relentlessly pleasant? it's the power of nice
Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 12:29PM | Lisa Gates My personal women's community is growing at an alarming rate. Alarming only because I doubt my ability to keep up with the woman energy that is being infused into business, culture and politics worldwide.
I meet one woman these days and she turns over her resources and her social capital to She Negotiates without a second thought. We are bursting at the seams and popping with excitement over woman power on the ground and on the 'net.
Most recently, "She Negotiates" workshop veteran, Harvard Business Review and "Dare to Dream" blogger, and Rose Park Investments' President, Whitney Johnson introduced me to Linda Kaplan Thaler's The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness.
The Power of Nice echoes the advice of negotiation gurus Babcock and Laschever to be "relentlessly pleasant." Here's an excerpt from Nice.
For months, our entire team at The Kaplan Thaler Group had been working to create a pitch that would wow Davis and win us the huge U.S. Bank account.
At the time of Davis’s visit, it was down to the wire. We were one of two agencies still in the running for the account. Davis and his team were flying in from their executive offices in Minneapolis to meet personally with us. We didn’t realize it at the time, but in fact Davis and his staff were a bit apprehensive about the kind of treatment they’d get in New York City. The furious pace and hard-bitten “out of my way” attitude of the Big Apple had become part of the mythology of the city. They were afraid we would be too cold, too aloof.
But when Richard Davis and his team walked into our building, they received a warm, enthusiastic greeting from Frank. When Davis reached our offices a few minutes later, he was gushing about the friendly security guard. “This guy gave me a huge hello!” he said. “And all of a sudden, I thought how could I not want to work with a company that has someone like Frank? How can I feel anything but good about hiring an agency like that?” We won the account.
Of course, Davis wouldn’t have awarded us the job if he wasn’t impressed with our work. But we’ve gotta give Frank credit. With a multimillion-dollar account in the balance, it was Frank’s warm hello that helped us cinch the deal.
That is the power of nice.
There's a Nice IQ test over at Linda's website which I've attached here (.pdf). Take it to see whether you're already "relentlessly pleasant" in all of your business affairs.
She Negotiates workshop begins on July 19.
Reader Comments (1)
Victoria, thank you so much for sharing our book with all of your readers! We love the idea of being "relentlessly pleasant." It's amazing what you can achieve when you adopt the counterintuitive philosophy that you can succeed in the dog-eat-dog corporate world by valuing the simple act of being kind. Through even our smallest acts, we make little, yet important impressions upon others. By making NICE as automatic as breathing, you can make sure that each of your interactions is a positive one--and that can do more than help you build your business; it can transform your life.