Wired to Care How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy

Leverage true connections as an engine for growth and change!- Create more actionable understanding of your customers as real human beings, and create high-profit innovations in both current and new markets.- Reveals secrets of winning 'Open Empathy' companies that truly walk in their customers' shoes.- Patnaik has helped the companies in this book leverage empathy for growth, including American Girl, Harley Davidson, Microsoft, and Target. Empathy isn't about being touchy-feely. It's the ability to step outside of yourself and see the world as other people do. Empathy helps to make good leaders into great ones: they see new opportunities faster than their competitors, have the courage to take a risk on something new, and have the gut-level intuition that they need to make the right decisions when the path ahead is unclear. Fostering empathy in an entire organization, however, is much harder. The thousands of people that make up a large company inevitably accumulate implicit experiences, feelings, and insights about people that affect the way that each of them makes decisions. But that does not, however, create an organization that has a collective, widespread sense of empathy. This book explains how companies can challenge themselves to meet their customers more than halfway. The author's original approach walks helps readers shift their thinking and their companies' thinking beyond the borders of the organization. The author begins by having the reader explore their own mental models and maps; explores how size and distance have disconnected companies from their true customers; shows how we are wired to care in our brains; and provides a way for companies to drive growth by understanding this truth about their customers: We are them, and they are us.

DEV PATNAIK is a founder and principal of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm. He is an advisor to some of the world’s most admired companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Target, Nike, and GE. Dev is an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University, where he teaches research methods to design and business school students. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

PETER MORTENSEN is the communications lead at Jump Associates and a blog contributor for Wired.