Keith Ferrazzi Interview: How to Build and Maintain Meaningful Relationships, Online and Offline

Hello and welcome to the Better Life Better Business podcast where we have conversations to help you live a better life and build a better business. I'm your host Shawn Ellis, founder of The Speakers Group, and I'm glad to have you with us. Today we're focusing on the power of meaningful relationships and especially on how to develop meaningful relationships online. Turns out it's not so different from the way we develop relationships in person. My guest is Keith Ferrazzi, one of the top thought leaders in American business today. His book Never Eat Alone redefined networking in the modern world, and he followed that with the number one New York Times bestseller Who's Got Your Back. Keith is founder and chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, which is a research-based consulting and training company, and he's also recognized as one of the world's most dynamic, engaging speakers, receiving accolades from audiences such as Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, the United Nations, Facebook, the World Economic Forum, and many more. I encourage you to get out your notepad and pen and give yourself a break from phone and email for the next few minutes, because if you do, I guarantee you'll pick up at least one tip or insight that will change the way you connect with people. Keith, welcome to the Better Life Better Business podcast. It is great to be talking with you again. And you know, our, our theme here is, is conversations to help you live a better life and build a better business. And sometimes we focus more on one side or the other, the life or the business, but you're right there in the sweet spot talking about developing meaningful relationships. Of course, we know how important that is to us as individuals, and obviously people power business. So again, thanks for being here. I'm excited to talk with you.

Oh, me too. Thanks a lot for having me.

Well, you just released a new and expanded edition of your bestseller, Never Eat Alone, and it's been almost 10 years since the first edition came out. So what are the most important new insights in, in this new edition that we should know about?

Well, look, in 10 years a lot has changed relative to technology and its enablement of us building great relationships. And I think unfortunately a lot of people feel like the technology has gotten the best of us. May be more connected today, but are we spending the time to deepen and build the kind of relationships? And I will consistently stand in front of a large audience and ask the question, "How many people think that we are more or less relational today than we were 10 years ago?" And it's always over 95% will say, "No, we're not." And so I think that the technology And I can actually— a lot of our research has talked about why we believe we have allowed technology to do what it's done. But technology is not the culprit. We are. And it's frankly our own fears and insecurities. As I often talk about, we are naturally, organically designed to build relationships. We're a tribal species. We function better that way. However, the downside of tribalism is you don't think something's of your tribe you push them away, you are fearful of them. And our reptilian brains that are used to and long to connect are also the same things that stop us from, you know, hugging mountain lions and picking up snakes. And walking into a big room to a lot of people feels like picking up a snake or hugging a mountain lion. And technology has allowed us to stay transactional and safer in some people's minds. Well, we've got to push ourselves to use technology just as I pushed people in Never Eat Alone around how to go to a conference, how to attend a meeting, how to do a long, slow dinner. These are all activities in the physical world that need to be transcribed into the virtual world. And we talk about how do you use LinkedIn, how do you use social media in general. How do you use it not just for staying connected, but how do you use it to grow yourself as an individual, continuous learning? How do you use it to create microcelebrity? In my book I had previously talked about building your brand. Well, building your brand now is a very different equation. It's easier, frankly, than it ever was before. You have ubiquity of publishing platforms. So a lot has changed. We pretty much rewrote the book by about 30%. You'll notice it's actually a— It's quite a much bigger book, but yet at the same time, we didn't lose any of the old heartfelt storytelling way in which we told the other one.

Yeah, I did notice that it is a little bit thicker this time around, and I know you've got a section in there on connecting in the digital age, and I want to ask you some questions about that. But first, just to go back to what you said about us kind of having this fear of being vulnerable, I remember, I think it was the first time I ever saw you speak, it was here in Nashville, a room, it must have been 500 people. 100 to 1,000 people. But you asked us or instructed us to stand up, pair up with someone and share something, be vulnerable. And I don't remember exactly how you set that up. But I'll never forget the conversation I had with the guy sitting next to me. And come to find out, we ended up talking about how he had grown up in this home where his mom was addicted to drugs and all the challenges related to that. And I don't know, we went off in a lot of other directions. But I I was just thinking, I mean, that's, that's not the kind of conversation you would normally have with somebody that's sitting next to you in a room. But, but yet when we open up like that, I mean, I've got, you know, I've got my story, you've, you've got yours, we all do, but yet somehow we're afraid to share that.

