Simon and schuster

 "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the 
other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” 
 
That is so simple, so obvious, that anyone ought to see the truth of it at a glance; yet 90 percent of the 
people on this earth ignore it 90 percent of the time. 
An example? Look at the letters that come across your desk tomorrow morning, and you will find that 
most of them violate this important canon of common sense. Take this one, a letter written by the head of the 
radio department of an advertising agency with offices scattered across the continent. This letter was sent to the 
managers of local radio stations throughout the country (I have set down, in brackets, my reactions to each 
paragraph). 
Mr. John Blank, 
Blankville, 
Indiana 
Dear Mr. Blank, 
 
The ------ company desires to retain its position in advertising agency leadership in the radio field. 
 
[Who cares what your company desires? I am worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the 
mortgage on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks, the stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed the 
eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn’t invited to the Jones’s dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high blood 
pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning worried, 
open my mail and here is some little whippersnapper off in New York yapping about what his company wants. 
Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression his letter makes, he would get out of the advertising business 
and start manufacturing sheep dip.] 
 
26 

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This agency’s national advertising accounts were the bulwark of the network. Our subsequent 
clearances of station time have kept us at the top of agencies year after year. 
 
[You are big and rich and right at the top, are you? So what? I don’t give two whoops in Hades if you are as big 
as General Motors and General Electric and the General Staff of the U.S. Army all combined. If you had as 
much sense as a half-witted hummingbird, you would realize that I am interested in how big I am, not how big 
you are. All this talk about your enormous success makes me feel small and unimportant.] 
We 
desire to service our accounts with the last word on radio station information. 
 
[You desire! You desire. You unmitigated ass. I’m not interested in what you desire or what the President of the 
United States desires. Let me tell you once and for all that I am interested in what I desire, and you haven’t said 
a word about that yet in this absurd letter of yours.] 
Will you, therefore, put the ---------- company on your preferred list for weekly station information 
every single detail that will be useful to an agency in intelligently booking time. 
 
[Preferred list! You have your nerve! You make me feel insignificant by your big talk about your company and 
then you ask me to put you on a ‘preferred’ list, and you don’t even say ‘please’ when you ask it.] 
A 
prompt acknowledgment of this letter, giving us your latest ‘doings’, will be mutually helpful. 
 
[You fool! You mail me a cheap form letter—a letter scattered far and wide like the autumn leaves—and you 
have the gall to ask me, when I am worried about the mortgage and the hollyhocks and my blood pressure, to sit 
down and dictate a personal note acknowledging your form letter, and you ask me to do it ‘promptly’. What do 
you mean, ‘promptly’? Don’t you know I am just as busy as you are—or, at least, I like to think I am. And while 
we are on the subject, who gave you the lordly right to order me around? You say it will be ‘mutually helpful’. 
At last, at last, you have begun to see my viewpoint. But you are vague about how it will be to my advantage.] 
Very truly yours, 
John Doe 
Manager Radio Department