Kondo-ing Your LinkedIn Network

Marie Kondo is having a moment (to be fair, her moment may have already passed but I wouldn’t know, I am usually late to the cultural party) and both she and a joyless (in fact depressing) connection request on LinkedIn got me to thinking about doing a KonMari “de-clutter” of my LinkedIn network.

So, I have decided to start a new tradition this year: spring cleaning of my LinkedIn account. From this year onwards, every year in May, I will purge LinkedIn of 10% of my connections. As of this writing, that means about 110 links are going to be on the chopping block. We’ll see if each following year I’m netting an increase or a decrease. I am guessing that it will be a net decrease in connections from here on out.

Don’t get me wrong, I find a lot of value in LinkedIn. I use it 2 – 3 times per week searching for someone or researching a company. The service is indispensable when I am hiring for a position, and potential clients have found me there when I could not be reached in another manner. Overall, LinkedIn is a net positive for me, so then why actively reduce the number of my connections there?

Biases Against Disconnection
Before I answer, let me point out that the LinkedIn deck is stacked against the removal of connections. Notice how easy it is to ask for and get a connection on the service? You’re even given buttons to reply with stock phrases such as “thanks” as if the saved two seconds worth of typing is a value. The frictionless-ness of connection is one of the reasons there’s a spam epidemic on the platform. My rule is never to accept a connection request for unsolicited services. I will accept connections from unknown people if they are in a market or company I’m interested in. This requires a certain amount of diligence because so many connection requests come in looking legitimate. Disconnecting later on means searching for a contact and then unlinking them which is an extra effort. The effort is nowhere near as easy as connecting, and the system is set up that way on purpose. Taken all together, this means that we all probably have far more connections than are useful. All those dead-end links languishing in the “contact list closet” is merely hoarding. De-cluttering will increase the efficiency of the network.

The logic for keeping a connection is that someday, you might need that link, so you let it stay. This is a bit like saying you’re going to eventually use those college textbooks sitting in a box in your garage. Consider this: a useless connection the very definition of a waste of time. LinkedIn’s sole purpose is business networking (although some might argue its purpose is to promote feel-good platitudes on our timelines)—it’s specifically built to help people start and maintain business connections that can be mutually beneficial. Any link, therefore, promotes itself as a utility—it is by its very nature a willingness to connect in turn, to be helpful. So if you are not connecting, not willing to join, or (as we shall see) promoting a false sense of connection, you are as far as the platform is concerned, “friction.”

No Tokimeku
Which brings me to what happened last week. I asked for an introduction to a company from one of my connections. If you research a company on LinkedIn, you can sort your accepted relationships to see how well you are connected to people who work at the company you’re interested in. If you’re not directly connected, you can look at second order connections to see how difficult it may be to score an introduction. For me, if it goes to third or fourth connections to get there, I give up using LinkedIn for an introduction—it’s just too many jumps. So here I was trying to get an introduction to a company and, luckily, I had a direct contact which showed connections to multiple senior executives. This contact was not a person I knew at all, he was a random inbound request I had accepted expressly on the chance that someday I might want access to his relationships. My need for an intro meant our time had arrived.

Introductions ≠ Recommendations
My contact emailed me back after several days telling me that, actually, he really didn’t know anyone at my target company, and besides, he wasn’t comfortable making a recommendation for someone (that would be me) he didn’t know. This gave me pause. Why on earth was this guy on LinkedIn in the first place? Despite what his profile showed, he clearly had no deep connection to the company and the executives there. He also had been the one to reach out to me for a link. Did he think we were connected for a reason other than networking? Was he looking forward to clicking on a button to wish me a happy work anniversary? Secondarily, I never asked for a recommendation which meant he thought that all introductions were tantamount to an endorsement (they aren’t). In short, our connection had no value either way. Now consider the time wasted on my side as well as the delusion created by the platform that showed a reliable connection that was, in fact, nonexistent. This is worse than an old sweater taking up space in a closet; it’s like me thinking that moth-eaten thing is something I can really wear repeatedly, and I wear it. There are connections we know are dead ends, and then there are those that at a quick glance, “spark no joy.” They all must go.

Block Away
Did you know you can actively block someone on LinkedIn? When you block a person, you cease to exist on the platform for them, as they do for you. This is done via settings in your profile, and it is a handy and underused feature. Block away, I say. Remember, you’re kicking a blocked profile out of your network. If they search for you, it’s as if you’re not on the platform. Conversely you can’t see their connections either, but you’re doing the blocking so why do you care? Blocking is a more drastic step than simply disconnecting someone, but sometimes it is necessary. My basic rule is: if I don’t want to do business with you under any circumstances in the “real world” why am I allowing the possibility of a connection on LinkedIn? In fact, what am I tacitly endorsing by keeping those connections in my network? What does a link to someone I do not want to do business with actually say about me? These connections are 100% joyless, so out they go too.

