Maddie Grant - Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World

Humanize offers practical content and insightful thinking that will help businesses make the deep changes needed to thrive in todays 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 isnt easy. But armed with this book, youve 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 wont 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 Customersand Ignite Your 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

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, theyll 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. Its 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 Gladwells 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 startwith 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

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 cant 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

How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World

Jamie Notter
Maddie Grant

800 East 96th Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46240 USA

Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World

Copyright 2012 by Que Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-4112-7
ISBN-10: 0-7897-4112-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file.

Printed in the United States of America

Second Printing: December 2011

Editor-in-Chief
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