If strategy is future competitive advantage, generosity is smart for individual or company strategies.
Generosity builds good will which is both an asset and a moat.
It is an asset in that it can be tapped in the future.
It is a moat because when an individual or a company has been generous in times of trouble their employee or customer are less likely to switch to a different firm for a lower price or higher pay.
Generosity is also a key differentiator in that usually when a person or firm needs help there are few people willing to help someone out of power or in trouble. Those individuals and brands who do help stand out and their showing up and helping when others are not burns into the emotional and mental memory of the recipient.
Emotional connections are harder to sever or replace than financial connections.
A story shared with me:
“Long ago, must be 30 years ago or more, I went into Tiffany’s to purchase one cufflink.
The night before I had attended a black-tie event and one cufflink must have worked itself free (it was the solid type, and was difficult to get on and off), and I lost it off my sleeve. Just wasn’t there when I got home.
I said to the counter person that I just wanted to buy one cufflink to match the other one.
She left.
She returned with the typical Tiffany’s blue box with the white ribbon. “Here you go…no charge,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it.
You must be — at least — the 400th person I have told this story to.”
Brands today cannot succeed unless their employees are happy. It is the employees who after all provide the service to customers and clients. It is the employees who generate the ideas and solve the problems. It is often the employees who are most believed and can be the greatest ambassadors and advocates of a brand. Often employees are far more authentic ambassadors than a celebrity that companies give tens of millions too. Why not be generous in care, money, and attention to employees?
Kindness Is Key
One of the keys to a good life and possibly success at work is kindness.
This includes not just being kind to other people but kind to oneself.
Often we spend our time regretting, self-flagellating, doubting our decisions and wondering if we can ever measure up especially in a world filled with standards and measures that are unattainable.
In today’s competitive marketplace of rapidly transforming landscapes and constant benchmarking we often forget that we are dealing not just with buyers, sellers, users, members, competitors, analysts, scientists, management and employees but with analog, carbon based, feeling filled people.
Humans.
Messy and Moody. Dream filled and desire driven.. Anxiously ambitious. Undulating with uncertainty.
Kindness is a way to connect in a world where connections are key.
But it not easy to model in an Excel spreadsheet, display in a PowerPoint , or be described with any depth by GPT.
The machine will rapidly compute an answer, garland it with perspective, refine and correlate what has been fed into its innards, and then emit an output in a dazzling display of verbosity.
Answers that may awe us.
But rarely move us.
The author George Saunders gave a short and remarkable speech on the importance of kindness which everyone should listen to.
A key theme is “to err in the direction of kindness”
Some key passages of his talk to students
“When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .
And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.
Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.”
Try generosity and kindness.
It is not easy.
But it may be the way to being better.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Rishad Tobaccowala, Author of Restoring The Soul Of Business: Staying Human In The Age Of Data
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