Humanize

01/30/2012 · No Responses

A practical guide for realizing the true potential of social media—not for marketing, but for leadership.

Knowing the tools of social media is a must for successful marketing these days, but the real promise of social media is the way it can teach us a whole new way of doing business. Humanize takes the principles underlying social media’s growth and applies them to the way we lead and manage our organizations. Leading organizational consultants Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant help you change your organization, from the culture down to individual behavior, in ways that make it more human—and more effective. Drawing on their extensive experience, Notter and Grant help you make management innovation real and doable. Regardless of your title or position, this book can help you:

Build a more trustworthy, open, generative, and courageous organization by embracing social and human principles.
Change organizations from the inside out.
Address critical elements of organizational behavior, process, and culture.
Move beyond the social media buzzwords like transparent, decentralized, and open—and actually make them happen.
Promote forms of “generative” success that go beyond profit and loss.
Learn how to get started–you, personally, today, right now!

Review

“Humanize offers practical content and insightful thinking that will help businesses make the deep changes needed to thrive in today’s social world. “
—Mike Smith, author of Matchpoint and President of Forbes.com

“Companies need to be social, and worry less about doing social media. In this timely and important book, Grant and Notter provide a detailed model for making the humanization leap. Social media success is about people, not logos, and embedding that attitude in your company isn’t easy. But armed with this book, you’ve got a fighting chance.”
–Jay Baer, co-author of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social

“I like how-to.Which is why I like this book immensely. It gets beyond theory (which is interesting) to give you something you can actually act on (which is far more useful)! Think roadmap, not research. In other words, you won’t finish reading this book and go, ‘Now what…?’”
—Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, and co-author of Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks,Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business

“The days of controlling your message are dead. Born is the human organization where people buy from people, not companies. This is not another social media book. Notter and Grant dispel the notion that your leadership and your culture can continue to be self-centered and two-dimensional.With additional reading recommendations and worksheets, they’ll have you well on your way to creating a sustainable shift inside and outside of your organization.”
—Gini Dietrich, CEO, Arment Dietrich and founder, Spin Sucks Pro

“Our organizations have been modeled after mechanistic machines,where the human being is often treated as a cog.We know better.We know humans matter. It’s time for a change. And this book illustrates how to be change agents as leaders, and for our organizations.”
—Nilofer Merchant, author of The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy

“In 2002,Malcolm Gladwell released The Tipping Point, and changed the way we looked at influence. In 2008, Seth Godin released Tribes, and showed us how small groups of people could take Gladwell’s influence model and become leaders. Now, in 2011, Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter take these seminal books to their natural evolution. Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World shows us how leadership and influence of your internal and external customer starts as all businesses start–with its people. This book strips away the myth of strong-arm leadership and offers solid, actionable paths that actually work. This is your compass for the direction your business needs to travel if you want to stay alive.”
–Danny Brown, CEO of Bonsai Interactive Marketing, award-winning marketer and blogger at dannybrown.me, and author of The Parables of Business

“Humanize is a deep dive on the impact of social media on leadership and the challenges of harnessing the power of engaged people.Wherever you are in the organization, this book helps you figure out what you need to change and dares you to make it happen. Stimulating and well done!”
—Mark Sanborn, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Fred Factor

“This is a systems leadership book hidden inside a social media book.We work with clients who encounter major challenges when we start helping them incorporate social media into their business practices, but those challenges are not solved with solely social media tactics and those hurdles are not cleared without digging deep inside the organization. By helping our clients figure out how to make their organizations more human, we get them on the path to success more rapidly. This book is an amazing first step and is a great tool for businesses as they venture into the social space. I can’t wait to share it with our clients!”
–Shelly Kramer, CEO, V3 Integrated Marketing

“This book defines the new human quotient within organizations around the world. Large and small business alike should heed the call being screamed from the rooftops and shouted down the hallways.Maddie and Jamie make me want to be more human.”
—Kyle Lacy, author of Branding Yourself and Twitter Marketing for Dummies

“Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant have produced a real rarity among management books: truly insightful thinking that is both brilliantly fresh and actionably disciplined. First, they comprehensively reframe the problem of leadership in organizations. Next, they draw out and organize the resulting insights into a system that hangs together of its own accord. Finally, they explain to any manager at any level what this means in a practical sense, and how to profitably adapt and act on it.”
–Jim Stroup, DBA, author and management consultant

“Social media is not only changing how we communicate with key constituencies but it is challenging the very structure of our organizations. Historically, organizations have been structured to optimize efficiency for themselves, but not for their customers and markets. The open dialog organizations are now having with their markets is exposing how inefficiently those organizations work in the context of their larger ecosystems. Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter take a crack at pulling apart this puzzle and providing guidance in how to make concepts like trust and authenticity apply not only to people but to the organizations with which they interact.”
—Rachel Happe, Co-Founder & Principal, The Community Roundtable