Marketing: What's Love Got To Do With It by Evelyn Rodriguez (More Space)

Marketing: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Marketing: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

by Evelyn Rodriguez

Society needs a return to spiritual values—not to offset the material but to make it fully productive. . . . Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share.

—Peter Drucker

I confess—for most of my life, I was the quintessential “functionally guarded” person.

I mean that in the Alcoholics Anonymous sense: someone who manages remarkably well in the public eye while spending great swatches of time under the inﬂuence is “functionally alcoholic.” As long as you don’t get too close or peek behind the curtain, all is well in Oz.

I’m also a recovering computer engineer. The day I stepped into marketing (even though it was technical marketing), my fellow geeks viewed my shift as “going over to the dark side.” Their wrinkled noses revealed their distaste for the subjectivity and nuances; anything involving interpersonal communication was “politics,” as far as they were concerned.

I tended to agree. Hiding in numbers, code, concrete forms, and the formulaic is a safe place for the functionally guarded. I could avoid the self-conscious discomfort I had with emotion, with softness and the vulnerability potentially exposed by dabbling in the realm of people. In his new book A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink insightfully points out that the reclaiming of the “right brain” follows the path of the archetypal hero’s journey. But Pink never addresses the central fear of embarking on this journey: the seeming descent into hell. While I might be worried that my job will be shipped to Bangalore, I’m even more terriﬁed of going into the abyss of my right mind. Left-brainers may avoid expressing feelings—but they deﬁnitely have them.

A lot has happened since I entered marketing. But ﬁrst and foremost, I’ve come to the conclusion that the “functionally guarded” stance just isn’t functional any longer. And not just for me. I don’t know if you are feeling the pain yet, but if you are paying attention, something must seem amiss in global media and markets today.

The media are a harbinger of things to come. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the act of creating, viewing, participating, or engaging in media alters the human nervous system. Media literally mess with your mind. Deeply ingrained patterns of thought reinforced by biochemistry can be loosened and new brain terrain explored after the emergence of a new medium.

If the media serve as a leading indicator—a canary in the coal mine, so to speak—then what are blogs and other participatory media signaling? Or perhaps it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon? Do new media structures arise after individual and collective mind-sets and thus worldviews emerge?

No matter. The point is that for the ﬁrst time ever, we now see at least three worldviews, or decision-making frameworks, clashing in the media. And even more in the marketplace. The working assumption that everyone holds the same frame of reference used to work just ﬁne—when a single predominant worldview governed
business and media.

We may never fully understand each other at a conceptual level of discourse. I’ve spoken with corporate executives who were sincerely perplexed when ordinary people they run into at the local Whole Foods—that is, non-anarchists—swarmed into Seattle to protest at the World Trade Organization meeting. On the other extreme, friends who tried to talk me into going to a teach-in at those protests couldn’t grasp how or why I could see any merit in the other side of the globalization debate.

For strategists, innovators, and marketers, the challenge is that developing and marketing an innovative product that meets deep-seated and even unstated needs requires more than reading people, more than understanding people; it requires knowing others as ourselves. Paradoxically, this knowing does not mean voting for the same candidate, going to the same church, buying the same SUV, watching the same reality TV shows, coming from the same corner of the world, or even having the same motivation for waking up each morning. You can still relate to others (and market to them) when you don’t entirely grasp their worldview.

Everything Happened After 1996

New forms of media don’t emerge whole from a hermit’s cave. Media are deeply informed by current times. Likewise, the times deeply inform media. And these are interesting times indeed if we look at the last ten years against the backdrop of history. Business and media are relatively new institutions, historically speaking, and they’ve both spent most of their existence in equilibrium—with everyone involved holding more or less the same worldview. That is, until now.

I believe that we are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not. For one sees that, in the things that lead to the end which everyone aims at, that is, glory and riches, men proceed in different ways.

—Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli’s work—written in 1513—is still commonly cited in business schools as support for the claim that we, Homo sapiens, are driven by self-interest.

In Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Richard Wright sets out to map self-interest over the “arrow of the history of life, from the primordial ooze to the World Wide Web.” Moving from cave survival to tribal clans to feudal empires to church states to nation states to corporate states and onward, we’ve become increasingly interdependent, Wright says.

Wright isn’t chanting a Woodstockian chorus of harmony and world peace. It’s not a matter of altruism as he sees it—we’ve simply become so intertwined and interdependent in our social structures that my self-interest is enveloped and enmeshed with your self-interest. In terms of game theory, it’s a “non-zero game,” which comes down to this: we all win or we all lose.

The thing that sticks in my mind about Non-Zero is the way the theme of expanding cooperative self-interest captured the imagination of attendees at the ﬁrst Accelerating Change conference a few years back. This is an audience of ardent futurists, uber-geeks, and a few ﬁnanciers of the future. On the surface the audience appears to be a Darwinian-Machiavellian brew where the ﬁttest cyborg triumphs. But following Richard Wright’s keynote, the conference bookstore sold out of his book within minutes.

Machiavelli is worth repeating: “We are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not.” Over the course of history we’ve steadily moved from an egocentric to an ethnocentric to an increasingly world-centric perspective. Our minds cannot help but be informed and inﬂuenced by the worldviews of our culture and our times.

And our times have changed, so we need new thought patterns. New times, new thinking. That’s the catchphrase of Spiral Dynamics (by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan), a book that outlines the evolution of human concepts—including the leading indicators to societal shifts in thought patterns—throughout history, capturing what’s happening now right before it started.

Think about 1996—the year that Spiral Dynamics came out. Beck and Cowan probably submitted their ﬁnal manuscript before Netscape went public on August 9, 1995. And certainly before the November 1995 launch of Fast Company. And the blogosphere wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye yet. San Francisco had cheap rents south of Market Street and my mom hadn’t heard of Sand Hill Road. The twin towers were intact and the media were the bailiwick of hip New Yorkers and not scraggly “citizen journalists.” I hadn’t joined the Internet revolution, er, I mean industry as yet—unless you count being addicted to online communities. Nor had I yet been married . . . or divorced. Ah, 1996. That’s the same year that Cindy Olsen joined Enron as VP of corporate affairs in charge of the 401(K) program—oh so many eons before she would “diversify” her own personal holdings and withdraw her millions. Geez, perhaps everything did happen after 1996.

Seeing Through The Kaleidoscope

Before I get carried away harking back to 1996, a few concepts need deﬁnition and ﬂeshing out.

For starters, you’ll need to know what a meme is. Richard Dawkins introduced the term into our lexicon in The Selﬁsh Gene. Since then it and its implications have spread like, well, like a meme is wont to do, like wildﬁre. A meme is deﬁned as the basic unit of cultural transmission, or imitation. It can be just about any contagious and attractive idea or concept.

