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Technology is meant to serve us. Instead it increasingly runs us — and runs us down.

Where we put our focus shapes our agenda and defines our experience in every moment. More and more, we’re turning over this precious resource to our digital technology, allowing it to define the depth and span of our attention, and to seduce us into operating at such high speeds that we don’t notice the insidious toll that’s taking.

I see it in myself, as I fight to stay focused on what’s most important, and to resist the urgent, addictive, Pavlovian pull of my digital devices. At times, I feel like a lab rat, mindlessly pushing levers in search of the next source of instant but fleeting gratification. I see it, too, in my colleagues and our corporate clients, each of them struggling to manage what feels more and more like a tsunami — information coming at us in wave after wave, threatening to overwhelm everything else in our lives.

The Internet, and all it has come to include, is the most powerful interruption technology ever invented. It slices and dices our focus, fractures and distracts it, gives us less and less of more and more. It prompts us to skim, scan, and skip rather than immerse ourselves in any one thing.

As the Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon put it so presciently, back in 1970, even before there was an Internet: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Cognitive load refers to the amount of information flowing into our working memory at any given time. We’re able to hold onto only a very limited number of discrete bits of information in our working memory.

Overload this limited reservoir and you will struggle to focus, retain information, and make connections to other information stored in your long-term memory. Too much information literally dumbs us down. If you’ve been worrying lately about your memory — a complaint I hear nearly every day — it may well have nothing to do with the fact that you’re getting older.

“It becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information,” writes Nicholas Carr writes in his brilliant book The Shallows, “We become mindless consumers of data.” The irony is that few people will read The Shallows because it is challenging, and deeply thoughtful, and requires a level of focus that fewer and fewer of us can muster.

Consider Joe Weisenthal, the lead financial blogger for the website Business Insider, and the subject of a New York Times profile last Sunday. Weisenthal, we learn, works 16 hours at a stretch, posts more than a dozen blogs a day, sends out dozens of tweets in between, and spends the rest of his time trolling the Internet for more information.

Weisenthal only manages to sleep 4 to 5 hours a night, which nearly guarantees that he’s both sleep deprived and cognitively impaired when he’s writing. No wonder we’re told that what he posts is often misleading or flat out wrong. Given advances in artificial intelligence, a computer could likely do what Wiesenthal is doing with more accuracy, and certainly faster.

Here’s the real point: the speed at which Weisenthal works and the volume he produces preclude his bringing to his work the sort of qualities that a computer could not.

What makes human beings unique is our capacity for reflection, and self-reflection, but also for creativity, conscience, empathy, and a higher purpose. Those are the qualities we ought to be cultivating.

Technology has no business setting our agenda, but it has turned into our dominatrix. Masochistically — but all too willingly — we submit to it. Emailing, texting and tweeting, searching Google, checking Facebook, and surfing websites not only consumes our time and energy, it also diminishes our capacity to pay attention to anything for very long — or to resist the next digital temptation.

I’m not a Luddite, and I appreciate the conveniences of digital technology as much as the next guy. I’m just suggesting that we need to become more far more conscious of its costs.

The antidote to a life online seems to me surprisingly simple. We must pay more attention to building a life offline, in which we seek depth, take time for reflection and define for ourselves what really matters, rather than letting a passel of promiscuous pings set our priorities.

People get awfully excited about quotas. So do countries. After Norway’s lead in 2008, gender quotas on corporate boards have been rolling out in a whole series of countries: Spain, then France, the Netherlands, even Italy voted them in. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding is pushing hard, and if she has her say, and if companies continue to make so little progress unassisted, quotas are likely to become an EU reality within the next few years.

Managers in Anglo-Saxon countries hate the idea. And perhaps there’s a better alternative: harness the power of investors.

New York City’s public pension fund has just nudged Goldman Sachs and MetLife to disclose their gender balance stats. To quote John Liu, the city’s comptroller: “without quantitative disclosure, shareholders have no way to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts.”

But very few companies actually publish their gender statistics, and certainly not anything more explicit than an aggregate ‘women in management’ number (which means they can all be first line managers). They much prefer publishing the wonderful initiatives they undertake in support of women in leadership, rather than the actual result of their efforts on the gender balance at the three levels below the CEO.

