Design Love In

Introduction: What Now Must Leaders Do?

Overview

Twenty-five years ago, First, Break All the Rules revealed that the best managers treated every person as unique and focused on strengths. That core insight still holds today, but the context has been completely reshaped by the digital revolution, social media, the pandemic, employee surveillance software, and now AI. Workplaces reach deeper into our lives than ever, trust in large organizations has collapsed to record lows, and the world has become abundant yet amoral, efficient yet unloving. This raises a pressing question: what now must leaders do? How do they earn the best people, deliver value to demanding and distrusting customers, leverage technology while building goodwill, and rally people toward a better future?

The answer emerges through the story of Josh, a senior leader at a Fortune 100 company who renamed his division “.Experiences” to signal that every interaction—from employee check-ins to the color of trash cans—is worth intentional design. Josh didn’t rely on charisma; he practiced a discipline of deliberately creating genuine connection, remembering a security guard’s son’s new job or crouching for twenty minutes to talk to a twelve-year-old. This skill is called DLI: Design Love In, and it represents the most powerful force in business. But most leadership advice assumes rational behavior, while in real workplaces we react to cues in our environment—the tone of an email, the lighting in a room, the rapport among colleagues. Those cues shape internal forces that drive our behavior far more than deliberate thought does. Leadership, then, is not primarily about setting goals or motivating people; it is the craft of shaping experiences that shape human behavior.

Every moment between a leader and another person is an experience—the first day, a weekly check-in, a single email. What we call “culture” is simply the aggregated experiences of employees. The question is not whether you are an experience-maker (you already are) but whether you are a skilled one. The real work of experience design does not belong to brand, marketing, HR, or digital teams. Those departments set the stage and make promises, but the actual experience your team member or customer has is shaped by how you speak, the energy in the break room, the smell of the store, the location of the trash cans. Local leaders are the real experience designers, the ones who keep the promises that others make.

This is why leaders like Josh attract and retain top talent even in tight labor markets, deepen customer loyalty, and fuel resilience, creativity, and well-being. The alternative is a transactional world we have grown too accepting of—where classrooms focus on grades rather than talents, employees are called “headcount,” and online attention is mined and monetized. We get more of what we accept, and right now we accept a world where everything functions but nothing flourishes. The DLI skill, embodied in leaders at every level, has the power to lift us out of that dispiriting reality, showing that we do not have to sacrifice what makes life worth living to have a life that works. It is that human presence—that “real-life-ness”—that we all crave, and it can change not only performance but the moral trajectory of our world.

The opening of this chapter traces a line from twenty-five years ago—when First, Break All the Rules revealed that the best managers treated every person as unique, focusing on strengths rather than grinding away individuality—to the radically different world leaders face today. That original insight still holds: people grow most in their areas of greatest strength, and great managers stay close to their people and treat them differently. But the context has shifted entirely. The digital revolution, social media, the pandemic, employee tracking software, and now AI have changed not just how we work, but our relationship to work itself.

Workplaces reach deeper into our lives than ever before. Employers monitor keystrokes, emails, even pupil movements. Our expectations as customers have been upleveled across every industry by the best-in-class experiences of a few. And trust has collapsed: last year marked the first time no large organization—government, media, tech, healthcare, schools, or the armed forces—had more than 15 percent of people expressing trust in them. We live in a world that is abundant but amoral, efficient but unloving. It works, but in important ways it is broken. So the question becomes: what now must leaders do? How do they earn the best people, deliver value to demanding and distrusting customers, leverage technology while building goodwill, and rally people to a better future?

Enter Josh, a senior leader at a Fortune 100 company. He is not a distant executive gliding through halls with handlers. He renames his part of the organization “.Experiences” to signal that everything—employee interactions, customer touchpoints, even bathroom lighting and trash can colors—is worth intentional design. When I spent a day with him, I witnessed something extraordinary. He was mobbed by customers and employees alike, not because he was a celebrity, but because he had deliberately designed moments of genuine connection: remembering a security guard’s son’s new job, crouching for twenty minutes to talk to a twelve-year-old who had been granted a wish, setting up a public Instagram account where employees could ask anything. This wasn’t random charisma. It was a discipline—a clear set of beliefs, intentions, and actions that created love in the hearts of everyone around him. Josh is an experience-maker who has mastered the deliberate design of the most powerful force in business. I call this skill DLI: Design Love In.

