Thanks to Arie Goldshlager (@ariegoldshlager on Twitter) who pointed me to Dev Patnaik’s book called Wire to Care.  Dev is founder and principal of Jump Associates, consulting on innovative practices to leading businesses.  He also teaches design concepts to students of both design and business at Stanford.

I’ve ordered the book. While I’m waiting for it to arrive, I enjoyed Dev’s video highlighting some of his key ideas.

Dev’s thesis is that empathy – a real gut-level feeling for customers – can be a key to corporate success, and particularly to the ability to innovate.  That’s music to my ears.

Here are some quotations from Dev on the video:

“Every single one of us understands what empathy is on a personal level.    That’s because we are blessed with the ability to connect with other people.   We’re born with this biological power to connect with other folks.   To step outside of ourselves and walk in someone else’s shoes.  To intuitively get where that person is coming from, and get their feelings and their point of view.”

“For an organization, having a widespread sense of empathy is to get every single person in that organization to have an intuitive sense of the people beyond their walls, for the folks who buy our products and services, and who ultimately fund our 401(k)’s, the people who actually have a stake in our success.   If we can get…everybody in the company to have that kind of gut-sense intuition for ordinary people, what we find is that the companies do better as a result.”

“The real power of empathy, and it’s something that surprised us when we started looking at the topic: yes, empathy will allow you to know things in your gut before the rest of us read about it in the Wall Street Journal, and yes, it will give you the courage of your convicitions to act on something, to take a risk on something new, but the big surprise for us was how much that sense of empathy for the world around you …gives people something that companies struggle with, which is to give their folks a sense of mission, to give people a reason to come in to work every day.”

“When you connect with the outside world, you suddenly realize that there are all these people out there who are counting on me, counting on me to do the right thing.   And so you start to see your business in a completely different way.”

“We need a gut level intuition and an empathy for people, so we can actually solve their problems, because that’s worth paying for.”

“Empathy is the key to innovation.”

Dev recalls giving a talk about empathy at GE.   Afterwards, he tells how “two guys came up to me.  Each of them had worked at GE for over 30 years.  They said, ‘You’re absolutely right.  Empathy is what we need around here.   That’s how we used to do business.   We’ve just been pushing the money around.’   Dev says experiences like this give him hope for GE, and others.

“We’ve gotten away from that (spirit of empathy)” he says.  ”We’re doing things that are good for the bottom line today, this week, rather than what’s good for the company and its customers and its shareholders over the long term.”

I look forward to learning more from Dev and others as they follow the stories of  the companies  building their cultures, and their success in the market, around empathy, empathy focused both outward to customers and business partners, and inward toward colleagues.

Here is the link to the Wired to Care website http://www.wiredtocare.com/ and here is the one for Jump Associates http://www.jumpassociates.com/

Scott is @scottdowns3 on Twitter

business · community · culture · customers · empathy · heart · innovation · profit · service · value

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