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Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Can Love Be a Fierce Business Force? | Marcus Buckingham - EP 779
00:54:08
In this episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles sits down with Marcus Buckingham, who is a global researcher, pioneer of the strengths movement, and bestselling author of First Break All the Rules, to explore one of the most provocative ideas in...
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- [00:00]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
This week at Safeway and Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit six pounds. Member price with coupon and fresh boneless pork Shoulder country style ribs. Value packs are $2.49 per pound. Member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars. Nature Valley granola bars, Mott's Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each. Member price when you buy three. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [00:31]
Grainger Advertiser
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- [01:01]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
This week at Safeway and Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit six pounds. Member price with coupon and fresh boneless pork Shoulder Country Style ribs. Value packs are $2.49 per pound. Member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars. Nature Valley granola bars, Mott's Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each member price when you buy three. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayeralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
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John Miles
Coming up next on Passion Struck.
- [01:34]
Marcus Buckingham
But when we humans try to vocalize the extreme positive experiences that we have in life, the word we use is love. And I kept changing it. Frankly, over the years, I kept changing it to something more palatable to the business world, like passion or joy or engagement or satisfaction. And those are really good words. But the actual words people use, they don't use delight. They'll use the word they use is love. So really, for me, it was a wake up call to go listen. As a researcher, if people are spontaneously using a word or a set of words, you don't dismiss it or try to change it for them as though they were wrong. You interrogate the word. What do they mean?
- [02:14]
John Miles
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to passion struck episode 779. In my last conversation with Greg McKeown, we unpacked the gap between what we think we communicated and what another person actually heard, showing us how emotional noise creates a devastating misunderstanding in our daily relationships. Today, we're tracing that exact path to its ultimate destination. If I told you that one of the most powerful drivers of performance, innovation, resilience and engagement was love, many leaders would probably roll their eyes. Love feels far too soft for the business world. It sounds too emotional to abstract and completely impossible to measure. Think about the best boss you've ever had. Chances are they didn't inspire your best work because they managed you perfectly. They inspired it because they made you feel seen. Research suggests that feeling is far more than a nice to have. It may be one of the most powerful drivers of human performance. The data shows that people do their best work when they feel valued, trusted and safe enough to bring more of themselves to what they do. In other words, the most definite, effective leaders don't simply manage performance, they design the exact conditions for people to thrive. My guest today spent years analyzing the hard data behind this exact human experience. Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher, a pioneer of the Strengths movement, and the legendary author of First Break all the Rules. Over nearly three decades, his work and
- [04:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
tools have helped tens of millions of
- [04:33]
John Miles
people discover how to thrive in their careers. In his latest research, Marcus has confronted the data to show why love is actually a fierce strategic force that directly dictates the long term value and vitality of any organization. By spending time with us today, you'll learn why certain experiences stay with us while others disappear almost immediately, and why the experiences we remember most often shape our behavior for years. Well, talk about why typical corporate metrics completely miss the mark and we map out the five specific human feelings that shape whether people thrive or completely shut down at work. Control, Harmony, Significance, Warmth and growth. Before we dive in, if this show gives you language for your own unseen battles, please share this episode with one person who needs to hear it. Take 60 seconds to leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spot Spotify because it makes a massive difference to our mission.
- [05:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And make sure to subscribe on YouTube.
- [05:33]
John Miles
You can grab the companion workbook for today's episode right now at my substack@theignitedlife.net now let's dive in with Marcus Buckingham. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now let that journey begin this week at Safeway.
- [05:52]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
And Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit 6 pounds member price with coupon and fresh bone Boneless Pork Shoulder country style ribs value packs are $2.49 per pound member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars. Nature Valley Granola bars, Motts Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each member price when you buy three. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [06:24]
Lowe's Advertiser
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- [06:50]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
Subject to change this week at Safeway and Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit 6 pounds member price with coupon and pay. Fresh Boneless Pork Shoulder Country Style ribs value packs are $2.49 per pound member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars. Nature Valley Granola bars, Mott's Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each member price when you buy three. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayeralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [07:27]
John Miles
I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus Buckingham, one of my favorite authors.
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John Miles
Marcus, so great to see you.
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Marcus Buckingham
Thanks for having me.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Well, 25 years ago, you helped redefine management with first break all the Rules, a book that so many of us who were in the business world read and applied, showcasing that performance wasn't built through conformity, but it was built through human uniqueness. That's how I interpreted it. But since then, it's amazing. Nearly 30 million people have taken the strengths, tools that you help create, and you've helped study what makes people thrive in these environments. So where I wanted to start today is after all the research you've done, and you do really extensive research, you've arrived at this startling conclusion that the most powerful force in business is love.
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John Miles
So let me start there.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
After a lifetime of studying performance, what ultimately led your work to love?