A value-meme (to use a term coined by Beck and Cowen, whose work is based on research by psychologist Clare Graves) is a coherent set of beliefs and concepts that compose and inform your decision-making framework. In a sense, the value-meme isn’t any single meme but an entire container of memes that gathers additional reinforcing and aligning memes. It helps me to picture the value-meme as something akin to what complexity theory calls a strange attractor—more or less drawing in matching memes and repelling others—or simply as a bucket o’memes. The value-meme helps explain why “red” states and “blue” states don’t always see eye to eye whether it’s pre- or post-Election 2004, why the best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life with its universal themes is restricted to a market of traditional churchgoers, why the “cause marketing” of ecologically minded businesses like The Body Shop attracts a cultlike following, and why environmentalists and cattle ranchers don’t chat together at the local diner.

New value-memes don’t just come out of the blue. Like any trend they start as a gurgling trickle before joining the river of cultural norms. I’m sure there were a few folks who thought I was eerily prescient when I lived in Utah. I’d be the one asking oddball questions about applying software engineering methodologies to globally distributed teams as scattered as the Philippines, India, and Bulgaria. They hadn’t begun to insist that offshoring was an anomaly and not a signiﬁcant happening—it wasn’t even on the radar screen. Yet. But my forecasts are not magical. Spend enough time traveling to the East and West Coast—and to Silicon Valley if you are tech forecasting—and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychic to see particular trends that have taken hold on the coasts eventually heading toward the middle states. Nope, not magic. But it does take a willingness to be a dispassionate observer, withholding judgment from either extreme: denial and resistance on one side and enthusiastically jumping on every bandwagon on the other.

In the same vein, perhaps it’s no surprise that organic foods purveyor Whole Foods is growing wildly, spiritual and New Age titles are underground bestsellers, Worthwhile and Breathe magazines both launched within the last few months, green and sustainable catchwords in business are multiplying, grassroots marketing is prevalent, The Cluetrain Manifesto is the bible of the blogosphere, and “corporate social responsibility” has crept its way into annual reports. The seeds were planted by the Baby Boomers as far back as the 1960s. So the anti-establishment fervor of the documentary The
Corporation, the book No Logo, and the WTO protests are all quite nostalgic.

But the world was not ready for the sixties in the 1960s. That was a time and place more suited to the emergence of the yuppie than the hippie. Yet there was no denying that a scattering of people on the lunatic fringe didn’t quite look at the world like everyone else, and were not motivated or concerned with quite the same things as the rest of us.

In the 1940s Abraham Maslow conducted hundreds of interviews, discovering that people—and even the very same person at different stages of life—don’t always have the same driving and motivating forces behind why they do what they do. And thus his famous hierarchy of needs pyramid made news. Then in the 1960s and 1970s Clare W. Graves also conducted interview after interview—and noticed a new pattern of thought emerging in individual mind-sets. He codiﬁed this pattern, assigning letters to designate individual and societal motivators in a nested hierarchy, a scheme Beck and Cowan later described in terms of a palette of colors that serve as mnemonics for the codes.

Because of its roots in the Graves letter-codes, this color palette doesn’t quite follow the visible spectrum; it starts with beige, then runs through purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, turquoise, coral, and other colors that don’t come up often enough to discuss here. It’s easiest to think of it as a set of nested Russian dolls: with the tiny beige doll nestled in the very center, fully enclosed by a slightly larger purple doll, and so on. And it is notable that yellow marks a distinctive and dramatic shift to a new “second tier” level, making a break from preceding colors—it reﬂects an expansive view relatively free from fear and self-protection. People who read Graves’s or Beck and Cowen’s work often jump to the conclusion that these colors represent archetypes—basically types of people. For instance, I’m blue, you’re yellow, and she’s green. Incorrect assumption. While individuals may hold a dominant orientation, the colors represent adaptive perspectives within people—what I think of as worldviews, or value-memes. Also, someone could deﬁnitely exhibit an orange streak in business while leaning toward blue value-memes in other interactions.

In the left margin is an ultra-brief summary of the four predominant worldviews in industrialized nations today.

This dizzying rainbow serves to stress the way our society now includes a multitude of conﬂicting worldviews that did not have critical mass only a decade ago. We can no longer assume that others hold our own worldview. Nonetheless, it really is possible to relate to others outside your own worldview without mentally juggling a table of colors in your daily business interactions—a point I return to later in this chapter.

But ﬁrst, the promised ﬂashback to 1996. That long stable period between the Enlightenment and the Internet isn’t as monochromatic orange as I’m about to make it, of course. Nor has the business world made the crossover from orange to green. However, we are for the ﬁrst time living on a world stage where orange, green, and now yellow are all players.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Here’s What We’ve Set Out To Do: Identify the values of the revolution and the people who are building companies that embody them: a commitment to merge economic growth with social justice, democratic participation with tough-minded execution, explosive technological innovation with old-fashioned individual commitment.

—Handbook of the Business Revolution: Manifesto, Fast Company, November 1995
(premiere issue)

I’m doing an (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

—Linus Torvalds, 1991, describing the launch of Linux

Enter Orange Stage Left

The Industrial Age ushered in the rise of the corporation and the values of the American Dream: achievement, status, prestige, and the tangible rewards of working hard and prospering by toil and ingenuity.

Branding became imperative after the surpluses that followed World War II. And it was cemented as a marketing vehicle in the June Cleaver era of the 1950s when everyone scurried to watch the very same television shows—back when mass media really did attract mass audiences.

Mostly business as we knew it throughout the twentieth century brought no abrupt upheavals—until a big wrench was thrown among the factory cogs. And that wrench was a new medium called the Internet.

Enter Green Stage Right

The Internet marked the ﬁrst time we all had access to a global warehouse of information at our ﬁngertips. We could now connect to practically any other person in the world. From its origins in sharing information and research within universities and scientiﬁc labs, the ’Net became recognized as a distribution platform where anyone with a business plan on a napkin could turn a buck. Frictionless commerce! Disintermediation! The prophets of the New Economy extolled the glories of the new medium. Fragmented marketplaces coalesced easily at sites like eBay and craigslist.

