Hi {{first_name|dear builder}}! Happy Passover, Happy Easter, Happy April.
I loved this bit from the book A Truck Full of Money, which I happened to start reading two days before the author Tracy Kidder passed away on March 24. The book is about Paul English, the founder of Kayak.com - a bit about how he built the company but mostly about his emotional and logistical journey to figure out how to direct his new wealth in meaningful philanthropic ways.
Did anyone at Kayak feel passionate about optimizing a customer’s flight options between Boston and Cleveland? If anyone did, it would have been Paul, but what he seemed to feel was empathy for customers—not passion but compassion. He had wanted everyone at Kayak—and especially the programmers—to imagine themselves in the place of that customer looking for the right flight to Cleveland.
Paul had devised a scheme he called “Empath,” which had obliged every coder in Concord to answer some angry emails from customers…[and] take a turn now and then at answering the red phone. This was a big red plastic old-fashioned landline telephone with a very loud ring. Paul had its number posted on the Kayak website, inviting customers to call with problems or complaints. He figured that if his engineers answered the emails and the phone, if they got yelled at by customers now and then—or, even better, had to listen to some customers cry—they would likely feel determined to find the guilty bugs as soon as possible and fix them.
I see this with my team too - our model makes sure that every consultant is client-facing for a meaningful chunk of their week. I don’t think anyone on my team (myself included) is passionate about Salesforce or consulting, but we are all extremely compassionate about our clients. Our internal motto is to Make Work Suck Less and we do that by paying attention to what sucks for our clients, empathizing, and trying to respond directly to it.
And now I’m seeing this for synagogue software too. Running a synagogue entails some of the most complex workflows I’ve seen across 100+ clients. I think often about this photo I took in 2017 of a training session at the office of my first synagogue client when we had just launched their Salesforce:
I was showing the three rabbis how to use Salesforce’s mobile app. We had done our best trying to make Salesforce’s limited layout options work for them, but as I watched their faces squinting at their phone screens, the realization hit with a thud: they are just never going to use this.
So now when we are setting out to make the interfaces rabbis and their staff deserve to use, I keep those faces in my mind. I am determined to make something that will light them up and free them up to do the work they really want to be doing.
We are always told: follow your passion! Which is great. Do that. Better that than be dispassionate at work where you spend most of your waking life.
Better advice: follow your compassion. What needs do the people around you have that you find yourself thinking about often? What makes you think “that sucks for that person and I am not okay with that”?
Follow your passion is self-centered. It’s about what you think and what you want.
Follow your compassion is about other people. Putting yourself in relationship with external needs.
“Compassion” often makes us think of charity. But compassion can be for your customer or your colleague too. Alleviating even a little bit of pain that people experience every day at work has a ripple effect. It makes them happier at their jobs, happier with their families, happier in their communities.
What kind of compassion are you following this week?
❤