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Co-sponsored by Emory Marketing Institute and AIGA, author, consultant, and marketing guru Dev Patnaik will be our guest speaker on Thursday May 14, 2009 from 7:00 to 8:15 PM.

His topic: Wired to Care: Driving Growth Though Customer Empathy

What it’s about: Recent history has seen the rise of innovation as a key mandate for driving top-line growth in business across multiple sectors. But as organizations have devoted increasing resources and attention to innovation, a critical issue has been ignored in the process. How can you create new value if your company doesn’t have a gut sense for what people outside its walls actually value? The challenge facing business today isn’t a lack of innovation, it’s lack of empathy.

Dev Patnaik takes audiences inside leading companies like IBM, Target and Intel to see how empathy can drive change and growth. He dives deep into the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy and their critical role in decision-making, learning, and judgment. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, to show how empathy can give politicians the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information.

Patnaik is a founder and principal of Jump Associates, a consulting firm that helps companies innovate. Together with his teammates, he works with visionary business leaders to identify new markets, reinvent existing categories, and define new products and services. Dev is a trusted advisor to senior executives at some of America’s most admired companies, including General Electric, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target and Hewlett-Packard. When he’s not working at Jump, Dev moonlights down the road at Stanford University as an adjunct professor, where he teaches design-research methods to undergraduate and graduate students. Since 1999, he has taught a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design and business planning to discover insights about ordinary people and create new products. While the class is required for all Design majors, it’s become a favorite of students from the Business School, School of Education and even Computer Science.

Learn more and register here >>

In recent years social responsibility has become all the rage in the corporate world, with companies in every industry eager to be seen as "green" and "socially responsible". Who would blame them? A 2007 Cone Cause Evolution and Environmental Survey revealed that 92% of Americans have a more positive image of a company that supports a cause they care about. Even better, 87% are likely to switch from one product to another (price and quality being equal) if the other product is associated with a good cause.

So when Wal-Mart announced on January 23rd its ambitious plans to become a greener company and offer cheaper health care to companies, it was easy to be skeptical. Wal-Mart has long been known for its low wages and often devastating impact on small businesses around its stores. But the Bentonville giant can't be discounted that easily. What makes Wal-Mart stand out is its sheer size: over $350 billion in sales annually, and a supply chain second to none.

What does this mean? If Wal-Mart actually follows through on its promises (which include forcing suppliers to meet stricter ethical standards, selling hybrid cars, and helping companies manager health care costs), the impact could be huge. Not only because Wal-Mart is so big, but also because other retailers will want to avoid being left in the dust.

Is Wal-Mart doing all this because it wants to help the environment? Probably not. But in this case, it might not matter.

-"Wal-Mart Chief Offers a Social Manifesto", 01/24/08, New York Times
-"Wal-Mart 2006 Annual Report", Wal-Mart.com