People Centricity: the incredible power of putting other people first

By Stephen Hewett

For most of us, it's the people we know who make our lives what they are. These include our family, our friends, and the people we work with.
This revolutionary and highly original book, People Centricity, brilliantly reveals that the secret of having great personal and work relationships lies in taking the trouble to understand the agenda and concerns of everyone with whom you interact most closely. This allows you to create a highly positive climate of mutual benefit, and to become truly people-centric.
In a lively style featuring many compelling examples, Stephen Hewett guides you through the mind-changing thinking you need to achieve the life-transforming goal of People Centricity.
The journey this book takes you on will make your difficult days better and your good days beautiful.

'Stephen is a people guru for our times'
Lord Price, Minister of State for Trade and Investment

'Stephen shares the meaning of People Centricity with you to make your life, and those you interact with, so much happier.'
Mark White, Media & TV Expert. Former CEO Channel 5 TV

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781912022151

Book preview

People Centricity Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2017

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ISBN 978­-1-­912022-­15-­1

Copyright © Stephen Hewett, 2017

The moral right of Stephen Hewett, to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

Cover desgn by www.bookstyle.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

What Is People Centricity?

Your Tribe

Social Tribalism and Its Potentially Dangerous Effects

People Centricity and the Law of Attraction

You Attract What You Are

Evidence of or for the Law of Attraction

Put It into Practice

Looking Harder at Yourself

People Centricity in Action

The Mutually Beneficial Interaction

How People Centricity Takes This Book Further Than Most Other Self-Help Books Go

The Big Problem

Religion and Its Role in Advancing People Centricity

Jesus Christ’s Teachings and People Centricity

The Sins of Social Tribalism

People Centricity and Eternal Life

An Obvious But Important Point

Yet People Centricity Is Calm Methodical, Logical, and Ultimately Sustainable

So Why Isn’t People Centricity More Natural for People?

People Centricity and Showing Appreciation to People

The Unfortunate Rise of Bad Manners and Insulting Behaviour in Our society

Looking Harder at Yourself

The Two Major Types of People-Centric Interactions

Why Being Generally Courteous, Polite, And Positive Towards Strangers Makes Sense

The String of Pearls

Looking Harder at Yourself

Other Perspectives on People Centricity

The People Centricity Lessons of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls

Dale Carnegie and His Major Contribution to People Centricity

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: A Major and Vital Inspirational Text on People Centricity

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Movie About People Centricity

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: We’re Made for Community

William Styron and Sophie’s Choice

My Own Visit to Auschwitz: An Experience That Completely Changed My Life

People Centricity and Your Personal Life

An Ideal of What Love Can Be

People Centricity and Romantic Love

Why Magnanimity in Romantic Love May Make Sense

Why There Are Limitations to What People Centricity Can Achieve for You in Your Personal Life

The Raw Deal Love Often Gets Today

The Ideal Kind of Romantic Love: Everyday Calm Happiness

People Centricity and Loneliness

The False Image of Single Life

Negotiations in a Relationship and When They Happen

Why Finding out the Truth of the Other Person’s Feelings Is Better Done Early on

The Potential Instability of Romantic Relationships

Romantic Relationships and the Challenge That People Change

Life Is Difficult

People Centricity and Family Life

Family Life and the World’s Most Popular Religions

People Centricity and Raising Children

Family Life and the Romantic Relationship at the Heart of It

Looking Harder at Yourself

People Centricity in the Workplace

The Special Role of People Centricity in the Workplace

Looking Harder at Yourself

People Centricity and Your Professional Life: Customer Centricity

Defining Customer Centricity

What Being Customer-Centric Really Means

The Essence of Customer Centricity

More About the Definition of Customer

Why Being Customer-Centric Ought to Involve Your Entire Personality

Reasons for the Blurring Between Work-Self and Real-Self

Internal and External Customers

Understanding What Your Customers Are Really Getting from You

Two Key Conclusions

Why the Core of Customer Centricity Is the Adding of Value

How You Can Decide Whether a Customer Will Regard Something as Offering Added Value

The Danger of Customer Centricity Being Eroded as Organizations Grow in Size

The Problem That the Nature of Customer Demand Changes over Time, and Sometimes Changes Quickly

The Problem of Cost

Looking Harder at Yourself

A Better, People-Centric World

Our Fundamental Choice as a Species

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

This book is about making you, your family, your friends, and those you interact with happier. I’d say that this, in itself, is an extremely good reason to give People Centricity: The Incredible Power of Putting Other People First a proper look!

The practical philosophy of People Centricity is about making people happy through mutually beneficial interactions. The people closest to us — our tribe — are those that we are emotionally or socially attached to. They are your immediate group of friends, family, and closest work colleagues. People Centricity is based around showing us how we can all invest more time and effort to interact and empathise with those outside our tribe to benefit us all with even more mutually positive outcomes.

Author Stephen Hewett is a man you just want to spend time with. Always wearing a smile and an aura of positivity, he engages you with stories from his days as a flying instructor and pilot, as well as offering advice from his vast experience and business observations, gained over years at the top of the retail world with The John Lewis Partnership.

