Cambridge Business Association
Humanize
Book

Humanize

How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World

Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant
QUE Publishing, 2011
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Eye Opening

Recommendation

Social media provide a venue for human behavior: creating, connecting, sharing and interacting. In the social digital world, companies’ hierarchical systems, opaque structures and rigid processes – business practices that have worked for the past century – can become organizational death traps. To thrive in the digital age, your firm should be attuned to the same human-based principles that fuel social media. As management consultant Jamie Notter and social media expert Maddie Grant explain, this requires overhauling your business’s culture, processes and behaviors to include the human qualities of being “open, trustworthy, generative and courageous.” The authors do a good job of explaining why this is important, but are less attentive to explaining how to achieve it. getAbstract recommends this book’s insights to managers seeking to understand how social media can help them shape tomorrow’s successful companies today.

Summary

Social Media Insurgency

In less than 15 years, social media have become mainstream. As access to mobile networks continues to expand, social media will continue to accelerate. This revolution affects how people relate to one another and how business works.

The social media are composed of “any website or application that enables individuals to create and share content that others can view, share and/or modify.” Social media enable people to ignore traditional purveyors of information by connecting and sharing with one another. Social media – the embodiment of word-of-mouth marketing – influence purchasing because people find online opinions more authentic than the usual marketing and advertising.

Consumers create and distribute their own content. Amateurs sidestep traditional filters and publish their own work. Internet searching renders conventional media outlets obsolete because people rely on their friends and online connections to discover relevant news in real time. Web searching also dilutes a company’s ability to reach its target audience on its own terms. When people connect online, they form “open communities” around common interests. They collaborate...

About the Authors

Jamie Notter heads the consulting division of Management Solutions Plus. Maddie Grant is a social media expert and strategist at SocialFish.

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