Glen Gould shares a story about moving from Massachusetts to Georgia and being told by a Southern man that newcomers must "learn how to be nice." He uses the anecdote to explore themes of manners and how to manage people, with humor aimed at Yankees in the audience.
Well, good afternoon. I couldn't help but hear something in the very beginning that I thought was powerful because I want to share a quick story with you. I remember before my first job at the catering company at 11, I was about 7, and we had just moved to Georgia. From Massachusetts. Anybody here from Massachusetts? You're a damn Yankee too, right? Absolutely, you came and stayed. So I remember coming in, and back then, I mean, I know this will come as a shock to some of you, but children were to be seen, not heard, and preferably not seen either, right? And so I came in from playing, and my mother's on the couch with a very strange man I've never seen before, and he's got this accent that I mean, he was just about as southern as you could get. And he was sitting on the couch talking to my mama, and I was hiding in the kitchen listening. He said, "Now, Mrs. Gould, if you're going to live in the South, you're going to have to learn how to be nice." Now, I didn't know what nice was, but I caught on a little later that that it meant nice, that this man actually believed that because we were from the North, we didn't even know how to be nice, we had to be taught, we had to learn to be nice. How many of you got employees like that, huh? Right now, right? You got some of those? Well, we're going to work on some things
