Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business

by Marcus Buckingham

From New York Times bestselling author and pioneer of the strengths movement comes a bold new blueprint for leading with the most powerful force in business—love.

Think about the last time you said, "I love that." Maybe it was about a product that exceeded expectations, a service experience that built instant loyalty, or a moment when your work brought out the best in you. That reaction isn't just emotional—it's electric. In the organization, it fuels engagement, strengthens performance, and drives lasting success. Yet most leaders don't even acknowledge it, let alone measure or make use of it.

In Design Love In, leading researcher on human performance and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham reveals how love—the deep connection that makes people feel seen, valued, and inspired—isn't just a soft feeling. It's a measurable driver of performance and growth. He shows how leaders, as experience-makers, can intentionally "design love in" to everything we our interactions with team members, our company policies and practices, the products and services and experiences we create for those we lead and serve. When we do this, we not only unlock deeper commitment, higher engagement, stronger customer loyalty, and lasting business results, we strengthen the human connection between us and create a better world.

Featuring vivid stories of global brands, current research, and personal experiences, Buckingham illustrates that tapping into this force is not simply about being more "warm and fuzzy"—it's a concrete strategy of utilizing loving experiences to drive behaviors to drive outcomes, and the book provides step-by-step advice on how to "design love in" to all your actions as a leader.

Love—it's the most powerful force in business. This book shows how you as a leader can unleash it.

Genres: Business

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

In a world where efficiency and competency rule the workplace, where do personal strengths fit in?

It's a complex question, one that intrigued Cambridge-educated Marcus Buckingham so greatly, he set out to answer it by challenging years of social theory and utilizing his nearly two decades of research experience as a Sr. Researcher at Gallup Organization to break through the preconceptions about achievements and get to the core of what drives success.

The result of his persistence, and arguably the definitive answer to the strengths question can be found in Buckingham's four best-selling books First, Break All the Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman, Simon & Schuster, 1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton, The Free Press, 2001); The One Thing You Need to Know (The Free Press, 2005) and Go Put Your Strengths To Work (The Free Press, 2007). The author gives important insights to maximizing strengths, understanding the crucial differences between leadership and management, and fulfilling the quest for long-lasting personal success. In his most recent book, Buckingham offers ways to apply your strengths for maximum success at work.

What would happen if men and women spent more than 75% of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged in their favorite tasks, basically doing exactly what they wanted to do?

According to Marcus Buckingham (who spent years interviewing thousands of employees at every career stage and who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on employee productivity and the practices of leading and managing), companies that focus on cultivating employees' strengths rather than simply improving their weaknesses stand to dramatically increase efficiency while allowing for maximum personal growth and success.

If such a theory sounds revolutionary, that's because it is. Marcus Buckingham calls it the “strengths revolution.”

As he addresses more than 250,000 people around the globe each year, Buckingham touts this strengths revolution as the key to finding the most effective route to personal success and the missing link to the efficiency, competency, and success for which many companies constantly strive.

To kick-start the strengths revolution, Buckingham and Gallup developed the StrengthsFinder exam (StrengthsFinder.com), which identifies signature themes that help employees quantify their personal strengths in the workplace and at home. Since the StrengthsFinder debuted in 2001, more than 1 million people have discovered their strengths with this useful and important tool.

In his role as author, independent consultant and speaker, Marcus Buckingham has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal and is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Yahoo and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and obtain and sustain long-lasting personal success.

A wonderful resource for leaders, managers, and educators, Buckingham challenges conventional wisdom and shows the link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and the rate of turnover. Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a master's degree in Social and Political Science.

Reviews

[Lindsay Ercanbrack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve always been grateful I spent a fair amount of time in customer service as a teenager and young adult because those practices have served me in every other professional and even personal interaction. And loving people is at the heart of customer service. Lots of good thinking points in trying to lead with love in my job.

[Cameron Norman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant Idea, Longly-written

This book’s topic — bringing love into the work we do and the organizations we’re a part of — captured me the first time I heard Marcus Buckingham speak on it on a podcast episode. I loved the idea and the central premise. The concept is that we can do good, OK, or acceptable, but if we want to make a real difference in people’s lives and enlist excitement and loyalty in those we serve, we need love.

We need people to love what we do and make. Love — and the various things that facilitate it — is what can be a central call for quality.

Alas, I didn’t love this book. This was a book that I felt would have made for a great HBR article (in size and scope). The ideas were sound and solid, but there was a lot of words used to describe things that could have been shorter and more simpler. Not that short is always good, but the concepts were clear, the examples needed to illustrate them didn’t need to be overabundant.

Another critique I have is that the book is at its best speaking to the creation of what I’ll call an ecology of quality, engagement and service (things that make for a love-like service, product or organization). Where it starts feeling less loving is in the frameworks, and lists, and short-hand guides. It starts feeling like it could be any old strategic framework. The central idea, which is so strong, starts to get lost and the feel is more like any other business book by the time I finished it.

It’s not to say the book isn’t worth the time, but in the end, I didn’t love it.

[Patricia K Poppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

He does it again!

