The Playbook for Tomorrow’s Leaders
Hey Reader,
Listen to the Alchemy of Politics Podcast Here
✑ It’s an odd thing I’ve noticed – people are everywhere but humanity’s no where to be found. We have a society where humans exist but people are not present.
Just go to any airport as many of you did for the holidays. It’s night of the walking dead. Everyone slow walks while zombified on a dopamine loop from their phones. Meanwhile our social media era has more isolated from each other than ever.
We’ve systematically carved out human connection out of human society.
That sense of isolation – not mere loneliness – is the greatest social need and biggest business opportunity today.
We eat but stare at our phones not our dinner companions. We have chat bots to help with our mobile banking but few human tellers. The mom and pop retail apocalypse is real and accelerated by the post COVID “doom loop.” Even online dating has become a consumeristic process masquerading as romance as opposed to a genuine expression of love. Now there are record levels of dissatisfaction with the process and generated a backlash against the dating app.
The conglomeration of these factors have left us alone, despairing and tribal. The atomization of the American citizen, now pressured by algorithms and influenced by the over-financialization of American culture, have created a modern life characterized by dehumanization, social fragmentation and obsessive fetishization of productivity.
The only corrective is a systemic effort towards rebuilding our social infrastructure, a Manhattan Project for humanity, aka the Great Re-Humanization Project.
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam changed my life. One of the great texts in sociology, it brilliantly chronicled the collapse of civic engagement in America during the post War era.
Perhaps it affected me so deeply because I have always been an outsider.
Alas, it is no less relevant today and more people unfortunately feel the way that I do. Our society is producing dangerous levels of lonely young men, in particular. Putnam’s work has resurged in popularity in the wake of our recent election and the tribal politics that ensued. Although even Benjamin Franklin seemed to know that we either “Join or Die.“
3 Types of Social Capital Putnam Identified. We need more linking and bridging capital in our society, which has emphasized “in group” status excessively.
His central thesis- that we need a concerted public policy program to rebuild lost social capital – has deep relevance. He outlined a series of proposals, including urbanization based on shared spaces (eg parks), civics education for students and family oriented workplaces.
His arguments need to be updated for the era of social media and the app economy, the rise of AI, and the greater power of the private sector:
- If done well, technology can help foster greater human connections from the use of Minted and Shutterfly to send creative holiday cards, to NextDoor and Citizen for local news and safety, and StoryCorp for online oral history projects.
Want to learn more about social connection in today’s age? Listen to my podcast episode on human fellowship with Pete Bombaci
In medicine, AI and technology may help re-foster doctor-patient connection if Eric Topol is to be believed. In his book the Creative Destruction of Medicine and other writings, he feels that AI, genetics and digital health can provide a more nuanced view of an individual patients health. Technology, in particular, can de-load some of the manual and laborious parts of doctoring to help foster more empathy.
He argues:
“The term ‘health care’ is off base,” Dr. Topol said. “We don’t really have care. It’s rare to have doctors providing true care even though they want to, because they’re squeezed to the hilt.”
I hope his vision comes true because ironically this passage cites why it may not: health systems will offset any increase in efficiency with more patients since volume is the only metric they truly value. AI may not be the administrative cureall doct
It’s why we need big data, technology and AI to help us connect with and serve patients and less so to be efficient with administrative tasks, as is the current use case (eg scribes). Take, for example, this compelling paper showing the use of algorithms to identify patients suffering from domestic abuse months before human providers could, largely because of the fragmented nature of episodic care delivery.
One corollary to the virtualization of daily life is the niche resurgence of the analog. Running clubs are exploding in popularity. Chess and other board games are becoming the new form of socialization (“Offline Joy”) and even dating in the Gen Z crowd. We all know about how hot pickleball has become. In an interesting twist, Barnes and Noble is making a strong comeback and becoming hero to the indie book publishers that once despised it. Flip phones and Vinyl LP’s are trendy again for their retro-appeal and are harbingers of an analog renaissance in culture.
The message is clear: people want connection. Community is a core business proposition as much as it is a social need. Now that we have outsourced communion to private companies and away from the public, non-profits and the government (or it was forcibly re-distributed?), it is incumbent on businesses to fill that need. Those that do will not have money as a constraint.
What does this mean for you and your business? There are a few implications:
- People leave bosses not jobs. A job that isn’t satisfactory can often be re-framed to help an employee thrive. A toxic or uninspired leader? Not so much. If you have high churn in your place of business, it’s not the benefits package that’s driving people out.
- Before companies can sell to clients you must sell to your employees – namely the mission on the organization. You need missionaries not just workers. Without it, expect problems at work because people will take the path of least resistance. This is an example of the principle-agent problem.
- Creating a community amongst your customers has to be an explicit business priority. Just as much as every company has to have a virtual footprint, every company is in the peoplehood industry. In this regard, there are no pure B2B companies; all are B2C in some capacity but the C stands for community.
There’s an old proverb that is apropos: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
But that maxim only applies if everyone is on the same team. No one goes far with strangers or their enemies, after all. Alas, that is the state of affairs as of late.
So the Great Re-Humanization Project is about just this: from alienation to integration. We have to convene together before we can make meaningful progress on the great challenges that face us all. In this sense, communal dissolution is the foundational challenge that underlies all others. Without it we get the 4 alienations that Marx identified over a 100 years ago : alienation from self; alienation from others; alienation from work; alienation from nature.
We need to create the art of living in the age of machines as opposed to the mass dissociation we have now.
The first principle is to remember that technology is a tool to help us not the other way around.
The next? Get a dog.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
