How to succeed in business (without being a jerk)

Newburyport pals offer path to top for the 'overly nice'

Timothy Hiltabiddle (left) and Russ Edelman replay their moment of inspiration. (Mike Dean for The Boston Globe)

NEWBURYPORT - Excess niceness wouldn't seem to be a big problem in the business world today. But two local businessmen say that overly nice guys who won't stand up for themselves and their ideas can be a drag on their own careers and their companies. Even, ahem, to the point of requiring a bailout.

"They don't want to confront a situation and . . . things go further and manifest through the rest of the organization, and ultimately I think you start to run into problems such as we're experiencing now," Russ Edelman said.

"Maybe as a country we've been overly nice in terms of not setting good boundaries around our spending, about confronting reality on a personal and a national level, and you just kind of inch down this road and before you know it you're stuck in this huge morass," said Timothy Hiltabiddle.

Now the two Newburyport men have penned a book, "Nice Guys Can Get the Corner Office," written with University of Massachusetts at Amherst management professor Charles Manz. It's intended to help overly nice guys - of either gender - stick up for themselves and stop dodging the confrontations that are a natural part of the work day.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who have found it difficult to confront greedy bosses, domineering managers, and lazy co-workers.

"We found that 61 percent of the people we surveyed said that they suffer from being too nice," said Hiltabiddle. "So it's this hidden silent majority that is struggling and not being as effective and productive and successful as they could be, because they weaken themselves by not confronting people and situations, by not speaking up, by not owning their choices, by not being able to say no, by not holding people accountable for results. It's this hidden plague . . . that has a huge, dramatic effect."

Edelman, the CEO of Burlington-based Corridor Consulting Inc., and Hiltabiddle, chief creative officer of Newburyport's Milestone Marketing & Design, met years ago when Edelman tried to hire Hiltabiddle's firm for a job. Edelman broached the Nice Guys topic, and one night over a couple of beers at Not Your Average Joe's in Newburyport the two friends penned their Nice Guy Bill of Rights on a stack of napkins.

Among other things, they say nice guys have the alienable right to: Speak up so their opinions can be heard; set boundaries and require others to respect them; confront problems directly; refuse to settle for less than they need. Of course, these "rights" are mostly about the nice guys themselves and how they act.

"Nice guys have to take a hard look at what kind of tools they can use," Hiltabiddle said. "You can't just say 'toughen up.' That doesn't work. They have to have an awareness, 'Here I go again,' so they can shift their behavior and choose differently."

Edelman met Jack and Suzy Welch at one of their book-signings and told them the Nice Guys theory; Suzy sent him to Harvard Business Review with a glowing recommendation. The case study he and Hiltabiddle wrote became one of the magazine's most popular in 2006, Edelman said. Now they've formed Nice Guy Strategies LLC with Manz, built an instructive website (www.niceguystrategies.com), and speak at events to help Nice Guys assert themselves.

Their book is subtitled "Eight Strategies for Winning in Business Without Being a Jerk," and it expands on the Nice Guy Bill of Rights with real-world examples and strategies for action for overly nice employees, as well as employers who want to encourage their nice guys to speak up.

"You want the best idea to come to the surface, not the loudest one," said Hiltabiddle.

A key component of the book is interviews with CEOs of companies like Dunkin' Brands and Southwest Airlines on the problems facing nice guys and the way to overcome them.

"I came into it because they figured my brother and I are the 'Life is good' guys and we must be nice all the time," said Life is good cofounder and "chief executive optimist" Bert Jacobs. "But from my perspective, to be nice is a lot less meaningful than to be good, and is also a lot less important or effective in business.

" 'Nice' doesn't really lead to some end result necessarily," Jacobs said. "It almost determines that if you're going to be nice all the time you're not going to be firm and maybe you're going to be afraid to give bad information, which is more valuable than good information.

"I said if I thought being nice was as valuable as being good, we would have named the company Life is nice," Jacobs added with a chuckle.

The Nice Guys team will talk and sign books at Barnes & Noble in Burlington, across from Burlington Mall, at 6 p.m. Nov. 20.