In this last video of the module, I wanted to return to a theme that I touched on earlier around empathy and the power of empathy and understanding others. This module has been all about how our brains are wired, especially the role of emotions and one plan a time thinking and decision-making. Empathy is an attempt to understand how other people are perceiving a situation and living their lives. It's a powerful tool that we want to harness to make better decisions. Now empathy is closely related to the emotional intelligence, which I am sure you know about, and a lot of people have talked about. It's the ability to understand the diverse experiences and ideas and aspirations of others to be alert and attuned to how other people are behaving. Cultivating empathy is all about building stronger teams and making better decisions. Of course, it's central to the mindset that's going to support diversity equity and inclusion efforts in our companies and our teams. I'll give you a couple of examples. Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft and he's been very successful. He wrote a book called Hit Refresh. That is really a great book. He's quoted as saying, "Empathy makes you a better innovator". Empathy makes you a better innovator. Why did he say that? I think it's really cool because if you have empathy, what does it mean again, you put yourself in the shoes of other people. You understand where they're coming from or get a little bit better, you understand their history as I've shared with you in this module as well. Well, if you do that for consumers, for customers, for people that are using your products and services. Not just the people within your team, which is how we usually think about empathy. You do this for people that are around you, that you're selling to, you're going to have a much better understanding of how they use your products or services. How they think about it and it's going to enable you to think about what could you do to help them fulfill their goals, to help them satisfy whatever it is they need to satisfy. What is the customer want? The customer doesn't want to buy your product or your service. The customer wants to solve their problem, their issues, their challenges, their opportunities. That's what they're all about. The more we understand that, the better we're going to be able to innovate and create the products, services and anything else we need to be able to help those people, those customers fulfill their potential and satisfy their goals and solve their problems. This idea that I just shared with you that comes from Satya Nadella, is all about design thinking. It's exactly what design thinking is which had become a very big topic. Design thinking is designing your product and service in a way that helps customers solve the problems that they have. It enables you to understand customers in a deep way. Empathy might be a word that maybe you think it's just about helping people or treating people well. Well, that should be enough if that's what it was. But it also has this business case to it as well. It's pretty interesting because sometimes doing the right thing when it comes to empathy and understanding can often be a competitive advantage. Jacques-Philippe Piverger, is a former student of mine that is the managing director of a venture capital fund called OzoneX. I also did a podcast with him that I've added is optional listening if you want to get into it a little bit more. His thesis, his concept is almost all venture capitalists focus on finding companies and supporting founders that are usually from the majority. For whatever reason we can fill in the blanks and what some of those reasons might be. Founders that are women and people of color and the under-represented groups have much less venture capital money going towards them. There are studies that are out there. You can find you and google this. It's a tiny percentage of venture capital money goes to founders from under-represented groups. Anyways, Jacques-Philippe Piverger, he understands that and he said, "That's actually an opportunity." Because he has now created this venture fund that is specifically targeting founders that happened to be women or people of color. As we talk about in the podcasts, he says, well, first of all, we have less competition from the mainstream venture capital community for these startups, for these founders, because they don't target them in the way that we do, number 1. Number 2, it turns out when you look at the data that you actually can have a higher return on investment as an investor in companies that are founded by people from underrepresented groups. It's unbelievable. Empathy and doing the right thing and understanding the situation around you and avoiding those emotional biases and maybe some degree of discrimination as well, can actually be very good for business. Let's not forget that as well. Wrapping up this module, here are a few things that I'd like you to keep in mind. Number 1, our emotions are an essential part of how we think and make decisions. I've shared a lot of examples on exactly that. Number 2. These emotions are usually far ahead of our rational brain in processing information and even acting on that information. Just go back to the video where I share that famous gambling experiment that illustrates that. Number 3. Because emotions are so central to how we think and how we behave, we should expect that our personal histories replete with positive and negative emotional tags will be very powerful influences on what we do as individuals, both at home and at work. Number 4. Companies make all sorts of decisions. But we should always remember that it's individuals who make those decisions. It's not really a company that decides anything. It's the people that work there, and therefore, it's the individuals who will be influenced by their emotions. Sony acquired Columbia Pictures to write an old wrong, one that had really struck a powerful emotional chord with Sony's leadership. All about the Beta story and missing out. Therefore, they missed making the right inferences from the past that might have saved them from literally a three billion dollar right down from the acquisition of Columbia Pictures when that deal went sour. Number 5. Most people follow one plan at a time decision-making, no matter what they might say about following the textbook approach to making decisions. I can talk a good game about how I have all these pros and cons and alternatives and all the rest. But most of the time, I, like you, I'm going to make a one plan at a time decision. That's just the way it is and we should just face up to the reality of that and make sure that we don't let it lead us astray by being alert, by being careful and being prepared to pivot and adjust as need be. Number 6, diversity and empathy. Attributes of organizations, but especially attributes of us as individuals, as humans. They're especially important in a world where emotional biases are all too common or standard. We can't be great decision-makers without paying attention to the dark side of emotional tagging. That's why focusing on diversity and empathy is so critical. Those are the six key lessons that come out of this module. I hope you enjoyed it. Hope you got a lot out of it. I especially hope that you were able to apply these ideas to your own work and to your own life as well. See you in Module 2.
