Peter Cappelli

How busy could you be and not take that one minute to just say, congratulations, David, happy birthday.

That's all you got to do.

Takes 20 seconds.

And you couldn't do that.

So that's the way the employees see.

Right.

And I think that is the lesson for us, you know, is to put yourself, if you're a manager, in the shoes of your subordinates or in any kind of relationship with power like this.

Put yourself in their shoes and they know they're supposed to get this card and they know the policy and they know part of it is about trying to build a little rapport between the boss and the employee.

And they can't even do that.

And if you look at it that way, then it's maybe not quite so surprising, right?

Well, you know, I started to look into this and the literature on this surprised me.

He goes back to Aristotle, who is not talking about being in line for coffee, but he was talking about the idea about insults.

What is really an insult?

And an insult, he says, which still seems to be accurate.

is not giving people their due regard, and that is not meeting what the norms and expectations are about how you should treat someone, right?

And so if the norm is you should give people a birthday card and you don't do it, it looks bad.

If the norm is you hold doors open for people behind you and you don't do it, you look like a jerk, right?

So it is sort of in context, social context.

And in this case here with birthday cards, it is a kind of social context.

It's not just what goes on in this organization.