Issue No. 144 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a Top-10 book in the Customer Bucket—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.” And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
In Search of Empathy
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. This week I found a Top-10 book for my Customer Bucket. 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. (Sorry, Joanne.) 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.
To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, by Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Any chance our organization is guilty of the Jell-O syndrome?
2) Early in his tenure as CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner met with the CEOs of his top customers to find out what IBM was doing wrong. When is the last time we met with our top customers (donors, clients, guests, church members, etc.) and asked what we are doing wrong?
Expect Staff to Bail - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Team Bucket, Chapter 9, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to leverage the strengths of your boss (or board chair) and your direct reports.
If you and your team members have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment from the Gallup organization (see below for more information), but you still can’t remember the Top-5 strengths of your people and you’re not leveraging their strengths every day—expect staff members to bail on you. Gallup reports that costly turn-over is less in organizations where people leverage their strengths every day. (Seventy percent of the workforce do not.) If a “strengths culture” is not in your corporate DNA, you can fix that this week by scheduling a strengths briefing.
For more help, download Worksheet #9.2: My Team’s Top-5 Strengths from the Team Bucket page at my Management Buckets website. Plus, check out the three book recommendations featuring the Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment.
Comments