Highlights: Wired to Care

Sharing highlights from Dev Patnaik's Wired to Care.

 People discover unseen opportunities when they have a personal and empathic connection with the world around them.

 For individuals, that means developing the ability to walk in other people’s shoes. For companies and other large institutions, that means finding a way to bring the rest of the world inside their walls When people in an organization develop a shared and intuitive vibe for what’s going on in the world, they’re able to see new opportunities faster than their competitors

 Over time, that implicit connection to the outside world helps blur the line between producers and consumers. Between inside the building and out. Between us and them. Harley likes to call the folks who buy its motorcycles riders, not customers, if only because so many Harley employees are riders themselves

 Having an intuitive understanding of other people can help overcome these challenges. Empathy for the people you serve can make the abstract more grounded and immediate because that information is now connected to a real person you know. It can provide context for the data we receive by incorporating factors left off the map

 What these practices have in common is that they go to great lengths to make commerce more immediate, in contrast to the rest of the business world. They step outside themselves to directly gain experience of their customers’ lives. To them, people are much more than a collection of facts. Companies benefit when they find ways to make the invisible facts of life more concrete, by getting outside and meeting the people that they might otherwise only read about in the newspaper or in a market research report

 You see, on some level, a great product has to function like a great gift. It’s a physical manifestation of a relationship. It’s both an embodiment of who the giver is and what they think of the receiver 

 While having empathy for other people is a good thing for us to do as individuals, it’s far more powerful when you can create widespread empathy throughout a large organization

 But the first steps toward an Open Empathy Organization are simple: Take the way that you already work today and add in easy, everyday, and experiential activities that put you in the shoes of the people you serve

Wired to Care

I just started reading Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Capture Widespread Empathy by Dev Patnaik.  In building a case for empathy, Patnaik shares how several business such as Harley-Davidson and the Zildjian Cymbal Company have prospered from building close and personal relationships with customers.  Patnaik also shares the story of Nina Planck and the London Farmers' Markets as further evidence that businesses need to understand, on a personal level, the thoughts and feelings of valued customers.

Nina Planck was living in London at the end of the 1990s working as a speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.  One day Planck left her apartment searching for carrots.  Planck ventured to the local market and a grabbed a bag of carrots.  However, before checking-out, Planck realized that the carrots were from France.  This lead Planck to review the packaging of vegetables in the produce section and the realization that nearly all of the produce was imported.

Planck had just discovered a little-known secret of Britain's food supply: More than half of its vegetables are imported, and more than 95 percent of its fruit comes from overseas.- Patnaik

Planck was shocked by this observation and set out to establish a small urban farmers' market in London.  She began contacting farmers and inviting them to sell goods at her new market.  

 She only had two conditions:  Their crops had to be grown within a hundred miles of London, and they could sell only what they grew themselves.  This was a marked rebuttal to the complex supply chain needed to provide organic tomatoes from Israel to a shop on a London street corner... she called her idea the Wheatland Farmers' Market in honor of her home town.- Patnaik

Planck opened her market on June 6, 1999.  Planck's markets have been well-received by Londoners.  Planck now operates 14 markets throughout London.  She has opened another dozen in the United States and now there are more than 400 farmers' markets in Britain.  

Patnaik shares the following thought about Planck and her story.  

Her farmers' markets did more than offer good veggies to upwardly mobile urbanites.  They were a forum for bringing producers and consumers back together.  That intimacy has acted as a sort of market accelerator to make sure that her shoppers get the best possible food and her farmers get the best  possible prices.

 I like the way Patnaik assessed the growth of Plank's farmers' markets.  The intimacy between farmers and shoppers has been a significant factor in increasing the popularity of these urban markets.  In creating a scenario where producer and consumer meet each other, a strong bond has been developed or as Patnaik puts it an empathic connection forged.

I wonder what schools could learn from Planck and the London Farmers' Markets.  Intimacy is not a term often associated with education and schools.  However, how well do contributing groups of stakeholders now each other?  Is there a level of intimacy that reveals valuable data to help an institution grow and address critical needs?

In promoting empathetic connections Patnaik says:

Producers move to better methods of production, because they know their consumers care about the environment and the health of their families. They cut fewer corners and make choices that are ethically right, because they know that the consumers who could be affected by their decisions are real people with feelings and needs of their own.  At the same time, consumers act differently toward producers when they see them not as companies, but as real people.  That empathetic connection then enables a better transaction... People want to make connections with folks they do business with.

 I see the above excerpt as a guide.  Greater empathetic connections need to be fostered in schools.   A greater level of intimacy needs to exist to ensure that ethical and effective decision-making is possible.  The connections we make that extends beyond academic content, grades and state testing lie at the heart of improving our educational institutions.