Clear out the Clutter
I know for some delinking large portions of their network is equivalent to a favorite chair being taken to Goodwill, but trust me, in the long-run the renewal will be worth it. I’ve written before in my blog (here) about the fallacy of Dunbar’s Number and network compression effects. The simple fact is, those people in your existing network that have “high betweenness centrality” are known to you, and you won’t be severing those links. Your personal network will reroute around any holes you create by disconnecting. This means you aren’t likely to be losing anything at all when you undertake a spring cleaning. I’m willing to bet the contrary: an active culling of connections will make my network more efficient, and that will make my work more efficient in turn. Give it a try: Kondo your network.

Fingerspitzengefül

This week we are going to get all touchy feely and learn some German words at the same time. The first word of the week is Fingerspitzengefül, which is a lovely compound German word packed with meaning and umlauts. Fingerspitzengefül (pronounced finger-shpit-zen-geh-fool) translated literally means “finger tips feeling.” Native English speakers might call it “touch” or “intuitive sense,” but none of those words does justice to the German.

Fingerspitzengefül is like having nerve endings scattered outside the body, reporting instantly, combined with the ability to integrate all that information into a seamless mental picture. With fingerspitzengefül, you can see and react to things that are outside your immediate informational flow. A person exhibiting fingerspitzengefül seems to have an almost intuitive feel for the the whole (bonus German word: gestalt) of a situation, be it a key negotiation or an opposing team on the soccer field. Finger-touch lets you anticipate, guess-ahead, shorten time in your favor. Wayne Gretzky of hockey fame once said he was so good because he could “skate to where the puck was going to be.” Battle commanders have been said to show fingerspitzengefül: Rommel and Patton among them, but we might also say, Belisarius or Alexander could feel the whole battlefield too. Fingerspitzengefül takes a smaller opposing force and makes it virtually invincible–you are David to everyone’s Goliath. Finger-tips-feeling is a skill, and it can be learned.

Which brings us to our second German word: einfühlung. Einfühlung (pronounced ine-fuh-lung) literally means “feeling into”; it often gets translated into English as “empathy.” Here again, the actual meaning is much richer. “Feeling into” is the ability to be in the mind of another—almost as if you have moved your sense of self outside your own body. To go back to the battlefield, a commander having einfühlung feels the space his troops are in as if he is there himself. The commander feels into his opponent; how he will react, move, what he will see, or ignore. The word “empathy” captures some of this but misses vast swaths of the intent of einfühlung.

Einfühlung is the key to getting fingerspitzengefül. Feeling-into is the mental scaffold that finger-tips-feeling fills out; the two capabilities make a formidable, unstoppable leader. Even if you’re not a leader, they make a better person. What underpins each of these characteristics is the mental agility to get out of your own head and into another’s and to do it so thoroughly that you know what they are going to do before they do it themselves. It is the equivalent of playing poker and seeing everyone’s hands as the game progresses. At home, you can anticipate the need of a spouse or a child and help before being asked. With a friend, you are checking in before she calls, because you just know that something is up. Einfühlung, believe it or not, can reduce suffering. That alone makes it a skill worth acquiring.

Why should we want these superpowers? After all, not all of us want to be Rommel commanding the Deutsches Afrika Korps. What good can einfühlung and fingerspitzengefül do for us daily? In a business sense, employing these skills makes for more successful outcomes and happier teams. You cannot develop any understanding of fingerspitzengefül unless you work with people you trust implicitly (they are part of your nerve endings; they also have to react in ways independently of you that you already know they will do). Healthy trust and shared goals are a great way to work. Do all this, and your work environment will be highly functional; job satisfaction will increase; empowerment becomes a lived reality. Then there is the act of “feeling into,” a skill sorely lacking in most social interactions today. To einfühlung another, even a competitor, is a lovely act. Feeling-into is not a capitulation, not an act of weakness, but an ingenious act of strength. Einfühlung, when well done, can be the act of loving one’s enemies. Feeling-into is caring about an outcome enough to sublimate your own ego and take on the mind of another; it is strength through weakness.