Well, you know, and, and you said something, you sort of buzzed by it, but I don't want to buzz by it. How I set that up was not very difficult. It was actually quite easy because I started sharing myself. And the key for us is, are we leading with vulnerability? Are we leading the room by letting our guards down sufficiently? And vulnerability is often considered a weakness. We could use different words. You could just use authentic. And know that it is our role not to wait around until the world meets us this way, but instead to lead the world in this way. Very critical.

Great insight there. And related to authenticity, I know you talk about, again, getting into that section on connecting in the digital age, you talk about the importance of authenticity online and building trust. And of course, it's, you know, it's natural, I guess, to talk about that when we're talking about kind of real, real-life person-to-person relationships. But online, you say it's better to be rough around the edges than polished into a bland sheen. And I think of going through my Facebook feed or Twitter, wherever it is, it seems like everybody is trying to be cool or show how amazing they are, and I fall into that too. I'd love to hear more from you.

Or even worse, when building a brand, you become so curated that you do look like that bland sheet. It's horrible.

Yeah, so how do we— of course, just being aware of it, I'm guessing, is a good first step, but what's your advice on how we can be more authentic, bring more authenticity into our online selves, our online brand?

Well, it's being more spontaneous. It's actually being yourself. It's using your own damn tools instead of letting a third party, you know, many corporation situations or CEOs, you know, letting a third party be your only voice to the market. It's about sharing yourself at a moment where you're really feeling. If you're feeling, other people will feel with you. And if the emotion that you're feeling is authentic, real, raw, all the better time to put it out there. I mean, people are not interested in the beautiful new version. People need to see you. When I'm on my best on stage, It's when I'm authentically me and I stop and I reflect and I'm letting people under my skin. And we can do that every day. That is how you tweet and how you post has to be a reflection of the generosity of your spirit to share with your lifelines. And that's when you'll build your brand.

Yeah, it's just— It's definitely more, I don't know, more fun. That's not exactly the right way to put it, but it's more meaningful, certainly when we, when we do connect. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I remember at that, that speech where you, you know, you talked about how, you know, you came out there with the introduction of your, your accolades and accomplishments and all that to, to make a point because then you shifted gears and then you shared more of your your story of coming up, overcoming obstacles, and certainly those are the things that make us connect with you and connect with each other more than just the stats on a page, so to speak.

Exactly.

Exactly. You know, one thing again in the technology side, the online world, you alluded to it earlier how just the sheer numbers can become overwhelming to us, the number of connections on LinkedIn or followers on Twitter, whatever it may be. You talk in the book about— there's a chapter called Tap the Fringe, and we're familiar with hearing you talk about lifelines, but I think— is this the first place you've introduced the term the fringe?

Yeah. I mean, look, we didn't have as much access to the fringe as we do today, and the fringe in both learning and development and network that I've always talked about how you need your A, your B, and your C-level priorities in terms of relationships. Your A's are that tight intimate group of lifelines that are critical to advancement, growth, your own personal emotional success, et cetera, whatever you want to consider that most important goals and objectives of your life. The C's is everybody. Everybody else. And now we have the ability, and that was originally intended just to be the idea of people you would send your annual Christmas card to, and people that if you happen to be in town you try to get together with them in a different city, etc. But now you've got something outside of that. And what you've got outside of that is everybody watching, and everybody you want to watch. I mean, the people that you follow, the people you respect. It's so easy for me to now to reach out and build relationships with people I admire. And some of them I don't necessarily need to ever meet. Others I want to convert into an A, B, or a C physical relationship. And those fringes are who I learn from. Those fringes are people who pass my information along to their audiences. And that didn't exist before. Now it does. And it's really a very powerful set of audiences. And I talk, there's a new chapter in the book around microcelebrity. And you really can, you don't have to be aware of your name by millions of people. You can be aware of the right several hundred people. And you can find that right several hundred people because they all approximate the same kind of content in the same kind of places online. Very cool.

Yeah, you know, I think of that just kind of reversing the role of, uh, myself. There are certain people I follow that I suppose fit that category, that label of, of micro celebrity, that if I mention their name to you, you may not know them, but, but to me, they, they're very relevant to me. And, and I guess we can imagine how we can put ourselves into that, into that role. Um, you give some very practical advice kind of on how you manage, manage the fringe, I guess you might say. But you, you said, said earlier how that you learn a lot, get a lot of ideas from them. How do you kind of separate your social media time or manage your social media time where you, you know, you connect with your, those true lifeline connections, but then also access those who are on the fringe?

