Business journalism loves to ** discuss ** empathy, but there are no action items

I wrote a post back in August 2015 about empathy as the next great management trend, and I’m not sure that has yet to come to fruition. Maybe it was because Trump was elected 14 or so months after that, and he helped usher in (or continue, really) a very specific type of douche-y “leadership” where loyalty is demanded above all. That might not be the reason and the easier reason might just be that we’re not very good at leadership collectively, and we don’t seem to know what it means either.

Anyway, I’ve long been bullish on empathy. I would say the most research I ever put into a single blog post in the last eight years was this one on whether you can teach empathy to adults. I actually wrote that laying on the rug of the apartment my ex and I shared, and it took so long to write that I woke up and had generic rug imprinted on my shirt. Ha.

So flash forward to yesterday. I am hosting church small group and in my driveway you’ve got chalk and a bubble machine for the toddlers. Real semi-suburban shit, even though I live 3 minutes from the 12th-biggest downtown in America. One of my friends, a doctor, is talking about how the med school she teaches with has some “new commitment to empathy,” which is good, since doctors need that, no? Right. But most of their “empathy modules” are…