The fabric of the World Wide Web is made up of hyperlinks—the lateral linking
structure that connects one document to another. Suddenly it was no longer necessary to create every last line of content—instead, you could simply reuse, reference, and link to other documents, including those you didn’t own yourself. If it was out there in the ether, or in “the cloud,” to use an industry insider name for the Internet, anyone could connect to it. The act of clicking on a site and following links to other pages and sites even on its own yielded far more interactivity and user control than sitting on the couch watching TV or sipping coffee and skimming the morning paper ever did. And interactivity could go well beyond merely surﬁng. Passionate users of online communities such as The Well, Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL catalyzed the explosive growth of Internet communities in all their variations—forums, discussion groups, and e-mail lists. For any community of interest—no matter how esoteric, eccentric, or absurd—you could easily ﬁnd and communicate with kindred spirits and like-minded folks who shared your passion.

The decentralized, distributed nature of the massively global network eventually alters the way you look at solving nearly any complex problem. I noted this for myself and for the visionaries, engineers, and ﬁnanciers around me. From Napster’s massive decentralized architecture to Small Pieces, Loosely Joined to The Wisdom of Crowds, complex adaptive systems thinking both intrigued and threatened holders of existing value-memes.

The competitive pace of the New Economy meant that creative destruction was now wired and equilibrium was tired—even in old lumbering behemoths. The Silicon Valley culture of “ideas trump titles” spread worldwide. Top down procedures and bureaucratic processes were scrapped like hourglasses in an era running on Internet time. The catchphrase “24/7” entered our vocabulary. Fail early, fail often. Business plans morphed faster than software could be cranked out. Cowboy coding: Whip it out and lasso it together pronto. A scalable Web site meant it wouldn’t be obsolete and architecturally brittle before the next trade show or venture capital pitch.

Allegiance wasn’t to your company but to your guild—or, ahem, to the start up with the biggest foozball table, the best on-site masseuse, and the sportiest car thrown in as a signing bonus. Work was supposed to be fun and fast. Staid and rigid hierarchies were the last place freshly minted MBAs were headed. The spoils were to be shared too, and more egalitarian stock options made sure that employment carried an aura of ownership.

Personally, I was enthralled by the fast paced ride recounted in eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capital at Work and sincerely gripped by business plan writing and IPO prospectus reading.

By late 1999 I was just plain crazed; I accepted a position as CTO of a brand-new VC backed start up while continuing full-time work for the next three months to make sure my stock options vested. I had no time for the mountain wedding my ﬁancŽ and I had wanted, so we ducked over to the courthouse. I really didn’t have time for marriage (or people for that matter, either).

The New Economy wasn’t just about calculating how many millions our stock options would be worth when we IPO’d and photocopying and distributing Fast Company articles. And then again it was about calculating how many millions my stock options would be worth. I could always do what I really meant to do . . . someday.

But things aren’t ever as cut-and-dried as they appear. While the year 2000 marked the peak of my “orange” period, at the exact same time I considered Rachel Carson my hero, belonged to Greenpeace, ran a regional “progressive” women’s e-zine as a side venture, and led a biweekly breakfast “business and consciousness” roundtable. At the roundtable we’d chat about the thoughts of Peter Senge, Dee Hock, Margaret Wheatley, and Anita Roddick.

The infamous RIAA versus Napster case was the classic portrayal of two worlds, or two value-memes, colliding. Pitted mano a mano was: “we can win this game only if we own the content” against “let’s share and we’ll see what innovations and business models emerge down the road.”

It was a toxic concoction: one part “change-the-world” and one part “fuck the establishment,” with one part “yeah, a condo in Vail would be sweet” and a dash of hubris thrown in. It was bound to explode.

Yellow Saunters Down The Aisle

Yellow’s whispering grows louder approaching the stage. . . . Enron and WorldCom are simply larger manifestations of the sordid underside of the New Economy and of the business world I witnessed daily around me. One too many Concorde ﬂights ﬁnally burst the bubble. Disillusionment and dissolution run rampant. A dot-com veteran—once the darling of the business community—becomes an overnight pariah. Friends still, the CEO and the CFO pass on my offer of coming with me to see Startup.com at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s not a matter of having time to sit through a movie now—it’s far too close to home. The CEO, a relocated Los Angeleno, is certain our tale makes an intensely dramatic screenplay—but, being shell-shocked, he doesn’t have the wherewithal to bother. I wonder whether the founder, a millionaire before plowing his money into company #2, regrets abandoning the playwriting he pushed aside.

For some the existential questions began when they were no longer catnapping in cots in the server room (OK, I slightly exaggerate) but were ﬁling unemployment claims. For others, they arose when they cashed in their founders’ stock in the nick of time and realized they now had the millions to do practically anything they wanted if they only knew what that was. It is impossible to ﬁnd a knowledge worker or creative class member totally unaffected by the NASDAQ market crash and the tech economy downturn. But plenty of opportunities to pause and reconsider our lives were on their way—including September 11th and its aftermath.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2002 when everyone else was in mass exodus (no, not that Exodus—its empty buildings still stand off Highway 101). It no longer reeked of the get-rich-quick air of 1999. A mature sobriety was the rule. The frontier spirit of Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift is replaced with the reﬂective questing of his ensuing What Should I Do With My Life? Something was bound to come out of this change in mood. I yearned for the authentic energy of possibility and self-expression. But Silicon Valley, an Indian entrepreneur reminded me, is one of those rare places where people can understand why you would choose to forgo a paycheck in one of the priciest places on earth in order to pursue a dream.

Enter Yellow Front And Center, Climbing Onstage

While scattered individuals have exhibited a decidedly yellow perspective for decades, Slashdot, Linux, and the new online media and collaborative workspaces—blogs and wikis—signal hints of yellow “by design” processes and media. (A yellow system does not mean that only yellow mind-sets congregate; yellow prefers to absorb ideas and concepts from any source in the palette.) And new media usher in new thinking—the act of using them breaks old neurological patterns and adds new ones.

In Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media, Jim Banister points out that the Internet emerged as the ﬁrst medium to emphasize feminine traits, or what Daniel Pink refers to as right-brain “R-directed thinking” skills. (Interestingly, research says men rank and women link. The blogosphere ranks and links.)

The blogosphere represents the ﬁrst medium to integrate both the masculine and feminine: a truly androgynous mind-set. And integration isn’t a combinatory function but a fusion. More akin to soup than salad.

Preceding blogs, the Linux operating system was an early hint of yellow-by-design processes. One could imagine a sort of free-for-all democratic process behind the success of Linux. If Torvalds had gone with that strategy, the end result might resemble that hideous painting Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid produced, inspired by a poll of 1,001 Americans’ view of good art: a landscape featuring George Washington, a strolling family, deer, and a hippo thrown in for good measure. Left entirely to the whims of voting and consensus, works of art, software, and even brands lose their cohesion.

“How do you get customers ﬁred up about a new product in a tired category? Simple. Turn your brand over to them,” says a March 2005 Fast Company article on Jones Soda Co. Not so simple in actuality. In the same article we hear Chris King of Jones Soda Co. say: “The customer’s not always right. F—- that. If you’re always trying to cater to everyone, you have no soul.”