The reason, I’m afraid, is simple: the statistics reflect the constant and largely unconscious preference and promotion of men over women. The Wall Street Journal recently reported how the 53% F/ 47% M gender balance at graduate entry level was followed by a drop to 35%F/ 65% M at Director level, which went down further to 24% F/ 76% M at Senior VP, and ended up at 19% F/ 81% M in the C-suite.

This is no glass ceiling. It’s a gender preference that starts relatively early in careers — and then continues. And this reality is not visible enough, nor even acknowledged inside companies. For most managers, there are ‘more’ women than there used to be, so all is improving naturally, right?

But if companies actually believed all the data showing a correlation between gender balance and financial performance, we shouldn’t really need quotas at this point. That, of course, is the rub. They don’t really believe it, or buy it. That is the work that still remains to be done. And one of the quickest ways to get there would be getting financial investors — like the New York pension fund — to convince them that THEY think it’s important.

Reporting the reality should be enough to let investors and stakeholders decide whether they buy the correlation argument. And that’s a lot easier to legislate — and a lot less controversial — than quotas.

Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and HASTAC cofounder, shares new ways to collaborate, share, and learn, which make teams more productive.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in executive retreats or leadership off-sites, you’ve probably been asked to participate in a familiar evaluation of your career and impact. “Take twenty minutes,” a facilitator will say, “and write your professional obituary. What legacy did you leave? What contribution did you make? What might colleagues remember about you?”

At one level, it’s a strange (and slightly morbid) exercise. At another level, it serves a worthwhile purpose — encouraging leaders to see themselves the way their colleagues see them, to evaluate their long-term impact from the perspective of people who feel that impact. One of the most revealing ways to reflect on how you’re living your professional life is to reckon honestly with how you might be remembered when you’re gone.

Well, what goes for individuals goes for organizations, too. That’s why I’ve begun to encourage senior leaders of companies, executives who run business units or departments, even mid-level managers who are responsible for a specific brand, to step back and take time (probably much longer than twenty minutes) and write their organization’s obituary. What legacy did your company leave in its industry? What contributions did your business unit make to your company? How did your brand move the needle in a market category? To clarify your company’s future, it helps to step back and imagine a world in which it does not exist.

This simple exercise grows out of a powerful question I heard years ago from advertising legend Roy Spence, who says he got it from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. Whatever the original source, it’s worth taking seriously as a guide to what matters in terms of success. When Spence visits a client, he says, he makes it a point to ask them: “If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?”

That’s an urgent question for companies in every industry, because every industry has customers with an unprecedented array of products, brands, and options from which to choose. In a world defined by unlimited choice and unrelenting sensory overload, if you have customers who can live without you, eventually they will. In order to increase the odds of your company having a long and prosperous life, it pays to write an unblinking “obituary” and wrestle with its messages and implications.

Think about it for a moment. Why might a company be missed?

First, because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by the five or six other companies that are its main rivals. BMW falls into this camp, maybe Ritz-Carlton and Emirates Airlines. But really…How many products or services do you know for which this is true? Your car? Your dishwasher? Your mutual funds? Your credit cards? In all of these categories, aren’t there plenty of pretty-good alternatives to whatever choice you’re making today?

Second, because a company or a business unit has created a workplace so dynamic and energetic that most employees would be hard-pressed to find a similar environment somewhere else. To be sure, in this slow-growth economy, having any job beats the specter of being jobless. But still…How many places have you worked in, or how many workplaces do you know of, where folks are so fired up to report for duty on Monday morning that if they had to go find a new job on Tuesday morning they’d miss their old surroundings? These days, the only thing lower than customer satisfaction is employee satisfaction — and that’s saying something.

Finally, a product or service might be missed because it has forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other offerings simply can’t replicate. That is, a relationship based not just on the economic value it has to offer, but the values with which it conducts itself. Apple is an obvious passion brand in the performance-obsessed technology world — maybe the greatest passion brand in the world. HBO comes to mind as a passion brand in the notoriously fickle media market, a network that doesn’t just have viewers but devoted followers. But ultimately…in a world of non-stop competition and endless choices, how many products and brands do you know that have achieved the status that Kevin Roberts, of Saatchi & Saatchi, calls a lovemark — in his words, a product, service or entity that inspires “loyalty beyond reason.”

