Not Feeling Your Pain: Competition For Tech Customers - and Therefore For Employees - Now Requires Understanding of Emotion

Competition has been so quantitative for so long that managers could be forgiven - if not excused - for forgetting that customer purchase decisions in the post industrial economy are no longer based solely on the simple calculus of cost.

As Apple has demonstrated repeatedly, design and innovation will frequently beat out more mechanistic measures when it comes to convincing a skeptical and financially challenged populace to part with their hard-earned cash, even when they are not entirely sure what to do with the new device in question. iPods? iPads? Smart watches? Numerous iterations of iPhones whose enhancements often require an advanced degree in computer science to understand?

What does 'need' mean when it comes to technology? And yet, there they go, flying off the shelves almost as fast as Chinese factories can churn them out.

So the battlefield, as it were, has shifted from a fairly straightforward assessment of cost versus benefit to one in which look, feel, cache and other drivers of emotional response hold sway. There was a time when the logos of Harley-Davidson and the US Marine Corps were the most commonly found on people's bodies in the shape of tattoos. Apple is now joining that august, if questionable elite.

The challenge, as the following article explains, is that the corporations producing these items are often neither looking for the attributes necessary to deliver on consumers' desire - nor, if they are prescient enough to sense the need, are they entirely sure where - and how - to recruit such savants.

Business and economics remain the most popular courses of study in many universities today. Students, having seen what has happened to their parents, are understandably focused on what it will take to secure a job. But in doing so, they may be forsaking their natural instincts and abilities for a type of knowledge which is widely available and which fails to differentiate either them or the enterprises seeking to hire them to then differentiate themselves in the market.

The reality is that the intangibles which are so hard to find in financial statements are ever easier to locate among the factors driving business and technology growth. You just need to be open enough to look. JL

Geoffrey Colvin reports in Fortune:

"Non-cognitive skills and attributes such as teamworking, emotional maturity, empathy, and other interpersonal skills are as important as proficiency in English and mathematics."

INFOTECH EXECUTIVES ARE starting to talk funny, and we all need to pay attention. "Designing emotion into the product is now something you really have to think about and measure yourself against says Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, the maker of personal finance and small business software.He's telling me what it takes to win in his business today. When he and his colleagues test software, they mark it up with "happy faces or puzzled faces so the developers understand the emotion we were feeling at the time." Really? For software that keeps the books?

"I need great product designers, and IT people arent always great at aesthetics," says the CIO of one of Europe's largest retailers at a conference in Berlin recently, describing his hiring challenges.

'And I need people who are empathetic and collaborative. I cant have a great IT architect who has to be locked in a room.,' Excuse me? Isnt that where code writers are most at home: alone
in a dimly lit room, a crumpled bag of chips at their side?

'We're hiring artists, special-effects creators, and people who understand beauty," says Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor a maker of enterprise software. We're at his headquarters in Manhattan s Silicon Alley, where he's describing his strategy for competing against industry"giants Oracle and ,SAP. Infor, he says, offers 'beautiful business software for your business processes." This, for software that has long occupied the boiler room of corporate infotech.

  The clear trend here is not some fad in the software industry. A mushrooming demand for employees   with affective, nonlogical abilities spans the economy. Empathy-sensing at a deep level the feelings and thoughts of others-is the foundation.

"Non-cognitive skills and attributes such as teamworking, emotional maturity, empathy, and other interpersonal skills are as important as proficiency in English and mathematics,,' reports an advisory group of executives and educators on education reform in the U.K. When author George Anders searched for
online job postings that paid over $1OO,OOO a year and specified empathy or empathic traits, he quickly found some of them from companies as varied as Barclays Capital, McKinsey, and Mars.
It's happening for several reasons. partly it's a search for differentiation in a world where many products and services are becoming commoditized. From computers to refrigerators to websites, they mostly work fine and are reliable enough. How will yours distinguish itself? Intuit's Smith knows the question
to ask: "Did it leave me with a positive emotion?"

More and more, CEOs are concluding that to compete and win, they first need to understand the customer's inner experience. Their employees need empathy. And that trait is becoming ever valuable, in part because the supply of candidates who possess it seems to be shrinking-at least in the U.S. Empathy among
American college students has  declined significantly 3O years, say researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Rochester Medical Center (see chart). Other research gives little reason to believe it will increase as they grow older.

And that brings us to a deeper issue. We have evolved exquisitely to connect in person. consider what happens when you,re near someone and his or her face displays an emotion fleetingly, through a so-called micro-expression. your own face mimics that expression within milliseconds, and the other person, in
turn, detects your response. You have empathized without eitherone of you being aware of it-but it doesnt happen if you're alone in your cube. Which, virtually speaking or not, is where many of us spend our time these days. As work becomes dominated by technology, our individual worlds become increasingly cognitive
and virtual, lacking in face-to-face contact.

That may be why IT companies are at the vanguard of this new movement in corporate management: Getting ahead in tech today requires, among other skills, seeing the world from outside the cube. Empathy, emotion, and beauty arent as easy to measure as other metrics of employee performance. But to use another affect-laden term, it's time to embrace them.