Kelly welcomes Marcus Buckingham back to the podcast. For over 25 years, Marcus has been the world’s leading researcher on strengths, engagement, and human performance. He began his career at Gallup and was the cocreator, with Donald O. Clifton, of StrengthsFinder. He is a bestselling author who has a brand new book: “Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business.”

Why is Love the most important word in business? 

“If you want to drive better outcomes, well, you got to go upstream. Change behaviors. How do you change behaviors? You have to change the experiences: the experiences you create for customers and employees, change the behaviors, and change the outcomes. If you then unpack that and go, ‘Well, what kind of experiences sustainably drive productive behaviors and really great outcomes?’ Well, if you unpack that, when you really look at what are extreme, extreme positive human experiences, the word that you come across again and again and again and again, customers and colleagues is Love. People go, ‘I love that brand,’ ‘I love those shoes,’ ‘I love that movie,’ ‘I love the minute I met that mentor,’ ‘I loved working on that team,’ ‘I loved wearing that outfit,’ ‘I loved that teacher.’ So, it’s big things and small things, but whenever we humans are trying to reach for a word that captures an extreme positive human experience, the word we use is Love.” 

As I was reading the book, I kept thinking of words like transformation or flourishing – which one might use when they actually mean Love. 

“Sure. The word Love. So, what do they mean by it? And when you push on it, yes, there’s 8 billion definitions of the word Love. I totally get it. But, if around the world, it drives productive human behavior; if we can predict what someone’s going to do next when they say, ‘I love that,’ which we can around the world, there must be something common about our understanding of the meaning of that word. And when I pushed and pushed and pushed on that and tried to code to like, what is the common understanding? The word that I landed on is the word you just used. It’s this sort of unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human. If you push on, ‘well, what do we mean by flourish?’ We mean the feeling of becoming more fully yourself over time. The feeling of opening up over time.” 

You write about the importance of the intentional design of experiences – and a great example is a Coldplay concert you attended. 

“An experience has to be designed. An undesigned experience leads to unpredictable outcomes. And we humans, if you don’t design an experience, that doesn’t mean we don’t have an experience. It means it’s an undesigned experience, which leads to things you might not want. The Coldplay example starts when you buy concert tickets. That’s part of the experience. The Ticketmaster gouginess of it all is part of the experience, and not necessarily a good part of the experience. You go through the concert experience. And my Coldplay experience was the actual concert itself was choreographed to within an inch of its life. Chris Martin and the boys figured out the right sequence of songs, the right time to bring out the bracelets that all glowed yellow and the flags and then the fireworks. It was designed to perfection. And then we got out and had to leave, right? And the last song was all about the fact that we’re all in this together. It was this beautiful. And then no sooner had we left to get into our cars, then we realized that it was a total disaster. No one had thought about the experience of leaving the facility. So, it took almost as long to leave the facility as it did to watch the concert. We were all fighting because there was no clear coherence about which lane we should be in and how you should get out. There was no Love. There was zero Love applied to that part of the experience.”