Nothing eases suffering like the human touch.

—Bobby Fischer

As a society, we are at a momentous crossroads. The past 30 years have seen tremendous growth in the areas of technology, data, and capital, although this growth hasn’t always been smooth. It’s the fundamental struggle for economic growth and social stability.

This same struggle has played out throughout history, but what is different about today is that our old controls, structures, processes, and understanding are failing us in the face of unprecedented change. Before, change happened slowly over time, giving people and businesses a chance to change and adapt to what was coming. Now, we face rapid-fire changes in technology, societal norms, and government policies, and we must adapt to the changing environments in the blink of an eye. There is nowhere to hide. Technology, data, and forces beyond our control have conspired to challenge us professionally, politically, socially, and emotionally.

I have arrived at a point in my career at which I believe I have a pretty good idea of where data, technology, and next-generation _____________ (fill in the blank) are going, at least superficially. But I also realize that this is not the whole picture; there is something more beneath the surface that is absolutely critical to understand if we are to survive, adapt, and thrive in this new world. Exactly how I got to this realization is an interesting question, because the path I took in my own career was a counterintuitive one.

When I finished college 25 years ago with a master’s degree in history, I hadn’t a clue what I would do with it. If I look back to the way the world was then versus the way it is today, it is virtually unrecognizable—particularly from a technology perspective. The iPhone was still a decade away from being introduced, Google didn’t yet exist, and General Motors was about to pull the plug on its pioneering EV1 electric car. The dot-com bubble was quickly inflating, and investors were bullish on most any company that had a presence on the web—whether or not it could actually turn a profit. Remember Webvan and Pets.com?

When I was in high school, I dabbled with computers and did a little programming—nothing out of the ordinary. My original plan was to major in architectural history in college, but I eventually settled on modern European history, which covers the period starting in the late seventh century and runs up to the coming of war in the early 1930s.

Perfect choice for someone who is now responsible for helping develop Accenture’s digital offerings in social media and emerging channels, right?

Okay—please bear with me for a moment.

Despite my choice of a major, my college experience shaped my thoughts about technology and business for the rest of my life. I was offered the chance to run the business club at Oxford, which was called the Industrial Society. Fearing unemployment, it was a chance I gratefully jumped at. That’s where I was first introduced to business and to companies—everything from consulting to engineering to consumer goods.

The raison d’être of the Industrial Society was to help students make connections with potential employers. And since there were no business-related degree programs at Oxford at the time—as you might imagine, the school was heavy on English literature, languages, classics, politics, philosophy, economics, and the like. The Industrial Society was popular with students who were thinking of starting a career in business after graduation.

I believe we were one of the first student clubs at Oxford University that had a web page, and chances are, we were probably one of the first student organizations anywhere that had its own web page. Still, I am not sure that the importance of that moment really dawned on me at the time. I had no idea how quickly events would over overtake the world and how in only a few short years a web page might spawn a whole new economy.

As I wrapped up my degree in modern European history, the topic of what I should do with the rest of my life was starting to gain some urgency. My parents were especially concerned, particularly when I said I was giving serious consideration to a career as an academic in architectural history.

At the same time, I was organizing yet another recruiting event at Oxford for a consultancy, this time on behalf of McKinsey. I was always organizing these kinds of events, but for some reason I never went to them as a guest. This time, however, the McKinsey recruiter asked me, “You’ve been organizing all these recruiting events—why don’t you come and I will introduce you to a few folks?”

Why didn’t I go? Good question.

So, I decided to go to the McKinsey event I had organized, and I ended up applying for a job with the firm. I didn’t know anything about management consulting, and I really didn’t think my application was going to go anywhere given my complete and utter lack of business, economic, or technology credentials.

One thing led to another, however, and I was scheduled for a round of interviews where seemingly every question was a case study about how many pennies there are in the United States or how to boost the circulation of newspapers in Norway. There was only one opening in my cohort, and I was up against a high number of very qualified candidates—some already working as analysts, plus a smattering of Rhodes and Fulbright Scholars. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance.

