Never Eat Alone Read online

  Some people become power brokers through sheer intimidation and force of will; others, generally with far better results, learn to become indispensable to the people around them.

  I still remember the advice that made me aware of these two routes to power. Greg Seal pulled me into his office one day not long after I had been hired at Deloitte, sat me down, and said, "Stop driving yourself—and everyone else—crazy thinking about how to make yourself successful. Start thinking about how you're going to make everyone around you successful."

  From the moment I had arrived at Deloitte, I was a man on a mission. I wanted to work more hours, meet more partners, be on the biggest projects solving the biggest problems—and I wanted to do it all now, because I was desperate to make a name for myself. In the wake of my ambition, a whole lot of people didn't like me. And at Deloitte, as in all organizations, it isn't easy getting things done when your peers dislike you.

  That you'd anger and abuse some people on your way to the top used to be accepted practice. Michael Korda's 1975 book on the secrets to becoming a corporate chieftain, Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, advised that "master players... attempt to channel as much information as they can into their own hands, then withhold it from as many people as possible." But if thirty years ago power was attained through a monopoly of information (and a whole lot of angry people), today the system is more akin to social arbitrage: a constant and open exchange of favors and intelligence, as Greg had so wisely advised.

  How does this work? Think of it as a game. When someone mentions a problem, try to think of solutions. The solutions come from my experience and knowledge, and my tool kit of friends and associates. For example, if I'm in a conversation and the other person mentions they're looking to buy a house in Los Angeles, the first thing I think is "How can my network help?" And there's no time to linger. Mid-conversation, I'll pull out my cell phone and locate someone who can help my companion buy a home. As I'm dialing, I might say something like, "You need to meet this Realtor I know named Betty. No one knows the Los Angeles area better. Here's her phone number, but hold on—" Now Betty is on the line. "Hi, Betty, it's so nice to hear your voice. It has been too long. Listen, I'm standing here with a friend who is in need of your wisdom. I just gave him your number and wanted to tell you personally he'd be calling." The connection is made, the work is done, and whatever happens next, both parties are pleased by my efforts on their behalf.

  This is social arbitrage at work. And the first key is, don't wait to be asked. Just do it.

  Let me give you another example, an interaction I had with Hank Bernbaum, the CEO of High Sierra, a small bag manufacturer out of Chicago. Hank had seen a short profile on me and my marketing expertise in the magazine Fast Company. He called me out of the blue and said, "The article on you was excellent."

  Already, he had my attention.

  "We're a tiny company," he said, "and we're terrible at marketing. We've got the best duffels and bags in America, but no one knows it. Our revenue and market size is a quarter of what it should be. Can you help?"

  He added, "By the way, we don't have a lot of money to burn." I usually love taking these calls when time allows, because I'm able to play confidante, counselor, or even concierge, for so many different people. I'm constantly introducing two people from different parts of my life who might benefit from knowing each other. It's a sort of ongoing puzzle, matching up the right people and the right opportunities. Once you, too, start to see the world this way, it opens up exciting opportunities. It's both rewarding and fun. Hank needed some consulting help and his bags needed exposure. I called Peter, a consultant who had worked with me at Starwood Hotels, a terrific marketing guy and someone who loved the outdoors. A perfect fit. Then I called another friend who is head of marketing at Reebok. Their bags never sold as well as their other products, and I thought the two might benefit from sharing insights and experiences. I even "cloned" a meeting I had with a marketing executive at Reebok, and brought Hank along to make face-to-face introductions.

  Then I asked Hank if he'd ever had any publicity. He hadn't. I sent a couple of Hank's totes to Alan Webber, the editor of Fast Company. A few months later, the magazine did a piece on High Sierra products after Alan had his writers evaluate a particularly innovative travel bag we had sent.

  Hank was ecstatic. But then I added one more thing: "Hank, the calls I'm making on your behalf, you need to be doing this for yourself. Do you belong to the Executive Club in Chicago?"

  "I've been thinking about it," he said. "Why?"

  "You've got to stop thinking of yourself and your company as an island. You need to meet people. There are a lot of CEOs and smart people in the Executive Club who could've done what I'm doing for you, only a few years ago. You need to be making these connections."

  Soon after, Hank started networking locally with other executives. Hank's products are superb; what he needed was the network. However, it's not just he and I who have prospered. My former colleague, Peter, the outdoorsy marketer from Starwood, used the experience to build the confidence he needed to ultimately go out on his own. He now has a thriving consulting firm in New York. The CMO at Reebok? He was grateful for an introduction that might help him boost his bag business. What started with one man and a problem, ended with several people and many solutions.

  My point? Real power comes from being indispensable. Indispensability comes from being a switchboard, parceling out as much information, contacts, and goodwill to as many people—in as many different worlds—as possible

  It's a sort of career karma. How much you give to the people you come into contact with determines how much you'll receive in return. In other words, if you want to make friends and get things done, you have to put yourself out to do things for other people—things that require time, energy, and consideration.

