Tag: connection

Walking by the candy stand

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I never noticed the giant candy stand in the subway station, right past the turnstile, that I’ve walked past twice a day nearly every day for the past five years.  Never noticed that I could grab a drink or a candy bar or a magazine, even though I’ve had more than 2,000 chances to do just that.  The place didn’t register because I’m always rushing by it either on my way to or from work.  My head’s down, there’s a crowd, I’m focused on other things.

Generosity Day (sign up here) is a little more than a month away, and I’m reminded of the original moment that kicked this whole thing off for me – the homeless person I walked by with my head down.  The guy I didn’t notice because I was busy doing other things.

A lot of the online conversation about my generosity talk on TED focused on giving to the homeless, as in “does it make sense to give to the homeless?”  That’s really not the point.

Rather, the point is that it’s high time we pick up our heads or, better yet, get out of our heads and really see the world around us.  The point is that there are other human beings around us every day who are craving our acknowledgment, our support, our attention, our generosity – just as we crave it from them – yet we’ll never notice them if we let ourselves keep on walking by.

To me the first step in leading a generous life is actually stopping to notice the full world around us – and notice it in an open way, a non-judgmental way, a way that’s not governed by fear or by separation.

Heck, if I can walk by a guy selling Twix bars (I LOVE Twix bars!!) every day for five years, then I’m pretty sure that I need to let go of the tunnel vision.

The simple act of stopping and noticing is how we begin.

Excited for 2012

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Happy New Year.  I’m looking forward to 2012.  2011 was many things – exciting, turbulent, at times overwhelming – and I feel like we all need a little dust-settling as we roll up our sleeves and head into this new year.  It feels like it’s going to be a good one, even with all the uncertainty spinning around us.

I took a week off at the end of the year and the short break from regular blogging was a chance to think about why people read blogs and, as a corollary, how we blog.

There are a bunch of basic reasons people are reading your blog: to stay up to speed on their industry (or an industry they’d like to be part of); to find interesting content that they otherwise wouldn’t stumble across; to be entertained, to get useful tips of one sort or another.

But I think most folks want more than that, and if they don’t get it you’re going to lose them over time.  They want to hear your voice, hear what you have to say that only you can say.  Hear something that they wouldn’t hear anywhere else – something that inspires them, challenges them, pushes their thinking.  Something that sharpens their focus, or even changes their prism altogether.

Not a how-to book, a call to arms.

The thing is, I don’t know how to be inspiring every day, and you probably don’t either – even the notion of trying to do that seems like a fabulous way to create writers block (bloggers block?). But I do know how to show up every day, to say something that I think is relevant and about which I have a unique perspective.

And every so often, when everything goes right, something exceptional comes out.  I don’t know how or when and I’m not even sure I’ll always agree with my readers about what is or isn’t exceptional.  But I do know that the only way it can happen is if I keep on showing up – knowing that some days I connect, some days I miss, and once in a while something great happens.

So here’s to another year of swinging for the fences.  Thanks for taking this ride with me, and I wish you and yours a great 2012.

One trait to rule them all

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

If you had one non-negotiable trait that you’d want everyone representing your organization to hold, share and transmit, what would it be?

Of course you’ve got bright, engaged people.  They are confident and interesting, energetic and well-versed in what you do and how it fits into the larger whole.  They are humble and they listen well.  They build relationships naturally, care genuinely about people, look to make others successful as much as they look out for the interest of the organization.

But that one thing, the oomph, the special something that sets them apart?

It’s joy.

Joy is infectious.  Joy is rare.  Joy is something we grab on to and won’t let go of.  It transcends.

(proof point: Zappos)

There’s just one catch: there’s no faking it.

Which means that the starting point is that what you do matters and inspires.  And HOW you do it matters just as much, because that is how your team experiences the work, their  colleagues, your values and how you and they walk through the world.  These all add up to something much greater than the sum of the parts.

But once you’ve got it?  Magic.

Blah blah blah blah Ginger

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

There’s a great old Gary Larson cartoon about what we say and what dogs hear.

I wonder if we could re-title this cartoon “our needs,” as in: every time we regale someone with “what we need” we remember that all they’re hearing is “blah blah blah blah.”  But whenever we say their name, whenever we paint them into the picture, whenever we make them part of the story, they hear us loud and clear.

