TWO DIFFERENT women, both of them up to their eyes in different sorts of trouble, last week put forward the same excuse to explain lapses in their behaviour.

Each said she was suffering from a new debilitating condition – a compulsion to please people.

Danielle Chiesi, the hedge fund analyst who has admitted to passing on inside information to Raj Rajaratnam and others, got her lawyers to tell the court she was “motivated by an unhealthy and abnormal desire to please”.

Her doctor said she had borderline personality disorder, on the strength of which the judge is being asked to limit the time she spends in jail.

A couple of days earlier, Sarah Ferguson offered a similar excuse when baring her soul to Oprah Winfrey.

The reason she fell for a sting by a News of the Worldjournalist, who offered £500,000 in return for an introduction to her ex, Prince Andrew, was that "my people-pleasing addiction kept me going on".

In the case of Ms Chiesi, the abnormal urge to please took the form of having a near 20-year “toxic” affair with Mark Kurland, her boss at Bear Stearns, who, according to the court submission, treated her as a “virtual servant”.

She passed him insider information, not to make a profit herself, but simply to please him.

In Fergie’s case, it’s harder to see whom she was trying to please and why.

In falling for the sting she was hardly pleasing the royal family, although I suppose she did indirectly cause pleasure to millions of newspaper readers who enjoy little more than reading about the latest scrape that Fergie has got herself into.

To get a better understanding of this compulsive condition, I’ve just consulted the American AllPsych index of psychiatric disorders, but have failed to find it anywhere on the compendious list.

However, the internet bristles with experts talking up the seriousness of such an addiction. The “disease to please” is apparently a dangerous condition stemming from low self-esteem that can lead to terrible suffering and even suicide.

Yet I can think of another condition that worries me even more than the please disease. It is the displease disease.

Most criminals surely suffer from an unhealthy and abnormal desire to cause displeasure in their victims.

So much so that one wonders why lawyers and doctors haven’t got wise to this in trying to get their sentences reduced, too.

This condition does not merely affect felons. It is also common among journalists and writers who appear addicted to antagonising others.

VS Naipaul, who most recently said that no female writer was equal to him, is surely a classic sufferer.

The condition is even more common among teenagers, almost all of whom are dangerously addicted to displeasing their parents.

The result is tragic, measured out in slammed doors, binge- drinking sessions and underage pregnancies.

By comparison, an addiction to pleasing strikes me as relatively benign.

My own worst lapses of behaviour tend to occur, not when I’m intent on pleasing other people but when I’m hell-bent on pleasing myself.

Far from being sinister, pleasing people is the very foundation of civilisation – and of capitalism.

Office life would not function unless we were all sufferers from the please disease.

In fact, in the hyper- competitive, modern corporate world, pleasing is more in fashion than ever.

Companies used to aim to satisfy their customers, now they have to delight them. Managers have to please shareholders.

Workers have to please bosses. Only through pleasing does success come.

However, I can see that pleasing can sometimes get out of hand, as Fergie and Ms Chiesi have both found. The good news, though, is that there are three simple rules to safe pleasing.

First, you need to please the right person. You can’t please all the people all of the time, so it’s important to identify who needs pleasing the most.

For example, at work, it’s almost always a good idea to please people above you in the pecking order.

It's almost never a good idea to please people who are News of the Worldjournalists in disguise.

Second, before you start pleasing, it’s worth checking if the person is a crook. If so, it is best not to please them.

Third, when trying to please your boss, it is important to do it in ways that are (a) legal and (b) involve clothes being kept on at all times.

People who fail to abide by rules one to three are surely not suffering from extreme pleasing disease but from rotten-judgment disease, which, although equally terrible in its effect, may not be something that a judge is going to be swayed by. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)