“It was just awful,” said Tim Waterstone, the founder of Waterstones bookstore chain. He was talking about the state of book retailing in the mid-1980s, when stores would only stock best sellers and closed at midday on Saturdays. Tim has loved books all his life. He took great pleasure in browsing in bookshops, but quickly realized that their limited stock, restricted opening hours, and unhelpful staff marred his enjoyment. He also realized that this presented an opportunity. “I reckoned that if I felt that way there must be several million out there like me.”

The answer was the first Waterstones bookshop, which opened in Old Brompton Road in London in 1982. By 2003 the company had grown to become the United Kingdom’s leading specialist bookseller, with 200 high street locations across the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe. Waterstones’ flagship store in Piccadilly is now the biggest bookshop in Europe, comprising five floors of books, coffee bars, and even a restaurant.

Later, when recalling how he came to create the very successful Daisy and Tom department stores, Tim said, “I became cross with Mothercare [the children’s retailer]. They had lost their vision.” In fact, when shopping with his own small children and finding that he was forced to drag them from one store to another to obtain what they needed, he became so angry that he decided to create his own brand of children’s department stores specialising in clothing, toys and accessories. Daisy and Tom was started in 1997, and today there are five stores turning over £15 million. Tim has just acquired the Early Learning Centre chain, which will add 200 stores and £170 million turnover to his business.

Tim Waterstone is not alone. Many of the leading entrepreneurs today started their businesses because they were fed up with what was on offer. Sinclair Beecham and Julian Metcalfe started Pret A Manger when they despaired of the poor quality of sandwiches on offer near their offices in the City of London. Peter Boizot founded Pizza Express in 1965 because he was “fed up that he couldn’t get a decent pizza in London.” Ho Kwon Ping founded the Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts because as a developer he reckoned he could make a better job of managing the hotel himself. He told us: “Since no such resort existed at the time, we couldn’t do a lot of market research. Instead it became a very personal thing. We extrapolated from our own travels and holiday experiences, and we took it from there.”

The scientific school of management would have us believe that effective business executives are cool, calculating automatons. In fact the opposite is true. George Soros, the Hungarian investor who bets against national currencies and has amassed a fortune in the process, was asked how he knew when to cut his losses. He replied,“I feel the pain. I rely a great deal on animal instincts”
The world of marketing is predicated on persuading people emotionally to purchase a product or service. Consumers think emotionally, react emotionally, and express themselves emotionally. So if you really want to engage with consumers, remind yourself that you are one too, and engage with your own emotions.

Facts, data and two-by-two grids all have their place, but are unlikely to inspire people to act. Feelings, on the other hand, are infectious. Tim Waterstone told us, “You have to understand the importance of the bottom line but everything we do is intuitive. People follow a dream, not a business plan.”

We think there are three critical abilities for leaders who want to add “feel“ to their repertoire:

• Emote. Allow yourself to express your feelings to your staff and explore the very emotions that your customers have.

• Engage. Ask your customers or employees to express their feelings. Create a two-way process. Communicate what you believe is important to your employees, but also create a means to find out first-hand what is concerning them.

• Empathize. Understand the similarities and differences between what you and your customers feel. Then close the gap.

This is the essence of SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO. The successful business leaders we spoke to were constantly looking for opportunities to make a difference for their customers rather than waiting for customers to ask, or worse still, expecting research or business results to reveal there was a problem.

Find out more in our book SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO.

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