The Soft-Side of Business

At a first glance, many businesses in Nigeria have all it takes to hit it big in business locally and internationally. Of course, we are good business people with sound business acumen and savvy. I know that you will agree with me.

Ironically, countless number of businesses, including those favoured by political, economical, social, technological, environmental and legal (PESTEL) factors, are still struggling in spite of huge investments. Something obviously may have gone wrong in their business equation.

You and I are familiar with the hard business operations like management, accounting, marketing, strategies, planning, and other operational models. Today, running a successful business has gone beyond having the money, minute, machinery, material, and the man behind the wheels like a military man on duty. It requires that pressing the magic buttons that produce the desired results. There is more to business that what we do presently.

It’s high time we looked at a new side of business that has emerged in the new economy –the soft side of business. This is the new business order which turns every other thing on in the business world. While the hard business is important, soft business is very, very paramount.

Suffice it to establish this premise: evidence everywhere indicates that the hard world is irreversibly softening. Our present, run by the intangibles, has gone soft and still goes softer by each passing day. This is the hallmark of the new world, or rather business dimension and you can gain a huge advantage by riding on this trend. Gone are the days when we relied on the physical or hard strengths to get results and take the lead. Times, indeed, have changed; everything has gone soft. Microsoft, the highest valued company today is a soft company.

The same change has hit our business life, which constitutes the core of our living. To keep your place in the present business economy, you’ve got to be compliant by basically going soft. Let me express it this way: it’s either soft or you rust.

The business universe is evolving and expanding daily. I know you would like to be left out. That would be very suicidal in this fast-paced business dispensation. You have in your hands the opportunity to escape being a business dinosaur.

As I pointed out earlier, what drives business has changed, and keeps changing; it’s no longer business as usual. The business operations no longer tilt towards the hard-side but the soft-side. What has brought us to our current business level may not take us beyond this point. There is indeed another side of business, the soft-side of business.

What is the whole idea of this new business paradigm? You may ask so impatiently.
The soft-side of business by definition is that aspect that meets the human pressing and usually unexpressed needs. It’s, in other words, business with human face, or still, the human side of business. This business model uncovers our ‘humanness’, touching our lives on a deeper level with immense intensity. It has the power to attract, keep and multiply clientele because it is human and speaks the language every one of us loves to hear. Who wouldn’t like it?

The challenges in today’s business life are most those of the intangibles, which over the years have suffer neglect, and also suppressed in most business deals. But the rule of the game has tainted for good.

This new-fangled business economy is based on the understanding that every person has a need, a drive, a motivation, a taste, a want and some yearning that they want met in the course of doing business. Check it out, in every business transaction; people are hungry for love, connection, respect, warmth, care, attention, relationship, and acceptance. There are never enough of them. And the tougher the times, the more important and scarce they become. In most cases, these virtues are value that the very transaction that brought us to the establishment in the first place.

How we are perceived as human beings is becoming increasingly important in the new business globe. And the difference maker in business today comes from this very side of business.

There are diverse sides of this business archetype. But for the purpose of this discussion, we would be looking at two main side of it: the emotion and the connection.
Join me as we examine the soft business that will make you win in the hard world o business. See you then.