What is the ROI on how I feel?
Absurd question, right?
It is absurd because we shouldn’t attempt to quantify qualia. But it isn’t absurd, because it represents is a massive missing link that companies cannot see. Companies deal in ROI; people deal in feelings.
Let week I wrote about the hidden cost of gifts. The very human social connectivity that giving and receiving builds. Our emotional connection, trust, interdependence arise from an overlapping continuity of shared give and take.
This a power that the commercially rational world finds very difficult to see, let alone understand and handle. It is the space where astute leaders bring real value.
The reason is the category difference and disconnection between ‘feelers’ and ‘non-feelers’. A corporation doesn’t know what life ‘feels like’. The company is a fiction; it doesn’t exist beyond the useful story we invent around it. It doesn’t feel like anything to be a corporation.
Regardless of the what the marketing department says, the company does not care about you or your success. The bank does not care about your family home; the insurance company does not care about your kid’s soccer training. The corporation doesn’t feel a thing. The “care” is an expression of existential risk to the continuity of the company – and the jobs of those seeking to keep the fiction alive.
But we humans deal in feelings, feelings are a currency that has no line in the P’n’L but is represented in every line for good or ill. In individuals it is our feelings and habits – collectively it’s called culture.
Because of this disconnect, many organisations miss a massive opportunity as they undervalue the incremental ‘felt’ things they cannot see.
What is the COST and OPPORTUNITY impact of the way people feel?
What is the COST and PRODUCTIVITY impact of an unhappy vs happy leaders and culture?
What would your business/division be like if you had more people showing up FEELING and being on the right-hand side list below?
How would you rather experience your life?
This is the hidden, felt value. The secret sauce that is worth investing in.