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Marcus Buckingham
Funnily enough, the thing that I started with was, well, to be honest with you, I started with my own company. I built my own company from 2007 to 2017, a company focused on providing tools for team leaders. Because I didn't think there were tools really to help individual leaders get the best out of their teams. And when you build a company, it's filled with love. You love the idea. You love the people that first join up with you to launch that idea. You love your clients, you love your product. There's, like a lot of love when you're building a company. And then in 2017, I sold it to a very large Fortune 500 company with the. And at the time, I justified it with. The timing was right, the scaling was right. They had 3,000 salespeople. I was like, wow, we could really scale through all of those people. The price was right. Everything seemed like. And then it wasn't. But six months later, where you could feel the love had died. And it wasn't the company's fault, the bigger company's fault. It's just that when you're running a machine, which a very large Fortune 500 company, it's really a machine. You just start talking about different things. You talk about KPIs, or you talk about quarterly earnings, or you talk about compliance. And as the love poet Pablo Neruda reminds us, love is born in savoring, and it dies from neglect. And what I realized is we just stopped talking about love anymore. We were talking about other things, and the love slowly died. And I'd let it die. In a sense, the impetus for writing this book was like, what died? Why did it die? And how do we get it back? And when you then do the research around that, which is what I spent the last five years doing, going, let me look at the data. The strange thing about the data is that the relationship between experiences that you have and your behavior and your outcomes, which, of course, we know there's a relationship between experiences and outcomes. But if you want extreme Positive outcomes like productivity, like resilience, like well being, like flourishing, or for customers, like advocacy or repeat visits. If you want extreme positive outcomes, you got to create extreme positive experiences. Well, if you dive into extreme positive experiences and you just ask people to talk about them and you do open ended questions or you do focus groups and you do let the sort of, let the conversation run. What people speak about is love. They'll talk about the word they spontaneously choose to describe their extreme positive experiences is love. They'll say, I love that team, I love that leader, I love that restaurant. They'll say it in all sorts of contexts. I love my mom, I love that mentor, I love my shoes, I love that movie. But when we humans try to vocalize the extreme positive experiences that we have in life, the word we use is love. And I kept changing it, frankly, over the years, I kept changing it to something more palatable to the business world, like passion or joy or engagement or satisfaction. And those are really good words. But the actual words people use, they don't use delight. They'll use. The word they use is love. So really, for me, it was a wake up call to go listen. As a researcher, if people are spontaneously using a word or a set of words, you don't dismiss it or try to change it for them as though they were wrong. You interrogate the word, what do they mean? Why? When we humans try to explain extreme positive experience, why do we pick the word love? What do we mean by that? And why are we using in so many different contexts, I love my socks, I love that company. Can it possibly be that we're actually meaning the same thing? And if so, what do we mean and how do we create it?
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus, what's interesting for me is I started this year 2026, out on the podcast with two episodes that actually explored love. The first was with Dr. Steven Post and he has a book that came out called Pure Unlimited Love, which he calls the culmination of his life's work. Is this discovery of pure unlimited love is the most important thing in life? And then I was actually doing an interview with the poet Mark Nepo, who many people know different contexts, but we were talking about living in the midlife and what should you concentrate on? What's he concentrating on? Kind of in this last chapter, as he called it, of his life, and he again went to this concept of I'm exploring love. How do I put more love into the world? How do I encourage love in all of its aspects? What I found really unique is that neither one of them was really exploring this from a business context. And what I found interesting reading your book, is that not only do you explore it as a virtue, but you explore it as a performance force. And performance force to me is really a unique angle. If a business listener is listening to this and they're thinking love, performance force, I don't get the two and how they equate. How would you answer that?
- [13:27]
Marcus Buckingham
I would answer in two ways. The first is what's the business case for love, if you will? And the second is, well, what the heck do we mean by love anyway? So the business case for love comes straight out of meta analytic psychometric data, by which I mean if you measure experiences of customers or of colleagues. Customers or employees, you measure experiences. We tend to think that the relationship between experiences and outcomes is linear. That if you have an experience measure on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being extreme positive, 1 being extreme negative, we tend to think that the relationship between experiences on the x axis and outcomes on the Y is a linear one. So if you move a two experience to a three, you get the same amount of outcomes increase as moving a 3 to a 4 or a 4 to a 5. Which is why most companies, frankly compared to lump the fours and the fives together, call it top two box or percent favorable, and then their whole strategy seems to be, well, forget about the fives, because they can't get any better. Let's try to move the twos to the threes and the threes to the four fives. The unfortunate thing for companies when they do that, and almost all companies do that, almost all management conferences and conversations and meetings are about how do we move the two to the three and the three to the four. Five. That's where the brain goes. The unfortunate thing is that the relationship between experiences and outcomes ain't linear. It's curvilinear. It's very curvilinear, which basically means it's a J curve. So in layman terms, that means if you move a two experience, which is a below average experience for customers or employees, to a three, which is an average one, you get virtually no change in the behavior of the customers or the employees. If you move a three experience to a four, you get virtually no change in behavior. The line's basically flat. It's only when you do something that's so remarkable or authentic or touches someone heart in a really meaningful way or that they say five when you ask them to rate the experience and they go five. It's then that you see a Massive change in their behavior and their outcomes. So in a sense, when it comes to experiences, you don't have ones, two, threes, fours, fives. You have fives which drive behavior, and fours, threes, twos and ones that don't that are non predictive in terms of behavior driving. So what that means is that fives