If you agree with the notion, rather than thinking tactically how to make this shift by “changing your pitch,” you might instead ask yourself what’s keeping you from actually seeing the person across the table as an integral part of the story….because she is.

If you don’t feel that way, she certainly won’t feel that way, and you’ll be stuck in exactly the wrong place: “blah blah blah blah blah.”

The gift economy and commerce

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

In biblical times, money was treated in radically different ways depending on whether you were dealing with someone inside or outside the tribe.  For example:

To a foreigner you may charge interest, but to your brother you shall not charge interest.

– Deuteronomy 23:19,20

Within the tribe, it was forbidden to make money on money you gave to someone (this is the genesis of usury laws).  It was known and understood that what mattered was the collective wealth and well-being of the tribe, and so there were established norms and expectations around the giving and receiving of gifts.  It was known that as a recipient of a gift it was your job to return what was given to you or its equivalent, whether to the person who gave to you or to the next person in the tribe who had a need.  This is how the needs of the members of the tribe were addressed. Gifts flowed in a circular fashion.

Outside the tribe, on the other hand, all bets were off.  You could lend, charge interest, even ask for a goat as collateral if this would help ensure payment.

I visualize it like this: within the circle, we have the gift economy; outside of the circle we have commerce.

Without judging what is good and bad here – indeed without commerce where would we be as a world? – it’s simple to observe that, year after year and century after century, the purview of commerce has gotten broader and the space for the gift economy has shrunken:

What was once the tribe became the extended family became, at least in the West today, the nuclear family.  Community ties weaken, religious ties weaken as many (but certainly not all) parts of the world become more secular, and the gift economy, the economy where generosity and helping first and asking questions later, gets whittled down so much that it’s just a speck in an ocean of commerce.

The irony of course is that, thanks to the amazing power of commerce, we’re wealthier than we’ve ever been.

Which means we have a choice.   Our first, most obvious option is to separate more and to insulate.  We can shop online and hide from the world; we can only associate with people who (socially, economically, politically) are just like us.  We can have Google and Facebook give us search results and friend feeds that systematically reinforce our beliefs.  Indeed there’s a great gravitational pull in this direction.

Our other option, the one that’s been nagging at us and sneaking up on us oh-so-quietly, is to recognize that what we desire most of all is to connect with others, to break down barriers and rip out the insulation, to experience the world and people and one another in a fuller, richer way, and to use our own wealth to heal the world.

The success of Generosity Day this year and, I’m hoping, in years to come is proof of the hunger for the second path, the one that leads to openness and connection, the one that allows us to take all our wealth and power and opportunity and build a different world, one in which we use our great capacity for change and for wealth creation to help one another.

In the end both paths will have to co-exist, but the false promise that’s being served up is that the first path alone will be enough.  It won’t.

So and so, such and such

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

This is how it usually goes.

The pitch:

Dear So and So,

I’ve been working incredibly hard on _____ and I think we are at the cusp of a breakthrough.  My new venture is going to __________ and __________ and _______ in way that would transform ________ and enable ________ in a spectacular fashion.  It would mean so much to me if you would ________ and ___________ and ________, and also, if you could, please could you introduce me to ________ and _______ as well.

(etc.)

The reply:

Dear Such and Such,

Great to hear from you. Exciting work that you’re doing.  I think I can help with _________ and _________.  And you might consider reading _______, going to _______, talking to ______.

(etc.)

The thanks:

So and so, thanks a lot.  Will do.

–          Such and such.

Which is to say, we throw our whole mind, body and soul into the big pitch, into getting attention, into demanding what WE want, and then we throw it all away without expressing thanks and appreciation with the same amount of energy.  It’s not even 80/20 most of the time, it’s 90/10 or worse.

This isn’t just about crazy cold calls/emails out of the blue.  Time and time again, we under-invest in thanks and appreciation, forgetting that this relationship business isn’t a one-shot deal.  Not even close.

We have to be tough on ourselves and really ask whether we’re putting our needs ahead of our customers’ needs.  It’s so easy to do, and it is such a fatal mistake.

