This is one of a set of thank-you cards we designed for 3000 managers at VMware; the Dell-owned, cloud computing and platform virtualization software business, to help recognize jobs well done. It’s deliberately old school, we even supplied them with envelopes.
A nice alternative to the ubiquitous email, or what is more ubiquitous: a big nothing. The idea here is that gratitude is a muscle, saying thank you and showing appreciation is actually a learned behavior. And, as our friend BJ Fogg, over at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab taught us, the easier you make behaviors, the more likely they are to actually happen. So, if you are in an organization that values gratitude and appreciation, this is a cool way to do it.
And that’s the great thing about genuine social gestures. They’ve been so ingrained into our DNA for so many millions of years, we’ve gotten very good at spotting the difference between the real ones and fake ones. Handwritten and hand delivered is the real deal.
And in a world where everybody and their uncle is doing the “ubiquitous” stuff, this presents a great opportunity to make a good impression.