are the most powerful predictor of positive human behavior at work or frankly, anywhere. And everything else just isn't. Fours are threes are twos are ones. The world's pretty binary. You got fives, everything else just not a five. And then when you dive into that, so you go, okay, well, fine, that's interesting. Never top two box again. Anyone who's listening, who's in the business world will probably heard of a score called the Net promoter score, which is a way we often understand the sentiment of employees and of customers. Okay, that's a terrible metric made by people who don't understand data, certainly don't understand the curvilinearity of the relationship between experiences and outcomes of our companies are run on a false understanding of what drives behavior. Fives do, everything else doesn't. Now you then interview the fives, and as I said, the word people use is love. So what we have to face up to with that is that love's the most powerful driver of all productive human behavior. Love is. And if you don't understand that, it's not because it's not true. It's because you don't understand that. But love therefore isn't a coating of niceness. Oh, come on, be loving. It doesn't. It's not soft. Ah, love's a driver of behavior. Love's a force. It changes behavior. In fact, it's the only thing that changes behavior. Well, that's interesting. So then you have to go, oh, what the heck do people mean by love? And then if you unpack that, of course everyone's got their own definition of love. But if you really unpack that, you bump into basically a description that says that love is the deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human. But if you unpack that some more, love really means becoming more fully yourself over time. We human beings go through life vigilant, protected, armored, defended against the vicissitudes of life because life's tough. But inside of us, we know they've got something unique that we want to express. Every one of us has that feeling that we want our life to be a place in which we can express some part of ourselves. And so anytime we bump into any Experience, no matter how trivial or how grand, that allows us to take off one of those plates of armor and lets us express ourselves in some small way. The word we reach for to describe that experience is love. So it could be, I love that restaurant because it let me just take off one little play of armor. It could be, I love those socks because when I put them on, I don't know, I just feel a bit more like me. It could be, I love that mentor that because he pushed through my performance rating and said, I love you, you're fired. I still love you. So it was tough love, but it was love because they were trying to get me to express me. Wherever we bump into any experience that lets us take off that little plate of armor or a big old plate of armor, we call it love. Love is, and I'm sure you would resonate with this. Love is human flourishing. And when we bump into that experience, we go, love. Well, you put all that together. The best companies and the best leaders are ones who design experiences like that. And that's, that's designable. We could design love in. That's why I call the book Design Love in Love isn't a feeling, it's a force. And you can design it in. And the reason you would do it a. I suppose it's morally jolly good to do, but the point of the book in a way was to go, yeah, but it also makes amazingly good business sense if you want to build a loveless organization, you can make short term profitability that way and satisfy Wall street, but you're actually destroying the long term value of a business. So I suppose the last point on this I would share is that the most powerful questions you can ask as a business leader are, do we have more customers in love with us tomorrow than today? And do we have more people loving working here tomorrow than today? Everybody on Wall street wants to know the answer to those two questions. If you as a CEO or CFO don't know the answer to those two questions, then you're failing your fiduciary responsibility as a business leader. That's the first couple of chapters of the book was like, hey, it's a business force. Take it seriously.
- [19:46]
John Miles
Before we continue, thank you for supporting Passion struck and for sharing these conversations with others. One of the biggest themes you're hearing in today's conversation is that your mind cannot be fully understood in isolation. We simply cannot live a truly essential life without upgrading our ability to communicate about the things that matter most with the people who matter most. If you've ever felt invisible despite working hard, contributing and doing everything you thought you were supposed to do? That's exactly the question I'm exploring in my upcoming book, the Mattering Effect. The book explores why so many people feel unseen despite doing everything they were taught should make them feel successful and what changes when we rebuild a genuine sense of significance. I also create companion workbooks and weekly reflections for every single episode to help you apply these conversations more intentionally. You can explore all of it completely free at my substack@theignitedlife.net Now a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support
- [20:46]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
the show this week at Safeway. And Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit 6 pounds member price price with coupon and fresh boneless pork shoulder country style ribs value packs are $2.49 per pound member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars, Nature Valley granola bars, Motts Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each member price when you buy three hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [21:25]
John Miles
You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now let's get back to the conversation with Marcus Buckingham.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus I want to explore both of those in a little bit more detail. So the first one I'm going to tackle, how do we get our customers to fall more in love with us through a personal story of mine? We're getting to know each other here, but earlier in my career, I was a senior executive at Lowe's at the time, reporting to the the global chief information officer. And I was involved in something that we called internally total closed loop. But at Lowe's at that time, we were really concerned about how do you deliver wow customer experience, which is how do you make customers love shopping at Lowe's? And what this total closed loop was trying to do was it was trying to give a consumer, no matter how they came into the Lowe's ecosystem, whether that was through the website, through the call center, through a store, through someone engaging with them in their home, through that experience, the same exact experience. We knew them, we understood them, they could track their purchases with us, they believed in us. And it was such a powerful concept because it really is the holy grail of retail. If you can make a customer, regardless of the channel that they're coming through, make them feel loved, it changes the whole perspective. And you have a Person who will be extremely loyal to you. And that's exactly what we were trying to create. Now, doing that, especially with so much accidental architecture and years of doing things in a business, is very difficult to do. But is that kind of what you're talking about here?
