Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy by Dev Patnaik

Author:Dev Patnaik
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2009-01-08T18:30:00+00:00

The key to developing real empathy, then, is to trigger an emotional response by engaging in firsthand human contact, like the Mercedes team did. Without that firsthand experience, it’s often difficult for people to appreciate the importance of potentially critical information. In the United States, one of our most-watched measures of overall economic health is the jobs growth number, reported each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A great month might add more than a million jobs to the economy, and a poor month might see an equal number of jobs eliminated. But as useful as this measure is for overall trend analysis, it paints an inaccurate picture of the real state of the nation. That’s because it doesn’t measure the number of jobs actually created or the number of jobs actually lost. For example, a month in which the U.S. economy added 50,000 jobs could actually be a month in which 100,000 people had their jobs eliminated while 150,000 other people gained new employment. While that’s a net gain for the U.S. as a whole, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a positive development for the nation. Were the jobs that were eliminated high paying or low paying? Were the regions that added jobs different from the ones that lost them? What happened to those 100,000 people who just lost their livelihoods?

The economy of the United States is not an academic exercise. It’s a complex organism made up of real people. If I lose my job, I don’t take comfort in the fact that someone somewhere else gained a job, to make the net change zero. I’m still out of a job. By focusing on net gains or losses, media reports based on labor statistics can paint a falsely optimistic vision of the economy. When they look beyond the numbers to study the people whose fortunes are actually changing, they sometimes find that the story told by the statistics is different from what’s actually happening. For their part, there’s little impetus for lawmakers to act without that human experience. As the old joke goes, there’s only one real difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is when the guy next door loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.

Operation Bear Hug

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