peopleandcompany-blog

[peopleandcompany-blog]

A brand is just the promises you make to people.

David Belt

[peopleandcompany-blog]

I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans — i.e., “human relationality” — that undergirded meaning.

Paul Kalanithi

[peopleandcompany-blog]

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy in January 2007, few experts gave it a chance. Yet few campaigns ever finished on such a high note as the Obama campaign last November.

Over the course of the previous two years, a movement took shape within a political campaign, the movement to elect Barack Obama. **Like earlier movements, it was rooted in shared values (equality, hope, community in diversity), driven by the creative energy of young people, demanded personal and political change (racial attitudes, acceptance of civic responsibility, etc.), focused on a clear strategic objective (electing Obama) and grew faster – and deeper - than anyone imagined. Because organizing was at its core it generated far more than a list of donors, potential donors, and a network of elected officials, funders, and campaign operatives: it trained some 3000 full time organizers, most of them in their 20‘s; it organized thousands of local leadership teams (1100 in Ohio alone); and it engaged some 1.5 million people in coordinated volunteer activity. And because this national campaign built its own local organization – and eschewed the usual goulash of interest groups, party organizations, contractors, and 527‘s – it was able to develop a new political culture, a foundation for a genuine renewal of American politics.

[peopleandcompany-blog]

"It happened because our corporate policies were placed ahead of our shared values. Our procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right."

[peopleandcompany-blog]

"What was that about the pollster being influenced by the conventional wisdom? Aren’t pollsters supposed to be objective? Well, yes, they’re supposed to be. And the best pollsters trust their data even when it comes to an unpopular conclusion. (By 'unpopular,' I mean a conclusion that differs from what journalists and other elites expect.) But pollsters also have a lot of choices to make about which turnout model to use, how to conduct demographic weighting, what to do with undecided voters, and so forth. This can make more difference than you might think. An exercise conducted by The New York Times’s Upshot blog last year gave pollsters the same raw data from a poll of Florida and found that they came to varied conclusions, showing everything from a 4-point lead for Clinton in Florida to a 1-point lead for Trump. [...] Under these conditions, it’s easy for polls to be contaminated by the conventional wisdom instead of being a check on elites’ views — and to be the worse for it."

[peopleandcompany-blog]

“The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively.

This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes.

We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money and no human rights—except in the common imagination of human beings. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee Heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”

[peopleandcompany-blog]

“Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. As Sloman and Fernbach demonstrate in some of the most interesting and unsettling parts of the book, individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to produce her own clothes, how to start a fire from scratch, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We today think we know far more, but as individuals we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood how a zipper works. Most people confidently replied that they understood it very well — after all, they use zippers all the time. They were then asked to explain how a zipper works, describing in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zipper’s operation. Most had no idea. This is the knowledge illusion. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

[peopleandcompany-blog]

People & Company at work and at play.

[peopleandcompany-blog]

They motivate people by being compelling storytellers and starting with the “Why”. They drive performance by pushing teams to think deeply about customer needs and to build remarkable, differentiated products that serve these customers better than anyone else does.

...

Revenue is a lagging indicator. Revenue is a natural outgrowth of doing the right things on every other dimension that matters. Purpose. Strategy. Customers. Products. Employees.

[peopleandcompany-blog]

East Coast, February 2017

[peopleandcompany-blog]

"You motivate action more with a simple, clear metric even if it's not perfect."