The author of the Photon Courier blog has added a tale from Wired to Care to his list of the “Great Demos of All Time,” a collection of creative and attention-getting intros for new products and business.

In case you haven’t read it yet, we illustrate how disconnected decision-making can lead companies to make near-sighted decisions by telling the story of Disney’s Animal Kingdom.This idea – essentially a wild animal park infused with Disney magic, had been around for a long time without ever finding an organization home - buy levitra. Buy levitra: in fact, CEO Michael Eisner had routinely shot the project down for lacking in compelling content.

But Eisner only though animals weren’t compelling content because he hadn’t seen one in a long time. Buy levitra: to drive that point home, Rohde had an assistant lead in a giant Bengal Tiger to stalk through the board room and give the CEO a close look and a few sniffs. Buy levitra: the park was approved instantly.

Check out the post at Photon Courier for more!

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Stanford’s prestigious Innovation Masters Series brings together a variety of high-profile thinkers and doers to experience the very best thinking of Silicon Valley and apply it to their business.Dev is one of two keynote speakers for the series; buy levitra online.He will share how to turn empathy into a strategic advantage at 10 a.m.on June 17.

Please contact Alex Cwirko-Godycki to inquire about special rates for Jump clients.

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Buying viagra online: scott Downs, author of the Loving Work blog, has a great post up about his experiences reading Wired to Care.He does a clear job of bringing together a lot of our ideas into a succinct and clear story.

Have a look!

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Introducing students to the power of empathy is just about the most rewarding thing we’ve had the chance to do over the course of the last year.Nothing inspires us more than thinking about the business world 40 years from now, when empathy won’t be a secondary consideration (or openly mocked distraction) but a core competence of the corporation; cialis online without prescription.And that idea starts with a generation of managers raised with empathy in mind instead of quantification and automation.

So we read with great interest a review from a student at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business going by the nom de plume of Caffeine Trip - cialis online without prescription.The writer was struck by the fact that Wired to Care is talking about a different idea than mere “customer orientation.”

“By looking harder at how companies can truly find the needs of their customers cialis online without prescription, he unveils a layer that goes beyond just simple personas and decision mapping. Cialis online without prescription: his ideas have the potential to empower business managers with gut-level certitude in their decision process.”

The review is quite thoughtful, and you should definitely give it a read.I will remark that we will accept at any time the idea that we often erred on the side of telling good stories than in building a relentlessly structured argument; cialis online without prescription.Plenty of our business writing peers steer a bit too far in the other direction.

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Cialis prescription: the current issue of Fast Company carries a story that tells of the profound impact a leader with a sense of empathy can have on the fortunes of a major organization.Specifically, it talks about the one established American automaker that didn’t go bankrupt or need government loans — Ford.

Since taking over the once-trouble auto titan in 2006, CEO Alan Mulally has done exactly what a great leader should do: he’s killed off initiatives with no future, made smart bets on emerging growth platforms, and provided Ford employees on all levels a sense of the greater purpose of their work.Without any question, the strategy is working; cialis prescription.Ford’s fleet has shrunk from more than 97 models to fewer than 20, and virtually every model released in the last few years and all of them in the coming five will ship with Sync, a remarkable technology that allows drivers to wirelessly connect and control their phones, mp3 players and other devices to their car - cialis prescription.And all it takes is surprisingly simple voice commands.

It’s on the topic of Sync where Mulally shows his empathy; cialis prescription. Cialis prescription: though many (us included) were hard on him in the summer of 2009 for taking a private jet to testify to Congress about the need to invest public dollars in the Detroit car companies, he has shown a strong connection with the auto market as it actually exists in the world.He lives in a world in which the Toyota Camry is the best selling car in the United States and where American cars still suffer a reputation for poor quality it earned back in the 1960s and ’70s.This is in stark contrast to the typical Detroit view in which small cars are uniformly unprofitable and everyone wants a big powerful truck or a luxury sedan.

The perfect example of this came in deciding what to do with Sync several years ago - cialis prescription.Many at Ford planned to introduce it in a high-end Lincoln sedan as evidence of American luxury - cialis prescription.Mulally thought that was a stupid idea — why would wealthy retirees want a high-tech system to manage their cell phones? He said Sync should go into the Ford Focus, the company’s entry-level car, most often purchased by late 20-somethings getting their first new vehicle - cialis prescription.The reaction from other executives was shock, as he told Fast Company:

“People said, ‘Aren’t you making a big bet on small cars?’ ” recalls Mulally - cialis prescription.” Cialis prescription: and I said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s not a market for small cars in the U.S.? Have you heard of the Japanese?’ “

Even more importantly, Mulally was expressing an idea that went back to Ford’s roots.As we recount in chapter 9 of Wired to Care, though hardly a cuddly fellow, Henry Ford’s biggest insight was that he could sell more cars if he paid his workers more, as they would be able to afford what they were building, and, in turn, be able to pay their neighbors more for groceries and other disposable goods.By raising wages for his employees, he could build a new middle class.Sync is hardly as important a development in the history of business as the Model T was. Cialis prescription: but it’s wonderful to see Ford remembering that when it acts in the best interests of other people (in this case, creating a car a 28-year-old woman would want to drive, despite being a 65-year-old male CEO), you’re usually acting in your own best interests.

