The Answer for Ugly Times? Do Something Beautiful

Posted by Bill - February 21st, 2009

It’s not often, in these dark and dreary days, that a good-news story stops me in my tracks. But today’s Boston Globe carries a front-page article about a gesture so simple, so warm-hearted, and so meaningful, that it invites you to set aside the economic meltdown and the plunging Dow—and gets you thinking about the power of beautiful gestures in these ugly times.

It turns out that Boston’s legendary Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where sick kids get some of the best care in the world, is building a big new facility. Every morning, in bitter temperatures and biting wind, ironworkers show up for work and move the building a little closer to completion.

No news there. What is news is what happens before the shift begins:

“It has become a beloved ritual at Dana-Farber,” the Globe reports. “Every day, children who come to the clinic write their names on sheets of paper and tape them to the windows of the walkway for ironworkers to see. And, every day, the ironworkers paint the names onto I-beams and hoist them into place as they add floors to the new 14-story Yawkey Center for Cancer Care.

“The building’s steel skeleton is now a brightly colored, seven-story monument to scores of children receiving treatment at the clinic—Lia, Alex, and Sam; Taylor, Izzy, and Danny. For the young cancer patients, who press their noses to the glass to watch new names added every day, the steel and spray-paint tribute has given them a few moments of joy and a towering symbol of hope.

“It’s fabulous,” said [18-month-old] Kristen [Hoenshell]’s mother, Elizabeth, as she held her daughter and marveled at the rainbow of names. “It’s just a simple little act that means so much.”

Why can’t each of us, in our daily work lives, take a small cue from these big-hearted ironworkers? Sure, government policymakers have to devise tax cuts and spending plans to energize a depressed economy. And CEOs have to cut costs and find opportunities for growth to avoid financial catastrophe. But those are long-term answers to deep-seated challenges.

In the meantime, what’s stopping us as individuals from engaging in a “simple little act that means so much?” Maybe the right response to a time of paralyzing fear and uncertainty is to conjure up the spirit of that old bumper sticker: “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty.”

Indeed, as I was reading the Globe piece this morning, I thought back to presentation by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the fast-growing, billion-dollar-a-year Internet retailer. Hsieh and his colleagues pride themselves on their unsurpassed customer service, which means, of course, delivering shoes and other merchandise on time and at low cost. But it also means more—every so often, delivering a bit of humanity that rises above the day-to-day routine.

During his talk to the fourth-annual summit of the Business Innovation Factory, Hsieh told a story about a customer who had been trying to locate a pair of hard-to-find shoes for her husband, until she finally found them on Zappos. But before she could give the shoes to her husband, he died in a car accident. This customer called the Zappos 1-800 number to ask for help in returning the shoes. The call-center rep provided all the technical support the customer needed—and then took it upon herself to send flowers to the widow, offering condolences on behalf of her colleagues.

It was a simple human gesture that conveyed a powerful signal—both on a human level, and about the type of company Zappos aspires to be. The widow was so moved that she spoke about the flowers at her husband’s funeral, the story got back to CEO Hsieh, and then he told it to a theater full of executives and technologists. Does Zappos have a formal policy to cover this kind of situation? Of courser not. Is there some way to seek supervisory approval to spend company money on a gesture of kindness? No. “Stuff like that just happens naturally, on its own,” Hsieh explained.

Like with the ironworkers. “They don’t have to do this, the guys,” said Kristen Hoenshell’s mom. “They could just do their job and do a good job at it and give us a building that we can get treatment at, but they go the extra step and that’s huge.”

Now, I’m not suggesting that we can kill this recession with kindness, or that “senseless acts of beauty” can cure a truly hideous financial mess. But tough economic times have a way of bring out the worst in our companies and ourselves. So let’s work hard to bring out the best in ourselves. It may not amount to a stimulus package, but it may make it easier for all of us to get through the day—and eventually get back to prosperity.

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