Try them for a few weeks and see for yourself. Start with einfühlung. Pick a problematic situation you are facing with another person and practice feeling into the other. Let go of being right or wronged and become the other person. Practice prediction: think of exact phrases or actions your “other” will take but then go the extra step of thinking of what their rationale will be. Stay away from any self-righteousness around “knowing”—this is not an act of superiority. When you can do it and feel it as an act of service, move on to fingerspitzengefül. Good luck!

Of Sacrifices and Existentialism

Entrepreneurs face an existential dilemma every day that they are burning cash and looking for customers: should I shut the business down? There is quite a lot of life-death thinking going on in the head of a good founder all the time about the ongoing struggle to keep a company going. Running a startup is one part business plan, one part hustle, and two parts ongoing existential crisis. Leading one of these companies means being like the proverbial duck on a pond—the rest of the company sees you calmly floating along, but underneath you’re paddling like crazy.

A lot of startup folks talk about “keeping a company afloat” like it is a leaky boat we have to constantly bailout, but I prefer to think of these companies as starving children that always need food. Sometimes, some months, it’s a very close call. I lie awake at 3 am and wonder, “How am I going to make payroll this time?” Then, after that dark night, I put on my shoes, grab my bag and get an order. Revenue is like the elixir of life to these babies. Spoon a purchase order into the ever-hungry mouth, and the color returns to her cheeks. Suddenly, magically, payroll is next month’s problem. 

You make do. You go without salary for long periods. Vacations do not happen. You’d visit a customer and sleep in your car if you thought it would stretch the cash further (can’t say I’ve done that one, but I have thought seriously about it a few times. I did know one guy who slept in his motor home in the parking lot outside his office for years to make a go of it). You don’t hire cleaning people, but instead, clean the bathrooms yourself. Early mornings, before everyone gets in, are a great time to empty the trash. 

A CEO who empties trash is not exhibiting self-sacrificial, “above-and-beyond” effort. Thinking of your work as sacrifice implicitly creates an expectation of reward later on—it’s a form of debt. That’s bad business. The same goes for getting noticed as a reward—that’s taking credit, and credit is just another form of debt. Why saddle your company with unnecessary debt? Doing the work and calling it “sacrifice” means you don’t have the mindset; it means “you’re owed” something. A good entrepreneur does what it takes to move the company forward and keeps any judgment surrounding the type of work to himself. I see a lot of people who get caught in the trap of wanting to “be” a CEO or an EVP, but neglect the genuine (and vital) part of “doing something.” Wanting to “be someone” and “doing something” are usually mutually exclusive. If “being someone” means that buying office supplies in bulk at Costco is someone else’s “do,” then running startups is probably not for you. Instead, take your talents to Google—free food and massages!

The answer to the “do I shut it down” question is always another question: “what am I doing, right now?” When you can’t do anything else, and you are out of options, that’s the time to shut it down. Companies don’t deserve to keep going just because of the Herculean efforts of a CEO. Businesses don’t deserve success because VP’s fly coach and chose Motel 6’s over Hyatts. The verb “deserve” does not belong in the entrepreneur’s dictionary. The decision to shut down a company is usually self-evident. The decision to keep it going? That is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment series of acts. Sacrifice, however, is not one of them.

Four Types of Wealth

I saw this on twitter and it was so good, I had to share it:

There are 4 types of wealth:

1. Financial wealth (money)
2. Social wealth (status)
3. Time wealth (freedom)
4. Physical wealth (health)

Be wary of jobs that lure you in with 1 and 2, but rob you of 3 and 4.

—James Clear “Atomic Habits”

Network Compression

Human beings are (among other things) compression machines. Every day we are confronted by massive amounts of information, for which we only can deal with a small fraction. Humans take those fractions, snippets of data over time, and construct a seamless mental narrative. We decompress these snippets so effortlessly that the gaps in our information stream never seem to appear.

Take the simple act of blinking. The average person blinks 15-20 times per minute. Many of us were taught that this autonomic act is there to help us spread lubricants across our eyes to keep them from drying out. However, the frequency of blinking is far more than is required for moist eyes. The math shows our eyes are closed due to blinking for about 10% of our entire day. Think about that: in the last hour you did not see anything for about 6 minutes, and I’ll bet you never noticed.

Science is starting to show that we use the blink as a mental “rest,” turning off sight so that we can process the information mentally. Visually, our brains are constantly discarding data not deemed necessary for survival. Something moving across the visual field immediately gets our attention, but we gloss over the detail in a static image. A repeated touch, smell or sound can happen enough for it to no longer be novel, and we quickly learn to ignore it. You may have noticed how overstimulation of any sense can be overwhelming to the point where we shut down it down—an effort to reduce its cognitive load. In each of these instances and hundreds more, we are absorbing high bandwidth data and filtering it down to something that can be used to reconstruct a mental model of our surroundings. Show this human algorithm to a computer scientist, and they will tell you that that is data compression (actually they’d say it is “lossy compression,” but that’s another topic altogether). The thing about humanity is we are compressing all the time; it is a central fact of our survival. We even do it with friends.

