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Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership Hardcover – May 22, 2018

by Michael Ventura (Author)

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A BUSINESS INSIDER BEST BOOK

"With Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura shows us how to unlock our ability to design solutions, spark innovation, and solve tough challenges with empathy at the center."—Arianna Huffington

Michael Ventura, entrepreneur and CEO of award-winning strategy and design practice Sub Rosa, shares how empathy—the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes—could be what your business needs to innovate, connect, and grow.

Having built his career working with iconic brands and institutions such as General Electric, Google, Nike, Warby Parker, and also The United Nations and the Obama Administration, Michael Ventura offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward.

Empathy is not about being nice. It’s not about pity or sympathy either. It’s about understanding—your consumers, your colleagues, and yourself—and it’s a direct path to powerful leadership. As such, Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work and the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value).

For leaders of all levels, this groundbreaking guide lays the foundation to establish a diverse, inventive, and driven team that can meet the challenges of today’s ever-evolving marketplace. If you want to connect to the people you work with and for, you first have to understand them.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Atria Books
Publication date

May 22, 2018
Dimensions

6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1501182854
ISBN-13

978-1501182853
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"With Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura shows us how to unlock our ability to design solutions, spark innovation, and solve tough challenges with empathy at the center."— Arianna Huffington

“I believe that empathy has been the most underrated characteristic of the biggest winners in society. Michael has demonstrated an understanding and an execution around this incredible skill that I admire tremendously. Everybody should read this book.”—Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Times bestselling author of #AskGaryVee

“The most neglected fact in business is we're all human. Michael Ventura makes a powerful argument that empathy is the secret sauce of 21st century business. The more digital we get, the more empathy we need. Loved this book”—Chip Conley, Hospitality entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of Emotional Equation

“Meaningful change happens when people come together with open arms, minds and hearts. Honed through his experience working with a range of companies, Michael Ventura provides great insights and tools for how you too can make meaningful change happen.” — Beth Comstock, author of Imagine It Forward and former Vice Chair GE

About the Author

Michael Ventura is the CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design firm that has worked with some of the world’s largest and most important brands, organizations, and startups: from Johnson & Johnson, Pantone, and Adobe to The TED Conference, Delta Airlines, and The Daily Show. Additionally, Michael has served as a board member and advisor to a variety of organizations including Behance, The Burning Man Project, The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and Tribal Link Foundation. He is also a visiting lecturer at institutions such as Princeton University and the United States Military Academy at West Point. In addition to these pursuits, Michael leads a thriving indigenous medicine practice where he works with patients to help them address illness and injury of all types, on the road to better well-being. A passionate entrepreneur, he also owns and operates a globally recognized design store in New York’s West Village with his wife Caroline. Applied Empathy is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Applied Empathy

Introduction

Empathy is a squishy word. Sometimes it’s confused with sympathy or misinterpreted as “being nice.” That isn’t empathy. Empathy is about understanding. Empathy lets us see the world from other points of view and helps us form insights that can lead us to new and better ways of thinking, being, and doing.

The words business and empathy are rarely used together—in fact, for some of us they might even sound oxymoronic, but there are incredible benefits to taking on others’ perspectives in the context of our professional lives. That’s what Applied Empathy is about. Empathy is not some out-of-reach mystical power. Instead it is a skill that each of us can make a part of our daily practice and ultimately bring into the organizations we serve.

This book presents a set of tools and ideas for applying empathy to:

• Understanding your customers’ needs and improving your products and services by infusing them with rich, meaningful insights gleaned from a newfound perspective.

• Connecting and collaborating with your teams more effectively—understanding the skills and styles of each person and how to get the most out of your interactions.

• Leading with a new awareness that will undoubtedly aid you in not only understanding others better but, perhaps more important, understanding the truest aspects of your own self.

Applying empathy may seem obvious for one-to-one interactions, and it is a critical part of any good relationship, but it’s also a powerful advantage when applied at the business level to gain perspective within your company’s walls and in the world within which the company operates.

There are countless instances in the business world where companies have missed the opportunity to apply empathy, many of them paying dearly for the oversight.

