How We Discovered The Power of Nice

[Demeter]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kaplan-thaler-and-robin-koval/how-we-discovered-the-pow_b_30240.html


We will never forget the day we gave a huge boost to our business -- by applauding a competitor.

Shortly after we started The Kaplan Thaler Group, we had a small piece of business with a large global financial company. Our client invited us, along with another advertising agency, to a meeting with the CEO. Our presentation was brief and to the point, but certainly had some sparks of creativity in our work. We received appreciative smiles from our client and the CEO, but not so much as a head nod from the rival agency. Then the other agency presented their work. It wasn't stellar, but their presentation style was phenomenal, filled with the appropriate bells and whistles. Frankly, we were duly impressed. So when they finished, we gave them a well-deserved round of applause.

The next day our client called us, astonished. "Something happened yesterday that was extraordinary," he said.

"Well, our work wasn't that good," we said.

"No, it had nothing to do with the work," said the client. "It's just that in my twenty years of business, I have never seen an agency so genuinely proud of the company they were competing against. Do you have any idea how rare that is? I would have expected you to be stone-faced. So when I saw you applauding for them right in front of our CEO, I just knew you were the kind of agency I had to work with."

Shortly after that phone call, we were awarded several more accounts from this company. And today, they are one of our biggest clients.

When we started The Kaplan Thaler Group, we never made a conscious decision to be a "nice" company. We didn't write it on a piece of paper or put it in a mission statement. We never even said it out loud. We just knew that to be successful we had to start, not with some formalized and esoteric vision inscribed on our walls, but with a set of ethics and moral behavior. We somehow knew that kindness and consideration would be the building blocks of our success. We had both had some nasty bosses in the past, and while we saw that they frequently got results, we knew that there was a more productive, more positive way to lead. But never, when we began our tiny agency nine years ago, would we have imagined that this recipe for success would not only create an environment that was happier and healthier, but one that would make our company wealthier as well.

Or that some of the nicest seeds we'd sown actually were planted years earlier.

One day, about four years ago, we received a phone call from a woman who worked for an agency that had just been dissolved. She called us, and we assumed it was to ask about employment. We have a policy at our agency of returning every email and phone call, and invited the woman to meet with us, although we knew we had no immediate job openings. However, from the tone of her conversation, we thought it would be a nice gesture.

Little did we realize the intent of her visit. It was not, in fact, to get a job. It was to help us land a $40 million dollar account that she was working with. Her client had told her that they wanted to retain her stewardship, but that she could help choose the agency she wished to work with. Why us? Because, she finally revealed to us, twenty-five years earlier Linda was managing an account at a former agency, and had always treated her, a junior assistant at the time, with kindness and respect. She had waited years to repay the kindness. Forty million dollars because we were nice to a woman over two decades ago! This is the true power of nice.

Unfortunately, there is a deeply rooted belief in our culture that in order to succeed you have to act like a blood-thirsty medieval warrior, and that niceness is for the weak and the naive. That's why there are books out there, like "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office" and "Leadership, Sopranos Style." That's why reality shows encourage contestants to "eat their young" in order to survive.

[acmejack]

1. What a great story!

Screw you Donald Trump!