Tag: connection

Radical openness and what it means for conferences

~ Sasha ~ 11 Comments

I had a surreal moment yesterday, while sitting in the audience at The New York Forum with my laptop open.  I had WiFi connectivity, so, out of curiosity, I logged into the live stream of the panel I was attending.  Indeed, there it was, exactly as I was experiencing it in real time, with just a 5 second delay.

The knowledge that I could have been experiencing that panel from my desk or from halfway around the world shouldn’t necessarily have made me wonder what I was doing (what we all, conference attendees, were doing) sitting in that room.  But it did.  We all came a long way to experience something that we could have experienced – at almost the same quality at almost the same time – without ever leaving the comfort of our homes or offices.

On some fundamental level, we know that it doesn’t make sense to get hundreds of incredible people together and then have them spend 80% of their time sitting in silence listening to panelists. We used to convince ourselves that it was worth it because of the illusion of scarcity and exclusivity: sure I can hear Maria Bartiromo any day on CNBC, but there she is, just 50 feet away from me, probably saying things she wouldn’t say on the air! 

The livestream shatters that illusion.  Anyone can (and should!) watch, so there’s no more scarcity.  And like it or not, scarcity equates with value.

So what do we do now?

Here’s a thought experiment, just to mess with you: wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to pre-record some or all of the “talks” at a conference, make them available (earlier?) to conference attendees and to the whole world, and do away with panels so you can use the conference to let attendees talk to one another.  Or better yet, if you want attendees to be able to hear the “panel,” have a Star Trek-like hologram of the “panel” playing in the front of the room for those who want the 3D experience.

Absent this semi-crazy notion, there really are only three options that really make sense for conferences:

Hold an un-Conference: the Tallberg Forum and the Opportunity Collaboration both have essentially no formal talks – they are gatherings focused exclusively on facilitating connection between the participants.  Note that both of these are held in remote locations, which I’m sure facilitates dialogue long into the night and makes it less likely that people will jump ship early (since normally the closing Keynote by some dignitary keeps people around until the end).

Copy TED: If you are going to have speakers, do what TED does – create a conference structure (who’s in the audience, brand, potential for your talk to be viewed zillions of time if it’s great) that makes it extraordinarily likely that most of the speakers will give the best talks of their lives.  And then build in big chunks of time for interaction amongst the participants – between panels, late at night, etc.  If you don’t want to do a TEDx (for whatever reason), there’s still no harm in borrowing shamelessly from the playbook – it works.

The fireside chat: I don’t know if anyone does this, but here’s a third idea which plays off the strength of going deep with individual “speakers:” an interview-style conversation that’s not a formal TED-like talk, one that feels intimate and is built around audience participation and really exploring the depth of knowledge of the featured guest.   You’d have to have great interlocutors who get the best out of the “speakers,” and would have to add special touches (room design, lighting, etc.) to make it feel really intimate. Or, you go completely in the other direction, SXSW style, and have great people do crazy things they’d never otherwise do (like battledecks, where people present a series of slides they’ve never seen before), so you really get a sense of personality and who they are.

You’ll notice there’s no fourth option, with an up-the-middle-of-the-fairway model in which you get 6 high profile people plus a moderator and try to direct them to have a substantive, meaningful conversation in an hour.  It’s structurally designed to fall short – panels are built to jump all over the place, to stay at a high level, to have panelists take up time explaining who they are, and never to have the chance to dig deep into a topic or a person’s expertise.  Yet despite these inherent shortcomings, it’s the natural thing to do  because that list of speakers is what fills your conference hall, the more you have of them the bigger draw you’ll be, and once you have them signed up, you may as well put them all on the stage together.

What’s interesting is that the radical openness that’s become the new standard for big conferences has done much more than democratize access to everyone who doesn’t attend the conference – it has also radically raised the bar on what is worth sitting down and listening to for 75 minutes (because there’s so much other incredible content out there, much of it generated by the very same people who are on stage at your conference).

The reason people pay between $500 and $1,500 for tickets to hear U2 isn’t because they don’t have access to U2’s music at 99 cents per song.  It’s because of the shared experience, the intimacy, the raw power of being there in the moment – it is an emotional experience that you’re not going to get in your living room, no matter how good your sound system is. (HT to Quentin Hardy for making this great point to me).

