Kindness and Compassion 51
A number of businesses and leaders are operating by these simple yet
powerful guidelines, some of them for overtly ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘spiritual’’
reasons, others because it’s the right thing to do or because they have
seen the negative effects of cruelty and coldness in their business and
personal lives. But all seem pleased with the long-term results.
The insurance industry, with its emphasis on bureaucratic proce-
dures, risk ratios, and exclusionary clauses, would not seem to be a
likely home for kindness and compassion. But USAA, a large auto and
home insurer, believes in the Golden Rule so much that it added a
‘‘rider’’ to it, creating USAA’s ‘‘Two Golden Rules’’:
- Treat each and every person the way you would like to be
treated. - Treat each and every employee the way USAA expects you to
treat the customer.
CEO Robert McDermott adds, ‘‘The Golden Rule can only be lived
if in fact you first love yourself and then love your neighbor.’’^1 This
love obviously extends to the employees. A few years ago, jobs at
USAA were the modern version of building the pyramids, but without
the variety. One person spent all day opening envelopes, another sorting
the mail, another reviewing a particular type of claim. Today, no one’s
job is that narrow; jobs have been broadened so that employees feel
more like human beings whose collective judgment is important and
less like robots performing mindless, repetitive tasks.
With the rapid proliferation of Starbucks, the service and products of
this amazingly successful franchise are well known. What is not so well
known is the compassion on which Howard Schultz, Starbucks’
founder, based the company. This compassion was based on his own
experience as a working-class Brooklyn youth whose father rarely expe-
rienced anything like the Golden Rule. Schultz’s father shuffled be-
tween a number of jobs—truck driver, cab driver, factory worker—at
which he rarely received benefits and even more rarely felt like a valued
member of the organization.
Schultz writes, ‘‘I guess I really began to realize that there were many