That’s why it’s not enough to satisfy customers rationally. You have to engage them emotionally, to conduct yourself as a company and as a leader in ways that are unusual and unforgettable. Harvard Business School Professor Youngme Moon, author of the must-read marketing treatise Different, likes to say that for companies, products, and brands, breakaway success requires “a commitment to the unprecedented.”

At Umpqua Bank, Ray Davis and his colleagues have devised a retail experience that appeals to all five human senses. Their goal: “We don’t want the experience of banking here to feel like banking anywhere else.” At Life Time Fitness, a “healthy way of life” company that has reimagined how the health-club business works, leaders say their goal is “operating to artistry” — devising a blend of well-chosen offerings, high-energy spaces, and thoroughly engaged staffers that leads to a deeply felt level of engagement with customers.

The real message: If your customers can live without you, eventually they will.

The big challenge: If you do business the way everyone else does business, you’ll never do any better.

The urgent question: If your company went out of business would anyone notice?

Good luck as you work on your answers. Feel free to share your company’s “obituary” in the comments section.

The other day, I finally tackled a long-overdue task: reviewing a stack of VHS tapes to see what was on them and whether it was worth digitizing. Amidst the usual detritus (Patriots games and Saturday Night Live episodes of yore), I found an unexpected discovery: a tape of the 1993 lesbian and gay march on Washington. Replaying those clips, I realized the difference two decades has wrought — not just in the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the workplace, but even more so in our ability to create and access information that matters, and the responsibility that entails for every business leader.

I remember the April day of the march, though I couldn’t attend. I was a teenager living in a small town in North Carolina where I didn’t know any other gay people, so I spent the entire day inside watching the march on C-SPAN. When they announced a band or speaker I liked, I’d run up to the VCR and hit “record.” (We didn’t have a remote.) Information in those days was scarce — and ephemeral. Sans YouTube, it was obvious I had to be inside watching the proceedings, or I’d never have another chance.

Back then, when I felt alone, I would pull out and watch the tape to see hundreds of thousands of people like me — though they weren’t exactly accessible. (No listservs and chat rooms and blogs, where we could build actual relationships with actual people.) Back then, in taping the march, I positioned myself close to the TV — ready to spring at a moment’s notice — because there was no good way to edit the video down once it was recorded. (Alas, no iMovie.) Back then, like the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge, I too played the guitar and wrote songs — and dreamed of recording an album. My parents kindly ponied up for studio time, but once my collection of songs was recorded, there was no way to distribute it beyond friends I could dub a copy for. (No Facebook, no iTunes, no “share this” button.)

In some ways, this democratization has cheapened information. I don’t have to record TV programs anymore, because I’m certain I can find them on YouTube or Hulu or Netflix streaming. I don’t have to carefully pick my mixtape of the day to tote around because I can rest assured I have my entire collection in my phone. There’s no need to treasure or obsess over a song or video because it’s always accessible: the cloud has you covered.

But this proliferation has also added a new urgency — a new requirement — to what it means to be a business professional and a leader. Twenty years ago, it seemed like speaking up only made sense if you were a celebrity. If you were a CEO, or an elected official, or a well-known entertainer, the media would cover your remarks, print your op-ed, or put you on TV. For the rest of us, there was almost no point: who wants to spend their time creating something no one will see? Staying silent — not just about social issues, but about our perspective in general — was often the default, because there was simply no means of distribution.

Today, all that has changed. You can edit videos on your laptop with tools only George Lucas had 20 years ago. You can publish your ideas worldwide for free, instantly, and interact with your readers. And you can be sure there’s a point to creating it because, thanks to the Long Tail of the Internet, someone (and maybe a lot of people) will see it and, hopefully, find it meaningful. You can create a legacy that will be archived forever — something only the most exalted among us could ever hope for in 1993.