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Marcus Buckingham
For sure. If you think about Lowe's, what we know is there are. If you wanted to drive customer loyalty or repeat purchases or the profitability of a store, there's only two ways to do it, right? You can do it through incentivization, which is you can do it through the pricing of your products, the loyalty programs that you might have, and you can maybe the strength of your brand. You can incentivize customers to change their behavior, just like you can incentivize employees by setting goals and then incentivizing them through coaching or feedback and rewards that they might get if they hit their goals. We humans do change our behavior based on some incentives, but we know from data that doesn't last. It's super temporary. So if you wanted a sustainable way to change customer behavior, then you have to back upstream and you have to go, well, behavior is changed by experiences. Therefore, if we want to change the behavior productively for our customers, then we got to change the behavior. So the experiences of a customer, by the way, different than a moment. A moment is a jolt. It's a one off. It's somebody holding the door open for you as you walk through the front door of the Lowes, which is lovely. It's somebody waving you into a parking spot in a Lowe's parking lot and going, oh, that was nice. Moments, particularly good ones, are a positive jolt in your day, but they don't change your behavior at all, which is why moments that matter is such a misunderstood notion, I think, because moments don't change behavior because they're not predictable. Experiences change behavior. And an experience is a series of touch points that affect memory, meaning, emotion, and action. That's an experience. And it's all the different touch points. It's the smell of the store. It's how cold it is. It's whether or not the IT systems know who you are at point of sale. It's the darkness or otherwise of the shelves. It's the relationship that you might have or the repeated relationship you might have with a number of different Lowe's employees as you walk up. It's an integrated ecosystem of touch points. And what's valuable about that as an experience, of course, is that lives in me. I've internalized that. So my experience has become prediction Devices. For me, when I go back to that Lowe's, I'm going to predict I'm going to have a set of experiences and feelings that are repeatable. Therefore, I go back. So experiences. It's like, if you want to change behavior consistently, you've got to understand that leaders are experience makers.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
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Marcus Buckingham
It's not the. And the question isn't, are you one or not? The question is, are you a skilled one? And it's why some. I'm sure you found this with Lowe's, why there was such variation, store by store, in terms of store profitability or foot traffic or repeat visits. It's because there are some leaders who are incredibly intelligent about experience design and seem able to look at all of the different touch points of an experience and design it so that a customer walks in and goes, I can't quite put my finger on it, but every part of this feels coherent and designed. And I, as a human, I lean into that. And we can get into the details of, well, what are the ingredients of that? But the main point, I would 1000% agree with you that the best leaders at Lowe's will have been experienced designers. They walk into a store and they see and feel what I call natural experience processing, where they walk into a store and they just let their five senses pull them or push them towards certain parts of the store and certain interactions in the store. They know that a store, a Lowe's store, is not a factory where you have to put stuff on shelves, and then somehow in the nighttime that somebody comes and takes stuff off the shelves. A store is a stage. You're putting on a play, and the parking lot is the beginning of the play. As then you walk in, and then your whole experience in the store, you're putting on a play, and the customer is the audience trying to make sense of the play you're putting on. That's an experience. And the best leaders of Lowe's, I'm sure, will have been incredibly good at putting on that play. And they're the ones that will have created inside of each customer this kind of this identity of. I'm going to go back to that Lowe's, because the last four or five times I was there, I had this multifaceted experience, and I want to go back and I want to do that again. I'll drive past Home Depot or I'll drive past Harbor Freight Tools or whoever to go back to my lows. That's experience design, and that's what leadership is, really.
- [27:52]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah, you totally get it. And I'm so glad you explained it in those terms because that's exactly what we were trying to do. One thing I found in my career, and I started in the military and then went into Booz Allen and then Anderson Consulting before I went in the Fortune 50, is when you hire McKenzie. McKinsey is a great firm, but it all depends on the team that you're getting. And the same thing is true with the store you go into. Not every store, as you're saying, is the same thing. It depends on the leadership in the team. And after going on 400 plus store visits, you could tell a good store from a bad one in about five minutes. So part of this thing we were trying to build is how do you build repetition in the model so that no matter where a customer enters, because so many people have multiple homes, the experience was very similar and we would recognize you immediately and you would feel that in how we would treat you. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is I wanted to lean into how your book begins, which is the book begins in tears. I broke something beautiful. And I wonder when I read about your story and the company you had built and then sold it reminded me in some ways of Tony Hsieh who founded Zappos and then sold it to Amazon. And he built this incredible company about making the employees feel significant and they belong into making their customers feel the same way. And then once Amazon acquired it, all of that started to get accompanied in this bigger entity that started to break the very love connection that he was trying to build. Do you see any connection to that? And unfortunately it led to a horrible outcome for him personally.