The day of the final interview, I stood up, thanked the interviewer, and said my goodbyes to the recruiter, confident that I would not receive an offer. I remember being subdued when my parents asked me how it went. We were about to go out to dinner to commiserate when the phone rang. The recruiter on the other end said nothing about how I did in the interviews but asked me if I would be attending the “offer dinner” in London. I asked what dinner she was referring to, to which she replied, “Oh my goodness, let me have someone call you right back!” She then hung up.

Two minutes later (which seemed an eternity), another recruiter called and let me know they were making me an offer. My head was buzzing, so I missed everything else she said after that. I just remember saying yes.

Later, when I attended the offer dinner, I met up with one of my interviewers. I asked why they had made me an offer (still sounding a bit incredulous in my mind—clearly, they must have made a mistake?). Luckily, the question seemed to come off as simply inquisitive. He told me that everyone liked how my mind worked, that having a historian’s perspective would be an advantage when working with clients that often had to deal with short-term issues but sometimes wanted a perspective on the long game.

I really enjoyed working at McKinsey, but in 1998—after just a few years there—some of my friends and I decided to start up our own company. Our vision was to develop web-based financial planning applications for retail financial services institutions, but our unique twist was to make these tools much more accessible to the end user—ordinary customers.

We were on to something. A number of our clients were trying to reach burgeoning investors and bank customers who didn’t know nor care what a Monte Carlo simulation was but did want to know if they should buy life insurance or an annuity. After some fraught sales cycles, we started to sign up fee-paying clients—retail banks and credit unions. All signals indicated that we were on the right path (making financial services accessible and more self-serve for consumers). The financial model made sense: licensing plus lead generation to major financial instructions. What could go wrong?

Then the dot-com bubble burst and funding dried up. That could have been the end but it turned out to be a transformational experience nonetheless. I could have gone back to school for a business degree, but the years I spent building a start-up were invaluable. I took a significantly deeper dive into technology, I learned how to put a business plan together, how to make pitches to angel investors and venture capital and private equity firms, and I figured out how to secure partnerships with major companies and content providers. Above all, the experience let me put into practice and validate lessons learned about the importance of treating employees, vendors, clients, and customers as “people.” Little did I know how important that lesson would become.

It was at that point that I got the technology and innovation bug—bad.

We sold the company in 2001, and I went back to consulting at another firm where my job was to apply some of the lessons I learned and drive profitable growth strategies for Fortune 500 clients. This is also where I got an appreciation for understanding the nature of demand. After a few years, I accepted an offer to become a senior vice president at an online data company, where I led the firm’s retail, technology, and travel digital analytics business. By this time, I had developed a very technical bent. It had quickly become a 24/7 kind of thing for me.

A few years into my tenure, I was working on a client project focused on building a new loyalty program, when one day the lead client asked me, “Since you architected this community program for us, how would you like to come on board full time and run it?” The company was Sears, and at the time it was still in the midst of a hoped-for turnaround. It was also still a really big deal—one of the largest retailers on the planet. I wasn’t sure what it was I would be doing, but it seemed like I could build something from scratch and was at the intersection of my two passions: technology and people. I jumped at the offer.

I became a vice president within their digital group and head of Social Media and Community. Working directly with customers and hearing their stories first hand was eye opening and was the first time I really started thinking about the importance of some basic self-evident truths, such as, if you want to build loyalty and long-lasting relationships, you need to build trust. And no matter what channel or technology your customers use, trust is predicated on a fundamental principle: all customers are people who want to feel they matter. This one idea has colored the rest of my career.