There is a somewhat famous number in social networking theory called “Dunbar’s Number.” Dunbar’s Number was hypothesized in the 1990s by anthropologist Robin Dunbar who spent a lot of time watching monkeys team up in groups. As a result of his studies, Dunbar speculated that the practical limit on the number of stable relationships any one of us can have is about 150 people. Put another way, our brains can only maintain relationships with 150 friends. Now go back and look at how many “friends” you have on FaceBook! Note that Dunbar is not talking about mere acquaintances, but actual friends—a cohesive group.

Based only on my own experience, the effort required to keep up with 150 close friends seems exhausting. Do I know 150 people who might be friends? Sure. Can I construct, only in my mind, a network of 150 people I care about enough to be engaged with over time? Yes. Yet, how do I do this without it becoming a constant (and tiring!) daily activity? The key is network compression. I do not need to know the details every day of every one of those 150 friends, I only need to engage with a fraction of that number. From that fraction, I can easily reconstruct whole portions of my more substantial network.

Think about it. Almost every one of us has a couple of critical friends who are super “tapped in”—they’re the first person we reach out to when we want to figure out what’s happening. We contact that key friend and that “node” in our network helps us reconstruct that portion the group of friends they, in turn, are connected to (a term used by network theorists is that our key friend has “high betweenness centrality,” but that’s another topic too). The fact is, (and having looked at the literature I can’t find anyone else saying this or I’d cite it) our compressed network topology is not 150, it’s probably more like 20 or 30 or even less. That group is a “compression” of a much larger group—I’d guess we all have an uncompressed number far more extensive than 150. In this way we’re always 2-3 degrees of separation from our whole network — this is much less of a cognitive load. The problem is that over time that network becomes a highly filtered input into our worldview. It becomes possible over time for us to have lots of friends and actually know less about what is really happening around us.

Which brings us back to why you should care to spend time with those you might not otherwise want to. You see, over time your network has evolved to compress even the data it shares amongst itself. Do you have a friend who can finish your sentences before you do? How about get-togethers where you are sharing old war stories? Can you accurately guess where one of your close friends will come in on a debate? Do your friends know how to push your buttons, or know when to call just when you need it? Are there some things “you just don’t talk about?” These are all the behavioral outputs of compression. Over time, we get less and less uncompressed data the more time we spend exclusively in our network. In effect, our worldview becomes increasingly curated (compressed) by a social network purpose-built to reduce bandwidth while reinforcing pleasure and survival. Over time, we learn less and less about the “truth”—only learning the truth we have built a network to see. This is self-reinforcing because our network feeds back upon itself. Wonder why internet memes work so well? They circulate and amplify in social networks designed to “see” them.

Friends are great, I am not advocating getting rid of them. I am, however, a big advocate of going to the edge of my network and learning something different. It is worth the cognitive load that comes with getting uncompressed data. In this context, “cognitive load” is the uncomfortable feeling we all get when introducing ourselves, or making a new friend. Try it. Be random. As your Lyft driver how business is going and then listen. Buy someone you know “only a little bit” lunch and get to know them a bit better. Invite a new face into a regular weekly meeting. Volunteer somewhere. Join a book club. You don’t have to do this all the time, but make network discomfort a part of your routine by going to the edge. You might be surprised at what you’ve been missing.

The Lessons We Teach

I was traveling in China all this past week, which brings me to a jet-lagged week after and all the aches, sleep deprivation and crankiness; so forgive me a moment to rant about behavioral teaching and the responsibilities of my generation to be noble leaders.

My last meeting in Shenzhen was filled with c-suite men from the United States who should know better. My company is small, “proud and poor” I like to say, and from the moment I showed up in this company’s boardroom I had to hang on to the pride because poor was all they deigned to see. I am used to this from a certain type of American executive. You know him too: he shows up to every meeting late and makes it restart so he can be brought up to speed. He takes out a phone and begins replying to something while you are talking. He expects “his people” to deal with the details and is pretty clear he has to be somewhere else more urgent. He’s the guy who’s not interested in doing something so much as he’s interested in being somebody. The mindset this person brings is not involved in learning anything. The problem is that what they are in fact doing is teaching, and the lessons are universally corrupt.

