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Moderators:
Mark Esposito, PhD Esposito Professor, Hult Int’l Business School & Director Futures Impact Lab
Matt Gitsham Professor, Hult Int’l Business School & Director, Sustainability Lab
Panelists:
Johan S Roos Roos Chief Academic Officer & Professor, Hult Int’l Business School
Matt Sigelman President, Burning Glass Institute, Chairman of Lightcast
Michele Zanini Co-founder, Management Lab
Mary Gentile Creator/Director, Giving Voice to Value (virtual)
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez Visiting Professor, Duke CE, Instituto de Empresa, Solvay, Vlerick, Ecole de Ponts Former Global Chair of PMI, Founder of Brightline Initiative
Engagement at work is declining dramatically, even if people earn more money and can work from home. What our economy needs is more human-centric systems– ”a more holistic approach to economic activity that puts the human in the center,” as Johan Roos put it.
Roos defined the workshop as about prioritizing social well-being – that is, “seeing it from a bigger perspective: of course there’s economic performance, but also society performance and an individual’s well-being.” He began by asking how to ensure that individuals can express their personal values in the workplace. From there a compelling workshop, with a number of different systems emerging that put the human at the center.
Mary Gentile, specialist in “giving voice to value” and value-driven leadership development, focused on the individual role of human-centered economy – ”not because those other things aren’t important, but because those other things don’t happen without individual actions. People don’t become motivated to make the kinds of changes and to work toward the kind of economy that we’re talking about, unless they can find ways to make their own work meaningful, unless they can find ways to find satisfaction and strength in the process of their own work.”
Values are often seen as dictated from the top, Gentile said, but this can be an excuse: “All change does come ultimately from the individual, even systemic change.” Systemic change involves working within the system, she added. Individuals face challenges at all levels. CEOs juggle pressures, juniors lack authority, and mid-levels feel squeezed.
Yet despite the constraints, individuals at every level find ways to act on their values by framing approaches differently and using different levers. To create meaningful workplaces and a human-centered economy, “we need to be able to build that capacity of individuals, wherever they are in the organization, to find ways to act.” If we can bring our whole selves to the workplace, Mary noted, we can make our work more meaningful and thus promote a more human economy.
Michele Zanini strikingly argued that many people feel their opinions don’t matter, since their work doesn’t prioritize originality. Managers often disregard the value of involving people in finding innovative solutions, reflecting a view of individuals as commodities. This approach not only harms productivity but is also morally questionable.
For Zanini, after spending three decades on optimizing operating models, IT systems and supply chains, and the past 15 years on digital transformation, management should devote the crucial next two decades to humanizing its approaches for effective market engagement. “To create organizations that are really focused on maximizing human contributions, for the sake of impact. Efficiency is important, but it’s not the only game, it’s not the only driver, and I would argue it’s probably less and less the determining factor in success”, he said.
In the realm of organizational dynamics, culture change must be more than mere slogans or superficial values, he emphasized. To hold genuine significance, they must be intricately woven into the fabric of the company’s reality – otherwise they are nothing but “cheap talk”.
As he described it, the challenge lies in the meticulous task of embedding these values authentically. To truly demonstrate commitment to a specific set of values, they must be reinforced through decision-making processes, determining whose voices are acknowledged, and judiciously allocating resource – a formidable undertaking that demands dedicated effort and strategic planning.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez drew attention to a crucial shift in the primary focus for organizational leaders towards maximizing the value of employees, along with the disruptive advent of the “project economy”. Contrasting with the traditional operational and efficiency-driven model that has dominated for decades, the project economy, according to Nieto-Rodriguez, marks a departure from hierarchical and siloed structures, presenting a new paradigm for organizational culture, competency development, time allocation, and performance evaluation.
“What is really disrupting the future of work is that we’re moving from a world where jobs were fixed and you would be doing the same thing for three or four years, to one where you might have a job for six months and then you move to the next one and then the next one”, he said. Through a project-based economy we can drive companies towards a more human-centric approach. “If we learn that projects can bring extra purpose and meaning to our work, and be more clear on what the priorities are, what the real incentives are for people to join projects, that will push companies to be much more human-centric.”
Matt Sigelmann argued that current systems are not designed to invest in people’s skills – ”We have an education system that focuses on training people to be the factors of production and that focuses on once-and-done models.”
In today’s dynamic economy, skills are evolving at pace. This underlines the need to reorientate perspectives not just towards the onboarding of students into the workforce but also towards developing mechanisms supporting continuous skill acquisition for working professionals. Much of this needs to happen in the workplace. “This can only happen when companies recognize that their biggest factor of production is, well, human”, Sigelmann pointed out. “Just as they need a supply chain for every other factor of production, they need a supply chain for human talent. And specifically for investing in human talent and skills. That means, first of all, knowing the talent they have inside their organizations.”
Although each speaker in this insightful workshop took a different approach to human-centric systems, they all agreed on one thing: The imperative is for a paradigm shift, challenging the traditional emphasis on productivity and compelling organizations to prioritize ongoing skill development, thereby positioning human talent as the cornerstone for a future of work that is both impactful and humane.
About the author:
Line Lorenzen studied online journalism, has been working as a freelance editor for three years and as a social media manager for five years. She has been working closely with the Drucker Forum since 2021.