In Wired to Care; How Companies Prosper When they Create Widespread Empathy, Dev Patnaik along with Peter Mortensen stress on the need for the companies to step into the customers’ shoes to be able to find out what they really require as opposed to what they are receiving. Patnaik who teaches at a special class called Needfinding at Stanford University encourages through examples and role-playing the importance of caring and empathetic towards customers. In the book, Patnaik, who is also the founder of Jump Associates, puts together his experience of dealing with companies such as IBM, HP, Nike, GE, etc. In an interview with Sanjitha Rao Chaini, the US-based author offers few tips to Indian companies and B-schools.
In your book, you mention examples of several international firms and their role in empathising with the customer. Are Indian companies empatehtic towards their customers?
As Indian companies start to compete on the global stage, they invariably discover the need for greater empathy. For example, the Taj Group is working to understand the needs of business travellers, and it certainly helps. Taj executives are frequent business travellers themselves. Jet Airways has done a great job of trying to understand and connect with their customers. There are a host of new media companies that are really trying to connect with specific audiences within India.
In a sense, empathy is related to innovation. Only when we empathise can we come up with new ideas to help customers. How can an organisation ensure that this connection exists with the customer?
There are really three things that companies need to do in order to maintain strong empathic connections with their customers.
First, encourage everyone to take a little time and get out of the office and go where people live their lives: homes, shops, restaurants, wherever they go to act like themselves. That's why Dave Schenone, the innovation director at Nike, spends as much time as he can visiting young athletes, both at sports facilities and elsewhere, to really understand the role athletics plays in their lives and what Nike can do to support that. He doesn't have to speculate what their lives are like — he sees it with his own eyes.
Second, Incentivise employees to be genuinely interested in other people. Forget about your products and care about the needs of real people. That's what helped Lou Gerstner turn IBM around in the early 1990s. One of the first initiatives he launched was called ‘Operation Bearhug’. He made the top 250 managers and executives of the firm each visit the sites of at least five customers. If you didn't, your performance was adversely affected. As a result, he got everyone at the top of the company thinking about the world the way that its customers did. That helped them launch game-changing innovations. Find the real needs of your customers first, and your solutions will dramatically improve, too.
Finally, bring evidence of the real world back into your offices. Harley-Davidson never forgets that the people that matter most to its business are the people outside their walls. The company can do this because it covers its headquarters with photos of the people they meet on rides, at motorcycle rallies, and at factory tours. The entire building is a temple to the story that Harley and its riders and enthusiasts have co-created together.
When did you first think of writing this book? How long did you and Peter Mortensen take to complete it?
I started thinking about this book around 2004. You see, innovation is really about three things: empathy, the ability to understand what people need; creativity, the ability to come up with ideas; and execution, the ability to get things done. And, of the three, there were many good books on execution, thousands upon thousands of books about creativity, but virtually no books about the role of empathy.
And then we really didn't have time to make progress on the book until the summer of 2007 when Peter and I got started. We approached creating the book like a design process. We wrote down stories we wanted to tell, and ideas we wanted to communicate on Post-it Notes and then clustered them to form chapters. Once we had a rough outline, we interviewed many of the people whose stories we tell, and then spent 2-3 months solid in a room writing from dawn to dusk, everyday. The whole thing was wrapped up by mid-July 2008, a full year from the start of writing.
Organisations are cutting back on spends due to slowdown. What if empathy is the last thing on their minds?
On the contrary, we have seen an even greater focus on empathy right now. Times are tough, and companies don't have time or money to waste. They need to get every single person in their organization working on things that are valuable to end customers. There's no time to waste on slow, bad decision-making. Companies need to act quickly, and they need to be right. The punishment for failure is that much greater. Empathy can provide the answer. If companies had a widespread sense of empathy within their walls, they wouldn't spend time arguing about issues that should be intuitively obvious — they would just know how to create value for the people who matter most — to the folks who visit their stores, use their products, and ultimately pay everyone's salaries. Not to mention — empathy doesn't have to be hugely cost-intensive. It's not very expensive to go for a walk and see what people are doing in your local marketplace.
Personalities 
In Wired to Care; How Companies Prosper When they Create Widespread Empathy, Dev Patnaik along with Peter Mortensen stress on the need for the companies to step into the customers’ shoes to be able to find out what they really require as opposed to what they are receiving. Patnaik who teaches at a special class called Needfinding at Stanford University encourages through examples and role-playing the importance of caring and empathetic towards customers. In the book, Patnaik, who is also the founder of Jump Associates, puts together his experience of dealing with companies such as IBM, HP, Nike, GE, etc. In an interview with Sanjitha Rao Chaini, the US-based author offers few tips to Indian companies and B-schools. 
First, encourage everyone to take a little time and get out of the office and go where people live their lives: homes, shops, restaurants, wherever they go to act like themselves. That's why Dave Schenone, the innovation director at Nike, spends as much time as he can visiting young athletes, both at sports facilities and elsewhere, to really understand the role athletics plays in their lives and what Nike can do to support that. He doesn't have to speculate what their lives are like — he sees it with his own eyes.
