All Else Follows
'People’ - half our name and the theme for this week’s edition.
People Are Our Greatest Assets
Hamid Ulukaya, recently delivered an excellent Ted Talk on how Chobani started. As he was buying that factory and looking around, his mind was clear ‘People are our greatest assets’, which then got him to wondering why the leaders in the company he was buying from didn’t understand that.
I think the answer lies somewhere in this People First Tenet.
I write more about it here. Too many leaders manage by the $, the accounts, the spreadsheet.
It’s People, Process Then Technology
Harold Leavitt coined the phrase people, process, and technology in his 1964 paper, Applied Organization Changes in Industry, identifying the key components for business success. Those three words have been constantly referenced ever since. Nowhere more than by those in charge of implementing technology.
I have always included a fourth word so that there is no confusion.
It has become increasingly clear that I haven’t emphasized this enough, which is why interviews like this one with Drew Saur in CIO magazine from earlier this year get to be published. We forget. Too often.
The Value of People’s Work
One aspect of work is creativity and related to that is an article by Om Malik published yesterday; ‘The Problem with Content’, which in turn referenced a piece written by Khoi Vinh ‘Writing Content vs. Writing Writing’ .. both talk about ‘content’, a topic I have written about; ‘Please do not call it content’ and ‘Owning your own work’ being a couple of recent examples.
The word ‘content’ is another example of the corporate hijacking of language to further business centric agendas at the cost of people’s value. As I wrote elsewhere;
As long as ‘we the creators’ fall into the trap of using ‘their’ words to describe our work, our soul, our passion, our beliefs as ‘content’, then our work will continue to be viewed as ’free - to - cheap - to - low - cost, homogenized, non differentiated, interchangeable fodder’.
Many Thanks For Your Attention
Please do forward this to colleagues and friends and have them subscribe. It’s a small but growing community that is resonating (or is that ‘vibrating’?) … more on that in time.