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Follow This Path

The Big Idea

This book shows that the ultimate solution to reversing the current leadership trends of margin slashing, accounting trickery, and shareholder hoodwinking is to run an organization that can maintain and expand its customer base without slashing prices and without reducing its fiscal integrity. In the end, the success of your organization does not depend on your understanding of economics, or organizational development, or marketing. It depends on your understanding of psychology: how each individual employee and client connects with your company.

An Emotion-Driven Economy

Cutting-edge and responsive organizations today know how to chart through the strong currents of competition by keeping their customer and employee relations, not only intact, but dynamic. They do this by connecting to them on an emotional level. When that happens, customers return because of the way they feel, or the good emotional responses they get from dealing with these companies. This discovery on the need to tap good emotional responses from clients and employees has been phenomenal that now, there is a term when such a relationship occurs in the world of business: emotionally engaged customers and employees.

The Gallup Data

How do we know that, indeed, an emotionally driven marketplace leads to continued success for your business? The Gallup Organization, one of the world’s leading polling groups, have conducted numerous studies on the subject, asking every major type of industry and conducting research on a global scale. The study also crossed gender, race and ethnicity boundaries as it assembled data on various types of occupations, nationalities, age groups, levels of education and spending habits. The results were far-reaching. The study showed that “good feeling” when doing business, especially when it involves employees and clients, leads to wide-reaching success in churning out profit.

Welcome to the Emotional Economy

In 1600, Giordano Bruno, a Dominican Friar, was burned at the stake in Rome because he had insisted that the earth did not remain motionless at the center of the universe. Today’s visible business world is not unlike the world in which Bruno or fellow “radical” Galileo lived in. Many innovations — like technology — are embraced as long as they don’t shake up long-established foundations. Machines are controllable and fixable. But then, the other system that fuels our businesses — human nature — is a whole other matter. Humans are emotion-driven entities, and we know that emotions are messy in the workplace. So much so that you don’t really want to deal with employee and customer-related tics and quirks, thinking that these take precious time from your work. Sadly, your view is upside down. All those personal tics are clues to who those people really are — and more important, to the innate talents they possess.

Across all kinds of organizations, references to “human capital” are growing. What does this term mean? The definitions are varied, but by whatever name, these references reflect a new alertness to the profound impact of human nature in the workplace. Multinational organizations, such as the European Commission, have been studying the economic implications of human capital. They are examining, too, the harder-to-measure implications of talent and employee involvement in the workplace. The common goal is this: to find the code of human nature’s role in shaping a company’s business outcomes.

The Unique Pathway of Emotions

In his book “How the Mind Works,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist Steven Pinker notes that emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals. Once generated toward a favorable activity, an emotion triggers a “cascade of sub-goals that we call thinking and acting with no sharp line dividing thinking and feeling.” In other words, emotions drive our reactions, which, in turn, are ruled by the innate talent we possess and our propensity to be emotionally engaged. Our natural predispositions explain our distinctive experiences. . . . .