Wired to Care: Why Empathy Drives Growth and Innovation

read on Forbes

Twenty years ago, I had an insight.

I had been working closely with companies like Nike and Harley-Davidson. And I couldn’t help but notice that these companies looked a little different than their peers. Nike was (and still is) a culture of athletes: people who had loved to play sports all their lives and, at some point, decided to go into marketing or design or operations. And so, they worked at Nike. As a result, everyone who worked on a running shoe was often a runner themselves. And because of that, if a market research report wasn’t very good, the shoe still ended up being good nonetheless. This was markedly different from other shoe companies, where it seemed like many people were MBAs who happened to be selling shoes, but who could be just as happy selling cereal.

That insight ultimately grew into my first book, “Wired to Care.” The book’s premise is fairly straightforward: a business has a greater chance of success when every person in the company has a gut-level intuition for the people they serve—the folks beyond their walls. That widespread intuition needs to be more than just a market research activity. It needs to be the result of culture.

When “Wired to Care” was published, most people weren’t using the word empathy in business. Empathy, after all, is seen as something soft. Something weak. And business—American business, anyway—is a culture steeped in the language of war. Companies have targets and beachheads. They assign chiefs of staff and war rooms. They launch ad campaigns and price wars. Within that context, empathy seemed out of place. I may have been better off choosing a word like intelligence or intuition. The irony isn’t lost on me that using the term empathy may have demonstrated a lack of empathy for my audience. But empathy captured something deeper, more instinctive, than intelligence ever could. And so, empathy it had to be…

Slowly, that idea began to catch on.

Ethnography came into vogue. Companies asked my colleagues and me to help hire and train their insight teams. CEOs began spending time in the homes of their customers. The class I taught on the subject at Stanford swelled in numbers—from 20 students to nearly 90. The word “empathy” started showing up in corporate mission statements and startup pitch decks. We were invited to help design innovation labs, rethink customer journeys, and build leadership programs all rooted in a basic truth: if you understand the people you serve, you’ll do better work.

For twenty-five years, I taught a class at Stanford called Needfinding. The premise was simple: if you want to do something meaningful, start by understanding what people need. Not what they say they want in a survey. But what they really need. I watched students go from solving problems to seeing people. And in that seeing, the students themselves came away changed.

But while empathy made its way into the business lexicon, other forces were gathering speed—forces that began to pull us in the opposite direction.

First came Big Data, then machine learning, then the explosive growth of AI. Suddenly, we had more information than ever about what people were doing, buying, clicking, sharing, and returning. But that data became a substitute for actual connection. Companies stopped walking factory floors or riding along with customers. They started hiring data scientists instead of anthropologists. They started talking about people like they were just lines in a spreadsheet.

To be sure, empathy isn’t a replacement for data. But asking whether you should rely on data or intuition is like asking whether you’d like to keep your left leg or your right. I’m very happy having both. And data without empathy is blind to what can’t be observed. It tells you what is happening, not why. And if you don’t know the why, you’re just reacting to noise.

Of course, then came the pandemic.

People retreated into their homes. We stopped going out into the world and started living life through screens. For many, work collapsed into a steady stream of video calls and direct messages, stripped of the informal collisions that spark creativity and shared understanding. Whole layers of texture and nuance—body language, mood, energy—got flattened. Empathy atrophied.

In some ways, the pandemic accelerated trends that were already underway. People had been self-sorting into ideological echo chambers for years. The algorithms helped. You saw the news you agreed with, heard the voices you liked, followed the people who thought like you. It became easy to avoid people who weren’t like you at all. Easy to assume the worst about others. Easy to stop listening altogether.

We’ve become dangerously comfortable with the idea that we don’t have to empathize with people who are different from us. That we don’t need to understand perspectives we don’t already share. That we can optimize for engagement, or efficiency, or conversion—without really knowing the people on the other side of the screen.

Nowhere has this detachment become more normalized than in the world of technology. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen the rise of a new kind of business leader: visionary, analytical, unapologetically rational—and often strikingly devoid of empathy. They have engineering minds and exponential ambitions. They’re brilliant at solving hard problems. But many of them don’t seem to care much for the human experience their products shape.

You can see it in the way social media companies tweaked their algorithms to prioritize outrage. In the way ride-share platforms treated drivers as disposable. In the way AI companies now talk about “users” and “outputs,” but rarely about people. These aren’t evil people. They’re often not even reckless. They’re just disconnected. Unmoored from the lives their decisions affect.

Empathy didn’t just go out of style. It got engineered out of the process.

And yet, even as empathy eroded in the public square, I saw the opposite happening in some corners of business. I had the privilege to work with leaders who doubled down on human insight. Leaders who walked into hospitals and watched the night shift. Who sat in kitchens and listened to single parents talk about what dinner looks like after a long day. Who believed that if you really saw people—saw their lives, their pressures, their hopes—you’d build something that mattered. And they were right.

Empathy, when practiced with intention, still delivers results. It leads to better products, stronger teams, deeper loyalty, and faster adaptation. It makes companies more resilient because it keeps them in touch with reality. It helps them stay relevant because they sense change sooner than others. But maybe more importantly, it keeps them decent. And in this moment, decency is a competitive advantage.

I stopped teaching my Needfinding class a few years ago. Not because I stopped believing in the work. But because I had more learning to do myself. The world had changed. And so had I. It felt like the right moment to step back and listen again.

Not just faster answers, but more honest questions. The students in my class were changed by the practice of empathy. Perhaps you can be, too. That begins with a simple act: stepping outside yourself and choosing to care about the people you ultimately serve. Empathy still matters. It always has.