Most leadership advice assumes humans behave rationally: stimulus, cognition, decision, action. But in real workplaces, we react. We pick up cues from the environment—lighting, tone of an email, the rapport among waitstaff—and those cues shape internal forces that drive our behavior far more than deliberate thought does. A nurse moves toward a bed before consciously deciding. A customer leans away before they know why. Our experiences contain the forces that shape our behavior. Leaders, then, are not primarily goal-setters or motivators. They are crafters of the experiences that shape human behavior. Leadership is the craft of shaping experiences.

Every moment between a leader and another person is an experience: the first day, the weekly check-in, an email, being recognized or dismissed. What we call “culture” is simply the aggregated experiences of employees. The question is not whether you are an experience-maker—you already are—but whether you are a skilled one. The rest of the book will show you how. It will deconstruct love into five sequential feelings, introduce the lens that reveals the most powerful possibilities, and explain the experience continuum—why the world feels so depleting and how to transform it. Part two offers a playbook for putting this into practice through two roles: the Mover, who designs love into their own work and health, and the Maker, who designs experiences for others. You might think experience-making belongs to marketing or HR, but if you want to be the leader people run through walls for, it belongs to you.

The real work of experience design doesn’t belong to brand, marketing, HR, or digital teams. Those departments set the stage—they make promises, craft calls to action, design interfaces with the latest UX principles. But the actual experience your team member has? That’s shaped by how you speak to them, the tone of your emails, the energy in the break room, the way colleagues greet each other. For customers, it’s the words of the service agent, the smell of the store, the chair they sit in, the location of the trash cans. All of it is within your control. The DLI leader doesn’t outsource this to other departments. They understand that while others make promises, you—the local leader—are the one who keeps them.

This is why leaders like Josh attract and retain top talent even in a tight labor market. They stitch a fabric of genuine connection with customers, who then return more often, stay longer, spend more, and bring friends. This skill isn’t just about performance—it’s about resilience, creativity, mental and physical health. It’s the foundation for good things now and the mechanism for building a better future. And if we look beyond quarterly numbers, this skill can change the moral trajectory of our world.

We get more of what we accept. And right now, we accept a transactional world where classrooms focus on grades rather than talents, employees are called “headcount,” online attention is mined and monetized, illnesses are judged by insurance coverage. We have normalized a world where everything functions but nothing flourishes. The DLI skill, embodied in leaders like you, can lift us out of that dispiriting reality. It shows us that we don’t have to sacrifice what makes life worth living to have a life that works. It’s why the employee on his fortieth anniversary found Josh to celebrate with, why the cook leaned in for a laugh, why customers flocked to someone who paid attention, honored fleeting feelings of love, and slowed down to listen. That human presence—that “real-life-ness”—is what we all crave.

Key Takeaways

• Local leaders are the real experience designers. Brand, marketing, HR, and digital set the stage, but you create the actual experience through everyday interactions and environment.
• This skill drives high performance and resilience. It attracts and retains talent, deepens customer loyalty, and fuels creativity and well-being.
• The alternative is a transactional world we’ve grown too accepting of. DLI leaders have the power to shift from “everything functions but nothing flourishes” to a genuinely human-centered way of working.
• We get more of what we accept. The call to action is to stop accepting loveless organizations and instead commit to building and choosing DLI companies.

1: Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes

Overview

The data from decades of research across retail, hospitality, and employee experience shows that outcomes like retention, loyalty, and performance don't just happen. They come from a clear causal sequence—experiences drive behaviors, and behaviors drive outcomes. But the relationship isn't linear. When a retailer mapped thousands of stores, they found that even with uniform training and policies, experience scores varied wildly. Only the most extreme positive experiences produced extreme positive outcomes. Moving a store from a 2 to a 3 or even a 3 to a 4 barely moved profitability; the dramatic shift only happened at the 5s. This curvilinear reality means fixing what's broken—the 1-3 world—misses the real opportunity. The real lever is understanding what makes a 5 experience, and that leads to an uncomfortable but undeniable four-letter word.