- [29:38]
Marcus Buckingham
Yes. By the way, just going back to the first point, it is a very strange thing to go into a company and see huge variation where you shouldn't see it, isn't it? It's like, it is like you got 400 stores and you walk in and you find the experience, it varies store by store and you're like, what? And of course, an undesigned experience leads to an unpredictable outcome. And there is an awful lot of stores where it's not really the leader's fault in a way because we have systems for so many other parts of the business. We have IT systems, we have financial systems, we have legal systems. But the thing which actually drives sustainably productive customer employee behavior are experiences. We don't have experience systems. We have disintegrated silos of aspects of those systems, like the technology aspect, which is run by one department, maybe the in store design which is run by a totally different department. The in store operations run by a totally different department. The in store metrics run by a totally different. It's like we have a disintegrated approach to an integrated experience for the customer. And if I was to start a new business with you tomorrow, I think I would start an experience systems business. Or if I was at McKinsey or I was at Accenture, that is a big business. In the past, we might have had business process reengineering. We should have business experience re engineering because we don't think the customer experiences it as you're describing holistically. But we don't approach it holistically. We approach it disintegratedly, which is why the poor leader in the store has got to try to pull it all together in a way that's. And it's all just a bunch of disintegrated touch points which the customer, of course, regardless of what you're putting down, even if what you put down you dropped, the customer picks it up and makes an experience of it, whether you like it or not. So it's interesting to think of the overall experience is integrated. The way in which we try to address it is disintegrated in terms of Tony. Yeah. Tragic end. What you realize is, in big companies in general is that they've lost the founder's flame. And there's something beautiful and loving about a founder's flame. And we humans, we lean into the love of a founder, the quirky weirdness of a founder. We lean heavily into that as a source of love. There's a certainty that comes from a founder's flame. It lives inside this human. And the human is a source of. For us, it's unpack things in the book around five feelings of love, and they're sequential. And if you want to get someone to go, I love that. Well, you don't just get there. You have to go through the sequence of five feelings. Well, the first feeling is control, actually. Not control over someone else. But you won't love an experience if you feel out of control, if you feel powerless, if you don't understand what the company is, what does it stand for? Who is it for me? What is this world you're inviting me into and how does it work? That gives me a feeling of control, of agency, of self efficacy. We humans love that. You have to start there. And of course, one of the best ways to give me control is to tell me who the founding person was of this world. What did they stand for what did they believe? And so if you look at the companies that even yet today with their size, are still beloved, the Founders flame still burns so brightly. Like Disney, like Apple, like Chick Fil a, you could argue, like Southwest Airlines. Until Southwest was sold in 2023 to a hedge fund. Herb Kelleher's weird founders flame was still flickering, even right up until the sale. We humans love that this isn't some disembodied a machine that's trying to survive through its own functioning. It's the expression of one human's desire to make a dent in the world. And we humans love that. It gives us a feeling of control over ourselves. We can go, I join that. Whatever your religious beliefs are, there's an awful lot of people that go, I joined Truitt, Cathy's founder of Chick Fil a, I join his mission. It's like, I love that we humans do that. I think what Tony found is that by the time he got sold to Amazon, Jeff was somewhere else. He was gone. The machine was the machine and the Jeffness of Amazon and I would argue today has virtually completely gone. I don't know what he stands for, I don't know what he's trying to do. I don't know how that lives and breathes in the byways and hallways of Amazon. They it's a blank faced monolith. And I think Tony found that and I think it killed him. His whole sense of his own direction, purpose, all sorts of things just seemed to crater after he realized that spirit that he had spent so much time conjuring incredibly intelligently had been. I think the word you'd have to use is smothered, vaporized.
- [34:57]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
He developed a company focused on mattering and in the end felt completely unseen.
- [35:03]
Marcus Buckingham
Absolutely.
- [35:05]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I love that you start out with control because it really is about agency. And then you move into harmony. Why was that the next feeling to move into?
- [35:17]
Marcus Buckingham
So the aim of the, the central part of the book really is going, all right, let's take it as a given that getting people to go, I love that is morally cool. And from a business standpoint, it's the most powerful thing you can achieve. Customers and employees going, I love that drives all of the most productive human behaviors. Let's just say that we've got the data that says that, which we do. So then the question is, well, how do you design it in, how do you operationalize it? How do you get people to that state when we do all tend to go through life, armored, protected against the world? Well, if you back up there, you've got you reverse engineer love, which I know is a very complicated thing to say or odd thing to say, but if you reverse engineer love, you have these five feelings which are sequential. And those five feelings, if you just meta analytically look at all sorts of different reverse engineerings of flourishing from Desti's work to Seligman's work, to Dina's work, to Mike Sheikh Shemihalyi, Barbara, Fred, you reverse engineer it all. It's like, oh wow, there's a blueprint. These five feelings are like a blueprint. Every leader might activate against them differently, might try to conjure them differently. But we humans, there is a commonality to our progression from the beginning of an experience to the point where we go. I love that there's a progression. The first one as we mentioned, is control. If you don't hit that one, I never take the armor off. It's what Seligman called learned helplessness. Right. The idea that I'm walking into a world and I don't know what the world is, I don't know what the tools are or if you give me tools, they don't work. A lot of us have experiences with our insurer or our bank or our airline or a hotel, or we have experiences which will render us helpless. I would argue that the intrusion of AI into the way in which we contain our customer service experiences actually, if we're not very careful, increases helplessness and puts almost all customers in a state of recovery. Almost right away you're trying to win them back because you've given them no feeling of control. Isn't awful lot of that going on right now. But the second feeling is harmony, by the way it goes. Harmony, significance, warmth of others growth. But the second feeling is harmony. And harmony doesn't mean soft. It means if you want somebody to continue to take off plates of armor, the next plate of armor you got to take off is do you understand what I'm feeling and do you care? Almost all experiences are predominantly emotional experiences. Our emotions are very close to the surface. So we look at an experience. One of the examples in the book I quoted was Audi. I got to the end of a lease, a three year