So Linus Torvalds and a very closely held circle hold the reins of Linux’s soul. Ultimately it’s up to them to make the ﬁnal call of what’s in and what’s out—and while each contribution may be considered, not everything is accepted. When Torvalds opened up Linux for collaboration he was already starting with a vision, the kernel of the operating system. Kernel: the seed he’d envisioned and planted. That’s not exactly to say that Torvalds owns Linux, either. It’s closer to a dialectic between what green might deride with a smirk as the “Linux elite” and its community.

Before Linux, software companies created their proprietary products behind closed doors and, in a similar vein, corporations told their story to mass markets via mass media. And it was their story.

Then customers (and a few fringe marketers) started countering: Hey, it’s our story. You don’t own the brand. Alex Wipperfurth deﬁnes brand hijack (a phrase he used as the title for his book) as a synonym for consumer takeover or “the consumer’s act of commandeering a brand from the marketing professionals and driving its evolution.”

Whether you are on the I or you side of the “who owns the brand” debate, both are about wresting control: a battle of who’s right—orange or green? What if one got above the turf wars and could survey the battleground from a higher vantage point? And what if it wasn’t even a battle? (If you do one thing as a result of reading my words, read Chapter 12, “Telling the WE Story” in The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.)

Now What?

I wondered about the inner workings of open source software projects such as the Linux operating system for a long time. You couldn’t get me to code for free, I said. Why would anyone? I realized we obviously had different motivations, yes. Yet I couldn’t quite put myself into their shoes. I kept exploring and questioning, and years later I ﬁnally understood the open source worldview because I embraced it, shared it, encompassed it: I was blogging for free.

The research literature would lead you to believe you simply cannot comprehend another viewpoint, period, if you’ve not encompassed it yourself. Starting in infancy, people go through the whole Graves palette beginning at survival beige and moving on to more complex shades. Most of us tend to stabilize at the value-meme currently in vogue in our environment—inﬂuenced by our parents, our locality, our culture. That is, unless the constellation of beliefs that make up the value-meme isn’t operating well in our lives and we seek alternative answers.

Unfortunately, although we aren’t conscious of it, we’re all a bit like autistic children. That is, we suffer from varying degrees of mindblindness: inability to relate to others from their perspectives.

Here’s an example of mindblindness in action: In one experiment, autistic children are shown a familiar candy box and asked, “What do you think is in here?” They say, “Candy!” But the box turns out to contain pencils. When asked what a new child who comes into the room will think is inside the box, they reply, “Pencils.” And they’re also certain that they always thought the box held pencils. Unlike normal children, they can’t seem to conceive that beliefs can be false and that two people can hold two different and potentially diametrically opposed beliefs.

Along with the advent of new media and new thinking, the opening of worldwide markets ushers in fragmented, oft-conﬂicting worldviews. The business stage is crowded with players of all persuasions—each heeding separate and distinct director’s instructions. The research conclusion: If you can’t encompass my perspective, you can’t understand my perspective, and thus you can’t ever understand me.

Although the literature frames the model as a map of the evolution of human consciousness, what it really gives us is a map of the evolution of human concepts. But, ultimately, we are not the current constellation of sense-making concepts. We are not the beliefs we’ve inherited from our tradition, our culture, our society, our parents, or our religion. We’re not even the beliefs and stories we make up about ourselves. The woman I know who over time has shifted from atheist to evangelical Christian is exactly the same person. She didn’t dissolve, but her beliefs did.

That’s the good news. The bad news: Adults assume. I assume you are like me, or like something I know. You assume the same of me. We may know that others are potentially coming from very different worldviews, but we’re mentally geared to trust our assumptions because they’ve worked just ﬁne, mostly. Maybe. Until now.

More bad news. According to the literature (and my empirical observations), although we’ve each lived in many different parts of the palette, we diss the neighborhoods we’ve come from. Say maybe I once resided in blue before I moved to orange, and now I’m swimming happily in green. I understand blue. Hey, I’ve been there. But it’s stiﬂing in the blue. And it’s way nasty and lonely in orange. We tend to devalue perspectives we don’t hold any longer. We get carried away at times and view people as their worldviews. Thus, they feel judged. Sadly, we can never truly communicate with those we judge.

Once we get to yellow and beyond, things brighten up again. Yellow marks a transition into value-memes that can relate to those nested below. And what is most important, it respects and values their contributions with far less judgment.

Honing the skills of empathy and empathic communication is the solution to this quandary. In a 2004 webinar with Daniel Pink, management guru Tom Peters cited empathy as the most crucial of the six skills that Pink, a Wired contributing editor, outlined in A Whole New Mind as essential in the future global talent markets. Empathetic communication is the ﬁfth habit listed in Steven Covey’s classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

However, what we’re all most adept at is conceptual empathy, that is, scanning for a frame of reference we can personally identify with. But what if there just ain’t any such animal? Conceptual empathy isn’t sufﬁcient when the concepts are out of your league. What you need is a higher, more general view. Nobody looks down from an airplane and points out the window exclaiming, “Oh, look, there!! See the dotted line separating India and Pakistan?” You simply don’t perceive borders from that vantage point.

When water joins with water, it is not a meeting but a uniﬁcation.

—Swami Prajnanpad

Blasting Assumptions

A new reader stumbled across my blog and later in his own blog described me as a “New Age Californian.”

I wonder what conclusion he’d have reached if he knew that the day before, between meetings in San Francisco, I’d ducked into a bookstore to read Forbes magazine’s annual billionaires issue. Or what he would make of the fact that I’d lived in the election-map “red states” of Utah and Florida for twenty-eight of the last thirty years? Or that I’d moved to Silicon Valley two years earlier to work on business plan due diligence with some colleagues who broker deals between venture capitalists and early start-ups. Ah, then would I be a bourgeois capitalist?

He was scanning his repertoire of worldviews and frames of references to quickly assess: was I green or orange? This or that?

We all do this all the time—and rather insidiously. One of the functions of the brain is to ﬁlter and pattern match. This thing is a table—it doesn’t present new information. No need to process its texture, the craftsmanship, the grain of its wood, or to touch this particular one. Table, check, done. Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and author, tells us that our ideas can become a perceptive barrier to reality. We cease to see a table and rely on our ready-made concept of tableness.

Marketers are simply notorious for this: we segment and slice and dice the population and make broad-ranging assumptions. On the furthest extreme beyond quick categorization, people believe that marketers literally lump customers into one category, as this statement attests:

In this age of test-marketing and spin, here is a business that does not treat the customer as a credulous cash dispenser.

