Big Data. Automation. Data Mining. Yuck!
Have you been to any conference on the future of work or leadership recently? Then you know how freely some terms are tossed around just to impress – big data is one of them. Nobody seems to know what to do with it or how best to use it but that does not seem to stop a bunch of people from trying to sound important and self-assured when they toss the idea around.
I was at an HR event recently where the response from the head of HR to every questions from the crowd was – Hackathon & digital. Something told me that if we scratched a little below the surface she would not be able to say much more. We are at serious risk of getting carried away with the over-quantification of the workplace. Technology and analytics for the sake of tech and analytics is a problem. Keep looking at numbers of the high level of disengagement in the workplace ,and the answer to that does not lie in more technology. The answer to that lies in connecting back to what makes us human.
In today’s podcast I talk to Tim Leberecht who is a TEDx speaker and the author of the Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and create something greater than yourself. He blogs for Harvard Business Review and several prominent business publications like Fast Company and more.
We talk about:
- The risk of digital Taylorism at work.
- What are the competencies of leaders who can bring enchantment back into the workplace?
- What do Etsy, Amazon, and Virgin know about enchantment that you need to adapt
- Can business imperatives and enchantment co-exist?
- The shift needed in seeing organizations as a machine vs. organizations as a garden metaphor.