assess the prospective customer’s cues and anticipating their internal narrative

Because his cafe is at the end of the alleyway he can watch people approaching. He sees them stopping to look at how busy a cafe is or to glance at the menu only to move on in search of a better option.

Ira knows that once they hit his place they are running out of choices and also beginning to question their original decision to wait or walk on. As each group approaches he watches their cues, makes an assessment, then acts. Families fearful of not finding room are asked if they’d like a table for four, and shown that there is more room inside. Couples are asked if they’d like to see the breakfast menu. Lone tourists wheeling suitcases on the way to the station are offered takeaways.

At every turn, Ira comes across as empathetic, in contrast to the usual way sales conversations are handled on the street in a ‘can I have a few moments of your time?’ fashion because he is constantly assessing the prospective customer’s cues and anticipating their internal narrative.

If we want to become better marketers and brand storytellers we need to pay attention to what people want but quite possibly haven’t yet articulated. When we do our actions are seen as good service and not an inconvenient interruption.

Some intrepid scientists are trying to bridge that gap by exploiting the hive mind—teaming some of the smartest computation researchers in the world. “Some supercomputers today are approaching the processing speed of the human brain although they require about a million times more energy than our 20-watt brains,” says doctor of Cognitive Science and Mathematical Psychology and director of the Human Computation Institute (HCI) Pietro Michelucci. HCI is a one-year-old, Fairfax, Virginia-based, nonprofit startup comprised of a worldwide network of human computation researchers who are “dedicated to the betterment of society through novel methods leveraging the complementary strengths of networked humans and machines.”

“Computer processing speed alone is not efficient enough to create intelligence,” Michelucci adds. “It is really about the software, and the software that runs in the human brain is the culmination of millions of years of evolution optimizing the most complex information processor in the known universe. We still do not know how to replicate this complexity in machines, so we turn to things like human abstract thinking, creativity, and knowledge about how the world works.”

Michelucci, with Cornell professor of Natural Resources and director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Janis L. Dickenson, recently co-authored an article published in this month’s Science magazine headlined “The power of crowds: Combining humans and machines can help tackle increasingly hard problems.” The article is a perspective on how human computation, crowdsourcing, and so-called “Citizen Science” intersect with computing power to create new opportunities for problem-solving at unprecedented scales.

One of the problems Michelucci’s HCI has started to address is Alzheimer’s disease, through an initiative called WeCureALZ. Dickenson points to an interesting human computation oriented initiative at Cornell called YardMap that has set out, she says, “to learn a tremendous amount about how to improve the way we manage living and working landscapes, not only for species conservation, but for human health as well.”

Since late computer scientist John McCarthy came up with the term artificial intelligence back in 1955, there’s been plenty of scientific research and experimentation around achieving that goal. But we’re still a long way off from fully reproducing the complexities of the human mind, despite all the exciting AI-related experiments we are witnessing at Google (autonomous cars), Facebook (facial recognition), Microsoft (language translation) and Amazon (voice recognition).

 

When a company demonstrates an authentic purpose, consumers feel a connection to the products and company. They will choose the authentically purposeful company’s products, even if it’s not the cheapest offering.

An organization without purpose manages people and resources, while an organization with purpose mobilizes people and resources. Purpose is a key ingredient for a strong, sustainable, scalable organizational culture. It’s an unseen-yet-ever-present element that drives an organization. It can be a strategic starting point, a product differentiator, and an organic attractor of users and customers.

As a company, it’s important to think about why you are in the business you’re in. What drives you? If your business succeeds, what would your ideal world look like? When a company demonstrates an authentic purpose, consumers feel a connection to the products and company. They will choose the authentically purposeful company’s products, even if it’s not the cheapest offering.
Starting and surviving in today’s economy is hard, but the companies that figure it out have something in common: the pursuit of purpose, alongside the pursuit of profit. A purpose mobilizes people in a way that pursuing profits alone never will. For a company to thrive, it needs to infuse its purpose in all that it does.

Acumen, the non-profit investment fund, has designed a recruitment process that enables it to identify potential employees who share the organization’s purpose. The organization doesn’t simply ask interested candidates to submit a résumé and cover letter; Acumen also asks candidates for responses to a series of short-essay questions that relate to the position. For instance, “How would you describe your interest in ‘impact investing’ (which is what Acumen does) versus regular private equity or venture capital investing?” Anyone who doesn’t have a good answer for that probably would do better elsewhere.

Economic value and social value are not mutually exclusive. Today’s sophisticated business leader recognizes the concept of shared value: creating economic value while addressing social needs and challenges. As Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote inHarvard Business Review in 2011: “Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.”

Yanik Silver is coming out with a great book on this subject. I’ve only seen an early release, but it’s a juicy bit of inspirational strategy for building a company that you Love and improving the world at the same time.
Check it out:  Evolved Enterprise

Image by Amber Rael | flickr.com