The tools of today have created a new responsibility. Not just in terms of job descriptions (though plenty of executives grouse about social media expectations). It’s a responsibility to yourself, your company — and your legacy. As a teenager, I would have relished finding a chronicle of others’ experiences; when you feel alone, a little wisdom and perspective can go a long way. Today, as a business consultant, my concerns are different — I’m writing about strategy and marketing and branding. But I’m doing it in a spirit that I think my 14-year-old self would have appreciated. Because for all us, no matter our backgrounds, we have to consider: what value can we add? How can we help others by sharing ourselves? What do we want our impact to be in the world?

So take up that microphone. Start writing that blog. Go live with that Twitter feed. And ask yourself: what are you doing to leave a mark that matters?

To stay competitive, organizations need to continually find opportunities for innovation in key processes such as customer service and product development, and adoption of a new process almost always requires the implementation of new information technology. In his 1990 classic HBR article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Michael Hammer argued that IT must drive radical process innovation.

Unfortunately, this creates two problems. First, as Hammer argued, these large investments in new IT systems tend to deliver disappointing results, largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business. That is, they leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up, rather than redesign them from scratch.

Second, they don’t take enough advantage of the innovative abilities of their people themselves. Employees often feel victimized rather than energized by the changes. They’re subjected to retraining, and they have to radically alter their routines, often in ways that they don’t think will work as well. Hammer nonetheless argued for using the power of information technology to redesign a cross-functional process, then deal with the people issues. Though many workers will resist a new process imposed on them, competitive demands need to override resistance. I heard him say, “We will carry the wounded but shoot the stragglers.”

Hammer’s thinking was very powerful, but I’d challenge that last point. The best way to solve both of these problems — and make innovation efforts stick — is not to impose a new process or technology system, but rather have front-line employees drive the change. You’ll get fewer stragglers, and end up with better ideas — ideas that come from the people who do the work every day and see the most glaring problems. Avoiding a new technology may not be an option, but it shouldn’t come first.

Look at ING, a leading bank in the Netherlands, which sets about process improvement by first getting its employees to recommend changes, ideally in short iterations and with frequent feedback loops, to avoid depleting people’s energy and to decrease the likelihood of going too far down the wrong path.

David Bogaerts and Jael Schuyer are process improvement experts in ING’s IT and operations group. They say their projects are more successful when they follow the sequence of people, then process, then technology. “If you automate too quickly, you don’t find out what the front-line people need,” they explained to me recently. “We stay with manual workflows longer than others. Until you have a clear idea of what people need, you may automate workarounds and waste. For example, we worked with people in our Automating Department to improve their processes (using “Lean” and “Agile” methods), and we are now looking at technology to further improve the processes in ways that will revolutionize them.”

ING acknowledges that it has occasionally neglected to engage workers adequately, with disappointing results. “In the case of a workflow management software project, we bought the tool and told people to use it,” Bogaerts and Schuyer said. “It was technology first, then process, then people, and it didn’t work very well.”

No doubt new technology systems can help bring about dramatic process improvements, no matter how much employees howl about the change. Yet organizations that implement an enterprise system (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) frequently underestimate the costs of front-line resistance. The systems force people to change the way they work, and while they eventually adapt, most implementations are delayed, operations suffer temporarily, and revenue can take a hit, as at Hershey Foods and Lumber Liquidators.

Why not tap into their expertise instead of dragging them along? Your investments will be better spent, and your workforce is much more likely to buy into the whole thing. As Bogaerts and Schuyer said to me, when workers identify improvements in their jobs, a new computer system appears as an opportunity to eliminate waste and better serve customers, not as a threat.

Engaging workers as drivers of process changes may seem like it’s slowing things down, particularly in implementing a revolutionary enterprise system. But what’s your alternative? You either pay upfront and get worker ownership and sustainability of changes, or you pay later to get buy-in and overcome resistance. The ride is much smoother when you can have your workers be drivers, not passengers.

Questions: How have you seen organizations use IT to drive process innovation? Were front-line people the drivers or the victims?

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Have you ever been in a situation where everyone seemingly agrees on a particular strategy, but somehow it never happens?

