I’ve spent two decades speaking about human connection, trust, and building real relationships in business. For most of that time, the reaction from a lot of people was polite but dismissive. “Soft skills.” Nice to have. Not the real work.
Meanwhile, every conference keynote was about disruption, digital transformation, AI, scale. The human stuff got a breakout session at 4 PM on the last day of the conference when half the attendees had already left for the airport.
Something shifted.
In 2026 alone, there are at least a dozen major books coming out from major publishing houses on human connection in business. Not from fringe authors. From people like Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, and Brene Brown. Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman’s book Open to Work is already a New York Times bestseller. Kate Murphy’s Why We Click came out in January. Dan Coyle, Marcus Buckingham, Douglas Noll, Asif Sadiq, Josh Block, Adam Markel, John Burrows and Seth Rachlin all have books dropping this year on connection, empathy, belonging, and social capital at work.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a correction.
The business world spent the last several years automating everything it could and going remote wherever possible. And now the research is catching up to confirm what a lot of us saw happening in real time: the organizations that maintained real human connection outperformed the ones that treated people like inputs.
I’m not saying this to take a victory lap. I’m saying it because if you’re a leader, a meeting planner, or anyone responsible for getting people in a room together, this wave of attention is your window. The conversation about human connection in business is about to get very loud. The question is whether you’re already doing the work or scrambling to catch up once it becomes conventional wisdom.
The people who’ve been building trust, designing events around real interaction, and investing in relationships aren’t going to be surprised by any of these books. They’re going to nod and keep going.
The rest are going to wonder why nobody told them sooner.
Somebody did. They just called it soft.