Empathy and Innovation - Two Great Books

Recently I read two books and also had the opportunity to hear each of the authors speak in separate events.
(w)Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy
by Dev Patnaik
(i)Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
By: Curtis R. Carlson and William W. Wilmot

Below I will go back and forth between the two books to explore the link between the two books and the potential integration of the concepts. The work below is the author's work.

Empathy is defined as "the ability to step outside of yourself and see the world as other people do". (w)
Innovation is defined as "the process of creating and delivering new customer value in the marketplace". (i)

Key Points:

• Enterprises that focus on their customers have shared language and tools for understanding customer value, and have a value-creation process do the best at creating new customer value. (i)
• 80 to 90 percent of new products and services fail after a year or so. They fail not because of technology, resources or a dozen other reasons. They fail primarily because customers didn't want them: the enterprise did not understand its customers needs. (i)
• Begin by asking "Who are my customers and what value do I being to them?"(i)
• If you focus on customer value as the starting point of successful innovation, a series of important questions arise: Who is your customer?, What is the customer value you provide and how do you measure it?, What innovation best practices do you use to rapidly, efficiently and systematically create new customer value? (i)
• Companies have to appeal to multiple types of people. (w)
• Over time, even former customers can lose touch. (w)
• Focusing on one group opens yourself up to being blindsided. (w)

High Level description of the 5 disciplines of innovation:

1. Important Needs - Work on important customer and market needs not just what is interesting to you
2. Value Creation - Use the tools of value creation to create customer value fast
3. Innovation Champions - Be and innovation champion to drive the value-creation process
4. Innovation Teams - Use a multidisciplinary, team-based approach to innovation to create a collective genius level IQ
5. Organization Alignment - Get your team and enterprise aligned to systematically produce high-value innovations (i)

The lack of any one of these disciplines will cause innovation failure. Since the 5 disciplines mist all be satisfied to achieve success, they are multiplicative.

Characteristics of companies who create widespread empathy.

• Blur the line between inside and outside
• Think like the people who are their customers
• surround themselves with information about the outside world
• Are often not that great and research
• Are not necessarily very touchy-feely(w)

Empathy:

• The intuition to feel a vibe before you see it
• The gut sense to know you are right
• The passion to take a leap on something new
• The courage to stick with something shaky
• The clarity to make better decisions faster(w)
• Make is easy - avoid creating extra work for people
• Make it experimental - avoid boiling information down into PowerPoint
• Make it everyday - avoid making empathetic connections into a special event

Widespread empathy isn't about how much customer research you do. It is as much about organizational change as it is about research, marketing or design.(w)

Empathy gets reflected in the language we use. (w)

Finally...A Ride in an SR 22

After admiring the Cirrus aircraft company http://www.cirrusaircraft.com/sr22 for many years I finally had the opportunity to ride in a SR22 aircraft! A friend owns the aircraft with 4 other people and he volunteered to give us a ride to West Palm Beach (thanks JD!). Ever since I earned my pilot's license about 9 years ago I have admired the design of this aircraft and the determination of the company. Bringing a totally new composite aircraft with a modern design to market is an amazing accomplishment. Why is this aircraft so special? I believe it is still the only production aircraft in the world that has a parachute built into it for emergency procedures. If you deploy the parachute the aircraft will be destroyed but who cares about that if you can walk away from the aircraft in one piece with your loved ones. It is a modern design that has an open all electronic cockpit. The airplane is fast and is able to carry loads that are realistic for a small group of people but it also has non-retractable landing gears and that helps tremendously with insurance for private pilots like me.

What does it look like with the parachute deployed? Funny you should ask...

Dealing with the death of team members

In late November and early December of last year we dealt with the death of two young team members in unrelated events. We lost one team member to an illness that lasted several weeks and another team member to a sudden health event over a weekend. Both of them were in their 30s and extremely well liked members of the department. For the most part, we all work in the same building on one of three floors. In total we have about 400 people in the department but we act like a much smaller department. We all know each other well and the team demonstrates a very caring attitude. We took these losses hard. It is hard to understand why young people who are so full of life leave us. It is hard to grasp the reality of death.

Like with so many other things that we do, we dealt with it as a team. Many of us attended memorials and we hosted a very moving celebration of life for them in the department, we talked to their family members, we sent gifts, we told stories, we laughed and we most definitely cried.

As a leader this was a very difficult thing to experience. At times I was not sure what to do but I knew the team would be watching. Ultimately, I did not do anything except be myself. My team would have known in an instant if I was not being myself. No matter if I wanted to be quiet, or talk or cry my team knew that I was struggling too. I mention this because I think it is important for leaders to be transparent, human, empathetic, sympathetic and most importantly....caring.

The Pulse smartpen

What a great gadget! I finally bought one of these pens after considering them for some time. I am delighted by the functionality and ease of use. I did have a little bit of trouble with the program once installed but after installing the software again everything is working fine. The device can capture sound very well and the play back is flawless. My favorite part is the capture of what is written or drawn on any page.

The vendor has developed a nice way to capture recurring revenue by requiring you to continue to buy special paper that allows the pen to work and record locations in voice and text. However, for a busy professional the convenience factor is well worth the price.

Microsoft Mesh.com

I have been playing with Microsoft's Mesh product over the last week. The product seems to be straightforward. I am trying it on three computers all running Windows XP. So far I have not had any problems and the interface is intuitive.

I can see an incredible amount of potential for this type of product and service especially because of the tight integration with the Windows environment. Once Microsoft matures their SaaS offering for office productivity applications we will see a concept such as Mesh really taking off. Companies will want the flexibility of remote processing and workers will want the flexibility to work from home perhaps with local software on home computers. Synchronization will be very important.

Security with this product concerns me and I will be discussing it with my security team. I was able to identify many security problems immediately after downloading the client on my work computers in order to experiment.