I’m reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott and as well as its explicit drive to encourage caring personally, the anecdotes have helped me care about people in a different way.

Big corporations turn me off. I feel that money and market power becomes ends in themselves, rather than a mechanism for delivering positives, which I dislike. That might always be accurate, but it’s my gut feeling. Reading how Kim’s teams worked at Google and Apple has been a powerful reminder that these big corporations, like any organised effort, are made up of lots of actual, real people.

Every one of them has hopes and fears, their own stories that I’ll never know about. This won’t be revelatory for many folks and I’m pretty sure it won’t change my habits and preferences, but it has helped me see the value of big business a little differently.

Businesses are made up of people – true whether it’s big tech and the gig economy, or the manual work that builds our physical infrastructure and is the bedrock for our lives.

The world’s better when we recognise the people involved.