Kindness and Compassion 57
mately, what matters is the good that we do.’’^11 This is one banker
who has been able to combine compassion and kindness with financial
success.
Hal Rosenbluth of Rosenbluth Travel was motivated primarily by
compassion, not profit, when he decided to move his data processing
and customer service center to Linton, North Dakota. Rosenbluth,
from his corporate offices in Philadelphia, had heard that much of the
northern Midwest had experienced a severe drought, causing many
crop failures and foreclosures on farm mortgages.
Performing further research, Rosenbluth found that Linton was the
hardest-hit city in the hardest-hit state. Eschewing any further profit-
ability analysis, he quickly hired about 200 people in the Linton area to
perform the data processing and customer service work for his com-
pany. This was a tremendous economic and psychological boost to an
area whose major source of income—agriculture—had been severely
threatened by natural disaster.
Disaster often brings out generosity and compassion. After the Sep-
tember 11 World Trade Center attack, a number of corporate leaders
gave economic assistance to the rescue and clean-up effort. The new
CEO of GE, Jeffrey Immelt, gave a corporate donation of $10 million,
an amount that soon became the corporate standard for a large com-
pany.
As a consultant to a major insurance company several years ago, I met
a supremely compassionate manager. The company was undertaking a
joint venture with another financial services company, and the opera-
tions were not merging well. The ‘‘partnering’’ company, located half
a continent away, was not familiar with insurance operations and had
hired very inexperienced people to process claims. The result was a
total backup in the claims process and total demoralization in my client
company, which had until then taken great pride in the prompt and
knowledgeable response to every claim.
My job as a consultant was to travel to every branch office and speak
to the branch director and employees to ascertain exactly what had gone
wrong, and to get their suggestions for remedying the situation. I was
particularly impressed with the compassion one particular branch man-