—Inc., speaking of craigslist

You can study value-memes until you are blue in the face. You can read up on and focus group Latinas, women, Baby Boomers, Gen Y, Harley-Davidson devotees, Star Trek fans, or any other imaginable demographic and psychographic under the moon. Ultimately these methods yield zilch in terms of real comprehension. I’ve been in those focus groups—and rarely do I come away feeling understood. I’d settle for being heard.

We make up stories about groups of customers to simplify our lives. Unfortunately, these simpliﬁed stories are based on our own autobiographies and what we’re familiar with. We don’t know what we don’t know.

One of the most challenging skills in the world has got to be seeing things from another perspective—the customer, the employee, the partner, the supplier, the person sitting on the other side of the table—because we are constantly ﬁltering everything through our own perspective and making unconscious leaps about others based on our perspectives, our decision-making framework, our autobiographies, our experiences with others beforehand, and our frame of reference.

And so when a new customer comes in the door, or sends e-mail, or sits down for the one-on-one interview, are you interacting with your mental story or are you listening and directly experiencing that person? How much of the time have you plucked up an idea from the trusty story grid in your head and scarcely needed an interview for validation?

With a personal story idea ﬁrmly in hand, the mind is off and racing again: Now, what’s a great story to tell to a New Age Californian? Sustainably grown crystals and sage? Bonk! Try again. You don’t know me well enough if you think a New Age story works on me.

Before concocting stories—and many marketers are fairly proﬁcient at creating, telling, and spreading stories—it’s useful to take a refresher course in observation.

That’s observing versus thinking—what Buddhists call bare attention. You note, register, and observe what’s arising moment by moment. You’re not thinking “about,” not needing to do something “with,” and—most important—not comparing or putting things in relation to anything else. This skill, which psychiatrist Arthur Diekman calls deautomatization, is the goal of all contemplative traditions.

Observation is especially key at the fuzzy front end of marketing—at the innovation stage. Even more cost draining and time consuming than the wrong sales pitch is an entire product built on the wrong premise.

The Human Frame Of Reference

It’s hard to believe, but you can go to the hinterlands of Papua New Guinea, and tribesmen there would correctly recognize the emotions captured in face shots of Italians, Americans, and Iranians. In other words, they instinctively know the basic emotions of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and happiness. The August 5, 2003, issue of the New York Times describes how researcher and psychology professor Paul Ekman did just that, to prove we hadn’t culturally adopted a set of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. Ekman says, “[The tribespeople] not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.” (See the story headed “The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal.”)

Being a lifelong photographer, Ekman naturally chose visuals as his tool, but he emphasizes that “voice is absolutely just as revealing.” Once we come across a person, a story, a way to make sense of the world, or a marketing campaign that is beyond any shared frame of reference we’ve encompassed, the thing to do isn’t to give up or to judge but rather to drop into the human frame of reference—a common ground that runs under the radar of the conceptual.

Almost intuitively, great brands have hit upon themes that resonate universally and connect to this common ground. Starbucks offers a classic study of recognizing the human frame of reference—the pull of a social “third place,” a home away from home. And Red Bull is another such brand, defying heftier rivals PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch as Alex Wipperfurth points out in Brand Hijack:

The company has been incredibly successful, both over time and across geographies, in standing for something broader and more ﬂexible: energy and stimulation. The result is that Red Bull can mean different things to different people. . . . From truck drivers to clubbers to extreme sports enthusiasts, Red Bull weaves itself into the lives of very different groups of people without ostracizing any of them. It effortlessly crosses socioeconomic boundaries.

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, tells the story of a highly successful television advertising campaign for Telecom New Zealand featuring scenes portraying the bond between fathers and sons. He’s shown the TV spot in hundreds of presentations
and makes the following observation in his book Lovemarks:

In Dubai, Denmark, Los Angeles, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, and Sydney, the response never varies. People feel this spot is talking to them personally. The story makes a deep emotional connection.

In Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life, Natalie Goldberg shares a story one of her friends wrote about someone dying of AIDS. It ends by saying, “Jeff was a doctor. The nurses stood crying at the nurses’ station because they believed a thirty-three-year-old doctor should not die.” Thinking of the piece, she notes:

There is a quiet place in us below our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, and our death. . . .

I could take Miriam’s . . . piece to Asia, to a small village there, maybe a place that knew nothing of AIDS, and they would understand her writing, because it came from the place where we are not American, not gay, not a New Yorker.

But if we wipe out country, sex, religion—the things that form us—where does writing style come in? Style is all these things fully digested into our humanness, so the fact that Miriam was brought up in New York doesn’t overrun the basic emotion of sorrow.

At the human frame of reference, we share a common motivation. The Dalai Lama says, “I believe that every human being has an innate desire for happiness and does not want to suffer. . . . Though some of us have larger noses and the color of our skin may differ slightly, physically we are basically the same. The differences are minor. Our mental and emotional similarity is what is important.”

The basic desire for happiness and to love and to be loved can be viewed as the mountain peak motivator. How we choose to we get to that peak is where our beliefs and worldviews differ; each has its own path to the peak. Evidenced by footsteps on the path, people all sincerely believe that theirs is a viable and good route to the peak.

While one person sees a Lear jet parked in a private hangar as the path to freedom and happiness, another might chose sculpting clay ﬁgures each morning outside the door of a roving RV. Our worldviews have much more to do with the how (to get there) than the what. Happiness is the root motivator that binds all the worldviews.

The Conversations We Are Not Having

Among [Darwin magazine author Graeme] Thickin’s reasons [for disregarding blogs]. . . . Business doesn’t do passion; business doesn’t like gossip; business doesn’t like doing public experiments; business doesn’t bare its soul; business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close.

Each of these arguments falls at the ﬁrst word; the fanciful notion of a single, monolithic thing called “business.” Well, this imaginary creature may not like passion, or gossip, or public experiments . . . but people do, and that’s probably why the numbers of bloggers keep growing.

—Johnnie Moore

Nike, P&G, Intel, Saatchi & Saatchi and countless other ﬁrms embed themselves within their customers’ environments much as anthropologists study a foreign tribe or culture. Hitting the mark on both the product front and the brand (symbol) front requires a ﬁrm foundation in actually knowing your customers’ stories. And that starts with a bit of “deep hanging out”—and perhaps a conversation or two that doesn’t skirt around the customers’ burning issues.

Companies scramble to ﬁnd out what matters to their customers and what makes them tick—all the better to sell to them. But business folks are typically left out of all these vital conversations. And why is that? It’s impossible to hear your customers’ burning issues and their stories if they sense taboos—conversations where they’d be judged for even considering the topic much less expressing their authentic feelings and viewpoints.