Emotional connection, human interaction, serendipitous connections with people you otherwise wouldn’t have met, and yes, doing real business that you couldn’t have done in any other way – these are things I can’t get live streamed at my desk, these are things worth flying across the country for, these are things that will always be scarce.

For everything else, I’ve got a great web browser and a broadband internet connection.

Keith Ferrazzi on trust, vulnerability, and deliberate relationship-building

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back, gave a fascinating talk yesterday at The New York Forum (event livestream is here – the Forum is from June 20-21st, my panel is this afternoon).  It was a broad brush conversation about how human beings build connections with one another, and Keith gave a passionate argument in favor of being more intentional about how we build relationships.  (bonus: if you want to dig into this stuff, check out Keith’s Relationship Master’s Academy.)

Keith’s headline is that we should all have a “people plan” – a listing of the top 25 relationships that are most important to our long term success, and a commitment to investing substantially and intentionally in these relationships.  And here’s the part that I loved: Keith argued that the only way to be successful in investing in these relationships is to lead with generosity, to enter every conversation thinking about “how can I help?”  This is the polar opposite of figuring out what we can get, the opposite of thinking about how to close the sale, and (of course) the opposite of figuring out what we can GET.

The other big idea I was left with was that, as life becomes increasingly virtual and as job tenure decreases, the natural building of relationships that used to happen in business is disappearing.  For example, Keith shared a story of IBM getting rid of all of its sales offices – the expectation was that this would both decrease costs and allowing salespeople to have much more time at home and better work/life balance.  What they didn’t foresee was how much was lost – the intangible connective tissue of shared stories, the decompressing and complaining about customers or about management, the informal mentorship that used to happen at the local Bennigan’s on Thursday nights.  The result: the company scuttlebutt is that IBM, which used to stand for “I’ve Been Moved” (to the next regional office) now stands for “I’m By Myself.”

Keith’s suggestion is that, especially for the generation (mine) that didn’t grow up in a social media, online world, we have to make much more deliberate attempts to create connection, to be vulnerable, to create an environment of trust as a precursor to the “business at hand.”  Keith shared that at Cisco, a major user of Telepresence virtual conferencing, they have implemented personal/professional “check ins” in the first 5 minutes of all Telepresence meetings, because the natural swapping of personal stories that happens at the start of in-person conversations actually doesn’t happen when we have virtual conversations.

Just one example, and I’m not sure I’d follow this one to the letter.  But I love the broader idea: that if we want to innovate, if we want to have tough and real conversations about big strategic decisions, if we want to dig in to areas of uncertainty, we will be much more successful if we make deliberate investments in creating bonds of trust, no matter how far away our colleagues or our customers sit.

Every day it gets easier to skip this step: to fire off emails to people we barely know, focused on the tasks they need to complete; to hold global conference calls in which most people say almost nothing; to never, ever, pick up the phone to a key colleague sitting far away, not with an agenda, but just to talk and see how things are going.

By skipping these step, we skip investing in trust, and we relegate ourselves to exacerbating global/local tensions, where trust and rapport exists for workers in the same office and global bonds – far from being stronger, thanks to all of this technology – keep on getting weaker.

Secret weapon

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to break through all the clutter, to stand out from the mountain of emails in your customers’ inbox, to have your voice be a clarion call above the deluge of Tweets and Facebook updates?

Guess what, there is:  a mode of communication where instead of competing with 150 others’ messages in a day, it’s just you and maybe 1 or 2 other folks; it’s direct and gets people’s attention right at that moment; it’s a way to show that you care more than the other guy.

It’s called a telephone.

Yeah, that’s right.  Pick it up, dial the number, talk to another human being directly.

All those scheduling emails are a way to hide.  All those emails full of questions and a proposal that you find a time to discuss three weeks from Tuesday are an even better way to run away.

Today, pick up the phone three times (let’s start small) when you otherwise wouldn’t.  Call up a customer, impromptu, and talk to them.

That customer is getting 150 emails a day and 3 phone calls, and you’re wondering why you’re having trouble getting her attention?

Call.

Why sweat the small stuff?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I wrote a post about making sure to get the font right in emails you send out.  The day before I reflected on responses to the simple question, “How are you doing?”

Why sweat such small stuff in a blog about generosity, philanthropy and social change?

