Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

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  Contents

  Introduction

  1. The Way In

  2. The Seven Faces of Empathy

  3. Connecting to Your Whole Self

  4. Showing Up

  5. Timeless Empathy

  6. Our Role in Context

  7. Ritual Creates Reality

  Encouraging Empathy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  For Caroline and Darryl, two of my greatest teachers

  Introduction

  Empathy is a squishy word. Sometimes it’s confused with sympathy or misinterpreted as “being nice.” That isn’t empathy. Empathy is about understanding. Empathy lets us see the world from other points of view and helps us form insights that can lead us to new and better ways of thinking, being, and doing.

  The words business and empathy are rarely used together—in fact, for some of us they might even sound oxymoronic, but there are incredible benefits to taking on others’ perspectives in the context of our professional lives. That’s what Applied Empathy is about. Empathy is not some out-of-reach mystical power. Instead it is a skill that each of us can make a part of our daily practice and ultimately bring into the organizations we serve.

  This book presents a set of tools and ideas for applying empathy to:

  • Understanding your customers’ needs and improving your products and services by infusing them with rich, meaningful insights gleaned from a newfound perspective.

  • Connecting and collaborating with your teams more effectively—understanding the skills and styles of each person and how to get the most out of your interactions.

  • Leading with a new awareness that will undoubtedly aid you in not only understanding others better but, perhaps more important, understanding the truest aspects of your own self.

  Applying empathy may seem obvious for one-to-one interactions, and it is a critical part of any good relationship, but it’s also a powerful advantage when applied at the business level to gain perspective within your company’s walls and in the world within which the company operates.

  There are countless instances in the business world where companies have missed the opportunity to apply empathy, many of them paying dearly for the oversight.

  One of the most infamous was Xerox’s fumbled opportunity to lead the personal computing industry. Back in the 1960s, Xerox’s 914 photocopier revolutionized the business world. At the same time, the company’s innovation facility, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), was fast at work developing other new and insightful products. One of those was the Xerox Alto, the first fully functional personal computer. It had processing power, a graphic interface, and even a mouse. So why isn’t Xerox a computing juggernaut today?

  In the 1970s, Xerox’s leadership was largely focused on raking in the massive profits generated by the 914 photocopier—which was not sold but leased to customers, who were charged per page—instead of looking out into the world and using empathy to sense the growing demand for personal computing. They didn’t do anything with the Alto or, frankly, with many of the other great inventions that PARC was churning out. They were preoccupied with their current successes and uninterested in understanding the shifting consumer needs around them. As a result, they missed one of the greatest technology booms the business world has ever experienced.

  Another more recent example of a lack of empathic leadership can be seen in the music industry’s inglorious failure to participate in the digital music revolution. While executives stretched their travel and expense accounts to the max and obsessed over CD distribution deals with brick-and-mortar retailers, Napster and LimeWire were hard at work building a completely new, and more empathic, distribution system that aligned with consumers and their needs (though not empathic to the artists or the record industry they were disrupting). Missing that opportunity crushed the major music labels’ business and gave rise to powerhouses such as Apple Music and Spotify.

  Would empathy alone have saved those companies from disaster? It’s hard to say. But had they applied empathy more meaningfully in their decision-making, they could have recognized new and innovative ways to lead their businesses into the next era.

  Fortunately, plenty of companies are applying empathy to solve tough challenges and lead teams with new and powerful insight.

  A darling of the start-up world, Warby Parker’s meteoric growth can be closely mapped to its executives’ clear understanding of the “grit” in the retail eyewear experience. Consumers weren’t getting what they needed from any of the big players in the space, and Warby Parker’s founders saw an opportunity to jump into the category offering a more human, service-oriented approach that has been voraciously embraced. (Full disclosure: we’ve worked with them and can attest to their empathic strengths firsthand.)

  One of my favorite empathic thinkers is Elon Musk. He truly understands the needs of the market and has proven to be a powerful innovator and entrepreneur who can apply his understanding to a variety of industries. Most recently, he’s decided to take on the challenge of “soul-crushing traffic.” His venture, The Boring Company, is solving this problem in an unexpected way. While everyone from Hollywood moviemakers to Ivy League–educated futurists has spent time imagining a world full of flying cars, Musk has taken his vision to a subterranean level, focusing instead on building a technologically advanced tunneling business designed to solve our increasingly gridlocked roadways by expanding them to the ground below us.

  These companies and their leaders understand how to use empathy to look at problems differently and create solutions that not only disrupt conventions but use empathy as a powerful tool.