LOVE this one! Why Love matters in our businesses and how to instill it with our coworkers and customers. Thank you Marcus!!

[Aaron Mikulsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business was really good at times and head-scratching at times. It's worth the read and deep discussion around it. Here are some memorable moments:

“Excellence isn’t the opposite of failure. To understand the ingredients of excellence, we must study the 5s.” Yet, fearful of the negative pull of the 1s, leaders don’t investigate the 5s. It is only when you somehow managed to do something so extremely positive that you see a dramatic change in their behavior. [page 33] Only “5” experiences predict outcomes. “Your 5s are the very things that make your life‘s journey worthwhile. Fives are those experiences you’ll always say yes to.” They are your sources of energy and define your life, and your living. People instinctively tied their “love” label to their feelings of an experience. “Our feelings, the data suggests, are binary: there is love, and there is everything else. And everything else is simply ‘not love.’”

“Harmony is created when you say, ‘I see the world as you’re experiencing it,’ before you try to change it.” “By designing efficient but unloving touchpoints they’ve unwittingly brought disharmony into their employees’ experience – and then these employees have turned around, psychologically or physically, and walked right out the door.”

Individualized praise: figure which strokes work best for which folks.

Growth is the feeling that you are not “done”—that your leader wants you to develop and is invested in your future. Buckingham describes love as forward-facing: if you love someone, you believe they have more to become, and you act accordingly. Without growth, warmth can slide into stagnation; love always includes a horizon of possibility. “Love says, ‘You’re good now—and you are not done.’ Growth is love’s promise that tomorrow can be better.”

“When we make doing something legally the priority, we are, if we’re not extraordinarily careful, draining love from the experience.” “The law is best fit for defining the boundaries of a relationship; it is a poor fit for defining the ingredients of a relationship. The more it does so, the more organizations allow legal considerations to dominate the conversation, to dictate the interactions of our working relationships, the more they will drive out love. When legal wins, love withers.” A legal framework means an unloving framework.

“The only surefire way to excel as a leader is to excel as a maker of experiences for your people.”
The foundation of experience-making, and leading with love are: your authenticity, your beliefs, and your customs. Find the love in what you do.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang’s explicit custom is that he never meets one-on-one with his people and refuses to read long emails. Jensen Huang has more than 50 direct reports. This may work for him, but it isn’t loving. He can’t see and know people at that scale. It fits his needs, but it doesn’t fit any other human’s need. Smaller teams allow for depth, connection, and shared responsibility.

Founded in Cincinnati back in 1883 as the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company by an enterprising young man named Barney Kroger, the modern day Kroger is massive. At these 2,700 stores work more than 400,000 associates, serving close to 22 million customers a day. [Remember Jim Collins juxtaposing Kroger with A&P in his book Good to Great.] Their Chief Associate Experience Officer has a core belief in the goodness of people and willingness to be there for his people. 10 years ago, Kroger launched an initiative called “Like to Love”. Designing love in means first designing noise out.

For the audience to fall in love with their experience, they need to hear your story. “For the story to live on in your audience‘s mind and heart, it needs to be one that they can retell, to themselves and others.”
What story are you currently telling?
Is this the story we want to be telling?

DLI X Team Metric: 12 questions [page 130] where each item asks your team member to rate only their own feelings and experiences; no item asks them to rate you as a leader.
DLI X Customer Metric: 12 questions [page 172]

Best practices include:
Conduct quarterly;
Pay attention only to the 5s;
A good score is a mean of 40% 5s across all items;
Compare yourself to yourself over time - paying close attention to the change in your own scores from one quarter to the next;
Do not include new hires (less than 90 days) in your survey;
Take action first by examining your highest scores;
When it comes time to focus on a lower-scoring item, begin with those in control and harmony, as these are the foundations of flourishing.
Beware of Goodhart’s Law which states that as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric. “Do the right thing for you and your team, and the numbers will move.”

“Sequence the scene” recognizes that the order of experiences matters. For example, you must establish control and harmony before pushing for growth, or people will feel unsafe. Love at work is not a checklist but a sequence: first clarity (control), then emotional acknowledgment (harmony), then individuality (significance), then warmth, and finally growth. “You can’t rush people to growth if they don’t yet feel control or harmony; the sequence is as important as the ingredients.”

The epilogue beginning on page 196 gives the 10 non-negotiables for building a DLI company.
Too many reports = too little love.
You cannot love someone you don’t trust.
Predictable cuts = predictable disconnection.
Competency models kill uniqueness.
AI can be loving. Deception can’t.
If I’m a score (performance ranking), I’m not a person
You can’t outsource customer intimacy.
IVR’s are a convenience for the company, but a disconnection for the caller.
A 300:1 average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is many things – “unloving” is the most damaging.
You can maximize return on intent only if the intent stays visible.

[Venky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of best-sellers such as First, Break All the Rules and StrengthsFinder, is back with what might be his most arresting work thus far. Marcus Buckingham exhorts companies to adopt a paradigm shift in both their operations and outlook by ‘designing’ in the element of love. Design In Love pays undivided attention and wholehearted tribute to the one emotion that is all encompassing and not just universal. And in the process, reveals many facets which even though simmering right underneath our noses, have been unfortunately dismissed and disregarded as mirages.