If “markets are conversations” as The Cluetrain Manifesto asserts, an awful lot of intensely important conversations aren’t even being whispered about in the presence of business.

I’m not speaking of the internal and unsaid “let’s tiptoe around the elephant in the room” conversations that plague all companies. More precisely, I’m talking about the conversations that get to the heart of the matter for your customers. Even if those conversations seem completely (debatable, but I’ll humor you . . . ) irrelevant to the tangible product at hand—they are where emotional resonance, universals, and the brand reside. At the end of the day, no matter what industry you are in or what you are selling, the bottom line is your customer is ultimately . . . a person.

We are embarrassed by sex. We’d rather not think about death. And if we bring up God
(or god or gods), noses will get out of joint. Yet sex, death, and God are the most profound

considerations of mankind. How can companies hope to remain relevant if they won’t discuss them?

—Harvard Business Review, February 2005

Sex, death, God—the stuff of human conversations.

Astonishingly, nearly every one of my friends is an engineer or scientist by training. Unbeknownst to me at the initial meeting—at a ski shop or a running club, no matter—they’ll later announce themselves to be, surprise, nerds too. The most rational, analytical people in your workplace—yes, even the guy with a couple of patents in digital encryption or the one who runs the strict quality assurance for the lab or the physicist in the high-energy accelerator—yes, even they think and talk about these very human subjects. A lot.

These are the deepest aspirations of human beings, aspirations for immortality—that is, for an experience beyond time and space, for we are the only beings that are aware that we shall die. Even if we are good scientists, we know we are going to die. The diversions we create for ourselves cannot prevent us from thinking of the fact that sooner or later we shall die. No diversion can prevent us from that truth.

—Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Your blog is the “deepest” one I read, two different readers recently told me. At a lunch meeting the aforementioned QA manager (entirely unprompted) differed, saying, “You haven’t written anything profound in a while.” Months before, he’d said that if he had his own business he didn’t see much need for consultants, nor executive coaches—ah, but a spiritual adviser, that’d be different. He compared our face-to-face conversations with what I’m writing for public consumption, and I had to admit I hold back.

The truth is we are all holding back more than we can bear. The dam is bursting at the seams—people are yearning to talk about what deeply matters to them. And there’s hardly anyone around willing to listen. The conversations we most want to have are hushed behind closed doors—or they’re not happening at all. War, says a Croatian woman I met in Italy, has made Croatians more openly conversant about life matters. Yet she is convinced that the United States is the hotbed of spiritual discussions because so many New Age and spiritual bestsellers spring from American authors.

“What about the best-selling Celestine Prophecy?” I tell her I have no idea where those purportedly millions of readers were—perhaps they’re all closet readers. We don’t discuss these matters in polite company. Or, that is to say, in business.

After a one-day writers workshop I went out to dinner with a few of the attendees—all complete strangers, as they say. We delved with intensity into the amazingly intricately interwoven topics of sex, death, and God. What started out as a breezy comic discussion on writing erotica quickly went to the bone. Two sisters shared their father’s last words (“I’m ready to come to you”) and how they’ve grappled with death and God since. Another woman’s voice quivers as she shares the ups and downs of taking one day at a time while she and the husband she clearly loves very much cope with his Parkinson’s disease. Yet another reveals how her own buried grief rose up when a best friend lost his wife.

I don’t bring up death now from a sense of overriding grief or morbidity. But death has a particular way of bringing a stark focus to the fragility of life. And what’s important in life. (In other words, what’s important to customers.) A friend recently shared that her marriage separation took shape after her sister’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-eight. “I looked at my life pretty closely after that.”

That’s the appeal of mega-bestsellers such as Tuesdays with Morrie and The Purpose-Driven Life.

These conversations may all seem anomalous. But I can assure you they are not. They are simply human conversations. I’m surrounded by these kinds of conversations all the time. And I’m just a marketer—not a clergy member, not a nurse or a doctor, not a counselor, not a therapist, not a masseuse, not a psychiatrist, not a social worker, not a coach. Simply another human being willing to listen without judgment, with compassion—and that’s enough.

Tuning Forks

Our limbic system, the emotional brain we share with all mammals, is a powerful antenna, attuned to each other’s wavelengths. When we say, “My heart went out to him,” we’re saying we can’t help but resonate, even when we try not to notice.

—Marc Ian Barasch

Beyond the conceptual empathy we’re most familiar with, there’s resonant empathy. Often it’s in the pauses within a conversation that true communication occurs. UCLA research cites that words themselves (or concepts) inﬂuence listener impressions the least. Facial expressions, body language, and the quality, tone, pitch, variation, and volume of the speaker’s voice accounted for 93 percent of the impact of the message.

Lorne Ladner relays a tale his wife, Terry, tells of working at an upscale department store’s cosmetics and skin counter in his book The Lost Art of Compassion. An irate older woman stormed in one Valentine’s Day to return a container of eye cream she had purchased, screaming at the young, attractive employees that the stuff plainly doesn’t work—“Look at my eyes!” Terry explained that it was no problem to return the eye cream, and the woman hufﬁly threw the receipt at her. In a split instant, Terry noticed something beyond the stated words and surface emotions.

“Your eyes are very puffy today. Is everything all right?”

The woman retorted, “No.” There was a long pause during which neither of them moved. . . . Somehow, as they looked at each other, they experienced a moment of genuine connection there in the midst of a mall. The woman softened. Though she certainly hadn’t known it when she came in, this was exactly what she was looking for—a connection.

She said, “Really, I’ve been crying. Every night, I’ve been crying. You girls don’t know what it’s like to be getting old, to be alone. It’s just terrible.” Her eyes welled up with tears. Empathy had uncovered the loneliness beneath the anger, allowing for a deepened sense of intimacy.

In this exchange, Terry wisely used resonant empathy to surmise that more was percolating under the surface. Whether we are trying to understand individuals or markets, we can easily brush past carefully buried issues and deep-seated motivations.

I had an enlightening encounter recently. A woman railed about being discounted as a woman. She was tired of the corruption she’d witnessed ﬁrsthand in her workplace to the extent she no longer trusted anyone in business or government, but particularly those of a male persuasion. She was so vehemently bitter and angry with the oppressors crushing her she was shaking when she spoke.

Conceptual empathy allows us to take the statement and state of mind—“I’m angry at being taken advantage of and feeling like a pawn”—and relate it to our own similar experiences and states of mind. We don’t have to necessarily fully agree with the cause-and-effect, we simply conceive of the state of mind. This approach is the most commonly used tool in empathic communication, but it has its drawbacks. In this case, as with the irate cosmetics customer, there was much more to the story.

