This empathy-driven communications guide from Fox, founder and CEO of Mission Partners and host of the Mission Forward podcast, kicks off with a series of “what if” questions posed to entrepreneurs and leaders of nonprofit organizations, such as this: “What if we could meaningfully disrupt inequities in organizations—including our own—rather than continue to co-exist with those inequities?” According to Fox, those inequalities and injustices, related to race, class, gender, climate change, and more, prevent companies and the world at large from flourishing. As the title suggests, Fox argues that merely paying lip service to these persistent problems is no longer enough. By using “what if” as a starting point, Fox guides readers through her company’s blueprint on how to develop a human-centric communications practice that creates “true social change.” Broken down into four tenets of socially conscious communications, which include “Dare to Ask,” “Dig In,” “Widen Your Lens,” and “Follow Through,” Fox’s guide is brimming with practical guidance, like how to use an “equity lens” in order to minimize stereotyping and biases, a tutorial on “radical listening” to allow for the inclusion of historically silenced perspectives, a clarifying breakdown of the asset-framing storytelling model, and many other practical strategies that show readers how to use the mechanism of empathy to shift companies’ purpose from productivity to people.
Fox’s guide is direct, inviting, and accessible, but it’s also hearteningly bold, as the empathy method challenges orthodoxies of traditional profit-first business communications practices that ignore what Fox calls “the human factor.” Fox notes that, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements and how they’ve affected consumer consciousness, “empathy is an essential tool for business success, directly correlating to growth, productivity, and earnings per employee,” and this guide offers the tools to show business leaders across various industries how to flip the paradigm and put that empathy into practice.
Takeaway: Human-centric business guide centering communication as a facilitator of social change.
Comparable Titles: Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead, David Bornstein’s How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