Fundraising with Generosity

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Katya Andresen, who writes the awesome Nonprofit Marketing Blog and is also one of my co-conspirators for Generosity Day, made a great point on last week’s generosity economy post:

I have been thinking a lot lately about the latest research on the mind – and our mirror neurons – which shows the extent to which we’re hard wired for empathy and, by extension, generosity…Yet giving to charity isn’t growing at the pace of other elements in our generosity economy.  I think one aspect is that many of the people in charge of unleashing generosity (fundraiser, namely) have failed to fully understand and embrace this landscape.  We as a sector must engage with supporters in a more meaningful, connected and GENEROUS way ourselves if we hope to inspire the generous actions that come to people naturally…rather than treating them like walking wallets.

In many ways, this observation was the nagging worry that led me, two years ago, to my generosity experiment: I was spending my days talking to people about connecting with their passion, about being bountiful in their thinking, about being generous, yet I hadn’t moved my own relationship with generosity forward much in the three years I’d been doing my job as a fundraiser.  And without that connection, I didn’t feel like I could do my job in an authentic way.

Sounds good, you may say, but let’s get real for a second.

OK let’s.  For example, I just talked to a colleague who is getting on an international flight on Monday for a fundraising trip.  If she doesn’t raise $400,000 next week, a branch of her nonprofit is going to be shuttered.  With that looming, how hard is it going to be for her to see those potential funders as anything but walking wallets?

The answer is that it’s hard.  Really hard.  But it’s the only way to be really successful.

The first thing we need to do is reframe what we’re doing here.  Last week I talked to the new class of Acumen Fund Fellows about how to mobilize resources behind their ideas.  I started the session with a a free association around the word “fundraising.”  They were wonderful and honest, throwing out words like “storytelling” and “connection” but also a healthy dose of “hitting up your friends,” “draining,” and “begging.”

But here’s the big secret: great fundraising is a fair deal for everyone involved.  You (the fundraiser) are connecting people to their passions and giving them an opportunity to do something great in the world.  You are helping them express their dreams and maybe, just maybe, connecting them with an organization that will be transformational in their lives.  You are giving them the chance to change the world.

Of course what you have on offer won’t be for everybody.  But that’s OK.  For the people who you do fundraise from, you are offering something of (at least) equal value to the donation they are giving.  In fact, by definition that’s what they’re saying by giving to you!

Approaching fundraising with generosity, to me, is about approaching each conversation with the attitude: “let’s figure out what great things we can do together.”  It’s not about your need, not about separating a well-meaning person from their money, and it’s definitely not a zero-sum game.

Best of all, it is incredibly empowering to wake up and realize that, as a fundraiser, you have something of great value to offer.  If you can couple that feeling of empowerment with a spirit of generosity, I promise it will transform your fundraising, transform how your donors experience you, transform your ability to connect great, meaningful, powerful ideas to the resources they need to come to life.

Thanks, Katya, for the inspiration.

 

*                             *                             *                             *                             *                             *

P.S. This post is about fundraising but there’s nothing special there – most of these conclusions apply to more traditional sales and business development when done the right way.  The greatest salespeople bring joy to their work, and the knowledge that they are making their customers’ lives better.  The thing they’re selling – and their attitude – is a gift to the customer.

Small talk

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Americans are famous for wanting to just “get down to business” in meetings.  Maybe a few minutes of chit-chat about the Yankees game or the weather, but otherwise, let’s get to the important stuff.

The misconception is that the meeting is just that – a meeting.  What if the person you’re meeting might be an incredible individual who maybe, just maybe, is going to become an important part of your life (starting today!).

Reflecting on yesterday’s post about generosity, we know that generous action increases when we expect to have repeated interactions.  The expectation of repeated contact makes it more likely that our kindness will be reciprocated, and makes it more likely that it will be witnessed by others, so the rational / optimal thing to do is to help others.*

So the question becomes: if the person you’re meeting just might be amazing, how do you act?  You’d want to make it more likely that you’ll see that person again in the future, of course.  And, going in, you don’t know who is and isn’t amazing, but I’d bet that there’s a lot more amazingness out there than you think.

To get us yankees to make a shift, instead of shouting (ineffectually) about how we should all “spend a little more time getting to know people,” let me instead propose that we reframe each meeting as one moment, the first moment, in a much longer-term relationship.  And that relationship is just latent potential until you activate it with real human connection at the outset.

Oh, and how IS the weather?

