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Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy 1st Edition
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In this essential and illuminating book, top business strategist Dev Patnaik tells the story of how organizations of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: empathy, the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. When people inside a company develop a shared sense of what’s going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. They have the courage to take a risk on something new. And they have the gut-level certitude to stick with an idea that doesn’t take off right away. People are "Wired to Care," and many of the world’s best organizations are, too.
In pursuit of this idea, Patnaik takes readers inside big companies like IBM, Target, and Intel to see widespread empathy in action. But he also goes to farmers' markets and a conference on world religions. He dives deep into the catacombs of the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, with James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun, and John McCain, a national hero, to show how empathy can give you the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information.
Wired to Care is a compelling tale of the power that people have to see the world through each other’s eyes, told with passion for the possibilities that lie ahead if leaders learn to stop worrying about their own problems and start caring about the world around them. As Patnaik notes, in addition to its considerable economic benefits, increasing empathy for the people you serve can have a personal impact, as well: It just might help you to have a better day at work.
- ISBN-10013714234X
- ISBN-13978-0137142347
- Edition1st
- PublisherFT Press
- Publication dateJanuary 9, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions8.1 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
- Print length251 pages
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Review
MALCOLM GLADWELL, author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point
"Wired to Care describes how to recover the basic human abilities of empathy that may be buried by your day-to-day business routines. Dev Patnaik shows how you can create a more empathic--and much more successful--business."
CHIP HEATH, author of Made to Stick
"Dev Patnaik's Wired to Care maps a path to innovation fueled by `seeing the world with new eyes.' On numerous occasions, Dev and his colleagues at Jump helped us break through to those most critical insights."
BETH COMSTOCK, Chief Marketing Officer, GE
"Wired to Care offers a roadmap to success paved with empathy. The bottom line is better profits, better products, and happier employees. There is a better day for business (thankfully) when companies are wired to care." ROBYN WATERS, former VP of Trend, Target Stores, and author of The Hummer and the Mini
From the Back Cover
“Wired to Care will convince you that businesses succeed with their hearts as much as their heads. Dev Patnaik has given us just what we need for the lean years ahead.”
MALCOLM GLADWELL, author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point
“Wired to Care describes how to recover the basic human abilities of empathy that may be buried by your day-to-day business routines. Dev Patnaik shows how you can create a more empathic--and much more successful--business.”
CHIP HEATH, author of Made to Stick
“Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care maps a path to innovation fueled by ‘seeing the world with new eyes.’ On numerous occasions, Dev and his colleagues at Jump helped us break through to those most critical insights.”
BETH COMSTOCK, Chief Marketing Officer, GE
“Wired to Care offers a roadmap to success paved with empathy. The bottom line is better profits, better products, and happier employees. There is a better day for business (thankfully) when companies are wired to care.”
ROBYN WATERS, former VP of Trend, Target Stores, and author of The Hummer and the Mini
Blurring the Line Between Inside and Out
What’s the critical difference between Nike and every other shoe company on the planet? Why do some airline executives continue to insist that air travel is great, when we all know better? What has enabled Zildjian, a family business founded outside Istanbul, to thrive for almost 400 years?
In this essential and illuminating book, top business strategist Dev Patnaik tells the story of how organizations of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: empathy, the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. When people inside a company develop a shared sense of what’s going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. They have the courage to take a risk on something new. And they have the gut-level certitude to stick with an idea that doesn’t take off right away. People are "Wired to Care," and many of the world’s best organizations are, too.
In pursuit of this idea, Patnaik takes readers inside big companies like IBM, Target, and Intel to see widespread empathy in action. But he also goes to farmers' markets and a conference on world religions. He dives deep into the catacombs of the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, with James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun, and John McCain, a national hero, to show how empathy can give you the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information.
Wired to Care is a compelling tale of the power that people have to see the world through each other’s eyes, told with passion for the possibilities that lie ahead if leaders learn to stop worrying about their own problems and start caring about the world around them. As Patnaik notes, in addition to its considerable economic benefits, increasing empathy for the people you serve can have a personal impact, as well: It just might help you to have a better day at work.
About the Author
DEV PATNAIK is a founder and principal of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm. He is an advisor to some of the world’s most admired companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Target, Nike, and GE. Dev is an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University, where he teaches research methods to design and business school students. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
PETER MORTENSEN is the communications lead at Jump Associates and a blog contributor for Wired.
Product details
- Publisher : FT Press; 1st edition (January 9, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 251 pages
- ISBN-10 : 013714234X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0137142347
- Item Weight : 13.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.1 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #950,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #498 in Strategy & Competition
- #2,210 in Systems & Planning
- #8,317 in Business Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates, a hybrid strategy firm focused on helping large organizations grow. He is a trusted advisor to senior executives at some of world’s most admired companies, including General Electric, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target and Hewlett-Packard. When Dev is not at Jump, he moonlights down the road at Stanford University as an adjunct professor, where he teaches innovation methods to design and business school students. A frequent speaker at business forums, Dev was featured on CNBC's "The Business of Innovation," and his articles on innovation and strategy have appeared in several leading publications, including BusinessWeek, CNN, Fast Company, and Forbes. He is also the author of Wired to Care, a critically acclaimed book about the connection between empathy and business growth.
