Thank you cards: Pick a level

For those of you who have attended a Knocking down Silos event, you understand the power and poignancy of a sincere, specific and unexpected thank you card. Let me frame that gesture under my philosophy of three levels:

Level 1: What's in it for me? Not sending a card. Employees should perform because that is their job. Children should behave because that is their responsibility. Expressing appreciation is superfluous.

Level 2: I help you, you help me. Reciprocity. Sending a thank-you card (e.g. birthdays, job performance, anniversaries, client's purchases etc) with the expectation that something will occur in return. The expectation is that a happy client/family member will appreciate your gesture and reciprocate in the future (e.g. with more business, better behaviour, a job-offer). See http://www.torontosun.com/Money/2007/05/09/4165198-sun.html as an example of sending a card as Level 2 in networking.

Level 2 is how many world governments work. I'll let your goods enter my market tariff-free and in return you allow our access into your market.

Level 3: Generosity without expectation of gratitude. Sending a "just-because" thank you card to acknowledge the works of others and not demanding reciprication.

Below is an example of a wonderful note crafted by "a good guy" to a former mentor. Anonymity has been preserved but the message is intact:

Dear Paul,

No matter where a person is in their life, and no matter how much where they are is about how they "be", there are always an untold number of contributions that other people make to them along the way – especially if one is open to receiving/recognizing/using those contributions.

I could pick any number of instances of contributions you have made to me, but the one that really stands out is the way you nurtured courage for my vision. The two-plus years in 2001-02 we spent trying to crack the Radical Results /Realtime Enterprise work has had a profound impact in my work and vision that I have only just begun to realize.

You taught me about disruption, about driving ideas toward their longer-range effect, about speaking about what will happen instead about what could happen, about profound technology and change cycles, about looking for where the money will land, about knowing that an idea can be right even though you are alone in it. (I think BEA would have done better if they hired you directly in 2002. By now they've missed the crown).

For over a thousand mornings from 2003 to late 2006, I woke up and said: "This can't work, it is too big, too complicated, the vast majority is telling me it can't work, and I have no money to staff this". It sometimes took 10 minutes, sometimes an hour to shake it off, to know that all real change is disruptive and is generated by a person with a vision and a person for whom a big employer would be a detriment. Of course the ontological tools I use to reject defeat are from my work at Landmark, but the intellectual and structural tools to go back to work the same day, every day, and to write, solve and innovate – i.e. to make some actual progress – came from a thousand hours with you.

You have provided a critical piece to Skymeter, without which this would not be happened. And it is happening.

Thank You.
With Gratitude and Love,
Bern