WASTE NOT.
by Creative Partner, Chris Clarke
Since our BETA launch in June 2018, GROUP OF HUMANS has grown to around 100 of the world’s best designers, thinkers, technologists and strategists. We have made 6 phone calls to 6 companies and now have 6 clients. We have a list of over 200 people who have applied to become Human. We have Humans working on the Humans Business and with Humans Clients. Amazing progress for a startup.
The who to work with bit is getting harder, we plan to remain invitation only, so as to balance talent and the right kind of work. Each Human, has to be a Limited Company, we are also developing a curated associate program offering wider expertise from small studios of specialists to enterprise software houses.
What we are building is a better way to service clients through a highly energetic, talent focussed, professionally curated, business to business network.
GROUP OF HUMANS exists to put the best talent in the world under pressure to design a better world for our children. There’s no bigger pressure than that. But with peers as good as this you recapture that desperation to prove yourself you had when you first started out.
That was the conclusion a small group of humans from our network reached over just two days in Brooklyn. Between the five of us, we have over 100 years experience in our industry and have started 15 companies. To feel reborn, re-set and renewed at this stage is joyous. The task ahead momentous.
There isn’t much time left for us to hand over something to our kids that doesn’t look like Mad Max. Our parents generation and our own have presided over a 60% loss of the total biomass of species on earth. And some of our peers, armed with incredible educations and technical prowess have responded with laundry apps and connected water bottles.
That our culture lacks vision and purpose is clear. What to do about it less so. Our answer is that when you connect the best talent and provide a moral framework, you can make some dents in the big problems. It forces you to focus and be conscious of your time.
So this is our idea. The purpose for our business and our promise to each other, and our kids.
Waste Not. Because we’ve all wasted our talent in big corporate jobs for a bit, we’ve all seen clients waste their money, we’re sick of seeing technologists waste their abilities by failing to tackle real problems, and we’ve lived in a an era when the planet has been wasted almost to collapse. Waste Not feels like a powerful and pertinent promise. We also like it because the best art, the most powerful stories, the most moving music, the finest food and most beautiful design contain nothing superfluous. Think of Picasso’s line drawings. One line. Perfect.
We chose not to write it up as a corporate style brand promise. Instead, I wrote us a poem. We hope it will guide us and remind us of 2018 and the important choice we all made to be a Group of Humans.
Waste Not
As children we were told waste not, want not.
Now we are old we want not waste.
We are just a Group Of Humans,
All status we disown,
We are grown beyond the baubles the money and the shows
Standing naked with ambition, stripped down to the core
To leave what’s broken better than before
Waste Not, your time, your talent,
Waste Not your planet earth
Waste Not Your weakness or your wisdom,
Your anger or your mirth.
Waste Not.
A curated network of Designers, Thinkers, Technologists and Strategists | We celebrate vulnerabilities, weaknesses and differences and find ways to learn from them.