Currently, the hallmark of many organisations, irrespective of the sector or segment of their operations, adopt an impersonal outlook towards not just customers, but also their own employees. As Buckingham demonstrates, customers and employees are faced with innumerable ‘hand-offs’ (physically and virtually being passed along department by department and personnel to personnel), shapeshifting (Delta airlines altering their frequent flyer programme from miles flown to amounts spent on credit cards), large spans of control leading to high attritions and outsourcing at the cost of empathy. Each of these experiences, bordering on indifference on the part of the manufacturer/service provider, according to Buckingham, is “unloving” to the recipient of the service or the product.

In order to transform unloving experiences into flourishing and memorable ones, Buckingham suggests incorporating five feelings of love: control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth.

The act of control removes the disorienting fog of confusion, by providing appropriate clarifications and ensuring that the customer or employee is always on top and in control. Anticipating the emotional state and freeing a person from emotional incoherence lends harmony to every experience. As Buckingham illustrates, the nurses who administer injections and drips with the least amount of pain are those who prior to commencing their procedure, gently but candidly inform their patients that there is going to be a bit of pain.

The five feelings of love need to be ‘administered’ in a sequential manner and not in a random way. A leader can design in love in her workplace by being both a mover and a maker. A mover leads with authenticity, beliefs and customs. While a mover designs in love as an innate quality, a maker spreads it outwards thereby impacting and influencing everyone around him.

Buckingham also intersperses this philosophy with a clutch of real-world experiences. Disney’s ethos of providing genuine customer experiences for people thronging their theme parks, Patagonia’s resolute and undying promise to make the world a better place and practicing what they preach, all make for some absorbing reading.

Taking a contrarian approach, Buckingham cocks a snook at the process of feedback. Terming it archaic he makes a clarion call for discarding the same. Instead, a leader would do well to ‘Walk the Stage’. As demonstrated by Joey, an employee at the departmental store Kroger, a leader would do well to put himself into the shoes of his customer and try experiencing the pleasures and pains which a customer would, by walking around the store. This is the best feedback mechanism one can incorporate.

Design Love In contains more such examples that are thought provoking. Marcus Buckingham aspires to induce companies to buck the conventional trend and shift to integrating the most powerful life force as an integral part of business.

Design Love In is published by Harvard Business Review Press and will be available on sale beginning April 7, 2026.

Thank you, Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!

[Sadie Steffens · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most unique business books I've ever read.

As a long-time subscriber to Harvard Business Review's "Management Tip of the Day," I first encountered Marcus Buckingham's work as a string of especially thoughtful and refreshing daily email insights. At first the concept of "Designing Love In," made me skeptical. I wasn't sure what "designing love in" could possibly mean, or how a concept like that would fit within the realities of corporate America. Still, I was intrigued enough to listen to a podcast interview with Buckingham, which ultimately led me to request an advance review copy of this book.

The ideas Buckingham presents are radical because they run counter to the direction many organizations seem to be heading. At a time when companies are increasingly prioritizing efficiency, automation, and profit maximization, often at the expense of meaningful employee and customer experiences, he argues for intentionally designing organizations around human connection, care, and belonging.

What struck me most is that, despite sounding unconventional at first, his approach feels deeply intuitive. It aligns with how most of us want to be treated: with dignity, value, and genuine care. As someone whose Christian faith places love at the center of how we should relate to others, I found Buckingham's message especially compelling.

I'm still reflecting on how to apply these principles within my own role as a middle manager, but I appreciate Buckingham's challenge to reject "unloving" organizational practices rather than simply accepting them as inevitable. His call for both employees and consumers to recognize these practices, speak up, and support organizations that genuinely value people offers a hopeful alternative to the status quo.

Whether or not you agree with every recommendation, Designing Love In is a thought-provoking read that challenges conventional business thinking and encourages leaders to build workplaces where people can truly thrive.

Thanks to RBMedia, Marcus Buckingham, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for a review.

[Mona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the advance audiobook via NetGalley, narrated by Marcus Buckingham himself. He has a strong central argument that designing experiences which make people feel seen and valued is a crucial and that it is often an overlooked driver of performance. In this regard, Buckingham makes a compelling case for shifting focus from mere engagement to something deeper. While the emphasis on love is refreshing, the book sometimes risks presenting it as a panacea for all organisational challenges. But leadership is rarely so singular. Businesses need a toolkit of approaches, not just one emotional lever. Ultimately, it is a thought-provoking listen that challenges leaders to be more intentional with human connection, but it would have benefited from a touch more nuance when it comes to the limits of love cures all.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Design Love In has a solid premise that creating experiences that make people feel loved leads to better performance. Unfortunately the premise is lost in the mediocre writing, structural disorganization, and nearly constant introduction of jargon and gimmicks.

[Gary Coovert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book that will make you rethink how you approach employees and customers.