Resonant empathy works when we’re clearly responding to something going on in the other person that’s vibrating within ourselves. Terry at the cosmetics counter noted how, immediately following the tense energy of anger, the next emotion that arose within herself was sorrow. This led her to ask, “Is everything all right?” In my own encounter, I was experiencing the resonating fear of being vulnerable although many others in the same group only perceived the obvious tough stance and rage. Once I recognized this, I felt an instant ﬂush of compassion and recognition, and the entire conversation shifted 180 degrees.

Practices

Over the last few years, I’ve gone from being self-conscious and uncomfortable with people to being equally at ease with Nicholas, the homeless Vietnam vet who frequents the parking lot of the neighborhood coffee shop, and with Thomas, the savvy biotech executive seated next to me on the direct business-class ﬂight to Paris. When I look back, I’m startled to realize that I’ve honed only two practices in the process of this transformation. They have made all the difference in both my personal and professional life. Neither is particularly difﬁcult; neither is particularly simple.

Some say that empathy cannot be taught, but it can be learned.

Dismantling Walls

Marketing people talk about emotion. They present charts and diagrams, even raise their voices and wave their arms, but fundamentally they treat emotion as . . . out-there, felt by someone else and able to be manipulated. Analyzing other people’s emotions and refusing to acknowledge our own dumps us in the same old rut. What a waste.

—Kevin Roberts

PHUKET, THAILAND, 27 December 2004: I lay weeping into my pillow at 4 A.M., curled on a green vinyl-covered twin bed in the fully lit hospital rehab room. The nurses attempted to mufﬂe their chattering and the tsunami news streaming from the TV around the corner was turned down low. Were they OK? And what of the gypsy families on Koh Jum we saw near the boat bar weaving their nets and fashioning bamboo squid and shrimp traps days before? What of the Danish family in the bungalow closest to the sea? What of every single person that donned one of the Santa hats that Phen, the bungalow operator, passed out at the Christmas Eve party? I shook the thought. Yes, yes, they must be ﬁne.

The unparalleled depths of sorrow, grief, anguish, and despair that rose like an angry sea dragon in the hours, days, and weeks that followed threatened to consume me even as the tangible tsunami did not.

At times like this we are tempted to draw up the bridge and fortify the walls, where in fact the thing to do is seize opportunity—while the heart’s soft spot is palpable—to further crack open the fortress walls that keep us distant from others. This was the ﬁrst time in my life that the temptation to run from intense emotions didn’t win out. I didn’t “let go” of feelings—rather the pithy advice was “let be.” I simply rode the waves out. I sat with whatever came up without resistance and surprisingly I learned that the way out was through. Buddhists concertedly cultivate their capacity for empathy via openheartedness, or bodhichitta.

Fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to ﬁnd this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.

—Pema Chodron

Strangely enough, I’ve found that my ability to remain present to pain, grief, and sorrow has made me less hooked by these emotions; I’m able to withstand others’ dramatic outbursts and intense expressions of suffering without triggering unresolved emotions within myself. Meeting our own intense emotions without resistance allows us to skillfully and gently handle others’ emotions without our own getting in the way.

Recently I witnessed a woman standing at a church service topple right over. She was having a seizure. While a doctor ran over and paramedics were called, I found that my presence of mind was uncharacteristically unwavering in its calmness and loving healing thoughts extended outward without thinking. Normally, I’d be more panicked and worried. As spiritual teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche noted after the tsunami tragedy, “We want the suffering to go away because it scares us or it causes us personal pain” (italics mine). Our own anxieties and fears, along with ignored and frozen emotions, come back to the foreground of our memory. Thawing out can be painful, but I wouldn’t choose to go back to the tundra of numbness.

Empathy can become second nature. The facial photographer and researcher introduced earlier, Dr. Paul Ekman, developed another test measuring how well someone can read people’s emotions from watching a videotape of rapid-ﬁre, ﬂeeting changes in expressions and attempting to correctly identify the emotion. This test’s results are known to correlate with empathy. Most people do very poorly, but two Buddhist meditators in the study received nearly perfect scores.

One of the two monks, Matthieu Ricard, was shown a ﬁlm clip used in psychology tests to trigger and elicit disgust. The clip was of severe burn victims having dead skin carefully, painfully stripped from their bodies. When one has cultivated openheartedness in repeated practice as Ricard has, it’s not surprising that rather than the self-referential anxious and reactionary response of disgust, he felt “caring and concern, mixed with a not unpleasant strong, poignant sadness.” Ricard insists he is not an extraordinarily gifted monk—in fact, compassion and empathy are the entire point of practice. The Dalai Lama has said he does not practice a religion so much as he practices loving-kindness.

Chances are, you will not be in a tsunami. But any day you’re facing a separation can open your heart up to others located anywhere in the globe who are facing similar relationship endings and feel lonely, scorned, confused, or any other emotions that you are feeling. The day you go to the ATM machine and discover you’re down to your last ten bucks, you may suddenly feel your heart lurch out to those millions that contend with poverty on a daily basis. Whether you are in a minor car accident, lose a pet, go through a layoff, struggle with your teenager’s drug problem, ﬁle bankruptcy, lose a best friend to cancer, or any number of tragedies large and small, it’s an opportunity to connect with the soft spot within and wedge into the hairline crack to further dismantle the wall that separates you from others. You may only have a few opportunities—use them wisely.

As our technology becomes more sophisticated we perhaps think that our emotional responses need to be more sophisticated as well. But what seems best is simple, direct feeling that is not padded with logic or twisted concepts, such as, “Maybe they deserved it,” or, “I’m glad it’s not me,” or, “They should have known better,” or even, “That’s their karma.” These
contorted responses reﬂect poorly on our own state of mind. If compassion feels unnatural,

it’s probably because we’re still thinking of ourselves.

–Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Besides riding out the waves of emotion, I’ve been practicing metta—the meditation for cultivating loving-kindness and compassion that monk Ricard uses. It begins with extending loving-kindness toward ourselves, then moves out in a circle to mentors and those who’ve supported us, then further on to loved ones, then strangers, and then even those we dislike (advanced practice!) until the loving thoughts extend to every sentient being in the universe. “It’s compassion with no agenda, that excludes no one,” says Ricard in an interview with Marc Ian Barasch in Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. “You generate this quality of loving and let it soak the mind.”

I can envision a cloud of loving-kindness starting at beige seeping out to the next encircling purple Russian doll, then to the red, to blue, to orange, to green, to yellow, to turquoise, to coral, and inﬁnitely spreading out to encompass the whole range of worldviews until they collapse into white.

