What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build The Perfect team –  NYT
[click on the link above to read more]

Why is business so hard? Simply put, we think it is due to a lack of humanity. Our obsession with data is conflated with a belief that emotion in business is bad: Data and emotion are incompatible, so we have a bias against connecting emotion to business and we work in sterile workplaces that do not value our humanity.

But what happens, when the data support the paradox that it is our emotional connections that create better, more efficient, smarter work? That is exactly what Google discovered.

There is a coming tsunami of change around the recognition that the future of work is about culture, and the connections that we facilitate between people in our businesses.

When we start off our Creative Sessions with clients (our more effective form of focus groups), we often say that we want to have a real conversation, the kind of conversation that you might have at a bar after 3 or 4 beers. Why? Because, we try to encourage an environment of real, open, honest communication. The kind of communication that is not considered s.o.p. at work.

What Google discovered is what many people intuitively know about anything that involves people. We’re human at work and at home. We want to work with people who are kind, and make us feel good about ourselves. We want to, as Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace says, “Be part of a winning team on an inspiring mission”. It is that simple.

Going as far back as 1999, our friend Tony Hsieh over at Zappos, really pushed this hard. He understood through observation that it is social capital that drives organizational effectiveness. He saw that people who had richer emotional connections, were more effective. So, he co-created a culture that was designed to be a rich, real life, tapestry of social and emotional interactions. It’s not the weirdness of Zappos that makes it so powerful  (and scary to other companies) but how they trigger the connections between people.

Tony has been kind enough to offer his insights on some of our illustrations and today is kicking off what will be occasional commentary in our daily email.

Thanks Tony 🙂

A note from Tony on what we wrote above: