This bonus episode of This Human Business tells the story of John Henry, the steel driving man who took on a machine in a race and won. What happened next serves as a warning for human researchers in our digital age of data-driven business.

The Story of John Henry, A Data-Driven Man

This Human Business is a podcast that explores the new movement to reassert the value of the human experience, in an age when an obsession with digital tools of automation has created a dangerous imbalance in the corporate world. The podcast looks into the use of mythology and storytelling to evoke emotional engagement, the role of rituals in commercial culture, new radically human forms of thick research that complement Big Data, human reactions to new business technologies, dark and hopeful visions of the future, digital racism, and the fluid opportunities for dynamic interactions with gender and identity in the business world. It then transforms into the articulation of emotional granularity, exploring the business of being human.

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It's possible to both be in a place and to be absent. This episode explores the experience of emotional distance and emotional presence.

Distance and Presence

This episode concludes the three-part exploration of the emotions of pilgrimage, moving from the feeling of the second wind to the experience of having arrived.

A Second Wind To Arrival

The uncertainty of the beginning shifts into an emotion that becomes dreadfully familiar: The feeling of being weary. The emotion of weariness is a child of long paths, whether they are literal or figurative. Much of the experience of a pilgrimage is negative, and purposefully so. It’s about loss, and pain, and the things that cannot be had, cannot be done.

A Weary Path Into Negative Emotion

As the first emotion of pilgrimage, trepidation is the unsettled feeling we get when we are about to begin something of importance, and are filled with both the urge to begin and the wish that we could abandon the journey altogether.

Trepidation

This episode marks a transition for This Human Business, away from a focus on business reform and into an emphasis on the human experience through emotional granularity. This episode explores despair and feeling grounded.

The Story of John Henry, A Data-Driven Man

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