Polishing Walls

They went to their room
and began cleaning and polishing the walls.
All day every day they made those walls as pure and clear
as an open sky.

There is a way that leads from all-colors
to colorlessness.

—Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

The ﬁrst practice of dismantling the walls through cultivating opportunities to open the heart is an advanced practice. We’re lucky to peek through any of the tiny ﬁssures. But while the walls are up, we can at least keep them shiny, clean, and polished.

I treasure the work of the thirteenth-century Afghan Suﬁ poet, Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi. His Chinese Art and Greek Art is a favorite of mine. A king is settling a debate about who are the best artists with a contest. “The Chinese suggested then that they each be given a room to work on with their artistry, two rooms facing each other and divided by a curtain.” The Chinese artists proceed to paint an elaborately intricate colorful mural with a hundred shades of dye on their wall. The Greeks never touched a single dye. As the snippet that opens this section states, the Greeks spent entire days polishing the wall. The detail and colors of the Chinese mural “astonished” the King. Then the Greeks pulled back the dividing curtain to reveal:

The Chinese ﬁgures and images shimmeringly reﬂected
on the clear Greek walls. They lived there,
even more beautifully, and always
changing in the light.

A good marketer allows the customer’s reﬂections to shimmer purely without distortion. Our ﬁlters don’t distort; our perceptions don’t skew. We simply become like a mirror. No, you can’t possibly juggle all the varied pigments of concepts. What you get when you overlay every single color isn’t completeness—it’s opaque darkness. Black. The absence of colored pigment is white. White Greek walls perfectly reﬂecting.

In A Brand New World, Scott Bedbury (who was director of corporate advertising for Nike) recounts how Nike had hit a growth plateau. The internal debate around extending the brand beyond the original die-hard athletes to the broader ﬁtness category hit a stalemate.

Having been a committed marathoner, I know that there is a couch potato lurking in the most serious of athletes. It’s a shadowy ﬁgure we keep at bay. We tend to have disdain for that which we loathe—even mildly dislike—within ourselves. I imagine it must have made a few folks in the original athletic core of Nike wince when weekend warriors, baby-pushing joggers, and mall walkers were now considered as potential prospects.

Finally one ad campaign spoke to both the founding core of Nike’s employees and clientele and to the expanding ﬁtness category. “Just Do It” was inclusionary—pro athletes, aging weekend warriors, and even a dog out for a walk—were featured in TV spots. “The deep secret to the longevity of “Just Do It” lay in the fact that its message possessed as much relevance for twenty-year-old triathletes as for ﬁfty-year-old mall walkers,” Bedbury continues. “‘JDI’ was not uniquely male or female, not just sports-or-ﬁtness-oriented, neither purist nor recreational. It embraced all categories.”

Psychologists use “the shadow” to describe the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried in our unconscious and neglected out of fear of disapproval. When we run across someone or something that evokes any memory of this shadowy part within ourselves, we “project” the shadow outward onto them. We tend to exaggerate our perception of the trait within them—whether or not it’s even present—just because they’ve triggered its remembrance.

Nike had to confront its wimp/loser shadow before it could expand into the ﬁtness category. Paradoxically, “Just Do It” resonates with the indomitable hero tucked in all of us; this unifying message bridged the two groups while subtly acknowledging the shadow.

Shadows obscure large swaths of brilliant whitewashed walls. Usually shining a light evenly on the wall dissolves the illusory darkened splotches.

The fundamental skill of observation comes back into play. This is the single most indispensable practice: watching thoughts and feelings from a distance, much as a meteorologist watches the changing weather patterns go by—without judgment. That includes the particularly tricky practice of observing your judgment—both your self-judgment and your judgment of others—again, without judgment. Simply notice. (We can never practice enough radical self-acceptance.) It’s because we “project” precisely those unloved, unwanted, self-judged, and self-loathed aspects onto others that self-acceptance is crucial. And that’s why metta begins with extending acceptance and loving-kindness to your own self ﬁrst. The unaccepted are merciless. We believe that the darkened hues in the shimmering images displayed on the walls of our perception are actually in the original rather than our own shadow obstructing the reﬂection. Both conceptual and resonant empathy are unreliable when your projections obscure your perception of the world.

In addition, simply note how other people push your buttons and particularly your strong likes (guru- and goddess-worship, pedestal-plopping, admiration, adulation, awe) and dislikes (annoyance, contempt, disgust, dismissal). (The overtly positive traits are typically disowned as well.) Notice judgmental comparisons you make between yourself and others. Every person I encounter becomes a chance to show me my own blind spots (the shadow lurking below).

As you can learn to recognize and then recall your own projections on the wall, you will no longer need to make forced attempts toward compassion and empathy. You will see the other person’s reﬂection as clearly as your own. Eons before the wall is spotless, you will experience rich connections with others. Willingness, not mastery, is enough for dramatic results.

Conclusion: My Marketing Philosophy In A Word

I suspect these practices may at ﬁrst glance sound like horrendous drill exercises. “Be curious” has been my motto (“Ah, that’s an interesting reaction . . . ”). Curiosity transforms the onerous into the intriguing and illuminating. As conceptual empathy fails us with alarming frequency in the future, we’ll more naturally be inclined to be more curious.

Ironically, these touchy-feely practices do alter neural pathways. Over the long haul they lead to the cognitive abilities that Clare Graves noted in the subjects most able to enlarge their “perspective intelligences,” including agile decision making and an ability to engage and tackle systemic problems freshly.

And the outcomes go far beyond the cognitive. Matthieu Ricard “soaked his mind” in the unconditional compassionate glow of metta meditation while ensconced in an fMRI machine measuring his real-time brain processes. The experiment, by neuroscientist Richard Davidson, showed Ricard’s brain had intense activity in regions associated with joy and enthusiasm. In fact, the scan of his brain state was entirely off the bell curve dotted with 149 other participants’ results—pegged furthest, by far, on the happiness meter.

The beneﬁts accrue to your customers and prospects too. “There is no method, no program, and no technology that can make up for a lack of love for unbelievers,” says Rick Warren, author and pastor of the largest church in the United States (acknowledged by Forbes magazine as a business in its own right). Warren states that it is this all-encompassing love (plus, naturally for a church, the love of God) that motivates and ensures his Saddleback Community Church’s astonishing growth.

I typically don’t state my personal marketing philosophy so bluntly as I have here. Ultimately, it is simply this: Love attracts. The word love gets twisted around quite a lot. Loving-kindness more aptly conveys the infusion of a gentle kindness with no agenda, no strings attached, that excludes no one and resonates at a fundamental human frequency.

Oh, and one more thing. You could drop the extraneous and simply say it as a verb: Love.