It’s because from what I’ve seen, change happens – especially in the nonprofit sector – when the right people, ideas and resources come together to attack a particular issue.  The driving force and the glue are relationships, the ability to bring together seemingly disparate people and organizations that form strong, lasting partnerships.

Successful relationship management is first and foremost about attitude.  You have to care (or, potentially, you have to decide to care) about building strong and genuine relationships.  You have to have honest-to-goodness respect for the people with whom you’re building these relationships.  This goes in all directions (donor to nonprofit; nonprofit to donor; nonprofit to program beneficiary, program beneficiary to nonprofit; etc. etc. ), and it’s non-negotiable.  Without this attitude in place, you’ll fall short.

Once you’ve got this right, though, relationship-building and relationship management is a skill that can be learned.  Like any skill there are big pieces and small pieces; there are people who are born naturals and people who learn along the way.  There are a million ways to get this right and probably even more ways to muck it up.

So posts about how to write emails, or posts about the first impression you make when someone asks “how are you?” are part of the mountain of little tweaks that I’ve found help me get better at this every day – things I’ve seen, things I’ve messed up, things I’ve learned from others.  One by one they pile up, until one day, to your (or my) surprise, you’re in a totally different place.

It’s not personal (and that’s the problem)

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

OK, I know you’re busy, we all are.

And you have a lot of people you want to connect with.  We all do.

And yes, it’s true, sometimes you copy and paste stuff into more than one email, because the meat of the update might be pretty similar from person to person, right?

But here’s the decision you get to make: how much value do you place on making the person on the other end feel like the note was written just for them, every time?

Outlook has a whiz-bang feature that allows you to create a text email that is, in fact, a mass mailing.  It’s tempting isn’t it?  Think how efficient it would be!!

Except.

Except you have to decide if relationship-building is a mass-market undertaking.  You have to decide if scale comes from going broad or going deep.  You have to decide which tradeoff you’re willing to make, because halfway there is no man’s land.

Sure, you’ll be careful most of the time.  But the moment a giant block of text in your email is in another color, or another font, or another size, the illusion is shattered. The moment you email the same thank you note to five different people, the wires appear to the whole audience, and the magic of your flying act goes *poof*.

And the thing is, the moment someone discovers that they’re the kind of person who gets impersonal notes from you…well, there’s really no way to recover from that.

 

How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Last week I went to my 20-year high school reunion – which was neither as dreadful nor as exciting as the hype would lead one to believe.

Over the course of a few hours, a group of people (most of whom live in the same city even when not reunion-ing) who once knew each other well assemble to engage in a speed-dating type dance, trading 2-5 minute updates on the last 10-20 years of their lives.  Mostly I found it positive to hear how people have grown, the paths they are walking, how they are making their way through the world.

What’s unique about a reunion is that it combines long-lost friendship (trust, openness) with the expectation that you’ll give shorthand update on a few decades of your life.  There’s an intimacy that’s absent from cocktail party conversations, which I found breeds honesty and directness if you actually stand up and listen.

Perhaps most interesting was the simple answer to the question, “How are you doing?” asked repeatedly.  In the context of a high school reunion, this innocent phrase carries some real weight.  Peoples’ short answers to this question revealed joy, excitement, the desire to impress, openness, closedness, happiness, disappointment…the whole gamut, if you listened closely.

Hearing 30 people answer this same question in 60 minutes certainly made me think about how quickly first impressions are made.  And then I thought: wait a minute, maybe high school reunions aren’t any different at all in terms of what you can learn from how folks (how you, how I) answer this question.

I think with my brain, but…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I spent some time today talking with a great filmmaker and TV producer.  Her mantra for everything she creates is to what she called the “micro story:” that one, personal narrative that captures the whole.

We know this, but we don’t practice it.

We throw up statistics.  We create mash-up stories profiling a series of good projects and forget that the end result of the glossy portrayals is so much less than the sum of the parts.  We have conversations about giving to our organization that lead with programmatic jargon, budgets, abbreviations and ratios.

I think we’re afraid that telling real, honest stories will somehow be insulting to someone’s intelligence.  We know that “people respond to stories” but the woman across the table from you is so smart and so accomplished that of course she “really wants to dig in.”

What if we imagine our audience wearing block-lettered, tacky t-shirts (like the caps that Frank from 30 Rock wears) that shout out:

I THINK WITH MY BRAIN

BUT I ACT FROM MY HEART

I bet we’d act differently, we’d inspire more often, we’d create genuine connection and a sense of hope.

