Love Is the Most Powerful Force in Business. Most Leaders Are Designing It Out.

That word will make some leaders uncomfortable. It made me pause, too. But Buckingham isn’t talking about sentimentality. He’s talking about a measurable force backed by decades of data, one that predicts loyalty, productivity, retention, and advocacy more reliably than any engagement score or incentive program. Leaders who understand this have an enormous competitive advantage. Leaders who don’t are quietly destroying the very thing that creates long-term business value.

We Live in a Transactional World

Buckingham paints a stark picture of where we are. Trust in major institutions has hit historic lows. Last year was the first year since Gallup began measuring that fewer than 15% of people strongly agreed they trusted big media, government, schools, hospitals, and other large institutions. At work, employees are tracked by keystroke counts and screen time. Customers are reduced to lifetime value calculations and average basket sizes. Humans have been reduced to countable elements in transactional equations.

“Humans at work are not called humans at work,” Buckingham told me. “They’re called FTEs. Full-time equivalents. Headcount.”

He frames this as a continuum of experiences. On one end, you have loving experiences that are deeply moral and deeply human. On the other end, exploitative experiences that are clearly immoral. But most of us don’t live at either extreme. We live in the middle, in transactional experiences that are neither moral nor immoral. They are amoral. And that ambiguity is quietly corrosive.

“It feels weird to us humans to live in an amoral world,” Buckingham said, “because we want to live in a world where our human value is the organizing principle for what’s right or what’s wrong, what we do or what we don’t do.”

The danger is that we’ve come to accept this transactional middle as normal. And as Buckingham put it bluntly, “You get more of what you accept.”

Why Fives Are the Only Number That Matters

One of the most striking arguments in the book, and in our conversation, is about the relationship between experience and outcomes. Conventional wisdom says that a relationship is linear. If you can move a two-star experience to a three, or a three to a four, you’ll see a proportional improvement in results. That assumption drives how most companies allocate attention and resources. Focus on the unhappy customers. Fix the problem employees. Run exit interviews to learn why people leave.

Buckingham says the data tells a completely different story. The relationship between experience and outcomes is curvilinear. It follows a hockey stick pattern. Moving a two to a three changes almost nothing. Moving a three to a four barely registers. The massive jump in behavior change across loyalty, productivity, advocacy, and retention happens only when someone reaches a 5.

And when people reach a five, they all use the same word.

“The word they use is love. I love that. I love that ride. I love that team. I love working for that leader. I love that brand. When we as humans try to describe an extreme positive experience, the word we naturally, spontaneously reach for is love.”

This is where Buckingham’s argument shifts from philosophical to operational. If fives are the only experiences that reliably drive behavior, then leaders need to stop lumping fours and fives together. Stop using top-two-box scoring. Stop relying on Net Promoter Score as though nines and tens are interchangeable. They aren’t.

“Failure tells you nothing about success,” Buckingham said. “Nothing. It’s different. It’s like studying divorce to learn about marriage. Don’t do that.” He pointed to research showing that happily married couples argue just as often as unhappy ones. The difference isn’t in the frequency of conflict. It’s in what happens between the arguments. And you learn nothing about that by studying the marriages that failed.

The same logic applies to leadership. Exit interviews with departing employees won’t teach you how to create the conditions where people love their work. You have to study the fives directly.

The Josh Effect

To illustrate what experience intelligence looks like in practice, Buckingham told me about a leader he followed for several days across multiple settings. He calls him Josh, a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. The story is one of the most vivid examples of intentional experience design I’ve come across.

On the morning of Disneyland’s 70th anniversary, 10,000 cast members lined the streets. Bob Iger was there. The president of the New York Stock Exchange was there. Josh was supposed to ring the opening bell at 7:00 a.m. But minutes before the cameras rolled, no one could find him.

He had slipped under the ropes, walked to the far end of the park where the entry gates were, and was moving from one cluster of cast members to another. Hugging people. Shaking hands. Chatting as if he had all the time in the world.

When Buckingham asked him about it, Josh explained a personal custom. “Now that I’ve reached the point in my career where in many, many rooms when I walk in, there’s a stage, I just have a custom that I always go furthest from the stage, closest to the guest.”

Later that same day, Buckingham watched guests mob Josh as they walked the park together, something he’d never seen happen with any other Disney executive at that level. The reason? Josh had created an Instagram account and invited cast members to contact him directly about any issue, no matter how small. His PR team told him not to do it. He did it anyway. Hundreds of thousands of followers later, guests recognized him because his cast members had made him visible through the trust he’d built with them.

