Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and New York Times best-selling author who has spent three decades studying human uniqueness and excellence. Known for his work on unlocking strengths and performance, Marcus brought his research-driven insights to Oslo Business Forum with a provocative message: the most powerful forces in business aren’t efficiency, strategy, or innovation. The most powerful force is love.
The Power of Experiences
Marcus began by drawing a clear distinction between failure, mediocrity, and excellence. He shared five insights from his research that can help leaders unleash the most powerful force in business for long-term success.
1. Experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes.
Consider a large retailer where 100 people work at each store and tens of thousands of customers shop each day. Generally, stores that deliver the most positive experiences are the most profitable. But to understand how they succeed, it’s important to make a distinction between moments and experiences: moments are fleeting and external, while experiences live inside us, shaping memory, meaning, and action.
"Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes."
Marcus Buckingham: Leading authority on leadership, strengths, and extreme high performance.
If you want to grow your business, you need your customers to come back. And to keep your customers coming back, you need to create great experiences for them. Leaders who drive real results design intentional experiences.
2. Leaders are experience-makers.
Marcus argued that leaders are never neutral: every action either elevates or diminishes the experience of another human being.
“You’re on stage every day,” he said. “We don’t expect you to be perfect, but we do expect you to be predictable.”
Of all the companies Marcus has worked with, he finds this message the most challenging to convey. When you accept that nothing you do is experientially neutral, how are you going to step into leadership?
3. Strategic thinking is experience-making.
We may have an intellectual understanding of strategy, but when you really unpack it, it’s just a sequence of experiences designed to create a set of feelings. Marcus pointed to Disney as an example, recalling how they didn’t just invest in cruise ships—they designed an experience so compelling that they renamed the company Disney Experiences.
They may not teach this in business school, but real strategy is about asking, “What experiences are we going to design to create a set of differentiated feelings?” This question is the passion and obsession of the best strategic thinkers in business.
4. Study excellence, not failure: 3s are not 4s or 5s
Marcus challenged the common belief that learning from failure teaches us how to succeed. True insights, he argued, come from studying the “5s,” or extreme positives. This is where you find the differentiating factor.
"We think the world works in a linear way, but it doesn’t."
He noted that the relationship between experiences and outcomes is never linear. “There are 5s and then there’s everything else,” Marcus said. “Studying failures doesn’t tell you anything about excellence.”
In Marcus’s experience, one word comes up again and again when you study the outliers: love. And if people keep using a word to describe their experience, you should honor the word.
5. Love is the most powerful force in business.
Love, Marcus explained, is not a careless exaggeration of “like,” but a profound force that predicts extreme positive outcomes.
A loving experience is one where people feel that you are committed to their well-being and flourishing. Love doesn’t describe the size of an experience, but rather the depth of impact. Most companies have a strategy for doing things effectively or efficiently, but most don’t have a strategy for doing things lovingly. “You don’t have to love all you do, but when you find the love in what you do, it is different.”
Designing Love In
Marcus urged leaders to adopt what he calls a DLI Lens: Design Love In. Too often, organizations reduce people to metrics—employees are headcount, customers have lifetime value—treating humans transactionally. But real breakthroughs come from creating experiences that leave people saying, “I love that” or “I love working here.”
"If you want to excel, you have to engage with love."
He also acknowledged the challenges of technology. While AI may straddle the line between loving and unloving experiences, it cannot understand human flourishing. Leaders must discern where AI can foster connection and where it may undermine or erode it.
Ultimately, Marcus called on leaders to recognize love as the moral center of business. He believes that exploitative practices are immoral, transactional practices are amoral, but love is moral. This is where the deepest growth happens. If those you lead or serve don’t say they love the experience, you’ve settled for mediocrity.
Key Points
- Experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. Moments matter, but cumulative experiences determine behavior, memory, and results.
- Leaders are experience-makers. Every interaction shapes the human experience. As a leader, your influence is never neutral—it is always positive or negative.
- Strategic thinking is experience-making. True strategy designs experiences that create differentiated feelings, not just investment decisions.
- Study excellence, not failure (4s are not 3s or 5s). The greatest insights come from the extreme positives, not from average or failed attempts.
- Love is the most powerful force in business. Leaders must design love into customer and employee experiences if they want to move beyond mediocrity.
Questions to Consider
- Are you studying failures, or are you studying excellence?
- How can you design love into your customer and employee experiences?
- As you look to the future, where might AI enhance love and where might it risk undermining it?
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