In this meeting, I was paying attention to the most junior member of their group—a young Chinese man who was looking on his cadre of executives with earnestness and admiration. The American executives, well-coiffed, and French-cuffed brought their assistant in to serve us coffee and take notes, and from the first moment taught that young man “this is how we act.” Yet, my half dozen other meetings in China hadn’t been that way. When I met with a provincial minister over lunch, you would have thought I represented as much business as a Fortune 500 company. A senior executive at another company profusely apologized for a minor equipment malfunction. Yet another included junior staff member’s opinions the same as any other. And I suppose that was the lesson: there are no juniors in a well-run team. We are all serving each other in a fashion.

The was this one time someone asked me about how I interview people. I told them that interviews for people working for me start with the first interaction we have with you. I debrief everyone that comes in contact with a candidate, from the front desk in the lobby to assistants to everyone else in the interview group. If I can, I get the candidate out to a meal to see how they treat the staff at the restaurant. What I’m looking for is behavior—how do they treat people, especially those they might view as “beneath” them?

Noble leaders on the best teams take their jobs as teachers seriously; teaching is their first job. They look for opportunities to act out “doing.” The self-referential executive, he of the attention deficit and unearned confidence, needs to be shown the door. There are far better teachers out there.

Everyday Lazarus

Spring has finally sprung here in the coastal mountains of California. Pollen is dusting decks, cars, and the window of my bedroom. The plum trees in the back yard are decked out in white for a dance in the vernal breezes. All around renewal is showing itself in chittering chickadees and swarming hives of bees. This time each year I find my personal equator pointing directly at the sun, one foot in winter, the other, confidently in spring. Another season, another resurrection.

I don’t know where humans came upon the idea that gods could die and be reborn, but it is impossible to stand in front of a brave little Crocus pushing up between winter’s detritus of leaves and dirt and not see a bit of light born all over again. The shared experience of death and rebirth is so pervasive Carl Jung thought of it as an archetype —part of the collective unconsciousness of humans. Resurrection then is not a miracle, it is instead part of the natural order, resting safely within a standard, healthy, human process. Dying and being born again is common as dirt.

High school biology teaches that a living thing is born, grows, takes in energy, excretes, and reproduces. To the list I would add: a living thing dies multiple times. Indeed, a life well lived is multiple lives well lived. Here on the cusp of spring, I wonder over my own winters and all the routine deaths that brought me to the present moment.

I might have a unique and personal vantage point on death and resurrection. When I was 18, an internal bleeding incident took me to the point of being “clinically” dead for about a minute or so. I distinctly remember lying in a gurney and watching a heart monitor attached to my chest flatline before I blacked out. No, there were no bright lights, tunnels or long-dead relatives beckoning me anywhere. For me, the out of body experiences I have had all came later without any hospital drama or intensive care. My near death that day left me with an abiding understanding of how normal death and living in fact are. It was the first time I died that I could remember, but it was not my last.

There was this one time much later when I was having a particularly hard time dying, and I was miserable with the pain of it. It was late spring. The snow had melted back, and the sun was staying on the long side of the day, so I decided to go for a walk. Just a simple stroll down the road and back, nowhere special. There was an aspen at a bend in the street, holding onto a small berm above a lively stream full of the winter runoff. The afternoon was perfectly still and yet… the tree was shaking so beautifully I could not but stop and stare and die to myself there in the hiss and flash of green. That was another time I remember dying.

Of course, there were other times, all shared human experiences. Being fired from a job. Betrayal. Watching children leave home. Giving up on a cherished ideal. Seeing myself as someone else saw me. Accepting almost anything outside my plan with equanimity. All deaths. Sometimes, just the simple act of breathing and staying there has been a death.

But, but, but… it was never an end. In the dark, something bound up was waiting for an aspen, a crocus or a friendly word from a loved one to call me out into the sunshine. I am Lazarus every day. Aren’t we all?

Five Rings

I live in a small town such that even my doctor conforms to the small town ethos. His office is in a converted Episcopal church. Where the narthex was there is now a simple entryway. Where the pews were is a small half-wall separating waiting patients from the office area with its computers and filing cabinets. I imagine the sacristy is now the examination room and that seems fitting.

Only one doctor is peering down throats in this practice; his dog barks and trails him around the office, toenails clicking on the hardwood floors. The sunlight slants nicely through the stained glass windows, and the phone buzzes and Glenn Frye plays on the stereo, and I wonder why all Doctors aren’t doing this type of healing. It is a good place packed full of sincere intentions and quiet thoughts.