When, a few years later, I built the social media program at Bloomberg, I tried to apply the same vision. Instead of using new technologies and channels to broadcast and talk to customers, we used them to understand their needs, interests, and concerns in real time. One of the things that attracted me to Bloomberg was its culture, particularly the seeming flatness of organization. Since there were no structural barriers or walls in any of the offices, there was no real obstacle to meeting, talking, sharing ideas with people—from analysts, to the talent, to the CEO and chairman.

I remember one of the best pieces of advice I ever received, which made me think about the importance of focusing on people first. My first week at Bloomberg, I felt a bit lost. I had passion for the job before me, I had plan, and I had support, but I was struggling with where to begin. Should I jump in and just start organizing meetings with all the senior execs to extoll the virtues of social media—explaining how it could transform their business—or should I pick off a few small projects and demonstrate the power of modern channels out of the gate? I wanted to move fast and demonstrate value.

Luckily, I “bumped” into Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer as I walked past his desk one day. He immediately said a hello and asked me how I was settling in. I told him about my plan and how quickly I wanted to move. Peter struck me as very old school, partly because his career forced him to build deep relationships, but mostly because I think he is a people person—kind and caring. He listened impassively, and when I was done explaining how I planned to conquer the world, he said, “Before you do all that, just take whatever time you need to sit down with people and really get to know them, understand what motivates them. Don’t even talk about what you want to do, ask questions and find out what they are looking to do.”

So simple, but often something we all have trouble doing whether talking with friends, colleagues, customers, or clients. I was told when I first started as a consultant that I needed to speak up more, that clients paid us for our thoughts and counsel. In fact, to hammer home the point, one partner said, “If a consultant is quiet, it’s not because they are listening, they are just reloading.” But Peter’s advice stuck with me, and it must have worked. About two years into my tenure at Bloomberg, while Peter was speaking with the head of sales about the impact of social media on the business, the head of sales paused and told the room that all his salespeople were now using social to connect, interact with, and generate leads from their customers. The listening paid off.

In 2014, my wife and were expecting our second child, and a condition of moving to New York was that we would eventually move back to Chicago to be closer to our families. At about that time, a former colleague approached me and asked if I might come back to consulting and doing for other clients what I was doing for Bloomberg. After some fraught soul searching, I accepted and took a role with Accenture Song. This is where I finally got a chance to push the envelope in terms of using technology, data, and some of the softer people skills to build better and more human and purpose-driven experiences. I also got to use my bent for history more than ever.

With each new job, I got deeper into tech and digital, but always with an eye to understanding how to apply those innovations to understanding people better. Looking back, I can see how my original college interest in history served me well throughout my career. It gave me a sense of how to be inquisitive and push on things. Above all, history’s focus on people—their stories, motivations, biases, fears, aspirations, and journeys—stood me in good stead as I navigated the world of business.

And in my case, it’s looking at the story arc of technology over the past couple of hundred years, looking through a historian’s lens on digital. Each of the major technology revolutions we humans have sparked has been a major inflection point in our history—moving us ever forward to places we never imagined possible.

The Agricultural Revolution turned us from hunters and gatherers into builders of cities and complex societies. The Industrial Revolution drew people from farms to factories as new technologies such as steam engines, the telegraph, the Bessemer steelmaking process, and more changed the world forever. The Medical Revolution extended the expected lifetime of humans—in the United States from an average of about 47 years for those born in 1900 to an average of about 77 years for those born in 2000.¹

The Electronic Revolution led to ever more capable—yet smaller and less expensive—electronic devices based on transistors, which replaced bulky and fragile glass vacuum tubes, and other innovations. The Digital Revolution has brought us to where we are today—holding in our hand compact digital devices that are faster and far more capable than the old IBM mainframes from decades ago that filled a room. And the AI Revolution, where digital devices are able to think like humans, is taking us to where we’ll go tomorrow.

The common thread through all these revolutions has been the initial struggles and ultimate triumph of human factor, but each has taken less time than its predecessor. The most recent one—the AI Revolution, which is still emerging—similarly promises to make our lives better while it threatens to de-humanize society. It will either turn out to be a triumphant celebration of humanity’s ingenuity and creativity, or an indictment of our collective hubris and folly. Only time will tell.

