Kindness, not information, is often the way to lasting business relationships. Many an agent is baffled when a prospect doesn’t make the “rational” choice by choosing them. After all, they presented the cold, hard facts!
Sometimes that’s the very problem. Those facts were cold and hard.
In this eye-opening article by Bill Taylor for Harvard Business Review, we found multiple excellent examples of how kindness trumps cleverness, and thought it would be a useful reminder to Tuesday Tactics readers. Read about how a small kindness went viral for Panera Bread, and how Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com learned a valuable lesson about kindness when he was only a boy.
As Taylor says in the article:
“So by all means, encourage your people to embrace technology, get great at business analytics, and otherwise ramp up the efficiency of everything they do. But just make sure all their efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of their humanity. Small gestures can send big signals about who we are, what we care about, and why people should want to affiliate with us. It’s harder (and more important) to be kind than clever.”
It’s More Important to Be Kind than Clever:
http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2012/08/its_more_important_to_be_kind.html
Photo credit: deneyterrio