Across interviews with top performers, most loyal customers, and most effective leaders, the same word kept surfacing: love. A yoga instructor cried describing a tiny hip adjustment in Warrior 2. A salesperson loved the close. A diner loved that the restaurant remembered their favorite dessert. The author initially resisted, swapping in corporate-friendly terms like engagement or satisfaction, but the data refused to budge. Love is the only feeling that reliably predicts behavior—repeat purchases, advocacy, extra effort, resilience. Everything else—liking, enjoying, being satisfied—is nonpredictive. Feelings work like water: heat to 211 degrees and it's still liquid; only at 212 degrees—the boiling point—does it change state. Love is that boiling point, the only temperature where feelings transform into extreme positive outcomes.

This flips the strategic conversation. Organizations have elaborate strategies for efficiency, cost, and AI, but none for love—even though there is no such thing as loveless excellence, loveless service, or loveless loyalty. To unleash the most powerful force in business, leaders must shift from fixing problems to designing love in (DLI). That means evaluating every decision through two core questions: Will this lead to more customers loving us? Will this lead to more employees loving working here? Love isn't a cliché or a soft sentiment; it's a measurable, designable force. The path from experiences to behaviors to outcomes runs straight through love—and only by intentionally creating experiences that produce it can organizations achieve the dramatic, nonlinear results they seek.

The data is clear: outcomes are created by specific behaviors—employees prioritizing, collaborating, and giving discretionary effort, or customers returning and advocating. Those behaviors spring directly from experiences. The sequence is straightforward: experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes. Want better outcomes? Design better experiences. Back in 1994, the service-profit chain showed a causal link from employee experiences to customer loyalty to profitability. Then the experience economy explained how companies like Starbucks or Disney thrive by offering immersive experiences. Decades of studies confirm that extreme positive experiences produce extreme positive outcomes—but the connection isn't linear.

Take a retailer with over eight thousand stores. The graph shows a clear upward trend: stores with higher experiences generate more profit. But dig deeper, and the picture gets messier. Experiences vary wildly from store to store, even within the same company with uniform training and policies. Some stores deliver top-tier experiences, while others fall flat. This is the norm. Inside any organization, customer and employee experiences have high standard deviations, meaning leaders don't have as much control as they'd like. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.

The common approach is to focus on fixing what's broken—the 1s and 2s on a 1-to-5 scale. That's the 1-3 world, driven by negativity bias. Leaders invest resources in moving below-average stores to average, assuming linear improvement. But the data says otherwise. The relationship between experiences and outcomes is curvilinear. Moving from a 1 to a 2 or a 2 to a 3 barely moves the needle. Even moving from a 3 to a 4 doesn't create much change. The dramatic shift happens only at the 5. Only extreme positive experiences predict extreme positive outcomes. This means 4s are essentially the same as 3s in terms of driving behavior—they're not 5s. Lumping 4s and 5s together as "percent favorable" masks this truth.

That's why the 5s deserve serious study. For the author, this insight emerged after decades of researching top performers, great teams, and loyal customers. Concepts like employee engagement and strengths emerged from those studies, but the unifying force was easy to overlook. It was too obvious, too unscientific. But the trail kept leading back to it.

The Word They Kept Using Was Love

I’d spent years listening to 5s—top performers, most loyal customers, most effective leaders—and they kept saying the same four-letter word: love. A top salesperson loving the close. A diner loving that the restaurant knows their favorite dessert. A tenured employee loving their company. I kept trying to swap it out for something more corporate—engagement, satisfaction, passion—but the data didn’t budge. My reluctance came from a very British discomfort with anything that felt soft or sentimental. But after my company’s sale and the subsequent decline I watched unfold, I finally stopped editing the transcripts and started paying attention.

A Glimpse of Love in Action

During a round of primary qualitative research, I interviewed Jeanette, an environmental-engineer-turned-yoga-instructor whose classes were booked a year in advance. When I asked what made her different, she didn’t talk about routines or studio amenities. She showed me Warrior 2, made a tiny adjustment to her hip, and said, “What I love is finding this pose and then showing each student how to hold their hip here.” As she spoke, she was crying. That inside-out glow of love for the smallest detail of her craft, offered in service to her students, was the draw. Once you’d experienced being in the presence of that love, you wanted to feel it again and again. That’s why her classes were full. Love, in its purest technical form, was the magnetic force.

Love Is the Only Thing That Predicts Behavior

When I went back and reread every interview transcript, the pattern was undeniable. Whenever someone’s experience was so positive it drove the most productive outcomes—high performance, creativity, resilience, loyalty—they used the word love. Liking or enjoying or being satisfied told me nothing about what they’d do next. But love predicted repeat behavior, advocacy, extra effort, and resilience. Movie studios don’t care how many people say “I enjoyed it”; they care how many spontaneously say “I loved it,” because only that number predicts word-of-mouth and return viewings. Students who say “I love my teacher” are far more likely to graduate. The same holds for employees, customers, and teams everywhere.