As a historian, you learn to be critical and not necessarily accept at face value what people tell you. You always have to understand where they’re coming from. That empathy piece is critically important—both when I was studying history in school, and when I map out Accenture’s digital offerings today. Ultimately, everything we do is meant to make people feel good—to feel confident, satisfied, and even happy to interact with the digital programs we design for our clients across every industry, B2C and B2B. It’s as much about understanding human nature as it is about understanding what the needs and desires of customers are.

Since time immemorial, marketers have wrestled with the fact that as they try to figure out where the road is going to take them—where the market is going, where customers are going—they’ve had to look through the rearview mirror and can only see where they’ve already been with any degree of accuracy. The correct answer can only be found at the intersection of a lot of different pieces, and ultimately, that’s why I wrote this book.

I think a lot of people want to have tactical answers to immediate problems. That’s not really what this book is about. I wrote this book with the hope that it will get you to reconsider your perspectives when it comes to digital, invigorate what you do day to day, and maybe pull you out of the status quo that you’ve been comfortable in for so long. I also provide you with the tools you need to break through the walls that we’ve put up—sometimes internal, sometimes external—between us and our customers. And if you do that, you will open up an entirely new range of opportunities and possibilities.

Finally, I’m hoping that this book will influence how most effectively to use this thing we call digital—the technologies we have already created, as well as the ones we have yet to create—and use them in the aid of humanity. Lofty goals, I know, but it’s time for us to stop looking at the rearview mirror to chart our course forward, and to start looking through our windshield instead.

I keep an eye on start-ups as much as I do the companies I work with. I think one of the greatest things about start-ups is that necessity is truly the mother of invention. If you don’t have tons of resources to pay for the marketing data and analysis you need, you have to create them the best you can. And that forces you to think about what you can do—how you can push the envelope with what you have.

A few start-ups I’ve been watching—and personally using—include Decorist, Havenly, and Modsy. They are relatively small start-ups that ask the question: How can we take the whole process of home interior design and make it more egalitarian and use technology and digital to build a collaborative relationship with customers? In other words, how can we humanize an experience that is very much an online one and make customers love it?

With these services, you don’t pay thousands of dollars for one-to-one interior design service, as you would if you hired your own architect or dedicated designer. Instead, for a relatively small sum of money (a multiroom package currently runs into a few hundred dollars), you can get almost unlimited design advice. They are betting that you’re going to like their design recommendations so much that you will buy furniture and other items from their site, and they take their margin off those purchases.

Working with these start-ups is typically a simple step-by-step process that mirrors the kind of human interactions you would have with a real-life architect or designer. First, you can take photos of the room you want to redecorate and then you upload the photos to their design site. They then take your photos, virtually clear out the clutter, and create a to-scale 3D rendering of the room.

The next step is to fill out a style quiz that tells these services more about you—the kinds of questions an architect or designer would ask you in real life. Things such as your budget, your style preferences (for example, modern versus rustic), how open you are to new ideas, and so on. They take the results of this mini-psychographic Q and A and use them as the basis of the personalized design ideas they create just for you.

The final step begins when these design services create an interactive, 3D rendering of your room, with lots of design packages and options for you to consider. The designs are yours to keep, whether or not you purchase any of the furniture or décor items you’re offered.

While much of these experiences are digital, there is a human element involved—regardless of what package you buy, you are assigned an “expert” designer. This mash-up definitely works, combining the best of digital and human with great results. They also get to really know a customer on a deeper level because the customer feels comfortable sharing their real interests, preferences, and vision. They also share contextual information that exists nowhere else: their living space, their cherished possessions, their true motivations, things typically locked way in designers’ and architects’ heads when the project is done.

Of course, not every online platform based on digital leaves customers feeling so happy and satisfied. In fact, many end up frustrating customers—leaving them angry instead of happy, an outcome every company wants to avoid. The good news is that business leaders can do something about this.

