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6 Tips to Be More Human (In an Age of Machines)
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
as originally published in inc. magazine.
“Business is all about relationships.”
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
As someone who started his career as a techie during the rise of the web, quotes like these always used to strike me as the worst kind of “old economy” platitudes. Tired advice from baby boomers whose AOL email addresses were only marginally less embarrassing than their fondness for comic sans.
“Clearly, these oldsters don’t understand the geometric power of dot com thinking!” I’d smirk. “Why would I waste time on an individual relationship when I could write a Perl script to automatically hit 10,000 prospects in half the time?”
Looking back, it’s a miracle I didn’t choke on my own cloud of smug.
People? We Don’t Need No Stinking People
There was a lot of that sentiment in the late 90’s. Strategy consultants, process analysts, and software engineers alike, we Gen X’ers built our early careers on what was, in hindsight, a pretty simple premise: Replace People with Process.
Why pay old Ted to drink martinis with clients over lunch when we can pay young Trevor here half as much to mind the…