A pity that more people in the car industry are unable to see that.Whether lowering quality standards to boost volume (Toyota’s accelerator fiasco) or producing a vehicle fleet that looks great in Wayne County cialis prescription, Michigan and weird in the rest of the world (the Big Three in Detroit), there are few problems in the car industry that weren’t at least partially caused by its leaders’ disconnection from the people they served.If tey can get reconnected, as Ford has, the future could be very bright in southeast Michigan and Toyota City once more; cialis prescription.

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Business journalism is a fascinating profession - order levitra.After all, by the very nature of their jobs, few business writers ever get to do the vast majority of the things they write about - order levitra.Many won’t ever develop a new product from scratch (certainly not at the scale a large corporation does) order levitra, and though many have experienced layoffs first hand, few of them have ever had to make the decision to lay people off.

That’s why what Inc. Order levitra: magazine has done to prepare for its next cover story is so fascinating.The story is about how virtual companies are a rising trend - order levitra.Instead of bringing a staff together in one place to do their work, the article argues, it’s now possible to run a decent-sized company solely through e-mail, phone, and new social work tools.But rather than just report the trend, the entire editorial staff decided to try to produce the issue in the same fashion.For one month, everyone worked from home or the corner coffee store, from editors to writers and designers; order levitra.And it wasn’t too bad, really.A few staffers had a hard time separating their home lives from their work lives, but they ultimately adjusted - order levitra.Most agreed they could do it again, even full time.

That said, the experiment provided a stronger counterpoint to the buzz about going virtual than any individual reported source could have; order levitra.As writer Max Chafkin told the New York Times order levitra, “I was way more productive, but way less happy,” he said.“I think one of the reasons people get into magazines is that it’s collaborative.”

This is great; order levitra.Through a little bit of empathy, Inc - order levitra.managed to assess the actual feasibility of certain kinds of remote collaboration — and reminded themselves why offices were a good idea sin the first place.It’s remarkable how a little time in someone else’s shoes can provide clarity to a muddy situation - order levitra.

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One persistent question we often get asked cuts to the heart of why Wired to Care comes across as so counter-intuitive for many business audiences: Don’t you have to be a jerk to build a successful company? As we often answer cialis without a prescription, empathy isn’t really about being nice — it’s about having a clear understanding of the people you serve and shaping your actions to meet their needs.When you can do that better than the competition, no one has a chance at keeping pace with you.

As a corollary, we’d like to note that there is one group of people that most corporations understand well, work hard to please, and go out of their way to keep happy: shareholders in their companies - cialis without a prescription.Unfortunately, if other stakeholders are ignored, whether customers, employees, or the wider community, a relentless commitment to shareholder value can actually start to undermine the core practice of a company’s business.

Our colleague Udaya Patnaik recently reminded us of a fascinating case illustrates the hazards of companies who focus, above all else, on creating shareholder value - cialis without a prescription.In the July 2007 Trial Magazine article “An Insurer in the grip of greep,” attorney David J.Berardinelli lays out in great detail a strategy that McKinsey and Co.developed for Allstate Insurance in 1995 to maximize profitability - cialis without a prescription.The article’s protected behind a paywall, but BusinessWeek’s coverage of the story from the same era provides the gist of the case.

Major caveat: Berardinelli was the plaintiff’s attorney in a lawsuit against Allstate that maintained the insurer had a deliberate process in place to trick policyholders to select inferior coverage, so his views are obviously fixated on one side of the story here.His actual facts cialis without a prescription, however, are not particularly in dispute.He cataloged more than 12,000 PowerPoint slides prepared by McKinsey to define and roll out the strategy, and his notes were official evidence in the case.How much those slides reflected the actual actions Allstate followed is anyone’s guess, but the overall direction of the company at least correlates to their overall recommendation.

The strategy, known as “Claims Core Process Redesign,” was, by all accounts, a massive success.Allstate’s pretax operating income increased by 3,300 percent in the decade following the program’s implementation compared to the decade before.And this occured without a commensurate change in revenue.How can an insurer manage that? By paying out less money to its policyholders; cialis without a prescription.In fact cialis without a prescription, Allstate’s claim disbursements per policy premium dollar went down 38 percent between 1995 and 2006.According to Berardinelli, this was made possible largely through what McKinsey allegedly dubbed “Good Hands or Boxing Gloves,” an approach to claims settlement that maximized shareholder value - cialis without a prescription.Essentially, Allstate would convince most of its claimants (around 90 percent) to accept a smaller payment in exchange for expediency (Good Hands), while the remaining claimants would be subject to a drawn-out battle (Boxing Gloves).