One of the most infamous was Xerox’s fumbled opportunity to lead the personal computing industry. Back in the 1960s, Xerox’s 914 photocopier revolutionized the business world. At the same time, the company’s innovation facility, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), was fast at work developing other new and insightful products. One of those was the Xerox Alto, the first fully functional personal computer. It had processing power, a graphic interface, and even a mouse. So why isn’t Xerox a computing juggernaut today?

In the 1970s, Xerox’s leadership was largely focused on raking in the massive profits generated by the 914 photocopier—which was not sold but leased to customers, who were charged per page—instead of looking out into the world and using empathy to sense the growing demand for personal computing. They didn’t do anything with the Alto or, frankly, with many of the other great inventions that PARC was churning out. They were preoccupied with their current successes and uninterested in understanding the shifting consumer needs around them. As a result, they missed one of the greatest technology booms the business world has ever experienced.

Another more recent example of a lack of empathic leadership can be seen in the music industry’s inglorious failure to participate in the digital music revolution. While executives stretched their travel and expense accounts to the max and obsessed over CD distribution deals with brick-and-mortar retailers, Napster and LimeWire were hard at work building a completely new, and more empathic, distribution system that aligned with consumers and their needs (though not empathic to the artists or the record industry they were disrupting). Missing that opportunity crushed the major music labels’ business and gave rise to powerhouses such as Apple Music and Spotify.

Would empathy alone have saved those companies from disaster? It’s hard to say. But had they applied empathy more meaningfully in their decision-making, they could have recognized new and innovative ways to lead their businesses into the next era.

Fortunately, plenty of companies are applying empathy to solve tough challenges and lead teams with new and powerful insight.

A darling of the start-up world, Warby Parker’s meteoric growth can be closely mapped to its executives’ clear understanding of the “grit” in the retail eyewear experience. Consumers weren’t getting what they needed from any of the big players in the space, and Warby Parker’s founders saw an opportunity to jump into the category offering a more human, service-oriented approach that has been voraciously embraced. (Full disclosure: we’ve worked with them and can attest to their empathic strengths firsthand.)

One of my favorite empathic thinkers is Elon Musk. He truly understands the needs of the market and has proven to be a powerful innovator and entrepreneur who can apply his understanding to a variety of industries. Most recently, he’s decided to take on the challenge of “soul-crushing traffic.” His venture, The Boring Company, is solving this problem in an unexpected way. While everyone from Hollywood moviemakers to Ivy League–educated futurists has spent time imagining a world full of flying cars, Musk has taken his vision to a subterranean level, focusing instead on building a technologically advanced tunneling business designed to solve our increasingly gridlocked roadways by expanding them to the ground below us.

These companies and their leaders understand how to use empathy to look at problems differently and create solutions that not only disrupt conventions but use empathy as a powerful tool.

My own company, Sub Rosa, is a strategy and design studio that works with large, often complex corporations as well as progressive thinkers in government, entertainment, and the start-up world to help them evolve their businesses with empathy. We have worked with some of the world’s most recognizable companies and leaders, and I’m proud that those clients have sought us out because we offer fresh solutions that support their need to explore, learn, and grow.

Our clients come to us because we can help them figure out who they truly are, what they are actually trying to accomplish, and, perhaps most important, show them how to take their goals or their businesses to a higher level.

• We’ve worked with countless CEOs and leadership teams to think differently about how empathy can ignite a spirit of creativity, innovation, and growth in the hearts and minds of their teams around the world.

• We’ve helped one of the world’s most successful athletes understand himself and his brand with empathy—giving him a mission and vision that will take his career to new heights.

• We even brought empathy into the West Wing of the Obama White House, applying our thinking to a series of initiatives started by the first family to help bring a greater sense of understanding to our nation’s indigenous people’s rights and resources.

Empathy lets us better understand the people we are trying to serve and gives us perspective and insight that can drive greater, more effective actions. The seemingly magical quality of empathy is the connection it helps us form with other people. Some of us are born with an overwhelming degree of empathy, while others are callous or even blind to the perspectives of others. The rest of us fall somewhere in between. But empathy is more than just a natural talent; it can also be a process, a learned skill, developed and applied when and where needed.