  Successfully connecting with others is never about simply getting what you want. It's about getting what you want and making sure that people who are important to you get what they want first. Often, that means fixing up people who would otherwise never have an opportunity to meet.

  The best sort of connecting occurs when you can bring together two people from entirely different worlds. The strength of your network derives as much from the diversity of your relationships as it does from their quality or quantity.

  Most of us know the people within our own professional and social group, and little more. Through other connectors, and on your own, I would urge you to make a point of knowing as many people from as many different professions and social groups as possible. The ability to bridge different worlds, and even different people within the same profession, is a key attribute in managers who are paid better and promoted faster, according to an influential study conducted by Ron Burt, a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

  "People who have contacts in separate groups have a competitive advantage because we live in a system of bureaucracies, and bureaucracies create walls," says Burt. "Individual managers with entrepreneurial networks move information faster, are highly mobile relative to bureaucracy, and create solutions better adapted to the needs of the organization."

  His research goes a long way toward answering that persistently nagging question: Is it what you know or who you know that leads to success? For Burt, it's both. Who you know determines how effectively you can apply what you know. Getting things done, and climbing the walls of your company, require having the right relationships.

  I've always been well aware of this idea. At Deloitte, I got to know the CMOs of our largest competition. At Starwood, I quickly became familiar with the industry influencers. When I became CEO of YaYa, I set out to meet the leadership in the media and computer games industry. What I didn't realize was that all along I was setting the groundwork for the success of FerrazziGreenlight at the same time. No matter what the job, if I was going to push my company's product into an important brand position among those who mattered, I needed to be able to converse with the p
layers inside and outside the industry who could help me make that happen. One of the ways I achieved this was by helping them get to know one another—which they, too, knew was beneficial for their business. I was surprised, for instance, that the heads of marketing for the big consulting firms didn't know one another.

  Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "But I don't know any executives or key people in my industry! And why would they want to get to know me anyway?" Not a problem. Performing social arbitrage when your financial and relational resources are thin is actually not too big a hurdle. The solution is knowledge, one of the most valuable currencies in social arbitrage. Knowledge is free—it can be found in books, in articles, on the Internet, pretty much everywhere, and it's precious to everyone.

  The ability to distribute knowledge in a network is a fairly easy skill to learn. So easy, in fact, you should get started today. Identify some of the leading thinkers and writers in your industry. Do these figures have any new books on the market? Look at what's hot on the nonfiction New York Times bestseller list. Or for business bestsellers, check out the Wall Street Journal's list in the Personal Journal section on Friday. Buy the book, read it, and take some notes summarizing the Big Idea, a few of its interesting studies or anecdotes, and why it's relevant to the people you're thinking about passing your knowledge on to. You've just created your own Big Idea of the Month Cliffs Notes (or whatever snazzy title you choose). Now pick a few people, some whom you know well and some you don't, and e-mail them your work. All you have to say is "Here are some cool ideas I think you'd like to be on top of."

  Presto! You're now a knowledge broker. After you get the swing of it, you might want to send out a monthly Big Idea Cliffs Notes e-mail. Turn it into a newsletter. If one month you don't have the time, you could forward some particularly helpful article you read. Or, if the book is particularly interesting and you really want to make an impression, send the book itself.

  It's easy enough to make knowledge brokering a habit. Let's say, for instance, someone mentions over lunch or in the minutes before the start of a meeting that they are having a hard time dealing with their teenage son or daughter. You should hear "problem." As a practitioner of social arbitrage, you think "need to find a solution." If you don't have any personal advice, the solution will come from asking yourself, "How can my network of friends and contacts help? Which one of my friends has teenagers?" It probably won't take long before you come up with someone you know, maybe your own parents, who handled their own teenage kids in a constructive manner. Get on the phone and ask them if they have any advice, or if they used any books or articles to help them through the process. Now pass it on.

  Or let's say you're a real estate agent but you aspire to be a clothing designer. I don't know too much about clothes, but as with just about any subject, I'm sure others do (one of those people has almost certainly written a book about it). Do a search on Amazon.com, and find something that seems helpful to someone looking to become a clothing designer. Then send the aspiring clothing designer a link or even the book itself, or broker a direct conversation—that would be real value.

  Yes, this kind of reaching out takes time and a certain thoughtfulness. But that is exactly why it's so appreciated. Facilitating all those connections, all that knowledge, and ultimately all that happiness is what being a truly modern-day "power broker" is all about.

  To paraphrase Dale Carnegie: You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people's success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.

  CONNECTORS' HALL OF FAME PROFILE V e r n o n J o r d a n

  "Make yourself indispensable to others."

  Vernon Jordan, dealmaker extraordinaire, former Clinton advisor, and Washington super-lawyer, currently sits on ten corporate boards, including American Express, Dow Jones, Revlon, and Xerox. He's the Senior M a n a g i n g Director for Lazard, an international investment bank, and also a high-ranked senior counsel at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akin Gump. Fortune ranked him ninth on its list of the most powerful black executives.

