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

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."

Wired to Care combines real life stories about many companies we know and understand along with business background information to help us apply the lessons to the places we work.

The core message here is that caring for your customers isn't just new-agey PR material. It provides tangible benefits for your company and helps you succeed.

The examples demonstrate this lesson. Many motorcycle companies were failing - but Harley Davidson put its efforts into building up its connections with its loyal fans. It was those fans who helped Harley thrive in a down economy.

You need to really know where your customers are coming from. Many if not most Harley employees own and ride Harleys. A schoolteacher doesn't need to BE eight years old, but she needs to understand what eight year olds worry about and how they learn best. An Indian doctor is not African-American, but she can still work to understand her patient's concerns.

Microsoft is a juggernaut - but they have had successes and failures. When they wanted to make a game system, they took a bunch of gamers, had them develop a system THEY would love, and they were able to take on the powerhouses of Sony and Nintendo. However, turning their attention on Apple's iPod, they didn't build the same quality team of "music lovers". The result was a MP3 player which failed miserably.

I loved the story about coffee. Several decades ago Arabica (tasty coffee) was expensive, while Robusta (bitter) was cheap. Coffee manufacturers slowly added more and more robusta into their blend over the years. Existing coffee drinkers got used to the new flavor and coffee makers thought they were all set. However, they weren't bringing in new drinkers! Young people who tried coffee thought that older people were insane to drink this bitter brew. It wasn't until coffeehouses started coming out with all Arabica coffee again that younger people saw just how tasty a good coffee could be.

Zildjian took the cymbal, which was an orchestra-only instrument, and by talking with musicians in small bars, created an entire new market for their crashes and rides. They were hugely successful even in the middle of the great depression.

Numerous studies show that our brains light up when we relate to someone. If we see them pick up a book, to our brain it's almost as if WE picked up a book. So by having customers who relate to your company on a personal level, you have already made those connections that will keep them supporting you and buying your products.

There was just one minor complaint with the book. At one point they are talking about how a book was written with suggestions to save money. The money-saving book talked about looking at what other people had put out for trash / recycling and if something seemed interesting. Wired to Care felt this was "inhuman" advice. Inhuman? I know many people who swap things with their neighbors and they all feel it's a quite fun way to keep items out of the trash stream. I would hardly feel this is inhuman. If anything, we should all be swapping used goods more often, and recycling more, rather than throwing away so much stuff.

Still, a small issue in a great book.

This book presents a design-inspired exploration of empathy as a driver of business growth, sustenance and ethical behavior. It provides a practical body of work on the importance of empathy as it relates to customer connections and market engagement.

While the author suggests that empathy has been detached from modern capitalism and the contemporary organization by default, one sees the presence of empathy in several exemplary, large companies. Further, Patnaik gives reference to the common religious, cultural and philosophical roots of empathy that are met in the forces of neurophysiology to suggest that empathy is part of our make-up, our meaning and our human purpose.

A couple of slot-references in Wired to Care are especially useful and valuable to those who lead and manage growth strategy:

1.Getting Beyond Original Visions... organizations are evolving entities that must transcend what energies and inventions may have given them their rise. What founders gave, others must advance.
2.Getting a Deeper Sense of Meaning... companies are culture-sensing entities, and as such, people who lead and manage must have their "meaning-making" gears engaged to sustain themselves.

This book is a nice complement to Prepared and Resolved in terms of both orientation and strategic approach. Patnaik references thought leadership that includes Dale Carnegie, Mintzberg, Gandhi and the world's faith traditions as guideposts for creating widespread empathy. As strategists and researchers have noted for a long time, getting close to customers is a powerful thing. Patnaik and his team at Jump take this to a higher level of engagement, which is a more powerful thing. Drucker and others would agree as part of what we see as the social ecology mindset of business.