empathy in business

journey to the center of the mind -amboy dukes

i was just reading the latest post from palojono, an industrial designer who has his own blog providing insight on design and the nuances around it's effectiveness. or at least, how i read it.
whoever is in business and is reading this post, check this below. highly relevant for both service and goods business, B2B or B2C.
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Wired to Care: How companies prosper when they create widespread empathy

I've talked about empathy a number of times in the past year, in the context both of having empathy for eventual users of your offerings, and having empathy for other members of your design team. In particular, my thesis, Effective Framing in Design, was about getting these two aspects to align. Being able to put aside your issues and put yourself in other's shoes is a key ingredient to eventual market success because it allows you to develop offerings others really want.
I'm excited to talk about empathy again because Jump's CEO Dev Patnaik (and Pete Mortensen), who together with Michael Barry taught me needfinding at Stanford, just released a book on how creating widespread empathy - empathy across a whole organization - helps companies prosper. It's called Wired to Care.
I'm not all the way through it yet, but so far it's packed with engaging stories about different companies' efforts to understand their customers through empathy. It also makes a great case for why empathy matters to business and, ironically, how the skill we all have wired into us is so easily lost in the setting of large organizations. Fortunately, there's also plenty of examples of how some companies manage to build and keep a sense of empathy.
For an interesting exercise take a look at the Wired to Care website's empathometer: a popular gauge of how empathic different companies are seen. As of writing, for example, Delta Air Lines, whose employees I am told always get to fly first class, score low, while Virgin who seem to constantly be trying to make flying a nicer experience, score high empathy.
The low-granularity of the empathometer also signals an important challenge we continue to face, which is how to put a number next to the gut-feel sense of empathy if it really can have the impact we think it can have. In my research I drew from both self-assessment survey data and team interviews, but tying this back to business $ is an interesting challenge.
From my perspective it's great to see a topic that's received much academic research attention step over into the mainstream bookstore.
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To get a better feel for the book you can also watch an early Wired to Care presentation by Dev at a General Mills speaker series.