XBOX and Zune. Both products from Microsoft. While the former is an all-time killer, the latter an all-time flop. With Xbox, a sixth generation video game console, Microsoft forayed into the gaming console market and competed with Sony’s PlayStation 2, Sega’s Dreamcast, and Nintendo’s GameCube. Xbox was an overnight sensation in the US making its signature game Halo the top selling title of its generation with more than five million copies sold.

Considering that the team of developers that worked on Xbox managed to create a killer product for Microsoft, top honchos at its Redmond headquarters decided to retain the same team to develop Zune to take on Apple’s iPod in the portable music player category. They believed that if the Xbox guys had done so well against Sony, surely they could do the same thing to Apple. Chasing an incredibly tight deadline, the developers that worked magic on Xbox pulled their collective might behind Zune, which they thought would eventually become the iPod killer. But when Microsoft launched Zune in 2006 it could hardly give a fight to Apple’s iPod that was becoming a global fashion accessory. Zune sold two million units in its first 18 months while Apple sold more than 84 million iPods during that same period.

What is the reason behind a team that is brilliant one day and a disaster another day?

The answer to these questions forms the central theme of Wired to Care, a new book by Dev Patnaik, founder and principal of innovation strategy firm, Jump Associates, with Pete Mortensen.

In Wired to Care, business strategist Patnaik tells the story of how organisations of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: empathy, the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. According to the authors, when people inside a company develop a shared sense of what’s going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. They have the courage to take a risk on something new. And they have the gut-level certitude to stick with an idea that doesn’t take off right away.

Therefore, it is the power of empathy that made Xbox a success, while the absence of it made Zune a fiasco. Patnaik, who conducted considerable research into development of these products for the book, found Microsoft succeeded with Xbox because it was able to leverage the empathy of its development team. “The biggest challenge with Zune was trying to figure out who we were building it for. With Xbox, we knew those guys. Hell, we were those guys,” Patnaik quotes a member of the development team who confided in him to prove his premise.

Harley-Davidson, Zildjian, Cisco, IBM, Target and Nike are some of the other companies that Patnaik takes readers into. He believes they have used empathy as the number one differentiator to make themselves prosper and drive sustained growth.

The authors also dive deep into the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy. They discuss the power of mirror neurons and how they are incredibly important for learning. According to the book mirror neurons are the reason that when you watch a gory movie, you wince at any acts of violence — your brain reacts as though you’re getting attacked. Our brains ultimately experience other people’s actions and feelings in the same way that we experience our own.

“Wired to Care will convince you that businesses succeed with their hearts as much as their heads. Dev Patnaik has given us just what we need for the lean years ahead,” remarked Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point.

rejijohn@mydigitalfc.com