There was this one time I visited Dr. Steve to receive the results of my bloodwork. We were both pleased with what we saw as we sat at his desk carefully studying lipids, white cells, and genes that go back in time. That day the oracle declared my entrails fit for the future and it felt like no small thing. I asked too many questions. Steve answered them all, and we laughed about getting old. Steve said I reminded him of another patient, a friend. He also wanted me to get a colonoscopy. Handing me the reports he said, “See you in six months. Now go up front and tell Vivian to schedule the colonoscopy and also tell her: five rings.”

“Five rings?”

“She’ll understand.”

Up front I go, thinking about colons and friends. Vivian is Steve’s wife. I tell her about the colonoscopy, and she smiles and nods. She tells me of the patient they had, the one I am reminiscent of; he had colon cancer, it turns out. He died. She looks sad as she thinks on him and here in a converted church I understand a little bit more about death and pasts calling out.

“Oh,” I said. “Steve said I should tell you five rings.”

“Five!” She answers. “That’s a good one!”

Vivian comes out from behind the little half wall and leads me to the front of the church, where I see a rope dangling down from a hole in the ceiling.

“Go ahead and ring the bell!” She tells me. “Five pulls!”

The little boy, still in me, with a love of noise and insistent declaration is pleased.

“How often do you do this?” I ask her.

“We do it every time there’s good news. Also, sometimes when there’s not such good news. The bells help with sad news too.”

I think about their friend with the colon cancer tolling this same bell as I raise an arm and grab the braided rope. You cannot feel lousy ringing a bell hanging in an honest-to-god belfry. The image of a giant mastodon shambles unbidden into my mind’s eye as I reach up to hold the tasseled tail. The church, with its steeple and long trailing back, has just the right Pleistocene shape to it, standing in this old forest. I am in the belly of a forest-dwelling Leviathan, and he is in me, I think.

The mouth, the door I’m at, stares at big trees, ripe for grazing. I am a ponderous heavy-limbed thing with wrap-around tusks. Did the man with colon cancer get consumed by the immense Mammut too? I give a strong pull; the call goes out to the other half-eaten ones here in the hills, down by the market, standing by the river. I YET LIVE peals out on the second pull, my massive head raised toward the west and the evening sky. My fellow pilgrim, now passed on with cancer, pulls the third and I can see Vivian is smiling. Steve is standing nearby with his arms crossed, understanding too. On the fourth pull, the shaggy brute shakes his head, and together we stomp a ground-shattering foot. The earth seems not a thing I am standing on, but something I could easily carry on my back. The fifth pull echoes out into the gloaming, and then, quiet.

That is it: five rings. The front door is open. Vivian, Steve and I all share a secret now: the great beast is never defeated, it is consumed and later will consume us in its own time. The hills in front call the notes back to me as I walk carefully out to my car. My huge padded feet pick their way across the lot lest this great being damages something on the way home.

Nguyen and the Turkey Legs

Almost smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley is a place you can go to if you are hungry and need to get away from the crazy. Down Middlefield road past the avant-garde art infused offices of venture capitalists, amidst the multi-million dollar homes, sits an enclave of sanity where feasts are offered up daily. If you think you might have forgotten what good leadership functions like, or how priorities are kept prioritized, or what it means to really have wealth, go and visit, eat a little. Go away full. A short bike ride away from Stanford University is a soup kitchen that has served hundreds of meals a day for decades.

Serving that many meals is a logistical feat requiring dozens of volunteers and a network of providers all coordinated in an operational dance that, to the untrained eye, can look like chaos. Food arrives from local grocery stores or individual donations—it needs to be sorted and stored. Prep work happens in a large stainless steel kitchen where volunteers wash, peel, slice and otherwise break down the stream of food before the meal is cooked. It is always a hot meal served with some kind of salad and bread, coffee, juice, milk and a dessert. This happens every day. There are some well-funded startups nearby that have much less to show for their investments than St. Anthony of Padua does with the food other people would throw away.

