Humanizing the Enterprise – Convergence 2014 #CONV14

As Convergence 2014 wrapped up on Thursday night, attendees were treated to a concert by the Grammy award-winning band FUN at Phillips Arena.

Before the FUNtastic celebration, a lot of learning took place. With 212 Concurrent Sessions, 111 Interactive Discussions, and 46 Deep Dive Sessions ranging across all the Microsoft Dynamics lines of business and various user roles, attendees were not short on content.

Arianna Huffington, chair, president, and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post and Biz Stone, co-creator of Twitter, as well as co-creator and CEO of Jelly, were the featured keynote speakers on Wednesday. The overall theme for the keynote was “Experience is the New Currency”. We are moving from a world that is embracing participation to one that will involve solid engagement. We are going to have to “humanize the enterprise“ in order to deliver the experience that customers expect.

Arianna brought a media point of view to this concept. She declared that social media is the new homepage and offered proof from her publications that people like to share good news. In fact, The Huffington Post has dedicated a whole section to it. It helps evoke the best in human nature.

The challenge is that we are in a time famine. We can’t operate to our full potential and be our most creative when we are tired. Arianna’s advice was in order for us to give our best to our clients, to our jobs, and to the people we care about, we need to disconnect from our devices and get some sleep. Disconnecting and sleep will help us re-humanize so we can engage better.

Biz took the stage after Arianna. It isn’t surprising that the co-founder of Twitter and Jelly believes that humanity is at its best when it cooperates. Biz offered insights on success, failure, and altruism. As an entrepreneur and angel investor, Biz knows a few things about these topics. He shared the sage advice with the audience, “In order to succeed spectacularly, you must be willing to fail spectacularly”.

Biz reminded us that creativity is a renewable resource that we are fortunate to have. His thought on the future of marketing is that consumers will expect products to be packaged with a meaningful cause. They will buy into the cause as much as they will buy into the product. He believes that the true promise of a connected society is that we can help each other.

We are moving from a world of business-to-business and business-to-consumer into one of people-to-people based exchanges. Leveraging technology to help delight customers was definitely showcased this past week at Convergence. It will be interesting to watch as the Microsoft Dynamics product lines evolve to embrace this.

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