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 today’s social world.”—Mike Smith, author of Matchpoint and President of Forbes.com

Most of us are operating under outdated management practices, invented in an industrial era, that have become increasingly incompatible with today’s complex, social world. This leaves our organizations struggling to manage the constant disruption we face from our competitors (and sometimes even our customers or internal business units). We can’t stay ahead of the curve, and we don’t have the capacity internally to be the ones who are doing the disrupting.

Humanize offers a solution. In this book, Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant take the principles underlying social media’s growth and apply them to the way we lead and manage our organizations. By innovating management—making it more human and less mechanical—you can become more agile and build real engagement in your workforce, which builds your capacity for managing disruption.

Viewing this prezi takes about five minutes and it covers most of the core ideas in the book.

Jamie and Maddie have been collaborating for a few years on the intersection of social media and leadership. Maddie is a well-known blogger and partner in a successful social media consulting firm working with associations and nonprofits, SocialFish, and Jamie has been consulting to organizations on issues of leadership, conflict, and strategy for ten years. In 2009 they started to work together on the idea of the “social organization,” acknowledging that social media wasn’t just changing marketing and communications. It was challenging some of the tried and true principles of organizational leadership, structure, process, and behavior. In 2011 their collaboration came together in this book.

Praise for Humanize:

“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

“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

“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

“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

Need to reach us?  Contact Maddie Grant, or contact Jamie Notter. For speaking inquiries, email our agent, Marsha Cassel. For media inquiries or review copies of the book contact Lisa Jacobson-Brown of Que Publishing.