It was entitled 'Why kindness can help businesses grow' and was essentially about Henrietta Lovell, a UK based entrepreneur who is gaining quite a reputation as she grows her business: the Rare Tea Company. It tells the story of how, after an experience of drinking a wonderful tea in Hong Kong, she began to question the quality of the big brand teas available in UK supermarkets and realised that the tea she had fallen for in Hong Kong was simply not available in the UK.
She travelled to tea-growing places in China and Africa, and "fell in love with tea and the people who grew it." And as a result she started her Rare Tea Company to sell some of the enticing teas she bought straight from the growers in exotic places.
Much of the rest of the article details how, as a result of extraordinary acts of kindness, she has been able to rapidly grow the Rare Tea Company brand and her own reputation.
The author of the article, Peter Day, then goes on to comment on the "business of kindness", as he calls it. He writes:
"Why shouldn't this be another way of doing business, far removed from the brash competitiveness that businesses think they are all about? There is, surely, far more to running a company than the preposterous cut-throat competition of the TV challenge show, The Apprentice.
Why can't businesses be run with a generosity of spirit and a lot of goodwill? Henrietta Lovell says it can be done, but hers may be just a good deed in a naughty world.
I would like to think not. It may be the start of a trend. Companies have got away with nominal good behaviour for years. They do what their lawyers and their marketing people tell them they are obligated to do, and nothing much more.
As the banking crisis demonstrated, they did what they could get away with, driven by what they maintained was the interests of their shareholders, and the bosses revelling in the status symbol of their bonuses.
Now blinking in the glare of publicity - businesses may be waking up to other, more deep-seated, obligations. Good people may in the end decide they do not want to work for inhuman or merely operationally effective companies. They will want more from work than pay and promotion. They will want to be nice. They will want the organisations they work for to be kind.
That is what customers are discovering they want, too. They want to deal with businesses that work in decent ways, that reflect their own feelings about the world."
There's no doubt in my mind that he's right. This trend has been underway for some time already, and I'm convinced it's going to accelerate in the coming years. It's the big opportunity for businesses that respond to it, and a huge risk for those that don't.
Peter Day goes on to write: "It would be nice to think that the business of kindness will not be captured by professional marketeers and become just another device for paying lip service to how people think business ought to behave.
It would be nice to be un-cynical about it. It would be nice to think that kindness is a way of doing business that might infect lots of big business rather than just a few pioneers."
I guess we'll see.....
The full article can be found here: Why kindness can help businesses grow
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
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