(book review) Wired to Care

Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper when they create widespreadempathy by Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen

FT Press, NewJersey-USA, 2009

This “business” book is about what all of us already posses and use in our daily lives but are trained to leave it back as we enter the workplace – Its about empathy and caring about people. It takes various examples from Dev Patnaik's experience at Jump Associates – a hybrid strategy firm. The book kicks-off with a basic idea that companies should care about their customers and revolves around the idea that a business will succeed as much with their hearts as much as their heads.

The book arguably demonstrates that more a business appreciates what their consumers or employees want or empathizes with their needs, more are the chances that the business will succeed. The book makes even more sense if you have read – 'A Whole New Mind' by Daniel Pink. Its like a flow from one book to another like a sequel movie to a previous one.

What makes the book most interesting is the way Patnaik goes through real life examples about a number of companies such as Nike, Disney, Mercedes, Clorox, etc. and about empathy and the ways companies could integrate empathy into their daily businesses and narrates them like stories – Stories that you can't resist, stories that hang on to you even after you have finished the book. Dev Patnaik really connects to the readers.

I particularly like the example of Harley Davidson Motors where Patnaik shows that the simplest way to have empathy for your customers is to be like them. The easiest way to gain empathy is to hire your own customers as employees. Harley's employees are themselves riders and the company has their front parking lot reserved only for motorcycles. The parking for automobiles or “cages” as they say, is at the back. And this is just the beginning! I won't go into any more details of the story as it will take all the fun out from reading it yourself. Other stories for X-Box and Zune, Nike, Pattie Moore – the story of the designer are as much enthralling.

As Dev writes - “...if you want people to be interested in you, you should be genuinely interested in them. That's a pretty straight-forward lesson with relatively major implications.” The same thing applies to the relationship between businesses and consumers. 

Its a must read for all business leaders, CEOs, CFOs (all the people with a 'C' in their titles) and people in the design field. 

Their website is worth a look.

This book is all set to become a classic!