St. Anthony’s has a small paid staff that runs the operation, and they do it far better than many of the high tech companies that surround them. No consulting firms are mapping out efficiency for the kitchen. No board of directors opine quarterly on their balance sheets. There are no Gantt charts or SWOT analyses; action items look more like actions. Team meetings are as likely to take place in front of a dumpster with forklifts whizzing around as they are in an office. Every delivery they receive is “just in time” because there is no waiting for something to arrive—they make do with what they are given. Profit is measured in guests served, and “margin” is a deep understanding of how close to the edge most people live. I have been there when men in suits stood patiently in line for the only meal they would eat that day. I have watched mothers balance multiple trays of food and herd their hungry children to a table. Grandparents eat there, so do the homeless and day laborers. A long line has formed by 11:30 am when the doors finally open. All of these people, from the working poor to migrant families passing through are in that queue before the doors close again promptly at 1:00 pm. At closing, the staff sits down to eat their lunch, and all that’s left to do afterward is clean up and prepare for tomorrow when it will happen all over again. They serve, on average, 200 meals a day, not to mention the clothing distribution and at Christmas, the holiday toy donations. People come on foot, by bike, or in the cars that they have been living out of and they all get a meal. No one goes away hungry if they show up.

There was this one time I was working there in the kitchen carving up cooked turkey carcasses. On occasion St. Anthony’s will get a load of frozen turkeys from a grocery store, and the next morning the whole place will smell like Thanksgiving. Breaking down the birds is easy enough, if messy, and there were three of us in aprons and gloves separating the meat from the bones and putting the good stuff in big stock pots. Nearby a sink was full of squash being peeled and behind me donated sheet cakes were being cut into semi-even quadrangles and put on paper plates for dessert. On a stainless steel table was a lone ceramic blue plate, chipped on edge, with two roasted turkey legs nestled next to a mound of rice. This plate was covered in plastic wrap and stood out from everything else going on because it was apparently being saved for someone.

As I soon found out, the plate was for Nguyen. Nguyen is the Security Guard which, as is true for everyone else at St. Anthony’s is really only part of his job. He is a slight Vietnamese man with an easy smile and a willingness to pitch in. His role at the soup kitchen was to be a calming presence if a mentally unstable guest created problems. He wore a dark blue uniform with the word SECURITY on the left breast and stood near the front of the room where the guests came to empty trays into garbage cans before they left. In my time there I never saw Nguyen have to act as security, but it was clear he was in charge on the dining room floor. He was well-liked and respected; the guests deferred to him. He’d help families navigate to a table, or empty the trash or bring out extra flatware if it was needed. On the day of the turkeys, I was up front too, helping load dirty trays into the kitchen just behind Nguyen. In between scraping food into waste bins and putting forks and knives into baskets, I was teasing Nguyen about his forthcoming lunch on the blue plate. Nguyen was not a large man, he apparently didn’t eat much, but as I found out from him, he had an enduring weakness for turkey legs. Patting his stomach and licking his lips he happily told me: “Going to eat good today!” And we laughed a bit. He is an easy person to like. The kitchen did not show favorites, but when turkey came in, they set aside two dark roasted legs and rice for Nguyen, covered and waiting for the doors to close.

On that day, the big double doors were shut, and the serving station lamps were off. Steam was rising from the water baths that had kept the food warm. I was wiping down the tables as the staff went to get their own lunches; they usually ate together taking the table closest to the kitchen. Nguyen sat with them, always closest to the doors. Just down the long table, I could see him grinning broadly and bringing out his turkey legs. He sat down, peeled back the plastic and eyed one of the drumsticks reverentially. There was a knock on the door. The entry way double doors are framed by windows, and there was a guest, obviously homeless, waving at Nguyen pantomiming praying hands, asking to be let in. Now, letting someone in after closing is not usually done. If you allow one in, you’ll get 10; if you get 10 in you are never closing. Rules are rules. I watched as Nguyen put down his food and stood up to let the man join him. I still have no idea what prompted him to open the doors.

No one else seemed to mind or even pay attention though. The homeless man was effusive in his thanks. Nguyen offered a seat across from his own and then went into the back to fix a plate of leftovers. I guessed there was not much food left in the kitchen when Nguyen came out with a dish: some vegetables, maybe beans, and a piece or two of bread. The man, however, was impressed. As Nguyen sat back down the man thanked him again and reached into his pockets, pulling out plastic packets of Taco Bell sauce. He enthusiastically squirted the hot sauce all over the just delivered food while amiably chatting away. The whole time, Nguyen was smiling and nodding. Then, casually, as is done with family or close friends, Nguyen moved aside the man’s own plate and replaced it with the turkey legs and rice. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, the homeless man squirted Taco Bell Sauce on a drumstick and began to eat; I am not even sure he noticed the switch. Waving the drumstick around, regaling Nguyen with some tale I could not hear, they both looked satisfied.