  My own company, Sub Rosa, is a strategy and design studio that works with large, often complex corporations as well as progressive thinkers in government, entertainment, and the start-up world to help them evolve their businesses with empathy. We have worked with some of the world’s most recognizable companies and leaders, and I’m proud that those clients have sought us out because we offer fresh solutions that support their need to explore, learn, and grow.

  Our clients come to us because we can help them figure out who they truly are, what they are actually trying to accomplish, and, perhaps most important, show them how to take their goals or their businesses to a higher level.

  • We’ve worked with countless CEOs and leadership teams to think differently about how empathy can ignite a spirit of creativity, innovation, and growth in the hearts and minds of their teams around the world.

  • We’ve helped one of the world’s most successful athletes understand himself and his brand with empathy—giving him a mission and vision that will take his career to new heights.

  • We even brought empathy into the West Wing of the Obama White House, applying our thinking to a series of initiatives started by the first family to help bring a greater sense of understanding to our nation’s indigenous people’s rights and resources.

  Empathy lets us better understand the people we are trying to serve and gives us perspective and insight that can drive greater, more effective actions. The seemingly magical quality of empathy is the connection it helps us form with other people. Some of us are born with an overwhelming degree of empathy, while others are callous or
even blind to the perspectives of others. The rest of us fall somewhere in between. But empathy is more than just a natural talent; it can also be a process, a learned skill, developed and applied when and where needed.

  Applied Empathy begins with my journey of discovery, one that led to an early client assignment that helped those of us at Sub Rosa define who we are and how we approach our work. Through that project and others like it, we developed what we call Empathic Archetypes along with an understanding of the complex world within ourselves that we term the Whole Self. After establishing this baseline of empathic thinking, I will show you how leaders manifest empathy and how they encourage it in others. From there, we’ll continue to dive deeper into empathy, looking at its role in the world around us. We’ll look at its timeless nature, drawing from lessons of the past, present, and future; its application in the context of some of today’s tough business challenges; how it can play a role in evolving our own realities; and why now, more than perhaps at any other time in human history, we need it to solve the challenges lying before us.

  Our best work demands empathy, and that means each of us must be able to call on it when needed, regardless of mood or circumstances. To help elevate empathy from a buzzword to a reliable, repeatable, and responsive tool, I’ve taken all the lessons and thinking we’ve amassed on this topic and poured them into this book. May it bring to you the same appreciation for understanding it has brought to me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Way In

  “If you don’t get into trouble, you’ll never learn how to get out of it.” That was the advice a friend’s dad gave me back in 2003. I was twenty-three years old, had a little less than two years of advertising experience, and had just lost my job. I wasn’t sure about the risk I was about to take, but I was ready to meet whatever challenges I was about to face head-on.

  With faith in myself and the people around me, I decided to found my own company, a design agency in New York City that would grow into the business I run today. The risk of starting my own business would be the first of many challenges I’d encounter as an entrepreneur. More than a decade later, my company, Sub Rosa, has worked with some of the world’s largest and most important brands and organizations, from Google, Johnson & Johnson, and Nike to TED, the United Nations, and even the Obama White House.

  I often say we work as translators. Companies and organizations bring us in to help them establish their vision, share their message, or bring something new to the world. We work with them to create a plan, to see a path toward what they want to become, and then we help enact it. Sub Rosa is full of talented people—designers, strategists, technologists, producers, and researchers, to name a few. We are the “land of misfit toys,” mixed with a drawer full of Swiss Army knives. Perhaps paradoxical for some, most of the time our best work leads to our own obsolescence. But we see that as a good thing. In essence, we solve problems using an approach we call Applied Empathy, and through this process we empower companies to explore, learn, and grow along with us. It’s work I’m insanely proud to spend my days doing.

  So how did we get here? I had the dubious fortune of graduating from college in 2002, just when the dot-com bubble burst. It was not an easy time to get a job, and there were very few entry-level positions to be found. Whenever I did find an opening and applied, I invariably lost it to people who already had a few years of experience. It was disheartening for a wide-eyed twenty-one year old who was ready to take on the world if only someone would give him a chance.

  Eventually I landed a job at a boutique advertising agency as a sort of utility player, shifting among office administrator, project manager, art department intern, and executive assistant for some of the leadership team. The job quickly exposed me to many facets of the industry, and I was able to see the ins and outs of running a company. I sponged up everything I could. In this role, I saw how important it was to understand the people around me—my bosses, colleagues, vendors, and clients—if I wanted to serve them better and get my work done effectively.

  Luckily, I’ve always felt I had a knack for understanding people and situations. When I was a kid, I didn’t have a word for it, but we’re talking about empathy. No one gave me a lesson in it as I was headed out to the playground, and no one said it was something I needed to learn. But looking back at my childhood and my teenage years that followed, I recall an ability to innately sense when others were having a hard time or wrestling with a problem.

