’. It’s about freedom of choice, we control our own data.

Let’s invite them to participate in the digital lifestyle. What an amazing opportunity: It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, ugly or beautiful, if you want to talk about Canadian glaciers or Serbian poetry of the 17^th century. Showcase the steep advances or society made with the digital revolution – how lonely was a 16-year old gay person living in a rural village 20 years ago? What an amazing change and opportunity to be able to connect with like-minded people, escaping the frightening thought to be different.

Businesses need to implement systems to play to the strengths of the young and the weaknesses of the old. Just adding another technology layer to the mix will increase the divide. Instead, we need to implement systems that enhance the real-time experience of digital natives and help filter out the noise for the older generation to connect with signals.

And, as always, we still need to pay a price for all these positive developments: Media elites are not that elite anymore. Transparency and speed crushed their belief in being able to control the environment. Their greatest problem with the young generation is that they don’t belong to it anymore.

Below is the speech I gave at iMedia’s Agency summit in Scottsdale:

Most of you remember and lived through the dot-com bubble. All these promises of the new economy and new world and new life just disappeared in a few months. Looking back, Etoys, Pets.com, Kozmo: they all resembled Madoff-like Ponzi schemes. Amidst the ruins of the dot-com bubble, people got back to work, started mature conversations by trying to understand how digital communications can increase the value of relationships and a business.

When I think about Social Media in 2009, I have this nagging déjà-vu feeling. I see proposals for Twitter and Facebook for up to $80k. I see false promises. I see laughable Social Media Certification courses for $3000. Every other person on Twitter claims to be a Social Media expert. I think most of feel that the current state of Social Media is a huge bubble and my prediction is that it will burst in 2010.

The reason why it will burst is not because Social Media is just a fad. I would propose that most of us think about Social Media in the wrong way. The majority of marketers think Social Media is a cheap way to further their corporate and marketing strategy. I would argue, the majority has it wrong.

Post-Lehman, when the great recession hit, my personal experience was that all the glossy, snotty restaurants were struggling. But when you went to your local restaurant (upscale or coffeeshop style) their business was booming. Why? Because local businesses are rooted in developing, maintaining and strengthening relationships with customers. They listen to their customers, improve their business based on suggestions. They provide great service and thank their patrons. If you want to learn about Social Media: Skip Twitter conferences. Rather go to your local Farmer’s Market.

Social Media is such a unique opportunity for all of us to have a direct connection with customers. By conversing with them, they and all the other stakeholders in your business will help you determine your corporate and marketing strategy. That’s the real objective of Social Media: transforming the faceless corporation into a human business. Where people are heard and respected.

When I grew up, my father told me that my only job in life is to create heaven on earth. I’ve tried hard, I failed many times. And tried again. I believe Social Media or as I call it Humanizing Businesses is such a precious opportunity to get closer to that goal. Let’s not waste it with Twitter ads or Facebook pokes. Let’s take it seriously. Because creating heaven on earth is serious business.

We are not Social Media experts. We’re not Six Sigma pundits. And we don’t have all the answers.

In fact, we are skeptical of people who claim they know all the answers and provide them through Org Charts, Twitter pages or pie-in-the-sky strategy decks.
We are simply people across a wide range of communications and management disciplines with the unifying belief that businesses need to adapt and transform in the new reality of a post-consumption economy.

We see an incredible economic opportunity if we develop new ways to reframe problems, seize emerging opportunities and design solutions by looking behind the consumption-oriented economic model.
Just as we emerged from the dark ages to a new era of social and artistic enlightenment, we are now entering the post-industrial and post-Lehman age with the realization that the well-being of our economy should not be based on consumption alone and focus more on the human element.

For more than 100 years, businesses have focused on driving efficiencies, improving processes and increasing shareholder value. With the advent of new technologies, businesses invested billions of dollars in technology and transaction systems to reduce latency and inefficiency in value chains. “Six Sigma” is the epitome of this focus and thinking. However, the ROI on further optimizing processes for operational excellence is diminishing because of the human element. Unless you’re an Android, you can only be that productive, that efficient, that process-oriented without losing your humanity.

As Super Social Primates, our need to connect with others is deeply ingrained into our DNA. This is the reason why solitary confinement is regarded as the ultimate punishment. And babies with a loving relationship to their family have dramatically better chances to succeed. New and intuitive technologies have allowed us to connect with people in ways we could not have imagined a few years back. But we warn against the focus on technology: Too much energy and attention has been spent talking about CRM/Social Media/Networking technologies that many have missed the point: without people none of that matters.

Our thinking is based on the fundamentals of human needs and behavior. Technologies are just tools to tap into these needs, allow for connections and enable like-minded to come together. These technologies are merely the platforms for connecting and sharing. And they allow people to deliver on the normal human desire to be accepted and valued by others. By linking, commenting, discussing and sharing, individuals gain authority and influence in the social space and thereby develop and increase their own levels of esteem.

We see a lot of encouraging signs that thought leaders and innovative practitioners are trying to incorporate principles of social networking/computing into the enterprise. Some call it Enterprise 2.0, human-centered design or Social Business Design. These models assume that humans are rational primates, always acting in their best interest.

The financial meltdown and newest studies in Behavioral Economics are super-sized reminders that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

Our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. We tend to believe data to confirm our prejudices and ignore data contradicting them; we overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; we weave single multiple events into a causal narrative; we applaud our own expertise and skills in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

In short, we had to learn that we’re predictably irrational (to borrow from Dan Ariely’s fascinating book). In ‘The Happiness Hypothesis” Jonathan Haidt compares the self to a rider on the back of an elephant. He writes:

“The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.”

For the longest time, institutions have focused on the little boy while tinkering with the elephant. And we’ve optimized the little boy for the longest until we finally hit the wall. It’s time to focus our attention on the elephant and tap into its enormous potential. We don’t believe current models effectively stimulate the endless potential of human emotion and creativity.

For that reason, we propose a new model: Human Business Design.
What is Human Business Design? It is a model based in the belief that all human interactions/conversation inside and outside of your organization matter now: The way human beings are motivated to connect and create value has changed. Every business has to realize that it is a co-creative eco-system that includes its employees, partners, competitors and customers and the way they are motivated to create and realize value is the only measure of success.

Organizations need to provide a framework for their customer base (and entire ecosystem) to participate in the co-creation of meaningful value. The new paradigm is co-creation, co-operation on bigger ideas than just the motivation to consume. Each good organization has a big vision behind its products and services. And the goal has to be that all stakeholders work on this bigger vision.

This allows us to merge the left-brain efficiencies of organizations with the right-brain imagination of hyper-connected human beings, creating new value propositions nobody ever imagined.