I have a friend who is a sociologist. He describes humans this way: we are the species that will trade food for a good story. I love that idea! A well told tale is sustenance of another kind. Endorphins and serotonin pin-balling between synaptic clefts in our brain might be the same as tucking into a hot lunch on an empty stomach. Maybe. Maybe giving up food for another person is yet part of another older story epigenetically wired into us over generations. Whatever the rationale, it is something to see when it happens. There are stories and then the satiation that comes from understanding bigger truths. The way I remember it, none of us went hungry that day.

Watch Their Wallet

My father was a semiconductor salesperson long before semiconductors were a “thing”—back when Santa Clara, California was known more for fruit orchards than semiconductor fabs. His profession made an already odd upbringing all the stranger: a youth inundated with negotiation training. In my childhood home, the commandment “thou shalt not leave money on the table” was right up there with “thou shalt not steal.” Growing up, my father would make me negotiate for things with him and then break down where I’d gotten the deal wrong—this could be for a piece of candy, or gas money later on for the car. Although he wouldn’t classify himself as such, he was a behaviorist—reading the client was every bit as important as knowing the features of the product you were selling. Dad taught sales by example, and he wasn’t always that great an explainer. As a kid, some of his sales lessons were downright mystifying. When you’re eight years old it is not entirely clear why leaving money on a table is a bad thing. Who’s table? What money? In second grade you nod and think twice before you pile loose change on the desk in your room. Sometimes I didn’t figure out these zen koan-like pronouncements until long after he was gone and I was a salesperson myself.

Which is why there was this one time I had to re-learn my father’s lesson of “watch their wallet.” A renewed understanding of that phrase was all the more shocking because I thought I knew what it meant from the first time he said it. Dad’s basic lesson went like this: in any good negotiation, it is going to get uncomfortable. The give and take of both sides will always lead to tension which can lead to a breakdown and the parties walking away from the table — getting everyone back together after a failure is more difficult than keeping everyone there and pushing through the difficulty. The key is knowing how hard you can sell at that moment, and the way to know how hard to sell is to watch their wallet. Now, imagine you are in the sixth grade and are getting this lesson at home over dinner. It seemed to me at the time that this was a straightforward example: if I’m watching the customer’s wallet and he takes it out, I’m going to get paid. If the customer keeps the wallet away, then we still have some work to do. All I have to do is watch their wallet to figure out how we’re doing. Simple right?

Not so fast. Years later I was in a seminar, learning from a great negotiator, Jack Kaine. Not only did he negotiate well, but he explained things in a way that put context and meaning around so much of my viscerally learned sales skills. One of the things he said finally explained the seemingly obvious “watch their wallet” in a way that made me see it completely differently. The way Jack taught it, the hard selling moment of a negotiation could be navigated by watching the other party’s feet. Unlike my father, he went on to explain what “watch their feet” meant. If the client is saying “no” and they feet are pointed towards you (i.e., toes first), keep negotiating. If they are saying “no” and their feet are pointed away (i.e., you can see their heels) then they are physically leaving and the negotiation is over. The point being: “no” can mean “I’m still willing to talk” if the customer remains facing you. The moment I understood this, my memory flashed to my father’s leather billfold in his back right pocket. He hadn’t been talking about taking a wallet out at all (a fact I would have understood if I had listened carefully). Instead, he was describing the view of a wallet-filled back pocket as the client walks away–the customer’s feet were pointed in the other direction. I had never really grasped why my father seemed disappointed when I described how I conducted negotiations. He would ask, “Did you see their wallet?” and when I would say “yes” to prove that I had closed the deal, he always seemed deflated. I believe my father thought he was being completely obvious; his wallet was a throwback to a time when men carried epic leather tri-folds crammed with real pictures and credit cards. His wallet was huge; you couldn’t help but notice it walking away if he turned his back on you.

However, I had missed it. In a greater sense, I was watching the wallet and not the direction it was taking. I missed the whole point. I wonder, how many answers I think I know but am actually misunderstanding them at a basic level? Alternatively, in assuming an answer as “obvious” am I failing to check my comprehension? What vital things might I miss with this attitude? I could have asked my father what he meant at any time but didn’t because my ego told me I already knew the answer. An inflated sense of mastery makes for a lousy student and a really inept salesperson. Learning is, in fact, a lot like a good negotiation: a basic requirement of the “hard sell” is the humility to constantly test for understanding. Which is counterintuitive to how we all think how “closing the deal” is done. Keeping the customer engaged, facing us, talking, learning–there is a certain joy in the process.

These day I am no longer looking for wallets back there, instead it is a smartphone and it doesn’t even need to be in a back pocket to show me the customer has lost interest. If I can keep the phone from coming out, staying humble with a lot of “little asks”, I can work my way to the big ask.