The other day I was lucky enough to sit for an hour with the Acumen Fund Fellows for a talk on networking given by the wonderful, inimitable Sunny Bates.  Sunny is a natural connector, full of joy and exuberance, brimming with energy.

Would that an afternoon with Sunny were mandatory for every MBA student – who inevitably has been misguided into thinking that “networking” is about making a beeline to the most “important” people in the room (defined how?), giving them your pitch and collecting their business card.

Sunny talks about building and cultivating your personal network – the one asset you bring with you everywhere you go – and constantly feeding that network through your own generous acts.  Your network strengthens because you feed it – by making connections between two people who would enjoy meeting each other, starting a business together, or just sharing ideas; by helping others accomplish their goals.

This kind of active nurturing is a mindset shift that takes the instrumentalism out of each interaction while at the same time leaving space for asking for things that YOU that you would like others to help you achieve, the more specific the better.

To do this well you have to get good at making the right ask in the right time and the right way – which is about the timing and pacing of what you ask for as well as the medium.

For example, in the course of any healthy personal/professional relationship you might ask someone to: attend a party, serve as a judge on a panel, give a keynote address, fund your startup, give job advice to your niece, serve on your board, help you on a thorny strategic question, be a mentor.

Since these many threads are interwoven, and since there are asks flying in both directions as relationships deepen, my advice is that you make big asks in big ways, small ones in small ways.

Small asks over email: come to this party, serve as a judge, talk to a friend, speak at a conference

Medium asks over the phone: spend a day brainstorming with me and a group of peers, quick advice on something I’m stuck on, “do you know anybody who…”

Big asks in person: we’re stuck on this strategic question, help fund this idea, serve on my board.

Obvious when you write it out, but lately I’ve seen people trip up by asking for a meeting that’s billed as a broad, strategic conversation, and then spending the precious hour they have been given asking for something much too small. The person will say yes to this small ask, but you won’t get an hour or an afternoon from them the next time you ask.

[NOTE: more installments from my trip to Padrauna, India, coming soon.  If you missed it, check out Part 1 and Part 2 here]

I work at a global organization – my office is in New York and we have offices in India, Pakistan and Kenya.  Conference calls across time zones are an inevitability.  And with 9 hour time differences, someone (usually not someone in New York) is on the phone at an inconvenient time in an inconvenient place, trying to makes sense of and keep up with a bunch of voices half a world away.

The past 10 days I’ve been in India and have been on the other end of the line.  Not surprisingly, things feel pretty different.  For the best of these calls I was on a cellphone in a hotel lobby.  For the others I was on some combination of streetcorners, taxis, elevators and hotel rooms, sometime between 5:00 and 8:00pm.

Some thoughts on how to make things work better for people on the other end of the line:

• The standard should be, for each topic, one person giving an update and a maximum of two comments/clarifying questions.  Not because people don’t have more to say or ask, but because this will enforce a level of discipline and make people set a higher bar on the things they say.
• If you’re going around, asking everyone on the call to give an update, start with the people on the other end of the line, not the people in the room
• Quick side conversations “in the room” are just impossible to follow for everyone else.  Not sure what to do here since jokes, laughs and stories are what make the world go ’round, but it’s tough when you can’t tell what’s going on.
• Almost never ask a question just because you’re curious (versus you need to know).  When you’re sitting around a conference table with colleagues that you like, “curious” is fun and relaxing.  When you’re on the street, in a taxi, or just sitting there trying to get to the end of your day, a curious question often feels somewhere between unnecessary and disrespectful.
• Experiment with having someone who’s not “in the room” lead the call.  It might not work, but at least you’ll see how the pacing and tone differ.
• Be very active about “parking” questions and set a standard that this is par for the course…consider having someone be in charge of cutting off conversations

I wish the conference call services would add a feature allowing people on the line to vote “speed up” or “slow down.”  Imagine if the average sentiment were projected on the wall “in the room.”  Sure it would be distracting, but do that a couple of times and things will change forever.

This may all sound a little too grumpy, but things just feel different on the other end of the line.

How do you decide how many fundraisers you need at your nonprofit?  Do you need 5 or 6 or 15?  What about 100?

We know how much a fundraiser costs – say $100,000 including overhead and management time and whatever rounding we need to do to keep the math simple.

Knowing that, it seems like you have two options:

1. Keep hiring people until the next person you hire can only raise $99,999
2. Keep your fundraising team at some “reasonable” proportion to everything else you do

Either approach has its merits.  But more interesting to me is that I’ve never heard anyone approach this question in this way.

Instead, we tend to work backwards and say: “here’s how much we need to raise this year, let’s throw our team at this problem… ” and then if you come up short you tinker with the team or the approach in one way or another.

Two quick conclusions:

1. If you are a fundraiser (nonprofit Board Member, Exec Director, CEO) why exactly do you not hire that next person?  Do you not actually believe you can bring in an additional person who can raise more than they cost?    Because to raise $200,000, that person would have to raise $1,000 a day, and I’m pretty convinced that you can hire someone to do that.
2. Want job security in the nonprofit sector?  What if you could walk up to a Board Member or an Executive Director and say, “I’ve got some big ideas and I’d like to come work with you to make them happen.  I can raise $1 million in the first year to for what I plan to do.”  You’ve just written your own ticket, and it has nothing to do with anything that’s on your resume.