See if you identify with this example: A technology firm — with a number of different product areas, geographic units, and service functions — was figuring out how to integrate services for their largest global customers. After extensive planning, the senior management team decided to assign experienced executives to a dozen of these customers, and give them the authority to manage the accounts end-to-end. What they failed to address was that many of the best sales executives couldn’t be released to take on these roles; the financial systems couldn’t provide the right information on a customer-by-customer basis; compensation plans didn’t support integrated selling; and research programs remained geared towards new technologies instead of integrated solutions. So while everyone agreed that an integrated approach was needed, very little change actually occurred.

The fascinating thing about this case, and many others like it, is that nobody took accountability for the lack of strategic execution. In other words, everyone felt individually successful, even though the company experienced a collective failure.

I recently saw this dynamic play out at a meeting of a large consumer products firm, where the top 100 managers were anonymously surveyed with two questions: How aligned are you with the company’s ambitious change strategy; and how aligned do you think your peers are with the strategy? Over 90% of the managers said that they, personally, were aligned with the strategy — but 50% felt that their peers had doubts. In other words they were saying, “I’m fully on board, but many of the other people here are not.”

Obviously something about these answers does not make sense. So to understand them, let me suggest three underlying psychological factors that often cause strategies to derail:

Passive aggressive disagreement: It’s unlikely that everyone in an organization will agree with all of the nuances of a major strategic shift. Disagreement can be based on logic, experience, or (perhaps unconsciously) discomfort with change or loss of power. In any case, if the culture of the company does not encourage dissent, the resistance will go underground. People will voice their support but not actively do anything to make it happen. For example in our technology case above, the newly appointed account executives found that the finance function, while not standing in the way of the integrated customer approach, also was not doing anything to help.

Fear of confrontation: In most nice organizations where teamwork is encouraged, managers hesitate to confront colleagues who are not fully engaging in the strategic shift. They may not want to make waves or fear harming the relationship. So instead they try to work around it and end up sub-optimizing the strategy. Again, in our case, the account executives and their sales leaders didn’t want to push too hard on finance for fear that it could make things worse for them later by damaging relationships.

Lack of persistent top-down demands: If the successful implementation of a strategy requires change across a number of functions, then a senior leader needs to get everyone on board. Without this explicit expectation — reinforced again and again — people will avoid taking action even though they will continue to smile, nod, and profess support. Many senior leaders are hesitant to push too hard for fear that they will have to take drastic action, like firing someone. So instead they just assume that the pieces will fall into place.

Obviously it’s not easy to change these dynamics, especially when they are often invisible and rooted in long-standing cultural patterns. A good place to start is to point them out and provoke some dialogue, which was the purpose of that survey used at the consumer products meeting. Most people do not want to be part of a collective failure — so holding up a mirror can be a powerful way of helping managers realize when they are headed in the wrong direction.

What’s your experience with the challenges of strategy execution?

Institutional banking businesses — including trading operations — typically don’t have high barriers to entry. There are few copyrights or patents. Both the talent and customers are extremely mobile. It does require capital to get in, but new capital has historically flowed into the system. When a U.S. financial institution has pulled back or failed, there has almost always been a European bank or a Japanese bank or some other player willing to take over its trading operations or enter the market in its place.

Because the barriers to entry are low, there’s usually no good reason why returns in an institutional banking business should stay very high for an extended period. Competition should drive those returns down. As a result, sustained high returns on equity — especially higher returns than competitors are earning — can be a sign of impending trouble. They might mean a business is taking outsized risks, or misunderstanding the risks it is taking, or is skirting too close to the regulations. Not all high-return businesses crash, but variations on the comment “In hindsight, the returns were probably too good and too steady” are all too common in the financial sector.

Consider the headline-making $2 billion loss disclosed last week by JPMorgan Chase. It will almost certainly turn out to have multiple causes, and surely offers multiple lessons. But, from newspaper reports, it appears to be another high-return financial business gone bad. The bank’s chief investment office, where the losses occurred, was charged with protecting JP Morgan from financial market volatility by trying to hedge bets made by other parts of the bank. It performed well during the financial crisis, and continued to deliver big returns in subsequent years. Then its increasingly bold methods stopped working earlier this year — and it seems to have taken the bank’s top management (a group rightly viewed as absolutely top-notch) weeks to work through the problems. Newspaper reports indicate that the business was allowed to grow and increase its risk profile because the returns were so strong.