lease. You'd have thought Audi would have thought long and hard about what must customers be feeling at the end of a lease. Let's meet them at that feeling. Let's show them that we understand what they're feeling, let's harmonize with them so that we can show them we know what they're feeling. Because Wherever we might want to move them to, to. You gotta meet me before you can move me. Well, I got to the end of the lease. I'm excited. Why? Because I want to get another car and I've been three years locked into my lease. I'm excited. About what? New model, Maybe an Audi, by the way, that I could choose. My feeling is excitement. Well, Audi, shouldn't you meet me in excitement? Yeah, you should. But what do I get three weeks before the end of my lease? I get a robocall from a disembodied robovoice going, you have failed to schedule your termination inspection. And then instructions on how I could defail. Well, I don't even know what a termination inspection is, but I've already failed it. So I instinctively, as a human, I just lean out. I'm busy. I fail a lot of things. I'm sure anytime somebody comes in and tells me I fail, I'm like, I lean out. Next week, same call, next week, after that same call, I lean out. On some implicit level, I'm going, they don't get me. They haven't thought about me. They. Your Lowe's example of, like, an integrated experience where everyone's thinking about how to make a customer feel like their emotions are understood. Okay, that wasn't there. In fact, they couldn't have missed me more. I was excited and they met me with failure. Well, they lost me then Audi then lost me for five years. Just because no one thought that harmony, emotional harmony, was an important thing to design in. And yet it's hugely important to answer the customer or the employees question, do you know what I'm feeling right now and do you care? Even if I'm grumpy, meet me at grumpy. If I'm frustrated, meet me at frustrated. If I'm scared, meet me at scared. It's like that's what harmony is. It's the deliberate meeting of a person where they're at emotionally, wherever you might want to move them to.
- [39:59]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I want to move the discussion to the next two, significance and warmth of others, which kind of overlap. But I want to do this through an interesting prism. In the book, you talk about an experience going to see Coldplay, and you talk about the experience of the show versus the experience of parking. Last night I went to go see Florence and the Machine, and I have to tell you, the first thing that we worried about even before going to the show is where are we going to park? So I relate to it. But something. It was my first time ever seeing Florence perform, and it was pretty amazing. The entire way she sets up the entire show is to make her fans feel seen. The whole stage, the way that she operates the show and engages with them, she walks around the entire floor and gives people hugs and interacts with her audience, and it really made them feel seen. And I contrast that to other concerts I've been to where the artist makes you feel like it's a privilege for you to be there and watching them. And I think it encapsulated the two points that you're making here. Florence. Even the way she talked about to us was, when you say the words and I can hear you sing my songs back to me, it makes me see how much I matter to you and how much this music made you feel cared for, safe, connected with. And her asking people to sing as loudly as they could because it happened to be her birthday, it made her feel the impact that she had made on them and made her performance even better. To me is a great way to explain these two concepts.
- [41:47]
Marcus Buckingham
Yes. That's a great story. She's wonderful, isn't she? Yes. The next feeling, which you can't start with, many companies and many leaders get this wrong. You can't start with significance. But at some point in your journey, your emotional journey, you start with control. What's this world? How does it work? Then it's, do you understand what I'm feeling? Do you care? So significance becomes, do you know my story and do you care? My story is unique. Who am I uniquely as an individual? What are my strengths? What's my background? What are my skills? There's also a backstory, like, do you know where I come from? Do you know how often I've been here? And out of that is a feeling of being, as you said, a feeling of being seen as a unique individual. And then the question I have about an experience is, does anything change because of what you know about me? It depends. Ness of an experience because of what you know about me, do I have a different path? Do I have different things available? At some point, we will want to know that. If I go to the doctor, the first feeling I want to know is that you can explain my condition to me in words I can understand, and you can give me something at home to do to alleviate my condition. That's control. Like, I need to understand what I can do in this world. But at some point, my experience with you as a doctor, you're going to tell me, because of everything you know about me, that I don't have the flu, I have my Flu and it's a bit different. And I want you to be a doctor who will help me understand the difference. That's significance. Warmth of Others, of course, is we hate to be isolated. We at some point we pop our head up above our own experience and we look around and we try to find somebody who's going through the experience with us. So Warmth of Others says basically the thought bubble question is, who's with me and how can they help? Because we humans, we don't do well when we're isolated. We have all sorts of data show that's incredibly bad for our well being to be alone. You want to kill us, you want to give us heart disease, you want to give us depression, make us lonely. So again, you can't start there. That's where social media gets it right. But it's like at some point we want to know we're going through this together. And certainly Chris Martin of Coldplay, I don't know that he's following one after another, those five feelings, but at some point in his show, and I could unpack his actual show through the five feelings. And he was a master actually at hitting each of those five. But significance, rather like Florence. He has people come up and I've seen him a few times on the stage and he'll ask their story, he'll sing a song to them, he'll ask them which of their catalog is their most favorite song and then he'll sing that to them or for them. People have signs. He'll deliberately take time to read those individual signs and ask people. Famously, he's got the spotlight up there and there was that couple, blah, blah, blah. But it was all part of trying to show that each individual, although I can't speak to 70,000 people, says, Chris, I want to know your story and your story. And the feeling to your point is, the takeaway for me is he's trying to see us as individuals. And it's a beautiful trick, if you like. And then for us, the warmth of others. He was deliberately designing, deliberately designing feelings of communalness. Communality anyway, Coming togetherness. We all had these bracelets that all glowed yellow. As cliche does that sound when he's singing the song yellow, they all glow yellow. And you're like, oh, that's so cheesy. And then you look at 70,000 people with one bracelet all glowing, one color, him singing that song and it's like, it ain't cheesy. It's like you lean in. He had a whole section where he's like, Turn off your phones. Everybody just turn off your phones. And for the next five songs, we're just going to sing them together. And you're like, again, oh, okay, fine. But I don't know, it totally works. And you get drawn in and drawn in. So as I think about his design of the actual concert, it was a beautiful example of him deliberately designing for control, harmony, significance, warmth. It was a beautiful example actually of Designing Love In.
