Humans Working: The Book Reviews

Humans Working is a game-changer! Unlike most business books, you will not find strategies, tools, or techniques you need to follow. Instead, Naphtali points us to the most important thing for any business to thrive: what’s already inside us. With wit, humor, and personal stories, Naphtali takes you on a personal journey to ignite the spark inside your business and even your personal life. Read this book the first time for information and read it again for a transformation!

Humans Working is not your typical business book. This book goes much deeper than sharing organizational-level practices and strategies; it points to an understanding of human nature that applies to all people in all settings. If you are ready for deep, sustainable change that is based on mutual respect and understanding, I urge you to read Humans Working today.

Most business books share tactics that have worked for them.  This book points to principles that work for everyone.

Simplicity is beauty. Sometimes you come across something that is so trivial you just want to smack yourself for not getting it yourself. This book shows where problems that you (and just about every company) have been dealing with your whole life come from; how you’ve been compounding them; and presents a solution that seems to work every single time.

Naphtali is committed to the essence of human nature and to kindness. He prescribes no tools or tips or checklists to follow. He leads you to achieve clarity of yourself and your situation. We all make assumptions that we believe are obvious and true. But, without realizing it, we can let those assumptions impose false barriers to achieving what we want to achieve. Naphtali has a deep understanding of how business works – and the tech industry specifically – which adds to the calm confidence you develop as you read Humans Working. In this book, plenty of practical specifics evolve out of his pointing to you toward clarity through a simple understanding of how the mind works.

Naphtali’s perspective on life and business is refreshing and a reminder to keep things simple. Humans Working is a necessary read and it reiterates the importance of something you typically pay little attention to; your mind. You’ll be happy you read this.

Throughout my career as a computer scientist and serial entrepreneur, I have constantly pushed for businesses to realize that the single most important thing they can do to supercharge their business is to start paying attention to the people they work. Simply put, engaged employees do better work and faster. People matter more than strategy and tactics. I you don’t solve the human equation first, it’s very difficult to get much else accomplished. In this book, Naphtali, whom I’ve known for years, shows his caring nature and demonstrates his deep understanding of the truth that without a positive and happy culture, no business has a chance to be successful. If you embrace the ideas in this book, everything about your business will change.

Humans Working goes back to the basics. Whether you’re an executive of a large company or leader at a small startup, this book provides a useful mental tool to engage with the diverse interpersonal interactions that make up your day. These moments can either help push the company toward a common goal or compromise its solidarity, making each team member feel disconnected and uncommitted. Naphtali provides a compelling personal narrative, interwoven with corporate case studies, that allows you to see how seemingly complex situations, both professional and personal, can be resolved through a simple but powerful reframing of the mind – and a bit of empathy.

Humans Working is an unusually inspiring book on work, leadership, and innovation. Naphtali Visser, software engineer and entrepreneur, takes us into a journey of personal experiences, where he inspects work relationships from an internal point of view, as an extension of human behavior. According to Naphtali, good faith and trust point the shortest path to success. He keeps a conspicuous distance from moral principles and systems of well-being to set the foundation of his approach on the ways our mind processes information to build reality. Along these lines, working relationships based on simplicity and independent thought have far more constructive effects than rigid rules, manuals of conduct, rigorous pre-planning, and corporate obedience. Squeezing people into stereotypical roles kills imagination and the potential for creativity goes with it.

As the CEO of a fast-growing company who has always tried to control a tightly-held vision, Humans Working has helped me shift my mindset and see that the greatest CEOs and business leaders succeed by letting go and allowing success to come through them. By humanizing your culture and team, you can cultivate an energy that is far more powerful than you can create alone. Naphtali’s anecdotes hit home and relate to many circumstances and events I’ve experienced. I have read several books to continue to grow, but Humans Working has offered something different – that if I trust in the unknown; allow for something unexpected to show up; and allow the company to take on its own shape, the result can be far more powerful than I expected.

Humans Working has let me re-appraise what’s important in the day-to-day of running a creative agency – the challenges of high pressure deadlines, demanding clients, changing objectives, and the need to always be “creatively on” – all of which can be handled with far more grace and assuredness by taking note, and being inspired by Naphtali’s book.

For over twenty years, I have known Naphtali as a vendor, consultant, business partner, and friend. Naphtali’s personal journey and growth continue to fuel ideas and opportunities that he has effectively shared in this book. His ability to clearly communicate his own experience and distill this thinking and transformative mindset has allowed me, and many others that I know, to access and achieve their untapped potential. The message in this book is, at its core, pointing to what you already know, yet is quite contrary to much of the typical advice of the business world. Tapping one’s own, or someone else’s, potential does not come from incentives or consequences, but rather from engaging with the fundamental experience that it is to be human: shared, collaborative, honest, and fair. Naphtali’s take on business, management, and being a whole person gets at the core of what it means to be a “human working”. I encourage everyone to read this book and to look inward, act outward, and receive the benefits of these shifts in mindset and behavior to be a fundamentally happier and better person, employee, and business leader.