Reminds me of one my favorite passages from <i>The Periodic Table</i>:<p>"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."
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.
"Customer metrics are not the same as customer interaction."<p>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.
Empathy is an important trait no doubt.<p>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.<p>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.
I think one of the main advantages of building a start up that solves a problem you <i>already have</i> is that the empathy is automatic and built-in. There's no reason to emulate.
That's hilarious.<p>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.<p>Or let's then take G. W. Bush and try to turn him into a Nobel wining physicist. How do you emulate that?