Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of Maddie Grant and Humanize: How People Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, the book she co-wrote with Jamie Notter.
Humanized businesses are the key to business success. And knowing how to evaluate your business and the level of ‘human’ elements that presently exist will help you benchmark where you are now – and also set some goals for where you might like to be in the future.
The four human elements identified in Humanize are how open the organization is, how trustworthy it’s deemed, as well as how generative and courageous it is. These things are what we see everywhere as the lessons from the power of social media—things we want our organizations to be and things we want organizations we work with and buy from to be. We want them to hear us. We want access to people inside companies and we want those people to be able to help us (whether we’re complaining or evangelizing). We want to interact with companies we trust. We want to collaborate with brands we love. These four elements are aspirational. And if you build more of these things into your business, you’ll grow and flourish in ways that closed, machine-centric organizations never will. It’s human-centric organizations that will flourish in today’s connected world filled with passionate, empowered consumers.
The good news: Maddie and Jamie have developed a short quiz that will allow you to take a quick snapshot, no matter where you are in the organizational hierarchy, of your organization in about 15 minutes. The quiz results will give you some ideas as to what areas need your attention as well as where you’re already doing a great job. One added bonus: if you opt for the “yes email me my results” option, Jamie and Maddie will review your results and provide an interpretation of the information, as well as some advice for you moving forward.
Here’s how you can access the quiz and if you take it, I’d love for you to circle back and tell us what you thought. And if this conversation has inspired you to want to buy the book, well, you can skip over to Amazon and do that right here. It’s also available at Barnes & Noble and available for immediate download for the Kindle, iPad and Nook.
One final point: As a companion to the book, Maddie and Jamie have developed a set of four downloadable worksheets that you can use to start developing your own action plans that will help make your organization more open, trustworthy, generative and courageous.
It’s one of my favorite business reads of the last year and I recommend it often because I genuinely think it’s terrific—whether you (or your clients) operate in the B2B or the B2C space. Maddie and Jamie are onto something that’s really a crucial component of success.
Lead image via The Five
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
