Near Zero Labs · A film in 4:27
If the machines carry the work, what is human life for?
The cost of doing almost anything is falling toward zero. We rebuild companies around that fact, and help the people inside them turn what it gives back into a fuller life.
Near zero drag · Full-scale life
Something remarkable is happening
The cost of doing things is falling toward zero.
Writing, research, scheduling, analysis. Every month the machine carries more of the work, and most people meet that with fear. We would rather meet it with a question.
For the first time in history, one technology is changing two things at once: how an organization works, and the people who work inside it.
What near zero looks like
Drag goes to zero. What’s left is human.
Look at your week. The status report. The meeting about the meeting. Numbers retyped from one system into the next. Approvals nobody reads. The reminder about the reminder. An inbox that refills overnight. None of it needs you. All of it is drag.
Kindness. Curiosity. Courage. Taste. Presence. Wonder.
Drag goes to zero. What’s left is human.
The principle
Zero people doing what machines do best.
Zero machines doing what makes us human.
That is the whole idea. Everything here applies it twice: once to the company, and once to the life of everyone inside it.
Two halves of one idea.
A company is a system, and it is also the people who go home from it at night. Near Zero Labs works on both, because changing one without the other doesn’t hold.
The Revenue
The company you’d build today. Rebuild the technology map and the people map together, so fewer, better humans direct the machines and growth stops being priced in headcount.
Rebuild your company Near Zero Living · Half 02The Human
The life you’d live with what it gives back. Drive everything that drains you toward zero. Turn everything that makes you human all the way up.
Explore near-zero livingPut them together and this stops being a business strategy. It becomes a rethink of how we work, how we live, and what we build together.
You are running yesterday’s company.
The technology map and the people map were both redrawn while you were running the one you have. Rebuild them together and fewer people carry far less busywork, so the people you keep do the work only they can do.
Micro experiment · 90 minutes · Live
The $1,000 Cup of Coffee Tequila.
Not ready for a full engagement? Start smaller: a 90-minute Zoom call, one-on-one with us. Bring your business, and live, on screen, we drive the friction toward zero and build what’s next: new site directions, new ads, new ideas. You keep every asset we make.
What about the humans left behind?
300 → 60 is a design. It is also 240 people. Near Zero, the book, takes that number as seriously as the margin: what a company owes the people its rebuild doesn’t need, why the forty-hour week and the idea that we are what we do are up for redesign too, and the one test every answer has to pass.
Does it free people to move, or pay them to stay still?
Fewer humans. Elevated, not eliminated. And a plan for everyone else.
By Jonathan Whistman, author of The Sales Boss and The Unrecruitable. Amazon link coming.
For generations, the first thing we asked a strangerThe question that matters now
What we meant was: what’s your job, what’s your title, what’s your role in the machine, where do you stack up? That question is fading. The one that matters more now is deeper.
Not your job. Not your title. Not where you stack up in the machine. The human.
In their words.
Clients on what changed when the drag came off. Tap any story to play it. See the whole gallery.