Why empathy matters in business leadership

Martha Cotton, Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, brings 25 years of experience bridging anthropology, design, and enterprise transformation. Known for helping large organizations understand people, navigate change, and design for adoption, Martha shares how empathy, collaboration, and partnership shape modern design leadership.

In this episode, she and Jochem explore how designers can speak the language of business, why data partnerships matter, and what it really takes to drive customer centricity inside legacy organizations. They examine the future of journey management, organizational transformation, and how AI will reshape creative work.

Guest Bio

Martha Cotton is Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, where she leads design research and drives customer centricity across one of the world’s largest financial institutions. With a background in cultural anthropology, she has built a career spanning boutique studios, global consultancies, and enterprise design leadership.

Her work focuses on designing for adoption, shaping change inside complex organizations, and elevating design as a strategic partner to the business. Martha is also an educator and long-standing contributor to the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry community.

Takeaways

• Designing for adoption ensures experiences deliver sustained customer and business value.
• Design leaders must articulate impact in business terms, not just craft terms.
• Organizational change succeeds when it’s driven top down, bottom up, and radiating from the middle.
• Strong partnerships between design and data unlock measurable outcomes and credibility.
• Journey management becomes transformative when supported by diverse data and cross-functional collaboration.

Chapters

00:00 Setup and warm up

02:27 Intro to Martha Cotton

03:44 Martha’s career through line

05:46 Why empathy still matters in business

08:17 Skills needed to thrive in complex enterprises

12:04 Craft, business impact, and designing for adoption

14:42 How design leadership is evolving

16:37 The rise and pitfalls of design thinking

19:58 Making new ways of working stick

22:11 Breaking the glass ceiling for design

25:23 Moving from order taking to partnership

28:53 Charm offensive and influencing without disruption

30:57 Learning business context the hard way

32:40 Early days of digital transformation

33:45 Making transformation stick in enterprises

35:04 Top down, bottom up, and middle-out change

39:32 The challenge of creating opportunities inside enterprises

44:00 Design and data partnerships

47:26 The evolution of journey management

49:29 Data-enabled journeys and organizational reality

54:41 What Martha wishes she could change

55:47 Thinking about AI as a creative partner

58:29 Where to find Martha

LinkedIn

Guest: Martha Cotton

Host Jochem van der Veer