Consultant Bill Self has a great post up on his Thinking Like a Customer blog this week in which he pinpoints one of the chief benefits of an empathy-driven organization: context for your business. Why you work, who it’s really for, what value you can deliver. When you really understand how other people view the world, you get great clarity about what you can do to help them out. Drawing on our “Open Empathy Organizations” article in Rotman Magazine, he makes a clear case for how empathy and context create a big advantage.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:20 am
Thank you for adding to my post about how empathy-driven business cultures create their own advantages. I applaud what you are doing and writing about in your Wired to
Care-related articles. The space that you have defined as empathy, which we call thinking-like-a-customer, is the ultimate differentiator. It creates a sense of possibility for organizations and helps them meet the future proactively rather than reactively because it is action-oriented.
Empathy energizes the organizations that embrace this culture. Being customer-centered channels thought away from what worked in the past into a future base on continuous improvement. As you point out so clearly in your book, it is the foundation for big ideas and non-stop creativity.
What employee doesn’t want to be part of designing the future for his or her company?