Can anything be done to prevent such reversals? In my upcoming piece in June’s HBR, I look at several actions that bank boards of directors can take to improve bank governance and mitigate risk. One of them is to allocate their time differently. Because of the time constraints they face, boards can only focus on a limited number of issues. Corporate governance has to be one of them, and, in banking, regulation falls not far behind. After that, bank boards tend to spend their time on the problem children, the businesses that aren’t doing well. These days there’s an enormous amount of time being spent on the mortgage businesses, and now at JPMorgan likely countless hours to come to understand what went wrong at the chief investment office.

Yet this focus on problem children ignores that it’s the good kids of today who in banking so often turn into the bad kids of tomorrow. The businesses that typically trip up are the ones that appeared to be great businesses, with much better than middle-of-the-road returns. While it’s a fight against human nature, bank boards should allocate some of the time they spend on today’s problem children to digging in to understand how the businesses with the highest returns on equity are sustaining them in businesses with low barriers to entry.

In these discussions, boards should ask things like, Why are the returns so good? What are we doing that’s different? Why are the returns on this better than our competitors’? Why do we think this is sustainable? Spending that time may feel like a luxury given all the have-to-dos that bank boards have. But if you step back in history, it’s clear that having done this could have averted any number of debacles.

(Editor’s note: We’ll link to Krawcheck’s article in the June HBR as soon as it’s available online.)

This week marks the release of Clayton Christensen’s highly-anticipated book, How Will You Measure Your Life (with co-authors James Allworth and Karen Dillon). The book expands on Christensen’s McKinsey-award-winning HBR article, drawing life lessons from the models that form the basis of his business-oriented writing.

I first heard the germs of those ideas in late 2000. At the time I was one of Christensen’s students at HBS. Like all professors, Christensen used his final class lecture to share broader observations and reflections. The speech resonated with me, so while serving as his lead researcher in 2001 and 2002, I returned to his classroom to hear it again.

Ahead of the book launch, I had a long discussion with a reporter about Christensen. The reporter’s question was basically: Why him? He’s smart, but so are many other people. He’s a great storyteller, but there are lots of great storytellers in the world.

My own view is that there are three secrets to Christensen’s success:

1. An eternal quest for truth. Christensen’s mission is to help leaders make decisions using robust, well-grounded theories. His basic two litmus tests for a good business theory are something that explains the different circumstances facing managers and the causal connection between an action and a result. His disruptive innovation theory, for example, says that incumbents that listen to their best customers — when their offering has already overshot the mainstream — leave themselves susceptible to attack from companies armed with simpler, more affordable solutions. Past experience as a consultant and practicing manager ensure Christensen focuses on high-impact issues, and his work manages to be both robust and usable.

2. The belief in basic goodness. One of Christensen’s core beliefs is that people are generally well-intentioned and smart. So he often frames questions like this: “Why is it that a smart person did something that was so obviously wrong in hindsight?” While people will never use these precise words, a more typical framing is this: “Why are people so dumb that they miss things that are obvious to people with much higher intelligence.” That belief in basic goodness helps to identify hidden root causes, and makes Christensen and his ideas appealing and approachable.

3. Persistence. When I first met Christensen he was certainly well known due to the 1997 publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which won the Global Best Business Book award. Christensen could have stopped there and had a nice decade-long run repeating the messages from that book. But since then he has written seven mass-market books, some aimed at general audiences and some targeting specific industries such as health care and education. He penned an additional 13 Harvard Business Review articles, including three that won McKinsey awards (giving him a lifetime total of four award-winners among his 15 articles). And he’s given countless speeches. As a glowing profile in The New Yorker noted, he is so dedicated to his mission of bringing his ideas to as many people as possible that he pours himself into stories he has told thousands of times. This persistence — coupled with his famously strong faith — has helped him in his remarkable recovery from a series of illnesses (well documented by Forbes last year).

From working with Christensen for more than a decade, I am happy to report that the press reports about his kindness and generosity match up with reality. He is a wonderful human being who has brought great clarity to many of the mysteries of growth and innovation. Twelve years after first hearing the message, I agree with Forbes’ description that How Will You Measure Your Life is “one of the more surprisingly powerful books of personal philosophy of the 21st century.” Recommend the book to friends and family who have no connection to the business world. They will thank you for it.