  My parents tell me that when I was around ten years old, they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told them an “idea man.” They had no clue where I came up with this. “Idea man” wasn’t a career most ten-year-olds were thinking about. But something inside me knew I loved solving problems and using my mind to come up with ways of moving things in a better direction.

  I know this makes me sound like a dork, but I was the guy who tried to help the overwhelmed substitute teacher calm down the class. It wasn’t that I had sympathy for her, but I did understand what she was going through, and I wanted to help. After school I could tell when my friends were struggling with a crisis of confidence at the free-throw line or in a relationship with someone, and I always wanted to lend a hand and tried to help them see the problem from a different perspective. In the high school lunchroom, I bounced from table to table, hanging with jocks, goths, musicians, stoners, AP students, and everyone in between. I always found ways of connecting with virtually everyone, sometimes even bringing groups together.

  Don’t get the idea that I was the Dalai Lama or something. I wasn’t brokering peace deals during recess or volunteering my time in the local orphanage. I was a fairly typical middle-class kid growing up in suburban New Jersey. But I knew I was good at understanding people and seeing things from their point of view, and that was something I loved to share. It made others feel comfortable. And it was something I would always honor as an integral part of me.

  During my short-lived stint at the ad agency, I relied on that skill a lot. Understanding other people’s jobs, their motivations and goals, was critical to doing my job well. I learned a lot of practical skills in those eighteen months, but I was also discovering a lot of what I didn’t want for my future. Too many people in the working world seemed to be going through the motions. I saw emotional blindness everywhere. I saw people do their jobs, punching in at 9:00 a.m. and out at 6:00 p.m. most days.

  Of course, in the ad business there were plenty of late nights and deadlines and hemming and hawing at the bar after work. But generally speaking, I felt a lack of purpose. It was a job, and that’s fine—not everyone needs to derive their life’s satisfaction from their job. Some people work to earn a living so they can pursue their passions elsewhere. But that wasn’t for me. I wanted a job that was an expression of my passion. I wanted to fix problems. I wanted to help people better understand themselves and those around them. As my ten-year-old self had said, I wanted to be an idea man.

  After I had worked at the advertising firm for eighteen months, the universe stepped in and gave me a nudge. The company didn’t wait for me to decide if I should leave; it decided for me. I was fired without warning. The CEO thought I wasn’t spending enough time on the executive assistant part of the job, and I was out. No formal review, no negative feedback for me to try to correct. Just “This isn’t working” and “Good-bye.” In retrospect, it was the gift of a lifetime, though I definitely didn’t feel that way when it happened.

  There I was, unemployed in New York City, helplessly watching my meager savings evaporate. The job market was still down, and I was having trouble finding another job fast enough. At the same time, my college girlfriend and I broke up, and the rent-controlled apartment we shared was going condo. I couldn’t live there much longer, and before I knew it, I was doing the thing that pretty much every twenty-three-year-old dreads: I moved home with my parents.

  Meanwhile, my friend Albert was withering away as a software engineer at Lehman Brothers. We were both stuck and needed to fi
gure out how to change our lives. One night over a beer, I told Albert I had a plan. Remember, this was the early 2000s, a time when every company was looking to build a website, and I looked around and decided I’d learned just enough to be a little dangerous. I told Albert I was going to start a design firm. And I wanted him to join me.

  Our resources were incredibly limited. We each had a laptop and some cheap business cards we printed ourselves. I borrowed my mom’s car and drove into the city, where Albert and I networked with potential clients. Even though those were the earliest days of our business, we knew we had something many other firms didn’t have. We had an innate knowledge of the Web because we’d grown up using it. On the surface, we looked like a Web design shop. But we were actually much more, an empathy-wielding problem-solving studio, even if we hadn’t realized it yet.

  Of course, we probably looked like a couple of kids playing grown-up, wearing suits to meetings and talking like we had heard other execs talk: “omnichannel strategies,” “digital ecosystems,” and whatever other catchphrase du jour was being bandied about in the trades that week. But underneath that schmoozy business veneer, I like to think we stood out because of our honest desire to connect with people and help them solve the problems they were facing.

  We drummed up a few clients before I even told my parents what I was doing. When I sheepishly came clean to them one night, worried that they’d tell me I needed to get a “real job” or something, they surprised me.

  They told me, “You don’t have your own family to provide for. Or a mortgage. You can live cheap. Now’s the time to give this a shot!”

  That shouldn’t have surprised me, because my mom and dad had always been my biggest supporters in whatever I was doing, but I was nervous about the risk and was subconsciously looking for someone to tell me I was crazy. They did the exact opposite, and that encouragement played a pivotal role in nudging my dream into reality.