Page 63 - Kindness - No Forward

Understanding Creates Kindness

Not surprisingly, when we begin to work at understanding feelings, we
begin to make acts of kindness commonplace.

One of my favorite examples of this happened a few years ago at Gerber’s,
the baby food company. Gerber’s decided to discontinue a particular type
of baby food formula, a meat-based formula. They went about all the
proper research and communication to sales, the Board, employees, and
the marketplace to announce that this food item would no longer be made.

This created a problem for Raymond Dunn Jr. and his mother.

Raymond Dunn Jr. is a severely retarded teenager who has trouble
digesting food. He lives solely on Gerber’s meat-based formula. The very
one that was being discontinued.

I have two sons and two step children. What would I do if the substance of
their lives was to be discontinued? I’d do what Raymond’s mother did. I
call Gerber’s, I’d write, I’d pray.

“Don’t stop making the food that keeps my son alive.”

All her efforts did no good. Gerber’s stood firm.

But someone at Gerber’s heard the plea. Someone there understood how
Raymond’s mother felt. And they solved the problem.

Employees at Gerber’s acquired the ingredients to make meat-based
formula themselves. They volunteered their own time to make and package
it.

And the Associated Press ran a story a couple of years ago which opened
like this: “Raymond Dunn Jr. turned sixteen years old today, but the
profoundly retarded birthday boy feasted not on cake, to which he is
allergic, but on the day’s greatest gift…the brown, bland infant formula
which keeps him alive.”

Understanding how people feel can lead to kindness revolutions.

Commit yourself to performing one new ten-minute act of exceptional
customer service every day. Induce your colleagues to do the same. In a
100-person outfit, that would result in 24,000 new courteous acts per year.
Such is the stuff of revolutions.
Tom Peters, A Passion for Excellence