

Emulating Empathy - nathanh
http://steveblank.com/2010/02/08/emulating-empathy/

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zachbeane
Reminds me of one my favorite passages from _The Periodic Table_ :

"I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of Customer
Service: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years
in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness
for a long time actually becomes crazy."

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blasdel
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment>

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prewett
It troubles me slightly that he suggests "emulating" empathy. That sounds
mildly like using people. I think it'd be better to "develop" empathy. The
same techniques are applicable, except that the end result is to care about
people, not appear to care.

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metaforth
"Customer metrics are not the same as customer interaction."

This is a good insight. Sometimes startups assume customer development means
gathering a lot of metrics. There is something about a face-to-face
interaction which trumps metrics.

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gxs
Empathy is an important trait no doubt.

If you find yourself, however, to be one of those people who seem to lack this
trait, I urge you to look at the positive.

Someone who is in inclined to empathize, I find, is always more prone to try
to guess what another person is thinking. "Oh will he/she like this?" "So and
so said this, I bet they were thinking that". Over empathizing some times
leads to this behavior and clouds your judgment. While you should take other
people's feelings into account, you should try to act on what you know as fact
and not on what you think a person is feeling or thinking.

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DenisM
The two dimensions are orthogonal - one is emphathy/sociopathy axis and the
other one is epistemological hygiene/lack thereof axis.

One could be a sociopath and not aware of it, or one could be empathic and yet
aware of limitations of their knowledge. The latter would recognize situations
where more emotional participation could be required and probe to find out if
that's indeed that case before pouring out emotions. The former would think
little before "stepping on someone toes" and be completely unaware of his lack
of tact despite the facial expression of the victim.

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DenisM
I feel cheated - iwas expecting more detailed advice than "keep trying it will
come to you"

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angelbob
"Make eye contact", "shake hands" and so forth are that advice. However, since
this is what you read, the piece you should pay attention to is "get a
mentor." Until you do that, it appears you won't recognize the other bits of
advice, which is one major reason to do so.

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stan_rogers
And that stuff actually works. I started out in life as someone on the borders
of what would now be called an "autism spectrum disorder" -- I didn't "get"
people, had trouble recognising them and distinguishing faces, and certainly
couldn't make anything like a strong connection. When I was young, learning
everything there was to learn about stuff was a decent substitute for life.
Luckily (and here I use a meaning of that word that may be unfamiliar to most)
I went through a grossly self-destructive phase involving poorly-planned and
unreproducible chemistry experiments (even if you make the world suit your
needs, you _can_ make it go away for a while). The upshot of that phase was
that I had to learn to be human as an adult after a period of being something
completely other (the details of that period are beyond the scope of this
discussion).

It took longer than I wanted, but I was able to learn to read faces, to
associate body language and vocal modulations with various degrees and states
of distress and "happiness" in others, making finer distinctions as time
progressed, and after years of practice I found that I was no longer
approaching the exercise from the viewpoint of clinical (but interested)
anthropology -- the process had been internalised to the point where it was
indistinguishable from empathy. What's more, I seemed to actually care, and my
own emotional spectrum seemed to have more colours than "this sux" and "this
rulez". It may be nothing more than an elaborate simulation running just below
the horizon of observability, but it'll do nicely.

These days I'm not so good at technical matters -- a couple of strokes and the
effects of Lewy Body Dementia have effectively removed me from that realm,
though I still come to places like this to slow the rot -- but I've become the
go-to guy for emotional support for a surprisingly large number of people who
are emulating liking me in a very convincing fashion. And I'm emulating being
happy with that, and can't tell it from the real thing.

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SlyShy
I think one of the main advantages of building a start up that solves a
problem you _already have_ is that the empathy is automatic and built-in.
There's no reason to emulate.

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angelbob
Alas, for Sales there still is. Not everybody has your specific flavor of that
problem, or your way of looking at it.

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Towle_
Many of Steve Blank's posts are extremely illuminating. Others are very...
_here's-a-teaser-now-buy-my-book_. I see this one as the latter.

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kylemathews
Hmmm... seems to me that his blog posts are more a response to the realization
that many people won't/can't read his book.

But as it is, this blog post would of been very very helpful to me a few years
ago. Now it's a pleasant reminder of how far I've come.

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johnl
You could also title the article the "Art of Listening".

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klimchitsky
That's hilarious.

Dear Steve Blank! The problem you've been stuck at for whatever years is
solved easily: everyone should do what he is good at, tech geeks develop,
sociable people sell.

Or let's then take G. W. Bush and try to turn him into a Nobel wining
physicist. How do you emulate that?

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DenisM
Steve has earlier advocated, at length and with good arguments, that a founder
should be in touch with customers for a startup to survive. You can certainly
dispute that premise but in that case we expect more from you than a snarky
dismissal.

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klimchitsky
Read again the article. He never was a founder. In all the firms he worked at
he was a hired employee. No startup whatsoever.

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DenisM
I suggest you look for what's right and can be used to improve your lot,
rather than looking for what's wrong and can be used to dismiss an article or
a person with righteous indignation. The latter never serves any useful
purpose.