  According to Time magazine, Jordan earns a seven-figure income from a " l a w practice that requires him to file no brief and visit no courtroom, because his billable hours tend to be logged in posh restaurants, on cellular phones . . . making a deft introduction here, nudging a legislative position there, ironing out an indelicate situation before it makes the papers." He doesn't just talk a good game. He makes things happen.

  It's hard enough, in this life, to hold down just one job in a highpowered organization. But Jordan has made himself so valuable—so coveted—to so many employers that he actually works for several at once—and none of them seem to mind his vocational polygamy.

  Along the way, Jordan has become one of Washington's most networked individuals, a man w h o seems to have friends and influence in every quarter and province. He's connected Lou Gerstner with IBM. He approached Colin Powell about replacing Warren Christopher as Secretary of State. He helped James Wolfensohn become President of the World Bank.

  How has he done it?

  Jordan has used social arbitrage to make himself indispensable—he is, in every sense of the w o r d , a modern-day power broker. But he wasn't always at the vortex of everything that happens in Washington. He didn't even live full-time in Washington until Akin Gump hired him in 1 9 8 2 . By the time he arrived there, he'd done enough in his career—having built up several decades of contacts made and favors done—to know that, before long, he'd become a man of influence in his new town. Akin Gump knew it too, which is one reason they hired him: "I knew he would fit into the Washington legal community and come to be a dominant figure in it," said Robert Strauss, a senior partner. "This is a town built on the use of power and on relationships, and Vernon is about as good a people person as I know."

  Jordan became a household name to all Americans in the 1 990s because of his relationship with Bill Clinton. But long before then, Jordan was well known to the black community.

  In the ' 6 0 s , Jordan was an active civil rights lawyer in Atlanta. Later, he became a field secretary for the NAACP, fighting for school integration and registering black Georgians to vote. In

  1 9 6 4 , Jordan left the NAACP to head the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project (VEP). His role was to find volunteers w h o could organize voter drives, and to raise money for the project. Raising money compelled Jordan to travel throughout the South, pitching wealthy foundations on w h y they should grant money to the VEP. It was this position that allowed Jordan to gain respect as a man w h o could fight for the cause from within the establishment. His Rolodex began to expand as he forged connections with both the heads of foundations and the VEP supervisors in Washington, D.C.

  Jordan first ingratiated himself to the Fortune 5 0 0 community w h e n , in 1 9 6 6 , he was invited to President Johnson's White House conference on civil rights, which was attended by hundreds of CEOs. For the remainder of the '60s and ' 7 0 s , he traveled as a plugged-in member of both corporate and civil rights circles. His involvement in one circle made him all the more valuable to the other. Favors done and friends made in one circle could be leveraged to do favors and make friends in the other.

  Jordan's full-time jobs allowed him to keep one foot in each w o r l d . In 1 9 7 0 , he became executive director of the United Negro College Fund. In 1 9 7 2 , he became president of the National Urban League, a pro-business civil rights organization—a job he held for ten years. Both posts allowed Jordan to gracefully expand his personal network, to the point where, in 1 9 8 2 , Akin Gump paid him quite a hefty price for his services. "Vernon did not come c h e a p , " said Strauss. "But I told him: 'We'll carry you for a few years until you figure out what it's all about here, then you will carry us for a long time after that.'"

  Jordan's career is a wonderful example of the opportunity that comes from bringing different people together from different worlds and different organizations to do good thin
gs. When Jordan became a public figure during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, he was challenged on his claim that it was normal for him to help a virtual stranger like Monica Lewinsky find a job. His network once again came to his aid. Washington attorney Leslie Thornton detailed in the Wall Street Journal how Jordan had gone out of his way to help her and others. She revealed what many young black and white professionals had long known privately: Jordan had been opening doors for people of all colors and creeds for decades.

  20. Pinging—All the Time

  If 80 percent of success is, as Woody Allen once said, just showing up, then 80 percent of building and maintaining relationships is just staying in touch.

  I call it "pinging." It's a quick, casual greeting, and it can be done in any number of creative ways. Once you develop your own style, you'll find it easier to stay in touch with more people than you ever dreamed of in less time than you ever imagined.

  Yes, there's grunt work involved. Pinging takes effort. That's the tough part. You have to keep pinging and pinging and pinging and never stop. You have to feed the fire of your network or it will wither or die.

  How many times have you asked yourself, "What's his face . . . Ya know, that guy . . . " Or "I know her, I just can't remember her name . . ." We all face that situation all too often, to my mind. Every time I hear those statements uttered, I sense a network or community of contacts withering.

  These days we're overwhelmed with so much information that our minds can prioritize only the most recent data. What does it take to break through the white noise of information overload? Becoming front and center in someone's mental Rolodex is contingent on one invaluable little concept: repetition.

  • People you're contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication—by, say, an e-mail, a phone call, and a face-to-face encounter—before there is substantive recognition.