Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy

This book is a sleeper that, I predict, will become a classic. The author writes, "More than one business leader has complained to me that their company is attracting smart and ambitious young people who lack any sort of gut sense for the work they do."I'm on the hunt for the 10 best books for each of the 20 buckets (critical competencies) that help all of us with leadership and management issues. Dev Patnaik's book is a gem and immediately landed a spot on my Top-10 books for the Customer Bucket. (See my book,  Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit .) I'll tempt you with three stories on how "widespread empathy" (what's going on in other people's lives) will help you stay close to the customer.STORY #1: Eisner's Tiger Encounter. When Joe Rohde, a Disney Imagineer, wanted to convince Michael Eisner to open a safari-like experience for guests, he needed a way to get past the mantra "Disney doesn't do zoos." After making the pitch to CEO Eisner (still unimpressed), Rohde opened the doors of the executive suite to let in a 400-pound Bengal tiger. After experiencing this immense beast (bigger than his desk) up close, Eisner responded simply, "I see your point." Disney's Animal Kingdom was born.STORY #2: Eat More Jell-O. Author Dev Patnaik, founder and principal of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm, was invited to meet with the senior leadership of Jell-O about their declining sales. "For several hours, we sat through presentation after presentation of depressing quantitative research that described the situation. At some point, I had to raise my hand. I looked around the room and asked if anyone there had eaten any Jell-O in the past six months. No one raised a hand. Interesting, I said. Maybe that was part of the problem."STORY #3: Mercedes-Benz. Twenty senior executives from Mercedes-Benz flew from Germany to San Francisco to meet with Patnaik to learn how their cars could appeal to younger Americans. To help them develop empathy for this customer niche, Patnaik assigned each team of two executives to a 20-something person. After 30 minutes of interviews, each team of two was given $50 and a city map with an assignment: purchase a gift for the person they just met. Some teams blew it (San Francisco mementos for people who lived in San Francisco), but other teams were able to experience life in their customers' shoes and bought very meaningful gifts. Patnaik's point: "a great product has to function like a great gift."THE BIG IDEA. "...as companies grow larger and more prosperous," says Patnaik, "they start to look less and less like their customers. Airline executives stop flying economy class. The little tomato sauce company starts to attract Harvard MBAs who eat out all the time and never cook their own spaghetti. The lives of the people that the company employs become less and less like the lives of ordinary folks. Continued for too long, this gap can grow into an overwhelming gulf between the people inside of a company and everyone else."After 50 pages of non-stop defining business stories, I knew this book was a keeper. After 100 pages, I couldn't stop reading the stories to my wife--a sign of a great book. It reminded me of the Tom Peters and Robert Waterman 1982 classic, "In Search of Excellence." You could call this one, "In Search of Empathy."

More often than it would seem possible, I'll read one book, only to have another book come into my hands which so wonderfully complements the first that I couldn't have done better if I had tried. That happened with "Wired to Care"...this book came on the heels of my reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" and I can heartily recommend reading them both, in that order.Pink makes the case for the need for six traits (right-brain or whole-minded traits) that will be essential for workers who want to thrive in "the conceptual age". Those traits are: design, story, sympathy, play, meaning AND empathy."Wired to Care" concentrates on one of those traits, empathy. Patnaik uses experiences from his work at Jump Associates and his academic appointment at Stanford University to populate his book with compelling and relevant examples of what empathy looks like when it's translated into a business maxim. He shows how Detroit's car industry problems are related to a lack of empathy, how a political race (Bush, Sr. vs Clinton) was impacted by the empathy (who had it and who didn't), how Harley-Davidson resurrected itself and how Clorox gained insight that helped it define new directions to take by using empathy. Empathy helps the bottom line - because it helps companies reach, understand and provide exactly the kind of goods and services their customers want.Empathy can have added benefits - it can give employees a powerful reason to come to work every day. "Empathy," says Patnaik "helps transform jobs into careers and careers into callings." He notes "A job will deplete you, a calling will energize you, and a career is somewhere in between." A culture of empathy also results in a more ethical business/company/corporation. "Widespread Empathy" can be "an effective way to ensure the morality of a large institution, more so than any rulebook or code of conduct," according to Patnaik. Having an empathic environment within a corporation makes the ability to tell right from wrong a whole lot easier: "organizations that have real sympathy for the people they serve can be governed by the simplest law of all: the Golden Rule."One would wish that this book could be made required reading for all CEOs, Wall Street bankers, politicians and leaders of industry. On the Jump Associates website is the following: "The Harvard Business Review is currently hosting a fascinating debate on how to fix business schools. Jump's Dev Patnaik is now a featured commentator in the debate, and his first post cuts to the root of the problem: maybe we have selfish business leaders because business school rewards ruthlessness?"Someone please put this man in charge of business school curriculums...with an approach like Patnaik's, how much of the current financial and ethical meltdown could have been avoided if the lessons he teaches had been instilled in the current crop of head honchos? They didn't get this kind of ethical guidance; maybe we can do better with the up-and-coming generation. Read Patnaik and envision how ALL companies could be...read Patnaik and know how much better your company can be with empathy as a cornerstone.

I stopped reading this book, it could be me but most of this is common sense and a lot is wishful thinking.Anyway, not a bad book but I would not hesitate to re-sell.