Yet above all what makes Stephen so special is that he always listens and is genuinely interested in you. He is a walking billboard for People Centricity, as it comes so naturally to him, as he practises it in all aspects of his life. This book allows Stephen to share the meaning and different applications of People Centricity with you to make your life, and those you interact with, happier.

When I was growing up my dad told me to always do as you would be done by. I suppose, in its own way, it was about taking the time to look at the other perspective, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see how it feels to be on the other side of the fence. Whether it be as a boy on the playground or the CEO in the boardroom, I’ve always tried to follow his advice and taking the time to do so has always helped to achieve happier outcomes all round.

In the world of commercial television, where I have spent the last thirty years, every day is about looking for mutually beneficial outcomes. The channel needs to attract an audience to its shows by understanding through research, or by just asking them, the types of shows they want to see across the schedule. The commercial breaks between these shows will, in turn, attract advertisers to invest money in order to reach that self-same audience with their products and services. Much of that revenue is then re-invested into more programming and so the cycle begins again. When the cycle works at its best, with each element listening to the other’s needs, everyone benefits and everyone’s happy: the viewer, the advertiser, and the broadcaster. Whilst this is a highly simplified version of the process, it is essentially what happens. This provides the entertainment and educational content that television delivers to make television one of the very most important media in the world and a great place to initiate a conversation when interacting with someone from outside of your tribe.

As well as explaining how People Centricity works in practise, this book also talks us through many examples of People Centricity in life, history, religion, literature, and the natural world including:

How Social Tribalism led to World War II and 9/11.

Are teenagers deliberately un-People-Centric?

Why you can’t leave your leisure-life personality in the corporate cloakroom.

Why didn’t Jesus have a family of his own?

How do sharks breathe?

Why we all depend on strangers.

If you’re good to your waitress it can change your friend’s life forever.

Do fish like strawberries and cream?

All these and more are waiting inside these pages together with a recipe to make your life happier.

So what are you waiting for? Take the time to turn the page — both right now and in your life.

Mark White

Television & Media Consultant

Former CEO of Channel 5 Broadcasting

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976)

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871)

Scientific man cannot survive if he is going to make war.

Bertrand Russell on BBC TV’s Face to Face (1959)

My warm thanks to Lord Price for his contribution. Lord Price is author of the book Fairness for All, which is about the power of an engaged workforce and how to achieve it.

The website www.measuringworkplacehappiness.com measures individual and companies’ happiness with a view to better engage employees.

1

What Is People Centricity?

Would you like to have any — or all — of these…

good health?

financial security?

personal, emotional and sexual gratification?

the enjoyment of the happiness and health of the people who are dear to you?

an occupation you find absorbing, fascinating, and lucrative?

agreeable leisure-time activities?

a faith you find important, whether religious or secular?

an overwhelming sense of positivity in yourself?

the feeling that you are a good person and that you generate good outcomes for yourself and for the people you care about and work with?

anything else that makes you feel most happy?

If you have all of these great things already, I mean all of them, I congratulate you. You may not need to read this book. But if you’re missing any if these things, then, Reader, I urge you to read on, because this book will help you get more of the above things … if not all of them.

All I ask is this: if you do want to get at least one more of the great things listed above than you already have, do please accept that you’ll need to change what you put into your life in order to get out what you want. After all, how can you expect to get new outcomes if you don’t change your inputs? It’s only logical, isn’t it?

People Centricity is what I call the approach to life I recommend in this book. So let’s answer the question: What’s People Centricity?

Well, it’s all these things:

a powerful, invigorating and life-enhancing life philosophy

a new way of seeing the world

a way of making your life even better

fun

interesting

engaging

fulfilling

liberating in that it liberates you to a new life.

How can we define People Centricity? I suggest

the life philosophy of making an investment of time and emotional energy to advance the agenda of people — with whom you have a mutually beneficial interaction — who are outside your immediate close circle.

People Centricity is a fairly obvious term to think up, so perhaps I shouldn’t make a claim for having invented it. I wasn’t aware of it, though, until I first started using the term in my consulting work as an extension of the more familiar expression Customer Centricity.

But Customer Centricity only focuses on customers; People Centricity focuses on everyone. The notion of People Centricity is, I’ve noticed, becoming increasingly present on blogs and in articles; more and more people are feeling that there must be something in the idea of attempting to focus the discipline of centricity on people rather than only customers.

All the same, this book is, as far as I know, the first ever on the subject of People Centricity.

Your Tribe

Here’s another important definition I use here. In this book, I refer to your close circle as your tribe.

So who is your tribe? Well, I’d say it’s

the person or people you live with;

whoever you regard as your immediate family;

the people who are your closest friends;

the people you work with most closely;

if you belong to a religion, the people you are closest to at your place of worship;

sometimes, people beyond your immediate circle of acquaintances whom you see as belonging to your own ethnic, national, or religious group. (This is a more extensive definition of the concept of your tribe, and applies most often in political situations.)

There may be other members of your tribe, but the categories above are the most important ones. You get the idea: basically anyone in your life to whom you are emotionally or socially close is likely to be part of your tribe. In practice, the most important constituent of your tribe will be your family.

Social Tribalism and Its Potentially Dangerous Effects

In this book I use the term social tribalism to describe putting a narrow focus on the agenda of your own tribe. This narrow focus often, though not always, means being actively opposed to the agenda of people