In another setting, Buckingham watched Josh spend three hours in an Imagineering meeting discussing redesigning the Millennium Falcon ride, which already had a two-hour wait. When Buckingham asked why he was personally involved, Josh’s answer was precise: “We have data which suggests that when people get off the ride, they like it. They don’t love it. Disney is a delicate brand. It lives in people’s hearts. Anytime I can do anything that turns you from like to love, I have to.”

Josh has since been named Disney’s chairman. Buckingham sees it as a signal. “In a world of chest-thumping directive behaviors that pass for leadership today, the board went, no. We’re going with this guy. This is a guy who understands experience design for humans.”

The AI Question Leaders Aren’t Asking

One of the sharpest moments in our conversation came when we discussed how leaders are using AI. Buckingham told the story of a CMO at Netflix who used AI to write 26 performance reviews in 20 minutes and spoke publicly about how brilliant the experience was.

Buckingham sees it differently. He draws a clear line between two uses of AI. One is genuinely valuable: AI as a metacognitive partner that helps you think, process, and express yourself more fully. When AI makes you feel smarter and more capable, that’s a form of flourishing. You can love AI for that.

But the other use, deploying AI to construct or contain a human experience on behalf of someone else, is where the destruction begins. Those 26 employees knew the words weren’t hers. They didn’t know her intent. They couldn’t feel her investment in their growth. And so they leaned out.

“You’ve destroyed productive human behavior for 26 people,” Buckingham said. “You’ve done that. And then you’ve proudly talked about it. And then no one has come in and gone, what you did was unloving, and that’s bad business.”

His framework for evaluating any decision, including AI adoption, is simple: look at the experience continuum and ask whether this moves us to the left or to the right. Outsourcing, large spans of control, excessive handoffs, and AI-generated human interactions. All of these carry the risk of designing love out of the system. And, as the data shows, love is the source of long-term value.

“Love destruction is value destruction,” Buckingham said. “If you, as a leader, don’t know whether more people will love working here tomorrow than today, you’re failing your fiduciary responsibility to your investors.”

Five Feelings That Serve as a Design Blueprint

Buckingham doesn’t leave leaders with an abstract philosophy. He identifies five sequential feelings that, when present, produce the experience people describe as love. These aren’t interchangeable. They build on each other in order, and skipping ahead creates confusion rather than connection.

Control comes first. People need to understand the world they’ve entered. What are the values of this team? What are the rules? What tools are available? What decisions can I make? The opposite of control is learned helplessness, and it’s one of the fastest ways to lose someone.

Harmony follows. Every experience is first an emotional experience. Before you can move someone, you have to meet them. Buckingham used the example of nurses who give painless injections. They don’t use a different technique. But they all say some version of the same thing before inserting the needle: “This is going to hurt a little bit. I’ll try to make it hurt as little as I can.” That acknowledgment of the other person’s feeling is what harmony looks like.

Significance is the third feeling. This is where individualization enters. Do you know my story? Do you understand what I’m dealing with today? Does anything change because of that understanding? The best leaders, teachers, and doctors all live in a world of “it depends” because they recognize that each person’s context matters.

Warmth of others is the fourth. At some point in any experience, people look around and ask whether they’re going through it alone or alongside others. We’ve designed too many workplace experiences, from onboarding to car buying to opening a bank account, as solo journeys. That isolation is unloving by design.

Growth is the final feeling. Love is forward-facing. If you care about someone, you’re aware they have to wake up tomorrow and face the world again. Growth means helping them be a little more capable, whether through a small tip or a significant development opportunity. It’s the link between love, learning, and loyalty.

One Thing You Can Do Tomorrow

When I asked Buckingham for the simplest starting point, his answer was a practice he’s advocated before, but one that takes on new weight in the context of this book.

Check in with each of your people for 15 minutes every week. Ask two questions: How did you feel about last week? What are you working on this week, and how can I help?

Do it 52 times a year. In that single ritual, you hit the first three feelings. You create clarity about decisions and priorities (control). You demonstrate that you understand what they’re going through emotionally (harmony). And you treat them as individuals whose unique work and personalities matter to how you lead them (significance).

Buckingham was direct about the implications. “If you can’t check in with each of your people every week, individually, you’ve got too many people. If it sounds boring to check in with each of your people every week, then don’t lead people. Because that’s leading.”

The Real Question

Throughout our conversation, one idea kept resurfacing. Love is not a coating you apply to the surface of a business. It’s an ingredient you design into the experiences you create, for employees and customers alike. It is measurable, predictable, and the most powerful driver of the outcomes leaders say they want.

The two most important questions any leader can ask are ones Buckingham returns to again and again: Will more customers love us tomorrow than today? And will more people love working here tomorrow than today?

If you don’t know the answers, it doesn’t mean the questions aren’t important. It means you have work to do.

Marcus Buckingham’s Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business is available now wherever books are sold. Learn more at designlovein.com.