Spending most of my days in a corporate environment has taught me one thing, the world can be a tough place. We are all turning into cynics and there’s no room for just being nice. We spend our days strategizing and forging alliances instead of actually caring and building friendships.

Every now and then we come across a person who is nice and we readily stack him up as either having an ulterior motive or being naïve. Whatever the category, we can’t seem to accept that person is just nice.

Of course, the first category is the most liked. We are all skeptical about a person’s motive if he is being too nice. We readily assume that there must be a reason and of course there will come a time for payback.

While all of this is probably indicative of how we are being moulded and having to scratch to stay alive, I can’t help but think that we are all losing our values in the process.

The other side to the story, is that “good guy’s finish last”. In an environment where we question a person’s motives for being nice, it’s common to believe that a nice person just doesn’t have what it takes to succeed. Being rude and standoffish seems to be all the rave nowadays. Worse still, that seems to be the only kind of behavior that often works with people. People seem to respond to the guy who is unnecessarily rude, just to avoid conflict. It’s a sad sad day, when you realize that the corporate world has become a battlefield and we are not taking any prisoners.

Still, I strive to find a balance between the two extremes and hold on to my values. The question still remains – when is nice, too nice?

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