Dignity is a word we don’t hear much nowadays. It comes from the Roman word “dignitas”, meaning the worth of a person. The Romans talked about this a lot, it was the primary measure of worth in their society. Over time, the meaning and spelling of a word can shift, but experts will tell you that the oldest and most important words - blood, death, shit, flea, fuck, etc. - change the least. The fact that Dignitas has retained it’s spelling and meaning for such a long time suggests it’s a very important word for humans. This book draws on lessons from history, our operating experience running high growth companies, the collective experience of Silicon Valley and the projection of current trends. Our goal is to demonstrate the importance of dignity in business, how it helps a business to get ahead, and especially, how it can help address the new challenges in front of businesses everywhere in the 21st century.
What this book is notis consciously political or advocating one way is better and the other completely broken. As politics and division seemingly suffuses everything in the current moment, we believe that the best way businesses can help is to focus on the basics, starting with the humans. Furthermore, dignity has two very special characteristics: even a little extra will help; and anyone can do it. This means that any reader at any level should benefit from reading even part of our work, or at least that is our hope.
Finally, we exhort you to approach this book as a point-in-time statement of a philosophy. Like any philosophy, more time and minds will help mature and develop the idea, especially as we master it and it becomes normal. We have tried very hard to try and be as objective and neutral as we could, and naturally some human biases will unconsciously emerge here and there. If you look for the parts that do make sense and focus on those, then you will have learnt the biggest lesson of all on Dignity: everything has some value, it’s just figuring out what it is and how valuable it is to you that’s the trick.
Mat & Ken
Portland, October 2020
Blog Version
Dignity is a word we don’t hear much nowadays. It comes from the Roman word dignitas, meaning the worth of a person. The Romans talked about this a lot, it was the primary measure of worth in their society. Over time, the meaning and spelling of a word can shift, but experts will tell you that the oldest and most important words - blood, death, shit, flea, fuck, etc. - change the least. The fact that dignitas has retained it’s spelling and meaning for such a long time suggests it’s a very important word for humans.
This blog (?) draws on lessons from history, our operating experience running high growth companies, the collective experience of Silicon Valley and the projection of current trends. Our goal is to demonstrate the importance of dignity in business, how it helps a business to get ahead, and especially, how it can help address the new challenges in front of businesses everywhere in the 21st century.
What this blog (?) is notis consciously political or advocating one way is better and the other completely broken. As politics and division seemingly suffuses everything in the current moment, we believe that the best way businesses can help is to focus on the basics, starting with the humans.
Furthermore, dignity has two very special characteristics: even a little extra will help; and anyone can do it. This means that any reader at any level should benefit from reading even part of our work, or at least that is our hope.
Finally, we exhort you to approach our work as a point-in-time statement of a philosophy. Like any philosophy, more time and minds will help mature and develop the idea, especially as we master it and it becomes normal. We have tried very hard to try and be as objective and neutral as we could, and naturally some human biases will unconsciously emerge here and there. If you look for the parts that do make sense and focus on those, then you will have learnt the biggest lesson of all on Dignity: everything has some value, it’s just figuring out what it is and how valuable it is to you that’s the trick.
Over the coming months we will be sharing with you not only the practical benefits and philosophical insights that have come about when companies take care to nourish dignity, but also some frameworks and disciplines that wil allow an effective and scalable deployment of what is increasingly known as a ‘Dignitocracy’.
Mat Ellis is an tech entrepreneur, most recently Founder & CEO at Cloudablity, acquired by Apptio in 2019. Currently CEO at Thryve and Managing Partner at Sunny Ventures, he is well known as an investor, advisor and mentor to startups around the world. Originally from the UK, he lives in Portland, OR with his three kids and makes a very decent cup of tea.
Ken Boynton is an award winning writer and Parter at Message Glue, dedicated to helping get your message out there. He has acted, sung, written and made people laugh across the world, sometimes for some very famous people and companies. He lives in Seattle, WA and loves to write in iambic pentameter.