Applied Empathy begins with my journey of discovery, one that led to an early client assignment that helped those of us at Sub Rosa define who we are and how we approach our work. Through that project and others like it, we developed what we call Empathic Archetypes along with an understanding of the complex world within ourselves that we term the Whole Self. After establishing this baseline of empathic thinking, I will show you how leaders manifest empathy and how they encourage it in others. From there, we’ll continue to dive deeper into empathy, looking at its role in the world around us. We’ll look at its timeless nature, drawing from lessons of the past, present, and future; its application in the context of some of today’s tough business challenges; how it can play a role in evolving our own realities; and why now, more than perhaps at any other time in human history, we need it to solve the challenges lying before us.

Our best work demands empathy, and that means each of us must be able to call on it when needed, regardless of mood or circumstances. To help elevate empathy from a buzzword to a reliable, repeatable, and responsive tool, I’ve taken all the lessons and thinking we’ve amassed on this topic and poured them into this book. May it bring to you the same appreciation for understanding it has brought to me.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria Books; Illustrated edition (May 22, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501182854
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501182853
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #804,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,533 in Creativity (Books)
- #5,023 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #8,859 in Leadership & Motivation

Customer Reviews:
4.4 175 ratings

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Michael Ventura

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Michael Ventura is an accomplished entrepreneur, author, and designer. In 2009, Michael founded Sub Rosa, an award-winning, strategy and design practice. Sub Rosa's clients include a variety of Fortune 500 companies (GE, Google, Marriott, Nike), well-respected institutions such as the United Nations and the Obama Administration, as well as some of the world's most progressive start-ups and founders (SoFi, Warby Parker, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative).

Michael has served as a board member and advisor to a variety of organizations including Behance (An Adobe Company), The Burning Man Project, The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Friends of +POOL, and the U.N. affiliated Tribal Link Foundation. A dynamic writer and presenter, Michael is frequently engaged as an advisor to entrepreneurs and leaders of some of the largest corporations across the globe. He is also a lecturer at The United States Military Academy at West Point and Princeton University where he teaches empathic design.

Outside of this work, Michael and his wife Caroline have co-founded the New York-based retail store Calliope, as well as its adjoining gallery And&And. In his personal time, Michael is an active practitioner of eastern and indigenous medicine, working in private practice and regularly leading workshops on how to bring these powerful traditions into a modern life and workplace. Applied Empathy is his first book.

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Blake Nieman-Davis

Changed My Life

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

I know people will think the headline is hyperbole, but I can assure you it is not. I am a 4th generation retailer who has spent a lifetime working in various areas in the industry.

One issue that I have often dealt with is trying to explain some of my skills and abilities in a way that makes sense. This is especially true in an age where analytics seem more important than qualities that skew more creatively.

What Michael Ventura does is explains the value of empathy and how it can be utilized effectively to be a better employee, leader, business owner or just a better person.

I have always argued that maintaining the proper balance between the "Art and Science" is essential to ones success. I believe empathy is the trait that bridges the two, but was never able to articulate it in a way that makes sense. Applied Empathy and Michael Ventura have done that in this wonderful book.

I have read it multiple times and have listened to it on Audible as well. I have also given it as a gift to many business leaders who I know have enjoyed it as well.

I am not associated, with nor have I been paid for this review. I am just a fan.

5 people found this helpful

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Laura R

Healing the Ad Industry one page at a time.

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2023

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Highly recommend this book to anyone looking to foster a safe work environment and further develop their own relationship to kindness and empathy. Wise beyond its years, this book consolidates helpful psychological, spiritual, and industry insights and enables the reader with a deeper understanding of themselves and the work place environment around them. If you're looking to break free from outdated traditional practices driven by fear, the author has an amazing perspective on how to communicate and lead from the heart. Thank you, Michael — this book is truly a gift. Wish I could give it 10 stars.

One person found this helpful

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LorenG

Creative case studies that pack powerful results!

