There is much talk about the importance of empathy in today’s workplace, both externally and internally — but is empathy enough?

Is it enough to put yourself in the other person’s shoes? Is it even possible when the shoes are from a totally alien situation. Can a white guy, born with all the advantages those two words imply, really feel, i.e., empathize, what a dark-skinned woman/LGBT feels in the same circumstances?

Doubtful, if for no other reason than for one it’s an academic exercise and for the other it’s the reality of life.

For empathy to have meaning it needs to move from intellectual effort to real world action, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in his graduation speech at Wharton, “Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”

Not just at work, but life in general.

Compassion is not just morally correct, it offers substantial ROI, including building trust, to those who practice it.

The flip side is developing a culture with a compassionate ethos. That’s what our leadership team has tried to do at LinkedIn; create a culture where people take the time to understand the other person’s perspective, and not assume nefarious intention; build trust; and align around a shared mission. After nearly 10 years, I still celebrate the fact we can make important decisions in minutes or hours that some companies debate for months. Create the right culture, and you create a competitive advantage.

Obviously, as with any top university, the Wharton graduating class is privileged, no matter their color, gender or orientation. The alumni network will confer opportunities long after the degree, itself, does.

Read Weiner’s thoughts, because adding compassion to your skills set/qualifications is probably worth more in the long run.

Image credit: LinkedIn

“I sometimes say things — just stupid, little remarks — and expect people to just ignore them. They will not. They will not. Every little thing you say is something that will stick in people’s heads.” –Amazon CTO Werner Vogels 

Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer, said that he’s made a “benign comment that pissed off the whole sales team.”

Chief product officer of Interaxon, Trevor Coleman, said that once at a happy hour he joked about taking the company in a completely new direction. The following day, an employee asked him — quite seriously — what the next steps for that change would be.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said that every offhand comment he made would turn into a “massively disruptive fire drill…”

There is no such thing as a benign or casual comment, throwaway thought or product/strategy-related joke when you are a senior manager.

This is nothing new. I wrote about the same thing in 2006 and the event I described happened 20 years before that.

The question isn’t how to mitigate the damage; the real question is how do we change the thinking that fosters it in every new generation of leaders.

Image credit: Ben Beltran

Last Friday we looked at high profile role models—LinkedIn, Facebook, Zynga and Google.

With the exception of LinkedIn, which developed serious products that sell for serious bucks, they all rely on advertising for revenue generation; even Zynga’s virtual products revenue, which has tanked, is earned from its specialized ads on Facebook.

In March we looked at Angie’s List, also a subscription product.

Monetizing humongous user bases isn’t all that easy.

And it’s getting more difficult.

• Mobile ads are ignored more than 99% of the time.
• Privacy laws in other countries are far more onerous than in the US.
• Much like a slowly awakening Goliath, American’s attitude towards privacy is changing.

I’m no kind of expert, but I think founding a successful company based on ad revenue is going to be a much tougher sell as time goes by.

Even mighty Facebook seems to be following LinkedIn by creating products and even offering gambling outside the US.

Founding a company—wonderful.

Creating something that could change the world—fabulous.

Generating non-ad-based revenue—priceless.

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Who is your role model?

When asked, most Internet entrepreneurs talk about building the next Facebook as opposed to the next LinkedIn.

On the surface that’s not surprising.

Facebook has 900 million active users around the world vs. LinkedIn’s 150 million global users.

Mark Zukerberg is a household name unlike LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman or current CEO Jeff Weiner.

Based on user time on site Facebook, at 6.4 hours a month, kills LinkedIn user’s 18 minutes per month.

Now, take a closer look.

Users add $1.30 revenue to LinkedIn’s coffers for every on-line hour, whereas Facebook generates a whopping 6.2 CENTS for each online hour.

When LinkedIn users started using it for job hunting LinkedIn jumped on the band wagon and created a product called Recruiter that costs as much as $8,200 a year per seat. (Adobe pays for 70 seats—do the math.)

LinkedIn’s top salespeople make as much as $400,000

I can’t find mention of Facebook salespeople.

Facebook’s share price is $29 (IPO price $38; no first day pop), while LinkedIn is $104 (IPO price $45; doubled first day of trading).

Facebook is desperately trying to monetize its users, but there are no products that have emerged as they did for LinkedIn, so all that is left is user data and user actions.

In an effort to boost its advertising revenue Facebook decided to use the names and photos of anyone who clicked a product’s ‘Like’ button to plug that product—referred to as “Sponsored Stories”—and, as usual, did so without notifying users let alone getting permission.

A class-action suite was filed and Facebook lost.

Until now, Facebook users were unaware when and how they were exploited for advertising, and they may not have realized that a click on something as vague as a like button could be used to enrich Facebook, the company.

Facebook settlement update.

And then there is Zynga, whose executives are being investigated for insider trading after selling off 43 million shares a few months before the stock tanked to $3, down 70% from its IPO price.

Zynga executives, including CEO Mark Pincus, CFO David Wehner, COO John Schappert, and general counsel Reginald Davis, as well as many heavy investors, such as Google, Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Reid Hoffman and others, all cashed out part of their stock in April, months before the stock cratered on the disappointing earnings report.

Google, under Larry Page’s leadership, is still making excuses for not fixing the privacy complaints in France (Americans have no privacy rights and so can’t complain.)

The French data protection authorities asked Google on Tuesday to examine private information that cars taking pictures for its Street View service collected, after Google acknowledged that it had retained some of the information despite promising to delete it.

You may want to rethink your role models along with your revenue model.

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Do you dream of following in the footsteps of Mark Zukerberg and Reid Hoffman?

Will you follow their path blindly or seek to avoid their errors?

Do you plan to treat your customers/community with respect and be transparent in your dealings with them?

Facebook’s oft-changing and opaque privacy policy in the name of “better customer experience” has brought howls of rage and government scrutiny from around the world.

Now it seems that LinkedIn is following suite.

Apparently, LinkedIn has recently done us the “favor” of having a default setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising.

As you might guess, LinkedIn’s action isn’t engendering a lot of love.

Google, too, is getting hammered in the name of privacy for some of its actions.

Opaque processes have long been the bane of customers, but they’re usually attributed to “bad” corporations as opposed to “good” startups.

Which begs the question: at what point does a company cross the line?

And which side of the line will you be on when your company succeeds?

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For those of you who want to opt out of LinkedIn’s “favor” I’m including a screen to show you where, as well as exactly what it says. I think it’s a bit clearer than the one shown at the link above.

Hat tip to Dennis D. McDonald via LinkedIn Bloggers for the heads-up.

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Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

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