- [45:57]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And in the book you use Newton's prism as the metaphor. And we've been going through the different colors that come out of that experience.
- [46:05]
Marcus Buckingham
Love.
- [46:06]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
How does growth then become the last one that kind of culminates this experience that we've just walked through?
- [46:14]
Marcus Buckingham
Yeah, I love Newton's. I did this. In a sense, Design Love in is a follow up to first break all the rules. 25 years in the making. And I'd use that. I just had it in there as an Easter egg. I don't know whether anyone found it, but I loved the image of Newton holding the prism in front of the window, the chink in the wall and the white light being refracted out and we can now suddenly see all the colors within it. I'd use that analogy back in. In First Break all the Rules. And I thought, you know what, I'll just. I don't know whether anyone will pick up on it, but I'll use it again. So in a sense, that's exactly what we're doing with love. We're just, we're trying to pull it apart. And to your point, the last sort of the last color in love is growth. And where that lands is because if you think about anybody that you love, love is a forward facing emotion. If you love someone, you know that tomorrow they're going to have to face the world again. They're never finished. If you love someone, they're never finished, they're never done. They're always in a state of becoming. And they will be until they're 95 on the porch. That's the human condition, is we have to wake up and face the world again tomorrow. And what Growth says is, I want you to be more capable. The experiences that we lean into are ones that seem to understand that I am a work in progress. And if you can give me even the smallest tip or the smallest trick or the biggest technique, whatever it is, can you give me something that shows that I could be more capable tomorrow? Why would you do that? Because you love me. And love is the feeling of becoming more fully yourself over time. That's what Love is. That's how we think about love. We humans do. That's when we are taking off the plates of armor. We are feeling more fully ourselves over time. Well, the last tool, if you like, that we need is a set of experiences that can help us practically or spiritually or conceptually be a little more capable. And so companies that. Or leaders or other humans that can help us grow. There is this beautiful link between learning and loyalty and love. And when we. Gosh, there are so many examples, like, I'll just pick a car. If you buy a car today, they're so complicated that what you dearly want from anybody you're buying a car from is you want somebody to sit with you for a while and just go, Let me tell you a bit about this car and how it works, because it's basically a very powerful computer on wheels. And have car companies done that in a beautiful systemic way? No. Have they bothered to really think about what your learning needs might be without turning into a classroom? But how could we make each person feel as though when they buy this car, we're going to do it lovingly? And lovingly, at some point in their journey with us experientially will be learningly, because we want them to be smarter. We want them to be the smartest possible driver of our cars, because our cars are really cool and we want to in the right way. You can't start there. Don't start with growth. Because if you haven't taken off control and harmony and significance and warmth of others, if you haven't taken off those plates of armor, then I, as a human, I'm not available to be taught anything. It'll bounce off me. But if you've done those other things, gosh, I am so open to you helping me become a little bigger at the end of this experience than I was at the beginning. That's where growth is. It's. I want to be bigger. Why? Because tomorrow I've got to face the world again.
- [49:39]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus, we covered a lot of ground today. And what I want the listeners to hear about this is when I was at Lowe's, we were lucky enough that Wake Forest did a partnership with us and we took master's level courses during that time. And I remember one of them I took. The professor had us examine the Fortune 50020 years before and compare it to who was on the list at that point in time. Twenty years later, like 70 to 75% of the companies were gone. Well, I want people to think about what you've talked about. Today you said love is built through the sequence of control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth. And then in the book, you also show the shadow side. So without control, customers and employees feel powerless. Without harmony, we feel jarred. Without significance, we feel unseen. Without warmth, we feel isolated. And without growth, it all stagnates. And when I think about those 75% of the companies that disappeared, you can look just at these two different components and see why companies lose their ways. And company and customers tend to go to different places to shop. It's in everything we've just talked about today. So if a listener is listening to this and there's one key takeaway you could give them from our discussion, what would it be?