At Accenture, we talk about the difference between customer experience (CX—optimizing customer touchpoints around products and services) and the business of experience (BX—solving for human needs around a purpose). Our research shows that, on average, BX leaders outperform CX-oriented companies in year-on-year profitability growth by 6.5x over one year, 6.4x over three years, 6.4x over five years, and 6.3x over seven years.² Long story short, linking customers to purpose makes a tremendous impact on the bottom line.

Marketers must think beyond simply getting somebody to buy something to also getting them to come back, while thinking about the issues along the line that need to be overcome to engineer the experience from an empathetic standpoint. Not losing the sale because they haven’t thought about the things that get in the way of someone saying yes. Companies that do this well will use technology smartly to humanize their storyline end to end. They’re the companies that are going to win.

This book is all about using technology in smart ways to create empathetic and human digital experiences. In Chapter 1, I tell the story of my childhood customer experience at Marshall Fields, the legendary Chicago department store where I first learned about the importance of the human touch in retail experiences.

In Chapter 2, I consider why we should bother to humanize digital, where digital gets it right, and where digital gets it wrong. I do a deep dive into what makes humans human, and why people want their digital buying experiences to mirror their in-person buying experiences.

In Chapter 3, I propose the idea of creating a new role for CEOs in organizations: the chief community officer. This person has remit over the entire organization—to be able to say, “Stop!” whenever customers are suffering because of a company’s products or services, or the way they are being delivered doesn’t meet the brand’s promise. This, I believe, is the starting point for changing the way all the different operational organizational elements work—sales, marketing, and so on.

In Chapter 4, I explain why really focusing on trust above all is the key to the next wave of growth. We’ll examine the original digital vision and how it diverged from its intent—undermining trust—the threat to our markets and capitalism itself, and the digital law of diminishing returns.

In Chapter 5, I explain that many of the answers to our questions can be found in our past. What obstacles have impeded our ability to build human empathy into digital systems? How should we frame the problem and solution? What are customers and citizens looking for and what are their concerns? In this chapter, I address these questions and more.

In Chapter 6, I introduce the six pillars of purpose-driven experience. How you get your purpose into an organization and how you get people to align with it is critically important for it to become something that’s real—more than just heartwarming words and photos splashed across your website. And this takes an effort that is both bottom-up and top-down. The six pillars provide a framework for accomplishing this effort.

In Chapter 7, I offer a practical guide for readers to humanize digital in their organizations. This guide includes integrating the human dimension into the entire path (e.g., sales reps, distributors, channel partners, etc.); structuring the enterprise for digital trust; ensuring security, compliance, and governance; protecting your brand reputation; managing communications and PR, and much more.

In Chapter 8, I show how to fully realize the vision for digital trust. I consider what we need to put in place and what we need our leaders to do; building a digital trust environment with our people, skills, and resources; taking an organizational design and governance approach; adopting a reputational model that builds greater transparency; and getting everyone on the same page.

In Chapter 9, I provide you with a proven, six-part framework for implementing trust-based empathetic design in your organization—gaining the benefits and reaping the rewards. You can’t execute if you don’t have a roadmap for where you should take your team and your organization, and in this chapter, I provide you with one that you can quickly put to good use.

In Chapter 10, the last chapter of this book, I leave you with a final call to arms for humanizing our businesses. I show you where the money is, why this will drive operational efficiencies and growth, the value that can be derived, and why the C-suite needs to take this topic seriously and promote top-down change.

We need better understand how building humanity into our digital experiences is critical to meet the needs of our customers, employees, and citizens who are increasingly concerned about the motivations of institutions that embrace technology. This will in turn foster better communication, improve marketing, collaboration, and innovation, buttress democracy, and generate profitable growth. In this book, we address all these challenges—and opportunities—and much more.

Now, let’s get started.