An occupational hazard of competitive tendering is that you have to learn to live with rejection.  Even the very best companies experience more “No” than “Yes” when tendering for work.  Some of the time the “No” is explained with a detailed spreadsheet, showing how you scored against the client’s criteria; sometimes you receive some more general, qualitiative feedback; sometimes the “No” is deadpan and unexplained.  Most of the time, whatever the level of feedback, the No is delivered electronically with an apologetic explanatory sentence.

Despite the thick skin I have developed to cope with this, I did not react too well this week when, in response to a tender document I’d prepared, I received an email saying “Thank you for your submission, but I regret to inform you that you have been unsuccessful in your application…”  It wasn’t the No that upset me - although, as Samuel Beckett put it, ‘no’s knife in yes’s back’ is never entirely comfortable - but the fact that the email began “Dear Sir/Madame” [sic].

Now I know that research managers are busy people, and selecting the winning proposal from a few dozen tender documents is difficult and risky and time-consuming.  But to send a mass rejection email using blind carbon copy seems to me to display a basic lack of civility.  Every recipient of that email had tried hard to write a proposal to win a piece of work to look at the low carbon economy; every one of them had thought hard about the issues and the methodology and the timetable and the pricing and so on; and every one of them had put in many hours of effort to try to win the contract.

And the individual with the responsibility of telling all these people that they had been unsuccessful couldn’t even be bothered to spend half an hour writing ‘Dear Mr Fell’ or ‘Dear Ms Jones’ or ‘Dear Dr Mudgal’.

Perhaps I am not displaying the right attitude of ‘customer service’ here.  Perhaps, if the customer is always right, they have the right to dismiss me with a casual ‘Sir/Madame’.  Perhaps I should just take it on the chin, get back in my place and work even harder to win the customer’s business next time.

Er, no.  Tackling climate change, devising the low carbon economy and running twenty first century enterprises requires collaboration, partnership, engagement, trust, mutual respect. Yes, money needs to change hands (there’ll always be a client and a provider) but the best work comes from sensible, grown up working relationships in which both sides learn and contribute.  This single, thoughtless act of disregard - ‘Dear Sir/Madame’ - tells me clearly that such a mature relationship with this particular organisation would be impossible.

Maybe I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face (it’s something I’ve been accused of before), but I’d rather have a little less money than work with someone that holds me in such low regard.