Empathy Is Not a Luxury

To see the emergency room experience from the patient's view, IDEO sent an anthropologist through an emergency room process armed with a camcorder.   The video shows 20 minutes of ceiling tiles and fluorescent fixtures interrupted by the occasional nose.  The doctors and nurses got a very different view of the same events.

Empathy is seeing the world from someone else's eyes.  If you can't do that, you'll never create meaning in business.  Quit now.

If you can, you'll face the challenge of teaching others (usually bosses) to see things through others' eyes.  The CEO of AIG lacked this skill. Same for GM's CEO. 

While empathy won't guarantee success, its lack will guarantee failure on  a spectacular, front page scale.

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