The mutual interview

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

There are two things you’re aiming to accomplish every time you have a job interview:

  1. Figure out whether you want the job
  2. (assuming yes to question #1) Show the person interviewing you that you want the job and should get the job

This is delicate dance, since spending too much energy and time on either question can make a mess of the thing.

At one end of the spectrum, in the past few years I’ve occasionally “interviewed” folks who literally spent all of our time together grilling me, which didn’t feel right at all – and made it virtually impossible for me to consider them for the job.  Conversely, I’ve also made the mistake (and seen others do the same) of getting a job offer after multiple interviews and not knowing if I really wanted it.

As you get more senior, it’s generally understood that the pendulum will start to swing more towards the middle – that the job interview is more matchmaking than a test (though in truth, ALL job interviews are matchmaking and anyone who tells you otherwise is either deluded or putting you on).  But no matter who you are and what job you’re signing up for, you owe it to yourself to figure out whether the fit is right AND you have to find a way to do this without giving up the opportunity to convince your interviewer that you’re passionate about and qualified for the job.

Lifetimes ago (it feels) I was in college and had what I was understood to be an informational interview at an investment bank.  It became an interview interview.

When it got to my one question at the end of the interview, I asked, “When it’s after midnight and you get that phone call from a Partner that means you’ll have to work until the next morning, what motivates you to do it?”

My interviewer, sensing weakness (I suspect), replied, “That’s a great question, and I’d like to turn that back around at you and ask how you’d answer that question.”

At this point, I proceeded to show all my cards, and I blabbered on about how I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go into banking, etc. etc. etc.  Shockingly, I didn’t get called back for a follow-up conversation.

I’m glad that job interview didn’t work out for me – it wasn’t right for me.  But I learned that day that it was up to me to decide why I was interviewing: to get a job, or to figure out if I wanted a job.

Two different objective, two different sets of strategies, both are equally valid, you just have to decide.

Hello!

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Try this: the next time you have lunch planned with a friend, have him meet you at your office.  Put him on your calendar.  But don’t tell anyone who he is or why he’s there.

Then, when you sit down with him, ask him what it felt like to be a new visitor to your place of work.

How long does he wait at reception?  Does the receptionist pass him to another person before getting to talk to you?  Is he attended to quickly or does he wait for a while?  Did people say hello to him?  Was he brought to your desk or to a conference room?  Did the experience make him feel welcomed, excited, intimidated, put off?  Does your office feel active and buzzing or empty and quiet?

How was he left feeling before your “meeting” even started?  And how does this compare to how you’d like someone to feel before / during / after a meeting?

Here’s how this often works:

  • You arrive and say who you’re there to meet
  • A receptionist call an assistant
  • You wait a bit
  • The assistant comes to greet you and takes you to an empty room
  • You’re offered something to drink
  • You wait a bit
  • The drink arrives
  • You wait a bit
  • The meeting starts
  • (elapsed time: 5-10 minutes if all goes smoothly)

This particular sequence of events might be fine if you want to make a very specific impression (namely, we’re big and established).  But if the impression you’re after is “nimble, cutting edge organization” consider re-imagining the whole shebang.

Maybe something along the lines of: person arrives, they’re walked straight to your desk.

The advantage you have against the big guys is that you’re NOT them.  In which case acting just like them (because that’s how they do it) is a huge miss.

Have personality

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Saw this great sign yesterday morning at Fairway Supermarket in Pelham.  Fairway is the best combination of high quality and affordable food at any supermarket anywhere (they also make Zabar’s-quality lox, pickled herring, and olives, among other things).  Fairway’s original supermarket has been in business on Upper Wast Side of NY since the 1930s, and in 2007 they started an expansion blitz that has taken them to Harlem, Red Hook, even Stamford, CT.

This sign made me laugh out loud, and it reinforced the notion that it’s always better to have a personality.  Personality has a point of view.  Personality has a voice.  Personality will piss some people off but will make your rabid fans even more rabid-y and fan-y.

If you’re going to have personality, do it every time.  Every sign, every email you send out, every blog post, every quick reminder.  We’re not talking stand up comedy here, but if you write more like you talk and less like you think you’re supposed to write, you’re heading in the right direction.