- [51:07]
Marcus Buckingham
Well, I think I'll give you two. One, if you are a business leader, if you happen to be, the opposite of design isn't undesigned. The opposite of design is drift. And what you just described there is these companies drifted off the Fortune 500 list because they didn't take love seriously. What I was trying to do with this book is say let's take people at their word. When they describe an extreme positive experience, they use the word love. Let's take that seriously. Let's unpack it, and then let's see whether or not we can operationalize it. Now, if you don't really believe it, if you're inauthentic, then we'll probably sniff that out. But nonetheless, love is actually created with a methodology. You could design it. If you don't, you drift. And if you're not very careful, you'll drift into a state of lovelessness when where your employees don't love you and your customers don't love you either. And yes, it's difficult to measure that right now. Hopefully I'm going to try to change that over the next 10 years because I think you got to pay attention to what gets measured. And right now, we don't really have a way to measure how much love is in the system. But you've got power in your own life to design love in to your own working life, which, by the way, is an interesting concept. How do I design more loving experiences in my own life? I'll be smarter, more resilient, more successful, successful, more productive. If I do that well, how do I do that? And then, of course, you can design love into the experiences you're making for others. That email isn't an email. It's an experience. That meeting you're just calling, it's not a meeting, it's an experience. That phone call you're having with a customer or a prospect. It's not a phone call. It's an experience. You have the power to design experiences where when you're done with them, the person goes, I love that. I'm not even sure why, but I love that and I want to do it again with that person. Like, you have that power. And I don't mean to be too Tony Robbins about it, but you do have those five feelings are a design blueprint for your own power in your own life, if you choose to step into it.
- [53:11]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus, last question. Where can listeners go to learn more about you and buy your book?
- [53:17]
Marcus Buckingham
Well, you can obviously go to designlovin.com and you can get the book there. I'm also just on Friday, well, May 1st. So I don't know whether this is going out, but May 1st, I'm launching a whole platform and there's a part of it that's just Free Forever called Love that. So if you go to Love that dot com, I want to give everybody in the world a way to notice. Like the poet said, love is born in savoring. So I've just made an application that's in a way as simple as here's a slider. Loved it, didn't. Loved it, didn't Love it, didn't. And then what happened? And I'll just gather that over time and we'll create for everybody. As an individual, you can have your own love that score. So we'll give that to you for free so you can see how much love is in your life. But then we'll also aggregate your voice with everyone else's voice and start attaching it to companies. So over time, my goal is to produce a monthly love that report where we can say, American Airlines, you're trending down. You'll love that. Score's gone down. Next month it's gone up. Let's start to take love seriously as something that we measure. And I'm like, how do we do that? Mystery shopper, Customer sat. No, let's just give everyone a slider that they can slide. Love that. Didn't love that. Carry it around with you. And then you're going to add your light to the sum of light. And then we can shine a light on companies who are treating us, some of them, lovelessly. Well, how are we going to change that? We can't bang on the walls. We could actually start releasing scores that go, oh, no, you'll love that. Score is going down. I think the moment you start doing that, Wall street starts paying attention and we all of a sudden have power that is expressed in a simple loved it, didn't love it, loved it, didn't love it. So you can go to lovethat.com on May 1 and you'll see what that is. And we can start. Well, we can start a movement.
- [55:02]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Marcus, thank you so much for coming on today and for the listener. I really enjoyed this book. It's really a book about restoring human flourishing through leadership. And its promise is this. If leaders design for love, they don't just improve outcomes. They help repair what modern systems have eroded. Trust, meaning, belonging and vitality. So thank you so much, Marcus, for coming today. It was such an honor to have you.
- [55:27]
Marcus Buckingham
It was my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. I loved it.
- [55:31]
John Miles
That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Marcus Buckingham. What I hope completely reframes your perspective from our discussion is the vital distinction between a standalone moment and an experience that truly shapes us. A moment is just a temporary passing jolt to your day, but an experience is a holistic environment of touch points that permanently alters how you predict and respond to the world around you. When you intentionally shape a relationship anchored in control, harmony, significance, warmth and growth, you are doing something far deeper than managing a process. You are choosing to ensure that the people around you leave your presence just a little bit bigger than they were when they entered it. Remember to join me next week where we're going to focus heavily on reclaiming yourself and breaking the emotional and identity patterns that keep us disconnected. We'll be joined by world renowned therapist and author Kati Morton to dissect exactly why we get stuck repeating the same exhausting emotional cycles over and over again. It's going to be a powerful interview designed to help you dismantle the subconscious barriers holding you back from authentic connection.
- [56:42]
Podcast Guest or Listener
I think in general, as humans, it's a very. I know people always say there's a lot of people online that be like, I don't like to be around other people. I prefer to be alone. Or we want to be like the different person, the loner, the weirdo, and where people are trying to take ownership over that. But to this research's point, there's such a huge part of our creation as humans that are about us being connected and mattering to other humans.
- [57:14]
John Miles
Thank you so much for spending your
- [57:15]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
time with us today.
- [57:16]
John Miles
I challenge you to look at your next email, your next meeting, or your next phone call, not just as a routine task, but as an external experience waiting to be crafted with true intention. I'm John Miles. And you've been passion struck.