These probably aren’t words that you were expecting to see in the same sentence — Harvard Business School and empathy. But as I reflect back on my time as a student there, I’ve begun to realize that more than anything else, this is one of the the most valuable things that the school teaches.

It starts on day one. You’re put into a “section” with 90 incredibly smart folks, people with whom you quickly become good friends. Then the moment arrives when you step into class, prepared for a case discussion with what you’re sure is the right answer — but just before you’re able to stick your hand up and get in on the discussion, a good friend — someone who you deeply respect and admire — jumps in to the conversation with an opinion that’s exactly the opposite of yours. And it begins to dawn on you…that what they’ve expressed is right.

It’s a humbling moment. It’s valuable not just in reminding you that you’re not always right (though that’s always valuable), but also in teaching you to step out of your own shoes, and to put yourself into those of someone else.

It’s a trait that is sorely lacking at the moment. There’s a case to be made that the American political system is suffering at present because empathy has been almost entirely exorcised from within its walls. Politicians are being elected on the back of their ability to vilify those with whom they don’t agree. These are not people who come to office with questions, or who seek to understand; instead, many are dogmatists, able to see the world through their own eyes. Their interest in conversation runs only one way — many seem capable of only talking at, not with, those with a different point of view on the world. The jettisoning of compromise is a direct result of this state of affairs; why would you give an inch of your position to someone whose perspective you can’t even bring yourself to entertain?

The place for me, however, where an appreciation of empathy is most undervalued, is in business. The potential upside for those in business who are able to be empathetic is huge, and is eloquently described in Professor Clay Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done theory. Understanding that people don’t buy things because of their demographics — nobody buys something because they’re a 25-30 year old white male with a college degree — but rather, because they go about living their life and some situation arises in which they need to solve a problem… and so they “hire” a product to do the job. This is a big “ah ha” to many folks when they first hear it; but when you really boil it down, the true power of this is in giving people in business a frame with which to exercise empathy. In fact, both Akio Morita of Sony and Steve Jobs were famous for never commissioning market research — instead, they’d just walk around the world watching what people did. They’d put themselves in the shoes of their customers.

And for those businesses whose executives are incapable of it? Well, they are subject to the ultimate stick — disruption. No better example of this exists than the story of Blockbuster and its competitive tangle with Netflix.

Blockbuster saw the rise of Netflix in the very early 2000s, and chose not to do anything about it. Why? Well, its management couldn’t see the world from any perspective other than from the vantage point from which they sat: atop a $6 billion business with 60% margins, tens of thousands of employees and stores all across the country. Blockbuster’s management couldn’t bring itself to see Netflix’s perspective: that while Netflix was only achieving 30% margins, Netflix wasn’t comparing its 30% to Blockbuster’s 60%. Netflix was comparing it to no profit at all. And Blockbuster’s management certainly couldn’t see the world from their customers’ perspective: that late fees were driving folks up the wall, and that their range of movies eschewed anything that wasn’t a new release. While Blockbuster knew it could invest to create a Netflix competitor, that would be an expensive proposition, it might not work, and even if it did, it would probably cannibalize its existing business. With that being their perspective, they saw two choices: creating a disruptive entrant with all the pitfalls of cost, and risk; or just continuing with the existing business. Thinking those were their options, continuing with the existing business looked like a pretty obvious choice.

The mildest application of a different perspective — stopping and considering what the world looked like to Netflix, or even what the world looked like to Blockbuster’s customers — would have revealed that this was not the choice they faced at all. Their options, in reality, were to start the disruptive competitor — or go bankrupt. In fact, this story seems to repeat itself over and over for disrupted companies: they go out of business wanting to sell to customers what they want to sell to customers, rather than what customers want to buy.

It sounds obvious, but it’s not.

Serious people will regularly dismiss empathy for the more concrete and defensible virtues of rational analysis. You’ll get no argument from me that this absolutely has its place. However, depending on it alone to form your opinion can cause you to miss six billion other very valuable sources of insight.