 

 

*(let’s park the question of the motivation behind generosity for a minute…that’s a post for another day)

 

Time to be a little pushier

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A friend of mine who’s a media executive described a recent meeting thus:

“At the end of the meeting, their CEO agrees we’ll have a decision by Friday. Then she said, ‘…and you may need to bug me a lot before then, send me a lot of emails on Thursday, call me…go ahead and do it, I won’t mind and I’ll probably need to be reminded.”

*sigh*

My friend’s take on this well-intentioned statement was that we’ve gotten to such a level of media (email, web, social media, etc.) overload that senior folks in all walks of life are simply abdicating responsibility for being functioning, capable people who stick to deadlines, reply in a timely manner, remember what they say and follow through on their promises.

It’s a sad state of affairs which basically says: I leave it up to you to bug me enough that I pay attention.

There are lots of directions we could go from here – about people not spending time on the right things; about how more information is leading to less effective leadership; about fighting this tooth and nail in your organization by creating cultural norms that are the exact opposite of this tidal wave of abdication of responsibility.

Instead, let’s be overwhelmingly practical and take this moment to remind ourselves that the ability to stand in front of a person and get their real attention is more at a premium than ever.

That you need to master multiple channels of communication to get through to different folks (texting in Europe and the developing world; email plus phone plus text here in the U.S.; etc.).

That, instead of sending the eleventh email and waiting, you’d best have your top customers/clients/relationships on speed dial. (Really.  Do you?  Do you have the cellphone number of all your Board members in your phone and at your fingertips?  Why not?)

On the margin – sadly – I bet you have to be a little pushier than you’d like to be in order to break through.

We are living in a Thank You Economy

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I just finished Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, The Thank You Economy, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s trying to make sense of what’s going on online right now, anyhow who has questions like: do Twitter and Facebook really mean anything?  Should I invest in these tools to build my business?  Can I really use these tools to stand out and to build strong relationships?

Gary’s vehement answers to these questions are: YES, YES, and YES!!!!

His forceful, compelling argument is that the game has changed forever.  Business used to be a small-town endeavor, where word of mouth spread quickly and where you had to treat all of your customers right – even the elderly woman who never bought much, because the hammer would fall on you if word got out that you treated her wrong.  Then big companies and mass marketing and TV advertising on 3 channels came, and for 50 years it made perfect economic sense for businesses to be impersonal and not to care.  And now we’re back to a world in which the only way to succeed is to build powerful, one-on-one relationships with our customers – the elderly woman has morphed into the person commenting on Yelp, posting to her blog, or tweeting to her 100,000 followers about how great or terrible your product or service was.

I found the book to be incredibly optimistic – Gary’s breathless enthusiasm is contagious, it is filled with enough practical examples to be actionable, and he pulls the lens back just enough to let you see that there’s something bigger going on than people uploading twitpics of their grilled cheese sandwiches.  One on one communication is back, it’s still in its infancy, and folks who wake up to this fact now will have an incredible lead on their competitors.

Gary’s case studies bring things to life.  He shares how, for a while, restaurant-reviewer Zagat’s missed the social media boat and, in so doing, allowed Yelp to build a site with 25 million unique visitors in December 2009 (to Zagat.com’s 270,000); this same month Yelp turned down a $550 million offer from Google and a $700 million offer from Microsoft (Zagat tried to sell for $200 million in January 2008 with no takers).  He describes the over-the-top efforts of Joie de Vivre hotel employees to make guests feels at home and special.  He surprises with stories of a dentist in San Francisco named Irena Vaksman who built her practice through online marketing; and a lawyer (a lawyer!) named Hank Heyming whose firm let him tweet and blog under his own name, and in so doing he became a leading startup lawyer in Richmond, Virginia.

The point of the book isn’t that you should passively stare at your Twitter and Facebook feeds for hours a day and call that work.  That ain’t work – that’s being a spectator.  This is a new undertaking requiring, first, a new attitude (caring like crazy about your customers), and then a specific strategy for building genuine relationships with these customers – in a way that blends online and offline experiences to create something exceptional.

Whether you’re someone who directly employs online tools or someone who has people asking for permission to do more online, this book will help you make sense of what’s going on out there in the big bad web 2.0 world – most importantly, by demystifying it and bringing it back to the simple, powerful notion that we can, finally, get back to the business of caring about and taking care of our customers.