Sublime

We didn’t want people who thought servicing others was demeaning—we wanted people with high self-esteem. Not people who said in a crisis, “That’s not my job,” but people who’d say, “How can I help?” People who’d never answer a customer’s question by saying, “I don’t know,” but rather, “I’ll find out.”

Make a personal appeal

When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if e

Management consultant

“We try to position ourselves around jobs that don’t have competitors,” Whitman says. If a company is looking to change its strategy, that work usually goes to a conventional consulting firm. But if they want help in implanting that strategy, getting large numbers of people to do something better or more consistently in order to invariably execute