No one will protect what they don't care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced.

—David Attenborough

When I was a kid—and in the context of space and time, it wasn't all that long ago—department stores were a really big deal. And the most notable one in Chicago, where I grew up, was Marshall Field and Company, more commonly known as Marshall Field's. The business was founded in the 1850s, and its flagship store on the corner of State and Washington Streets burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The owners rebuilt the store, it burned again in 1877, and the owners again rebuilt—triggering years of growth and profits as the company eventually broke out of its Chicago roots and expanded across the country through numerous acquisitions.

Marshall Field's was always a magical place for a little kid like me because, in the 1970s, the downtown Chicago store's toy department spanned an entire floor. Like every other kid anywhere in the area, I loved to go there. My dad was known by the salespeople in the department because he regularly brought me there to check out the latest offerings (and being an avid model railway enthusiast, he also regularly bought items for himself). As soon as the manager of the department manager spotted my dad, he would make the effort to connect. “Hey Walt,” he would say to my dad, “it's good to see you. How have you been? How's the family? You know, something just came in and I haven't even put it out on the floor yet. Your kid's going to love it—I'll go get it.”

That was such a uniquely human thing. A salesperson who took the time to get to know us—not just as customers, but as living human beings—and then reach out to us by offering products that he knew we'd be interested in buying. And it seemed like a magical place because you had the feeling that people were doing special things for you behind the scenes, based on what they knew about you, even if they really weren't.

Like many other department stores, Marshall Field's has gone the way of the dodo bird. The company became an acquisitions target and was passed around a succession of corporate parents, starting with BATUS, then moving on to Dayton-Hudson (Target), May Company, and finally, Federated (Macy's), which retired the Marshall Field's name in 2006. My parents still mourn the day that Marshall Field's disappeared.

I'm reminded of something naturalist David Attenborough said in his film A Life on Our Planet. During the course of the film, Attenborough reflected on his long life while weaving into those reflections the storyline of the catastrophic loss of the earth's wild places and biodiversity. According to Attenborough, in 1937, when he was just 11 years old, the world was 66 percent untouched wilderness. As he began his career, Attenborough went to places that no one had ever been to before, saw plants and animals that no one had ever seen before, and met indigenous people who no outsider had ever met before.

As his career progressed, the earth's wilderness continued to shrink—taken by humans to exploit resources, convert forests into farms, and build thriving cities. The pace of change continued to accelerate. By 1997, the earth's wilderness had been reduced to 46 percent, and in 2020, just 37 percent of the planet's surface was wilderness. We've reached a tipping point where the pace of change will continue to accelerate, and we can expect much of the earth's wilderness to eventually disappear.

It's much the same in today's world of commerce. The kind of human shopping experiences that my dad and I enjoyed together at stores like Marshall Field's are rapidly becoming extinct. And with this loss, we are also losing something else: the human connection that we as people have always valued and longed for. In its place are digital buying experiences that in many cases undermine the connection to the customer—treating them as data, faceless, soulless financial transactions instead of as people with real needs, desires, and wants. Or bombarding them with ads for things that have no relevance to their current context. Or worse, when they finally have bought something but have a problem, pushing them into endless layers of customer service phone trees, mindless chatbots, or poorly constructed self-service FAQs.

This change is predictable, and in many ways necessary to scale, but the unintended march toward human ambivalence has pushed the customer, employee, and citizen further away than ever. I often ask a fundamental question of senior executives to test this theory. In light of all the technology, digital channels, and flood of data being collected today, what three things can they tell me about their most valuable customers that their competitors don't know? We'll circle back to this question later in this book.

Over the past 100 years, businesses have naturally evolved and become ever larger and more complex. To grow, CEOs put the emphasis on two levers in particular: driving efficiencies and productivity (controlling costs) and boosting short-term results by bombarding customers with every promotion they can think of as frequently as possible. But this is the law of diminishing marketing returns at work in full force, and the success of the latter is often left to hapless CMOs who are blamed when the expected results fail to materialize. As a result of these initiatives, the human touch has played a decreasingly important role in business—the “people” element has in fact been subordinated to the constant drive to scale.

I believe that we have taken this drive to scale too far, relying far too much on an ever-increasing arsenal of technology and gatekeepers to make up for the lack of “soul” in our interactions with customer and employees. We have neglected the human connection as we use digital to perform many of the tasks that people traditionally performed (and indeed still perform better).

Which brings us to the question: Why should we care?

We should care because our customers are telling us that they aren't happy with the status quo. We should care because we are spending more and more on technology and data, and getting less and less in return. We should care because our customers and employees are telling us that they no longer trust us. We should care because we have distanced ourselves from the real and ever-changing human signals that tell us our customers and employees feel they no longer matter. We should also care because the next big growth wave for businesses will be based on figuring out how to build purpose-driven experiences that will help those organizations that “get it” gain a lasting competitive advantage in their respective marketplaces.

We should care because building data-driven relevant and contextual experiences is where the future is going, whether or not we get on board.

Mark Curtis is head of innovation and thought leadership at Accenture Song. We discussed why people increasingly feel they no longer matter. Says Mark:

We spend a great bit of our time talking about how we can be relevant to our clients. If we're doing our job well, we spend even more time talking about how we can make our clients relevant to their customers. What we never talk about, however, is how we can make those customers feel relevant. So, my proposition here is we are looking at relevance through the wrong end of the telescope.

If we were to be truly customer focused, we would be looking at relevance from the point of view of the customer, as in how do we help make them feel relevant? In fact, if you just want to be commercial about it, I think there's a huge amount of money to be made by creating relevance engines for people.

I believe the world is in a crisis of relevance—people are suffering a decline in personal relevance, that they don't matter. And I think that's been going on for some time. There are a variety of causes for that, including the future of work which involves automation, robots, and artificial intelligence. People are worried that the skills they bring to work aren't going to be needed at some state in the near future, which makes them feel less relevant—like they no longer matter.

I agree with Mark. We need to find ways to help customers and employees feel more relevant—that they matter. In many ways, I think the world today is coming full circle. It's back to the future in the sense that what we've always valued and longed for are human connection and to feel we matter, and customers are telling us that's what they want. Few organizations of any scale can have the same level of connection that start-ups or small businesses have, so they have increasingly looked to technology to fill the void. But I believe that void cannot be filled by technology in its current form.

To be effective, data, technology, and emotional human connection need to come together to make a difference. How do we surprise, delight, and build lasting trust that can drive the next wave of growth? How do we provide the appropriate “digital kisses on the cheek” in an authentic way that makes our customers and employees feel they truly matter, something that makes our digital experiences feel as meaningful as our face-to-face experiences? Ten or 15 years ago, we couldn't do that sort of thing—we couldn't reinject humanity into all the scaled digital capabilities we've created.

But now we can.

Maybe for the first time, we now have the ability to dial back the clock and incorporate some of the genuine human experiences that we used to take for granted into digital to drive the next major wave of growth. We can accomplish this by recalibrating the power balance between customers, employees, and executive leadership—and between strategy, marketing, operations, sales, and technology—removing the labels and creating a revolutionary blur that will define these relationships for the next decade and beyond.

Ultimately, that's what this book is all about.

Some companies seem to be going in the right direction, while others aren't. The good news is that it's possible to follow some simple but powerful principles that will enable anyone to focus more on people first, but in a way that is not cost prohibitive or detrimental to the organization.

And, truth be told, it's more important than ever to apply this thinking to the enterprise to ensure that we use these technologies, data, and capabilities for good. Your business depends on it.