The Two Sides of Business
Empathy and Power

Executive Summary
• Any business blends disciplines
• Some disciplines focus on power and control
and for the sake of simplicity I’ll call them the
‘business disciplines’ – strategy, finance,
marketing (most of it) etc.
• Others focus on empathy and motivation and
I’ll call those the ‘Design Disciplines’ eg.
Product Design, User Experience Design,
Interaction Design, good advertising

BOTH Design & Business Disciplines
Drive Behavior
• Business drives • Design drives
behavior of behavior of
– employees – People
– customers – Users
– partners – Customers
– competitors – Audience

Business
often use
power to
drive
behavior

Businesses Have Power
• Power over employees
• Power over communication channels
• Power over competitors
• Power over unique resources
• Power over customers
• Power over information

Design has
Empathy

Design Has Empathy
• Empathy for human needs
• Empathy for human experience
• Empathy for human desires
• Empathy for deep human motivation

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Ability to influence Behavior
Empathy
Power
-

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Slavery Ability to influence Behavior
Power
- Empathy

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Enron/Wall
Street
Ability to influence Behavior
Power
Empathy
-

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Wal-Mart Ability to influence Behavior
Power
Empathy
-

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Threadless Ability to influence Behavior
Empathy
Power
-

Organizations Blend Empathy & Power
+
Amazon Ability to influence Behavior
Power Empathy
-

One is not better than the other, but
they need to be balanced
Power Disciplines:
Strategy
Empathic Disciplines:
Finance
Design
Mass-
Sociology
Communication
Anthropology
Ownership
Ethnography
Control of Resources
Observation
Experimentation
Conversation

Feedback
• These are some rough thoughts that I’ve
jotted down, if you have feedback please
comment on the blog post or on slideshare
and let me know you thoughts, I’m not an
empath

Who am I?
The Social Capitalist
http://twitter.com/karllong
http://experiencecurve.com
http://tcritic.com
Head of web and community for Games at
MBA in Design Management