Empathy isn’t a new phenomenon. There was a time not so long ago when there was a broad and deep connection between producers and consumers that allowed everyone to prosper.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik with Pete Mortensen, copyright 2009 Jump Associates.

For all of the Industrial Revolution’s wonderful impacts on the ability of the average person to go into business, it also created a giant rift between producers and consumers. Nearly overnight, we went from a world of face-to-face commercial transactions to a world that was simultaneously more connected and further apart. Today, we make things for people we’ve never met. The United States has a gross domestic product of more than $13 trillion, including more than $1 trillion in exports. More than 60 percent of those exports travel beyond North America, reaching markets and peoples that Americans know very little about. We also import about $2 trillion worth of goods per year, more than 70 percent of it arriving from outside North America. This gulf between producers and consumers is mirrored around the world. Japanese companies sell electronics and cars to Europe and the United States, who export their own cars to each other; India and China dominate manufacturing for soft and hard goods worldwide. India has pioneered techniques for software development and customer management that don’t require its people to ever see a customer firsthand. As a result, few producers have a clear picture of what life is really like for the people who buy their products. It’s as if we’re all playing the Play-Doh game with people who live on the other side of the planet, creating utensils to help them eat a food we’ve often never tasted ourselves.

Consider the example of the Tubbs Snowshoe Company. If you’re looking to go on a winter hike through deep snow, you might want to get a pair of Tubbs snowshoes. They’re light, strong, and they look great, too. Tubbs owner Ed Kiniry first produced the metal snowshoes in 1987, back when everyone else was making old-fashioned wooden shoes. Tubbs snowshoes used to be made in the tiny resort town of Stowe, Vermont by folks who loved to spend time outdoors in the snow. Today, the shoes are made in Guangzhou, China, by workers who see snow about as often as a blizzard strikes Miami Beach. It turns out that in 2004, Kiniry sold Tubbs to K2, a large sports equipment company well known for its skis. K2 moved snowshoe production to its manufacturing complex in Guangzhou. Located near the South China Sea, Guangzhou is an industrial city larger than Los Angeles. The weather tends to be hot and humid in the summer and dry and mild in the winter. It’s about as far away from snowshoe country as you can get.

It should be noted that the factory in Guangzhou makes snowshoes that are every bit as good as the ones that were made in Vermont. But something has been lost when snowshoes are made by people who’ve never seen snow. It’s unclear how workers in the Guangzhou complex can know whether the shoes they make are any good. While K2’s designers and executives reside in cooler regions and have a sense for snow sports, the company has lost any sort of frontline feedback to make up for leaders’ blind spots. Workers at the Guangzhou facility don’t have great intuition for how to improve the snowshoes they work on every day. They’ll probably never come up with a radically new direction for the industry the way Vermont native Ed Kiniry did when he improved on the old wooden designs. None of this is to say that employees at the K2 facility aren’t creative or don’t want to make things better. They’re simply so far removed from their customers that they have the deck stacked against them.

The challenges facing the makers of Tubbs Snowshoes going forward reflect an important truth of the global economy: it’s much harder to succeed when you create things for people you don’t know and whose lives seem alien to your own. When companies make products for people who live far away from them, they often make silly mistakes in their design and marketing. These mistakes are caused at least in part by linguistic and cultural differences. Americans who don’t speak Swedish are more likely to accidentally select a funny or offensive name for their Swedish products. Not so long ago, one of the largest manufacturers of men’s underwear in China considered entering the U.S. market only to find that Pansy brand underwear wouldn’t exactly click with American men!

Before the Industrial Revolution, it was fairly easy to guess which products would sell well. Producers and consumers led similar lives and shared tremendous implicit knowledge about each other. The broader the reach of individual companies has become, the more that this implicit connection between producer and consumer has diminished. Manufacturing managers in Guangzhou don’t intuitively know what life is like for someone who loves to snowshoe. Brand managers in Battle Creek, Michigan, have little sense for what children in New Delhi want for breakfast. Engineers in Silicon Valley create computer software for retirees in Palm Beach without any sense of what it’s like to be older. Marketers in financial services companies are unfamiliar with the everyday challenges facing the rural poor who sign up for their car loans. Companies don’t know their customers on a personal level, so they struggle to create and market products that resonate with ordinary folks. Leaders are left to conclude that they can’t accurately predict the success or failure of any individual initiative without sophisticated testing. Despite living in an age where technology has made always-on data connections ubiquitous, we are more disconnected from the people we impact than at any other time in human history.

Though immediacy in commerce has become a rare commodity, it hasn’t gone away altogether. Moreover, we still crave it. Fortunate is the company that knows its customers as real people. We all prefer to buy products from businesses that show real knowledge of our needs. And people who understand how their work plays a positive role in the lives of their customers produce better results and feel better about it, too. Creating greater empathy within the business world could have many different outcomes, from positive social change to greater revenue growth. Of all the possible results, however, this one is most certain: Empathy can help draw producers and consumers together, and heal the rift that began with the Industrial Revolution. To better understand what that looks like, I decided to visit one of the oldest companies in the world. For nearly 400 years, it has maintained a closeness to the people it serves that has transcended any kind of market research or customer testing. The result is a relationship that has stood the test of time.