The Boiling Point of Feelings

Think of water: heat it to 211 degrees and it’s still liquid. Only at 212 degrees does it change state. Feelings work the same way. There is love, and there is everything else. And everything else is simply “not love.” Love is the boiling point—the only temperature at which feelings reliably drive extreme positive behaviors. It’s not that love is more powerful; it’s that love is uniquely powerful. All other positive feelings are nonpredictive. Love alone changes the state of the person experiencing it.

Love as a Strategic Force

We’ve romanticized love into cliché—romantic dinners, Love Island, or vague career advice. But love is a force, not just a feeling. It fuels deliberate practice, discretionary effort, creativity, and loyalty. There is no such thing as loveless excellence, loveless service, or loveless loyalty. And yet organizations have strategies for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and AI, but none for love. When I presented this data to thirty chief HR officers, they couldn’t even say the word—at least not about their own people. They could imagine customers loving a product, but not employees loving their workplace.

The most intelligent questions a leader can ask are: Will this lead to more customers loving us? Will this lead to more employees loving working here? Those questions should filter every decision. To unleash the most powerful force in business, you need to intentionally design love into the experiences you create. That’s what it means to be a DLI leader—Designing Love In. Not drifting into mediocrity, but honoring love as a design principle, a moral imperative, and a business advantage.

Key Takeaways

• The word that 5s consistently use to describe their most positive experiences is love—not satisfaction, engagement, or passion.
• Love is the only feeling that reliably predicts productive behaviors like loyalty, advocacy, creativity, and resilience.
• Feelings are binary when it comes to driving behavior: there is love, and there is everything else. Love is the boiling point.
• Organizations avoid the word “love” because it feels soft, but loveless excellence and loyalty do not exist.
• Leaders should evaluate every decision by asking: Will this lead to more customers loving us? Will this lead to more employees loving working here?
• The DLI (Design Love In) mindMOVE treats love not as a cliché but as a measurable, designable force for extreme positive outcomes.

2: Loving versus Unloving

Overview

The chapter opens by diagnosing a widespread sense of unease—a feeling that the world is designed against us, producing chronic stress and a loss of trust. Sociologist Émile Durkheim called this anomie, but the book offers hope by redefining love not as a vague emotion but as a deep, unwavering commitment to another human’s flourishing. This definition, drawn from global research across twenty-eight countries, is proactive: love takes initiative, unlike mere care. A loving manager doesn’t just help when you struggle; they rearrange roles to match your strengths, or even fire you for your own good. The story of Mr. Hetherington, who withheld critique to protect a student’s budding confidence, shows that restraint can be profoundly loving.

All experiences fall along a moral spectrum from exploitative (immoral) through transactional (amoral) to loving (moral). Most daily interactions—at work, school, or shopping—live in the amoral middle, indifferent to our humanity. To push back, the DLI lens is introduced: disciplined sorting of every experience into loving (makes you feel bigger, safe to open up) or unloving (makes you feel smaller, on guard). This lens cuts through confusion and points toward what you can demand or design.

A loving experience requires continuity and being seen as a whole person; handoffs break that. A doctor’s visit with six different people forces you to retell your story each time, reducing you to a gallbladder in exam room two. Similarly, a restaurant where a busser can’t refill your water because they’re not your server turns you into Table 4. Every handoff communicates that you are a transaction, not a person—fundamentally unloving.

Shape-shifting is also unloving. Delta Airlines changed its frequent flier program to reward spending on its credit card rather than miles flown—a rational, amoral decision to extract value. But the DLI lens reveals it as unloving because clarity is loving: people entered as passengers and suddenly found themselves dealing with a bank. United Airlines went further, selling passenger data to advertisers. These shifts erode trust, and customer backlash forced Delta to reverse course. The lesson: if you don’t call it unloving, you accept it.

Large spans of control are another hidden source of unloving experiences. Nurses, among the lowest-engagement workers, often have one supervisor for forty people. Humans need attention to flourish—someone who knows their name and struggles. Such ratios work on a balance sheet, not for humans. One health system created informal twelve-person teams with a designated connector, adding no cost but restoring a sense of being seen.