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2019

Verified Purchase

I loved this book for the way Ventura legitimizes the application of empathy and why it not only matters to us as humans, but why it drives key insights that deliver the difference. The case studies are about brands we all know, love and have no idea where their branding solutions came from until now. I loved hearing the history of the problems and the approaches that solved them. I both listened to the audio and read the physical which included fun and mind bending exercises. I also appreciated the authenticity Michael's story and learning about his firm Subrosa, its pitfalls and exciting wins. If you want to learn about the impact of empathy and design thinking start here!

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Nathan O.

A brilliant look at how to better your life, your work, and the planet.

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2019

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Applied Empathy is one of those books that you want to share with the world!! Mr Ventura shares a vivid account of the rewards that comes from an open, empathic approach to a variety of situations and examples, where success is measured in a deeper understanding of the human condition, that bears its fruits in many forms. If we all adopted even a little bit of Mr. Ventura's wisdom, I'm sure that we would not only reap the benefits in our daily lives, but I think we could leave the planet in a slightly better condition than when we found it.

One person found this helpful

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K. Fr

A lot of self praise up front

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2022

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It was just kind of a bummer to have so much "i am so naturally gifted this way" language early in a book about empathy. An *intuitive* empath would know how cringy that is. That made it hard to take seriously, albeit some wisdom is in there between the hard self given pats on the back.

2 people found this helpful

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Brandrew

A framework for success by putting yourself in the shoes of everyone who touches your business.

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2018

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Applied Empathy teaches business leaders to 'Ask-Listen-Think' in a success method that is easy transferrable across industry domains. Before I read this book, I considered empathy to be an ineffable quality; either you have it or you don't. Not only does Ventura show how he applies empathy at the highest levels of leadership in companies like Nike and GE, he provides a tangible framework for applying it to your own business. Its impossible to read this book and not see how it can immediately improve your leadership. Oh, and somehow he winds magic and spirituality into the fabric of his proven methods. This is a gem to read and to ponder.

10 people found this helpful

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Over 50

A Very Thoughtful Piece of Work

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2019

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I really enjoyed reading Applied Empathy! Off the bat, Ventura makes the important distinction that empathy is often conflated with being nice, which obscures its true power as a perspective taking tool. This was a revelation! Not only does he supply tactical ways to become more empathic, he also includes anecdotes (both personal and professional) that really resonate and ground his advice in something tangible. Frankly this is more than a business book. Rather its a guide to deepen your relationship with yourself, peers and even brands/businesses. I'd highly recommend!

One person found this helpful

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JB

Applied Empathy is a must read- no matter what business you come from!

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2019

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Michael was so kind and came to talk with our book club. He shared his experiences creating the resources for Applied Empathy over his lifetime. What a journey and how his wisdom can apply across so many backgrounds, was a lovely surprise. I’m not a business leader but from the academic world, and I found that learning about how empathy can be applied in all life situations to make connections deeper is something I will be thinking about in all of my future interactions.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Luki D

Great read on a topic much needed in the (business) world today

Reviewed in Canada on January 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very enjoyable and informative read with many good frameworks, and questions to address empathy for a business (which can be extrapolated for personal needs as well). I’ll be looking to apply empathy more in the near future. And it got me to listen to the podcasts as well!

Very interesting perspective

Good Insights

Reviewed in Spain on June 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

I recommend this book to everyone interested in connecting personal growth within the organizations. I find the combination very inspiring, hopefully more business would apply empathy as a value.

Vernes

Empathy is a newfound success

Reviewed in Germany on March 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

Michael Ventura is a great story teller and I really liked the fact that through real life examples like GE, Nike, Pantone he and his team actually walk the talk.
Offered frameworks and practical questions included at the end of each chapter, go a long way in further sharpening our emphatic skills helping readers in understanding the concept and applying it to themselves.
Empathy is a way to go!

James Wassenas

Very relatable, great book.

Reviewed in Canada on November 6, 2019

Verified Purchase

Great book full of real life examples. It’s an easy read and full of stuff you can try tomorrow.

Graham

More for workplace relationships than personal relations

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

More for workplace relationships than personal relations
That said a very good book if you are looking to improve your business or relationsips at work. It has practical advice with tasks to do which can take a fair bit of time to complete

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