Why Yuval Noah Harari is wrong. The Future is Bright. Humans Matter to Each Other.
“Make friends with people who want the best for you,” title of Rule #3 in Jordan B. Peterson’s bestselling 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Critical to survival, to thriving, to excellence is the ability to grow. Whether you work for a 1 person organization or a 90,000 person organization, one of the core skills and joys in work and life is networking. Getting to know other people around subjects of mutual interest is pure joy. Finding people who want the best for you and your organization is double joy. To that end, I recently hosted a knowledge sharing event inside SAP, as part of the Digital Ambassador program, on the subject of Sustainable Cities and Autonomous Driving and Electrification.
Joining the knowledge sharing group was entirely optional. About 30 people signed up — globally — and when the date finally arrived there were 10 of us on the call. I was the moderator. Years of yoga teacher training, enterprise software sales, management consulting, parenting and classes in improv and acting have helped me to enjoy the surprise of being fully in any moment. The people who joined my call came from Paris, Madrid, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago, and Manhattan. Each of us has a very different role in the company. Several participants are on the corporate strategy team and strategic consulting, another is dedicated to customer success with SAP cloud, another leads pre-sales for the Midwest USA, and I am in automotive business development. We had one hour to get to know each other and share ideas.
Simply fantastic! Our conversation went from specific city initiatives — Detroit literacy for example; to company discussions — did you know Rivian is a startup SUV electric vehicle manufacturer who just received a $700M investment from Amazon? — to strategic challenges of consumer identity management across devices — including vehicles, to South by Southwest SAP appearances to explanations of what we do and how it fits within the larger corporate ecosystem. The running theme of we all work for SAP is likely what made this session work. Because we share a common employer, we share a common respect for culture and openness to presenting and sharing ideas. The conversation was virtual and without cameras — next time, I am going to suggest cameras — and there was a pre-planned topic giving the dialogue some structure. But what made the event so worthwhile was the opportunity to get to know colleagues. And here is the real power of SAP and humanity in general: we feed off each other. We get better through our questions and sharing and knowing each other. That’s the power of the network. I vehemently disagree with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Homo Deus and Sapiens in his very dark view that the future of humanity is an integration of technology into our bodies and the human mind. The future of humanity is and always has been people coming together, trusting one another and forging ahead. Machines, computers, data serves us but it does not own us. We own us.
“Today the main source of wealth is knowledge,” says Yuval Noah Harari. This is perhaps one of the most uplifting statements in Homo Deus. My argument is that the knowledge and joy and lifeblood that matters happens between humans. With conversation and getting to know and respect and admire the person sitting across the table from you — virtual or not, we grow. I hope for a world when everyday people participate in knowledge sharing within their company, but more importantly within the larger context of the world. How will you push human life to higher levels for yourself and all of us?
Special thanks to: Josephine Monberg, Paul Mahon, Steven Halmaghi, Philippe Souidi, Caroline Koenigsfeldt, Thomas Alexander, and Julie Chrysler for joining the Sustainable Cities Knowledge Sharing call on February 28, 2019.