Outsourcing fragments the experience. A Coldplay concert was magical until the parking lot turned into a battle zone; the vendor’s failure tainted the entire event. Post Malone and Jelly Roll’s concert saw thousands turned away due to poor access roads. Outsourcing puts pressure on each human to knit separate parts together. The solution isn’t to end outsourcing but to mitigate it—through careful selection and education, as Chick-fil-A does with its independent operators.

AI presents a new frontier. Can it be loving? The answer hinges on alignment: AI always optimizes for someone’s values, so the choice is which ones. Optimizing for love means training AI to produce the feelings that constitute love, even if it doesn’t understand them. But intent matters deeply. A store-bought blanket is nice; a hand-crocheted one carries love’s fingerprint. AI-generated text—"slop"—obscures intent, making people vigilant and protective. For leaders, the real ROI of AI isn’t efficiency but the return on intent when people trust you genuinely care. Three guardrails protect this: transparency (always disclose AI use), mimicry (limit how far AI simulates feelings), and empathic overreach (don’t let AI fake emotions it cannot feel). AI left alone won’t optimize for love—that responsibility rests with humans who understand what loving feels like and proactively create it.

Key Takeaways

• AI can be optimized for love by training it to produce the specific feelings that constitute love, even if it doesn’t understand them.
• Intent is the handmaiden of love; AI obscures intent, so transparency and authenticity are critical for preserving connection.
• Three guardrails for AI use: always be transparent, limit mimicry, and avoid empathic overreach.
• The real ROI of AI isn’t just efficiency—it’s the return on your intent when people trust that you genuinely care.

3: The Five Feelings of Love

Overview

Just as Newton’s prism revealed the hidden spectrum in white light, psychological research can break love down into its five core ingredients. Once you know what these ingredients are—control, harmony, significance, the warmth of others, and growth—you can deliberately build them into every experience, from recruiting and team dynamics to customer interactions and your own life. This mental model, once seen, becomes impossible to unsee: it clarifies why some experiences leave people radiant with love while others leave them cold.

The journey toward love begins with control—not power over others, but the sense that you can navigate your own actions and choices. Extraordinarily successful doctors earned passionate advocates simply by explaining conditions in plain language and giving patients something concrete to do at home. Without that orientation, people slip into learned helplessness, building walls instead of loyalty. Next comes harmony, the art of meeting someone exactly where they are emotionally. The nurse who says “this will hurt a little, and I’ll try to make it hurt as little as possible” shares the pain and lessens it, while a jarring robocall from Audi can send a loyal customer packing for years. Significance honors every person’s deep belief that they are a special case. The best doctors and teachers live in a world of “it depends,” asking open-ended questions and remembering each person’s unique story—because one size fits one.

Only after these three foundations are laid can the warmth of others and growth take hold. In an atomized world, people crave connection, yet most organizations design handoffs that leave them feeling utterly alone. Lululemon’s approach to former employees flips this: they celebrate ex-staffers, invest in their future dreams, and hang their photos on the wall long after they’ve left. That’s growth in action—love that asks, “How will you be more capable tomorrow?” and acts on it at every touchpoint. But none of this works if the sequence is out of order. The DMV fails on every front, while a professional services firm that tried to skip straight to growth and warmth with a bribe-like trip found that love cannot be shortcut. Without control, harmony, and significance, the final two feelings are just empty perks.

Even social media, which nails the first three feelings beautifully, stops short of genuine warmth and real growth, leaving users hooked but hollow. The trap is anything that targets the first blush of love and ignores the rest. And what is the opposite of lovingly designed? It’s not “unlovingly”—it’s legally. When legal thinking dominates, control becomes helplessness, harmony becomes jarring, significance becomes unseen, warmth becomes isolation, and growth becomes stagnation. Love is forward-facing, generous, and deliberate; legality defines boundaries but rarely builds bonds. The choice is clear: design for the full spectrum, or watch those who enter your world walk out loveless.

Key Takeaways

• Growth is about helping people become more capable tomorrow. Every touchpoint is a teaching opportunity.
• The sequence of the five feelings matters: control → harmony → significance → warmth of others → growth. Skip steps and love won’t stick.
• Social media gives you the first three feelings but not the last two, leaving you hooked but hollow.
• The opposite of “lovingly” is “legally.” When legal dominates a relationship, love gets designed out.