Leading with Noble Purpose

Chapter 5Make Your Customers Human

Business is the fundamental endeavor of human life, it is the primary place and context in which we enact our humanity.

—Steve Overman, The Conscious Economy

As the world grows bigger and companies get larger, there are more layers between the people who work in an organization and the market. The very fact that we use the phrase “the market” to describe customers is emblematic of the problem. The people whose lives a company is serving become abstracted, generalized, and fragmented. They become aggregated transactions, instead of individual human beings.

For example, look at health care. Cost-cutting measures tend to dominate the conversation, and the push for efficiency is relentless. Patients are discussed as clinical outcomes. It's ironic that in one of the most intimate industries, the connection to individual human beings is often lost.

This happens in all industries. Yet the further removed people are from customers, the more likely they are to see them as objects rather than humans. As a leader, your job is to humanize the customers for everyone in the organization.

Bringing Patients to Life

Explorys, the health care intelligence cloud company you met in Chapter 1, was founded in 2009 as an innovation spinoff from Cleveland Clinic. Originally inspired by physicians and informatics leaders, Explorys combines healthcare computing platform solutions for clinical integration, at-risk population management, cost of care measurement, and ...