Last week I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to students enrolled in the Hinman CEOs program at the University of Maryland (my undergraduate alma mater). Hinman CEOs is the nation’s first living-learning entrepreneurship program that places entrepreneurially-minded students from all technical and non-technical academic disciplines in a community where they live together, learn about entrepreneurship, and launch new ventures. Approximately 25% of students develop and launch companies as undergraduates.
Interestingly, a few days before my participation in the Hinman CEOs speaker series, I began reading Wired to Care, a book about organizational empathy and how companies prosper when they are deeply connected to the market they serve.
As a certified and professionally trained co-active coach, the concept of organizational empathy is nothing new to me, but reading about it and spending time with our future CEOs conjured up some thoughts:
How will these young minds wrap their heads around organizational empathy?
Will they use social media and emerging technology to gauge their own level of empathy or use it as a channel to build deeper connections with their market?
Will they prioritize personal connections, community building and real life experience over market segmentations, research reports and abstract data?
Consumers are human beings, not numbers on a spreadsheet.
Social media has certainly taught us that consumers want to be noticed and treated like people and not data. From reviews on Yelp, to broadcasts on Twitter, to blogs that talk about brands, products and services, the voice of the digital citizen is getting louder. Will our future leaders and CEOs take the unprecedented opportunity to go out into the real world and empathetically connect with the people they serve?
To my new future CEO friends, you have the ball. Run with it.
Footnote: Join me on Wednesday, November 4 at 2:00 EST for an interview with Dev Patnaik, co-author of Wired to Care. The interview is brought to you by the Social Media Voices Project, a division of Creative Blog Solutions.