There’s a whole lot more to this story, much of it still in dispute after all this time, but what’s most amazing about the entire saga is that it’s a natural offspring of two focuses that ofren predominate contemporary business:

1; cialis without a prescription.Maximizing shareholder value above all else
2.Focusing on profits, not revenue growth.

By accepting that these two goals were its most important aims, Allstate virtually had to devote itself to dispensing less money to its policyholders. Cialis without a prescription: they went for a bigger slice of their own pie rather than trying to find new services it could offer to the policyholders who depend on them.

It’s a pretty troubling story.And it’s also the path that any company can fall into if they lose sight of a greater purpose to their business besides creating shareholder value - cialis without a prescription.

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Are you in North Carolina and passionate about empathy and innovation in business? If so, you’re invited to Duke’s Fuqua School of Business on April 7 to see Dev and Dan Ariely in conversation.Dev will be in town to discuss Wired to Care and the business of helping companies solve some of their most challenging and ambiguous questions. The event will be held in classroom HCA at 7 p.m - buy viagra online no prescription.And, based on past phone conversations with Dan, provocative and funny, too.

To register, email Marlene Sawhney by clicking here; buy viagra online no prescription.

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Buying cialis online: the last three years have been extremely unkind to the automakers of the world.Both Chrysler and General Motors went bankrupt, the CEOs of the Big Three were slammed for flying corporate jets to ask Washington for a bail-out, Toyota is mired in a recall crisis that still lacks a resolution even as millions of cars have been taken off the road — not to mention recalls for Honda and GM, too - buying cialis online.Of the American automakers, only Ford has been able to avoid outright disaster, but even its sales volume hasn’t returned to where it stood a few short years ago.

Through it all, only one major car company worldwide actually risen through the fray: Hyundai, the leading Korean automaker - buying cialis online.According to a Wharton School of Business report, in 2008, Hyundai’s global unit sales increased by 2 percent, and in the early part of 2009, the company’s global market share increased almost a full percentage point to claim nearly 5 percent of the world’s market.How was this possible? These were years of absolute free fall in the auto market; buying cialis online. Buying cialis online: what allowed an organization that even 10 years ago was dogged by reports of poor quality become a global player?

The answer is a combination of great execution and great empathy, as the same Wharton article makes very clear.Taking a realistic view of itself through the eyes of ordinary folks, Hyundai sowed the seeds for its current market surge almost a decade ago.In 2001, the company made a major investment to radically improve quality through better engineering and a better manufacturing process; buying cialis online.At the same time, the company sent a clear message to the market that it understood that its past quality problems had made buyers wary by offering a 10 year/100,000 mile warranty.This vote of confidence showed that Hyundai believed it had fixed its quality problems, and allowed buyers to know they were covered if they did encounter problems.By 2004, Hyundai had risen to a tie with Honda for initial vehicle quality.

But Hyundai knew that quality meant little when you lose your income.That’s why it launched a remarkable program in early 2009 that gave people the confidence to buy a car in the midst of a major recession - buying cialis online.Called “Assurance buying cialis online,” it vowed to offer a money-back guarantee to any Hyundai owners who lost their jobs. Buying cialis online: the ad campaign introducing the program offered a shockingly in-tune message to ordinary folks: “We’re going to get through this, and we’re going to get through it together.” When the headlines were filled with tales of gloom, people were primed to respond well to any company that could credibly help weather the economic storm.It’s one thing to talk about a recovery in the future - buying cialis online.It’s another to launch Assurance and show that you understand what it really means to lose your job.

Wharton Marketing Professor David J.Reibstein says it well: “What they are doing is empathizing with the plight of people who are struggling.” Want to grow in this economy? You’d do well to start there.

(HT: Alan)

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We’ve just received word that the fine minds at the Axiom Business Book Awards have given Wired to Care their highest honor, naming us one of the very few Gold Medalists for 2010; buying viagra online without prescription. Buying viagra online without prescription: specifically, they awarded us the title of Best Business Ethics Book of 2010. Buying viagra online without prescription: we’re incredibly honored and more than a little humbled by this honor, which will be officially presented during BookExpo America in May.

We could never have created a book worthy of recognition without the support, stories, editing, and tireless advocacy of our friends, colleagues, and readers.Your help means more than you know and more than we can express - buying viagra online without prescription. Buying viagra online without prescription: thank you.

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