Does it Pay to Be Nice in Business?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2017
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The path to a profitable business could lie in your ability to be nice. From The Empathy Business, Belinda Parmar OBE tells us that some understanding between leaders and customers, and within teams, has proven to lead to sharp rises in profits.
And some people throw billions in to the business of being compassionate, and can turn huge profits. We speak to the founder of LeapFrog Investments, Andy Kuper, whose business invests in fast-growing companies that bring about serious change to the world and to shareholders. His projects include the world's first insurer to give life cover to HIV positive people across Africa.
(Image: A black and white photo English airline entrepreneur Freddie Laker (1922 - 2006) giving a thumbs up gesture and smiling; plane in background. (Photo by London Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Business Daily from the BBC, and I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:09.0 | Coming up, it's been 10 years to the day since the global financial crisis hit British shores in spectacular fashion. |
| 0:16.6 | Have we learned our lessons since? |
| 0:18.8 | Also, what followed globally prompted a lot of soul-searching about the nature of capitalism. |
| 0:24.2 | Can you be nice and turn big profits? |
| 0:27.3 | We'll hear from those who say yes. |
| 0:29.2 | The way capitalism is currently conceived, as if it's a choice between being Mother Teresa or being some rapacious capitalist, |
| 0:39.8 | is really a poor way to think about the world. |
| 0:42.9 | That's all in Business Daily here from the BBC. |
| 0:52.9 | It's been 10 years to the day since the spectacular and humiliating collapse of the UK's Northern Rock Bank. |
| 0:56.4 | In what was the most iconic moment of the financial crisis here in the UK, queues of people lined the streets as they waited to withdraw their life savings |
| 1:01.5 | from the troubled lender. Here's a reminder. Chaos, desperation, customers queuing to get their money |
| 1:08.2 | out of Northern Rock. I think they're going to run out of money altogether. |
| 1:12.0 | It is just a colossal shock. I don't think I'll ever trust the banking system in this country again. |
| 1:19.9 | Well, the collapse of Northern Rock was also a moment that chimed with the global financial crisis |
| 1:23.7 | about to grip the world economy at the time. So in the 10 years since Northern Rock's |
| 1:28.9 | collapse, have we learned our lessons? It's a question for Chris Wisconsin, who's here in the |
| 1:33.8 | studio with us. He's the chief executive officer of equitable life here in the UK. It's an insurance |
| 1:39.3 | company. He's in the process of winding down after it suffered its own financial scandal back in the early 2000s. |
| 1:45.9 | Great to have you here, Chris. |
| 1:47.8 | You've written that there are many similarities between what happened to equitable life and Northern Rock. |
| 1:53.2 | Explain briefly what they are. |
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