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Top reviews from the United States
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I'm on the hunt for the 10 best books for each of the 20 buckets (critical competencies) that help all of us with leadership and management issues. Dev Patnaik's book is a gem and immediately landed a spot on my Top-10 books for the Customer Bucket. (See my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit .) I'll tempt you with three stories on how "widespread empathy" (what's going on in other people's lives) will help you stay close to the customer.
STORY #1: Eisner's Tiger Encounter. When Joe Rohde, a Disney Imagineer, wanted to convince Michael Eisner to open a safari-like experience for guests, he needed a way to get past the mantra "Disney doesn't do zoos." After making the pitch to CEO Eisner (still unimpressed), Rohde opened the doors of the executive suite to let in a 400-pound Bengal tiger. After experiencing this immense beast (bigger than his desk) up close, Eisner responded simply, "I see your point." Disney's Animal Kingdom was born.
STORY #2: Eat More Jell-O. Author Dev Patnaik, founder and principal of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm, was invited to meet with the senior leadership of Jell-O about their declining sales. "For several hours, we sat through presentation after presentation of depressing quantitative research that described the situation. At some point, I had to raise my hand. I looked around the room and asked if anyone there had eaten any Jell-O in the past six months. No one raised a hand. Interesting, I said. Maybe that was part of the problem."
STORY #3: Mercedes-Benz. Twenty senior executives from Mercedes-Benz flew from Germany to San Francisco to meet with Patnaik to learn how their cars could appeal to younger Americans. To help them develop empathy for this customer niche, Patnaik assigned each team of two executives to a 20-something person. After 30 minutes of interviews, each team of two was given $50 and a city map with an assignment: purchase a gift for the person they just met. Some teams blew it (San Francisco mementos for people who lived in San Francisco), but other teams were able to experience life in their customers' shoes and bought very meaningful gifts. Patnaik's point: "a great product has to function like a great gift."
THE BIG IDEA. "...as companies grow larger and more prosperous," says Patnaik, "they start to look less and less like their customers. Airline executives stop flying economy class. The little tomato sauce company starts to attract Harvard MBAs who eat out all the time and never cook their own spaghetti. The lives of the people that the company employs become less and less like the lives of ordinary folks. Continued for too long, this gap can grow into an overwhelming gulf between the people inside of a company and everyone else."
After 50 pages of non-stop defining business stories, I knew this book was a keeper. After 100 pages, I couldn't stop reading the stories to my wife--a sign of a great book. It reminded me of the Tom Peters and Robert Waterman 1982 classic, "In Search of Excellence." You could call this one, "In Search of Empathy."
Pink makes the case for the need for six traits (right-brain or whole-minded traits) that will be essential for workers who want to thrive in "the conceptual age". Those traits are: design, story, sympathy, play, meaning AND empathy.
"Wired to Care" concentrates on one of those traits, empathy. Patnaik uses experiences from his work at Jump Associates and his academic appointment at Stanford University to populate his book with compelling and relevant examples of what empathy looks like when it's translated into a business maxim. He shows how Detroit's car industry problems are related to a lack of empathy, how a political race (Bush, Sr. vs Clinton) was impacted by the empathy (who had it and who didn't), how Harley-Davidson resurrected itself and how Clorox gained insight that helped it define new directions to take by using empathy. Empathy helps the bottom line - because it helps companies reach, understand and provide exactly the kind of goods and services their customers want.
Empathy can have added benefits - it can give employees a powerful reason to come to work every day. "Empathy," says Patnaik "helps transform jobs into careers and careers into callings." He notes "A job will deplete you, a calling will energize you, and a career is somewhere in between."
A culture of empathy also results in a more ethical business/company/corporation. "Widespread Empathy" can be "an effective way to ensure the morality of a large institution, more so than any rulebook or code of conduct," according to Patnaik. Having an empathic environment within a corporation makes the ability to tell right from wrong a whole lot easier: "organizations that have real sympathy for the people they serve can be governed by the simplest law of all: the Golden Rule."
One would wish that this book could be made required reading for all CEOs, Wall Street bankers, politicians and leaders of industry. On the Jump Associates website is the following: "The Harvard Business Review is currently hosting a fascinating debate on how to fix business schools. Jump's Dev Patnaik is now a featured commentator in the debate, and his first post cuts to the root of the problem: maybe we have selfish business leaders because business school rewards ruthlessness?"
Someone please put this man in charge of business school curriculums...with an approach like Patnaik's, how much of the current financial and ethical meltdown could have been avoided if the lessons he teaches had been instilled in the current crop of head honchos? They didn't get this kind of ethical guidance; maybe we can do better with the up-and-coming generation. Read Patnaik and envision how ALL companies could be...read Patnaik and know how much better your company can be with empathy as a cornerstone.
Top reviews from other countries
Anyway, not a bad book but I would not hesitate to re-sell.











