I'm alive, but man -- what an insane last couple of weeks, both personally and professionally.  I'll be blogging about the executive search-related issues after they get resolved, but not now.

On the personal front, my wife gave birth to our new baby daughter, Vivian Marie, on June 18.  Mom and baby were doing fine until Monday, June 25.  Beautiful baby.  Just beautiful.  Our fifth, btw.

Let me say how impressed I am with Northside Hospital in Atlanta.  Locally, the place is known as a "baby mill" -- and ladies, if you get a chance to deliver there, do it.  They have the whole thing down to a nit.  Every tiny corner of Northside's sprawling complex is filled with little signs and reminders for staff members on how to treat patients with the utmost care.

Get Good People

But just because you show a line-level employee a sign doesn't mean that they will treat their customers with real empathy.  That starts with hiring the right people.  Northside has this function dialed in, I assure you.  They anticipated my wife's every need -- and when things got "exceptional" they were able to use their common sense and deeply specialized knowledge of pediatric care to put out the fires.

So we delivered baby Vivian a week ago Monday, and continued to rave about Northside to anyone who would listen.

But this past Monday morning, my wife became very ill and had to be whisked away in an ambulance to Northside's ER.  I won't get into the details, but it was pretty intense.  My father-in-law used to tell me that "When you are healthy, you have a million problems.  When you're not healthy, you have one problem."

My wife (and I) spent Monday and most of Tuesday in Intensive Care.  She's fine, and we're home.  She's on bed rest, and the prognosis is excellent.

But again:  When we were in the ICU, Northside's staff was un-be-liev-able.  I'm talking about real empathy here, which is amazing considering that hospitals are temples of controlled chaos.  There's no point in managing by exception in an environment whose very existence is predicated on round-the-clock crisis.  As a nurse, there's no use pretending to care.  You either do or you don't.  Nobody can fake it all the time.

The Miserable Majority

Two years ago I heard an HR statistic that 66% of all workers hate their jobs.  Hate.  Sixty-six percent.  I don't know if that's true -- but even if the number is only 26%, then one in four people who are paid to serve you throughout your day (grocery clerks, postal workers, cab drivers, etc.) are doing so while transmitting the vibe that "my job sucks and my company sucks and I wish I were someplace else."  Friends, you're never going to win the hearts and minds of your clients like that, I assure you.  Technology and branding are irrelevant if you're hiring "well poisoners."

Good service is devine.

I won't get religious here, but I'll share something religious with you just to make a point:

There's an old Christian sermon about treating everyone around you AS IF they were Christ (or God) Himself.  Get it?  God is occupying the body of some random person that you meet -- just to see how you will treat them.  Sort of like a Mystery Shopper.  The story ends with the Bible verse "As you did it for the least of your brethren, you did it for Me."  There's probably a similar parable in the Qur'an, the Torah, and the sacred scriptures of other faiths.  Pretty universal concept.

I imagine that if you simply used this verse as your company's mission statement, you'd make a ton of money.  I'm not even sure the industry matters.

Certainly, the line-level staff members at Northside embrace this principle.  And now I'm blogging about it.  Tell your friends.  Send them a link to this post.  And for God's sake, hire those rare individuals who are genetically coded to care for others.  In a pinch, they'll make all the difference to your customer experience.

Now have a nice day.  And see to it that everyone around you does, too.  The money will take care of itself.