A new crop of business advice books for women is highlighting the fact that nice people can actually do better in business than traditionally aggressive ones.
In particular, the concept that women in positions of power must act like men is being questioned and replaced with the idea that female leadership can be both strong and feminine.
The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval is based on their experience using a "nice" approach to running their advertising agency, the Kaplan Thaler Group.
"We completely disagree with the conventional wisdom that 'nice guys finish last' and 'no good deed goes unpunished.' Our culture has helped to propagate the myth of social Darwinism—of the survival of the fittest—that the cutthroat 'me vs. you philosophy' wins the day," say Thaler and Koval (Andrea Sachs, "Nice Girls Get Even," Time, Nov. 6, 2006).
The world's oldest, most effective self-help book has long advocated niceness, or as is commonly stated, "doing to others what you would have them do to you" (a paraphrase of Matthew 7:12). God invented nice, and when it is applied as He instructs, it can work wonders in business and life.
