Marcus Buckingham on
Why Love is the Most Powerful
and Most Measurable Force in Business

Most leaders are managing the wrong thing. They’re fixing the ones and trying to move people to threes, when the only thing that actually drives behavior is what happens at five.

In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis welcomes back Marcus Buckingham, New York Times bestselling author, psychometrician, and pioneer researcher on human strengths and engagement, for a conversation about his new book Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2026). Marcus has spent over 30 years measuring what drives human performance, and his most counterintuitive — and data-backed — conclusion is this: love is not soft. It is the single most powerful and predictive force in business, and most leaders have designed it out entirely.

The conversation covers:

• Why the experience-behavior-outcome relationship is curvilinear, not linear — and why only “five” experiences drive any behavior at all, making fours functionally identical to ones.
• Why Net Promoter Score is built on a flawed assumption of linearity and should be abandoned by any entrepreneur who wants to actually predict customer behavior.
• What love means as a business concept: when people say “I love that,” they’re describing an experience that allowed them to take off a piece of their armor and express more of themselves — and that is both measurable and designable.
• The five sequential feelings that lead to a “love that” response — control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth — and how leaders can use them as a blueprint for experience design.
• Why the hospitalist movement in healthcare is one of the clearest examples of designing love into a broken system, and what any business can learn from it.
• How Marcus built Pablo, an AI trained on 30 years of his research, to act as a design partner for experience creation — and why the dog metaphor was intentional.
• Why dumping AI into customer service experiences almost always reduces love, and what leaders need to think about before making that trade.

Patrick and Marcus also dig into the fundamental difference between moments and experiences, why studying failure tells you nothing about excellence, and the surprisingly rigorous data that finally convinced a “slightly uptight British researcher” that love belongs in business.

Marcus Buckingham:

For over twenty-five years, Marcus Buckingham has been the world’s leading researcher on strengths, engagement, and human performance. He began his career at Gallup and was the cocreator, with Donald O. Clifton, of StrengthsFinder.

He is the New York Times–bestselling author or coauthor of many books, including First, Break All the Rules; Now, Discover Your Strengths; StandOut 2.0; Nine Lies about Work; and Love + Work.

He has two of Harvard Business Review’s most circulated, industry-changing cover articles and has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, TODAY, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.