I’ve found myself asking people this question more often lately.

“How can I help?” acknowledges that every interaction (a sales call, an introductory lunch, a brainstorm, a request for an informational interview) involves (at least) two people who could create something of value for each other.  It’s not a one-way street, ever.

“How can I help?” recognizes that, as a boss, my job is to empower others and remove barriers; that I work for me team and not the other way around.

“How can I help?” is often the best thing to say when someone is frustrated or angry or unhappy with the service they received or the response they heard.   (and it’s about a million times better than “let me explain.”)

And “How can I help?” is about leading with generosity.

I only wish I had started asking it sooner.

My generosity experiment from last December began on the NYC subway.  A homeless man asked passengers for money, I thought about giving, but then I rationalized and stalled just long enough to let myself off the hook.  When I walked out of the train I knew I had done the wrong thing.

People who run ultramarathons –100 mile runs – say that in order to finish, they have to decide and commit before the race how they’re going to react to duress.  If they don’t have a plan, they will make decisions in the moment, based on fear or pain, that will keep them from finishing.  There’s power in the decision you make beforehand to act a certain way in a situation you’ve deemed important (and stressful).

Last week I was on that same NYC subway train when another homeless man asked the riders for money.  He had, he said, just been let out of the hospital – he had discharge papers and unfilled prescriptions in his hand – and was asking for money to fill the prescriptions.  His swollen legs were enough to show his diabetes.  I stood up between stations and – impulsively, but armed with my prior decision – gave him $20.  A few others in the car then stood up and gave him a few dollars each.

Reading about giving $20 to a guy on the subway doesn’t seem like much.  Handing someone a $20 bill in that situation – where social norms say that you maybe give a dollar – felt like a big deal.

How do I go about changing what I do – which, over time, leads to the evolution who I am?  What works for me is making a decision to make a change and then starting to act differently – sometimes in small, safer ways before making the big leap.

$20 is very little money, but it’s way outside the norm for that particular situation.  So I got an incredible deal.  I got to experience the feeling of being absurdly generous when compared to what the world expected of me (and I expected of myself) at that exact moment.

It felt great.  It was exhilarating.  And once I had given away the $20, it was no longer mine.  And that was just fine.

Lots of people have told me over the last two months that they thought a lot about the generosity experiment.  For those of you who liked the idea, even if (maybe especially if) you don’t have a lot of money to give away, why not invest $20 to see how it feels?

Why not give a $20 tip on your next cup of coffee, or to a person who asks for money on the street, or to the person you buy the paper from or the full service gas station attendant or to a street vendor where you love to buy lunch?

Why not give $20, once, in a situation where it’s an unexpected thing to do?  Why not break the norm and see what happens and see how it feels?

I promise, you’re the one getting the great deal.

(comments welcome on how it felt)

P.S. If you do any sort of fundraising, you really shouldn’t take a pass on this.  I promise it’s a worthwhile investment in you and your ability to do what you do better.

I’m at my first TED conference, just arrived yesterday, and I’m trying to sort out how to blog while here.  I’m not too interested in writing “here’s what just happened” posts for a number of reasons (not least of which is that others can do a fine job of this), and given the length of the days and the number of great ideas and people here, I doubt I’ll be able to synthesize enough in real time to come up with traditional posts.

So my thought of the day, which I’ll either keep up for the week or not, is to share what I’m coming across that seems interesting, surprising, and delightful.  (Needless to say, I’m being absurdly picky with my list)

• I had a fun conversation with Cindy Gallop who just launched ifwerantheworld.com today.  Think Twitter meets the alter-ego of your beer-guzzling Facebook profile meets distributed volunteering meets fancy, elegant user interface.  Worth checking out.
• From the conversation I had with David Hornik I can tell that his VentureBlog is worth reading
• I’m dying to figure out if there’s a way to take online gaming platforms like Zynga and use them to get people obsessed about doing good things for the world
• If you’re interested in addressing the problem of small firearms (especially AK-47s) in sub-Saharan Africa, you might want to check out foundry47.org

Also I’ll be Tweeting more than I normally do, so if you’re interested follow me on Twitter, and if you’re interested in keeping up with TED you’ll probably enjoy searching for the #TED hash on Twitter search.

It almost goes without saying that airlines have taken customer service to new lows.  Even with this in mind, American Airlines surprised me at 6am Monday morning.

The boarding call began: “We would like all First Class customers to board at this time.”

And then, “Business Class customers are welcome to board.”

And then, “AAdvantage Executive Platinum customers can now board.”

And on down the line: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Group 1, Group 2, Group 3….after eight groups had been called, there I was standing together with about five other people who were left, and the gate agent may as well have said, “All right, I guess you all can get on the plane now too.”

It is easy to get lured into the concentric circles of customer segmentation and differentiated service, but it only works if the system is invisible to the customer.

Of course on some level I know and expect that there are people who get red carpet treatment, but that’s different than breaking the basic bargain that says: if you are our customer, we are going to treat you with respect and try to earn your business again.