Well, the social media is becoming more and more understanding that You can be in a wash in hundreds, sometimes even thousands of names, but they are giving us the ability to prioritize and segment. So that's what's key. I mean, I personally will make sure that I look on a daily basis at what's going on with my A-level Twitter feed. But I don't necessarily do that. I don't look at my total Twitter feed. I only look at that A-level on a daily basis. Your ability to segment Facebook, LinkedIn, and other things and use them for their appropriate uses, but at the same time prioritize various segmentations, very important.

Gotcha. How do you, when you speak to business audiences, how much do you focus on social media there and what, I'd just be interested in kind of your insight on how this plays out on a day-to-day basis for most of, let's say, the business world.

You know, I think it's very important. I do talk about it, but on 7 key items that I'm talking about in any given talk, I would say it's one of them. And it really does have to do with them building their brand. It has to do with them identifying opportunity for themselves. It has to do with them realizing that it's a form of knowledge absorption, that it's not just fanciful, that it really is an opportunity to reach out and learn a lot. I mean, just something as simple as following an industry leader and seeing what they're thinking about. Could be competition or whomever. It's amazing how many strategic insights people will put out there. On a daily basis and seeing what they're thinking about. So I don't spend a lot of time— frankly, when I'm on stage with my audience, I tend to open up their hearts to a new way of thinking, and then I allow our work in some of our technology tools that we have, some of our consulting tools, our books, I allow that to be the work that helps them take, once they've been opened to a new way of thinking, into action. So we definitely do a one-two punch in that regard. And I always start out my talks by, at some point in the first 5 minutes, letting them know I don't consider myself a success until 2 months from now they're doing something different as a result of this conversation. So I put myself still at a pretty high hurdle that way.

Yeah, yeah. Now that makes perfect sense.

No, just to wrap stuff up, the most important thing though still goes back to the old lessons of Never DeLone. It's real simple. Relationships are crucial and therefore one needs to be purposeful and planned about them. And to be purposeful and planned doesn't mean fake. It just means that it's damn important.

Yeah.

So being purposeful and planned and get your list together and align them to strategy that you have and outcomes. Is the first step. Then when you reach out to them, of course you reach out to them with generosity. Reaching out to people with generosity online is retweeting them, making sure that you are sending their comments to others, and you are being generous. You are sending them things you think might be of interest to them. Leading with generosity is crucial. Leading with authenticity, as we talked about at the very top of this interview, is crucial. Being yourself, and the more yourself the more people will be attracted to you. When you're awash in all of the memes and the posts and the feeds, what allows you to cut through, and what allows you to cut through is touching somebody more intimately. But the basic rules have not changed. What I did in this book is to let people realize the basic rules have not changed, yet there's a huge opportunity if we use these new tools much more effectively. Better than we're currently using them. I wanted to get people back on the right track.

Yeah, well said. And you know, for me, I'm— by nature, I'm an introvert, and so I love your approach to this with just the things you were just talking about— authenticity, generosity— because, you know, the old term of networking and the idea of going into a networking event, for somebody like me, that's just a nightmare. But when you think about it, in these terms and think about it's really connecting on this human level. Not to say that it's easy, you still have to be very intentional about it, but I can, I don't know, it just, human is a good word for it, I think, to make those real connections as opposed to, I think using your words, it's not about building a web of endless contacts, but it's about these meaningful connections.

You got it. I appreciate the time today.

One last thing before we go here, I wanna talk about your speaking since that's kind of the world where our lives intersect I respect a lot. Your relationships for business growth, that's kind of been your signature presentation for years, but I know you've got a couple of new things or newer where you're helping organizations with cultural change and even talking about improving customer experience. Can you give us a little bit of insight into the work you're doing as a speaker before we go here?

Absolutely. So, our— still at the core of our work is recognition that relationships and collaboration are crucial to your success in business as a leader, as a salesperson, as a careerist, for functionality and productivity increases. And that has been applied now to large leadership offsites, to large sales offsites, to Gartner Group meetings around the world for CIOs thinking about how to help their people effectively manage across silos and matrix. Which really led us into the world of change management a number of years ago. And so we have been, in fact launched a research institute of human behavior change. Sort of a combination of the segue from living and managing in a matrix requires managing change and managing people differently, led us into the change management space. But I also just got frustrated because it's one thing to, It's one thing to teach people what they have to do differently in sales, in leadership. It's another thing to make sure that they get it done. So we put a lot of research into human behavior change and how to shift and engineer different behaviors. And we have had tons of success in both large-stage opening up of organizations to realize they need to change, how they will change, and begin to set them on a path to change differently. We've started a whole series of talks we call Challenge Talks, which challenge an organization in a highly customized fashion to think about and open the idea that behaviors need to change to meet strategy. We spend a lot of time now, what kind of strategies? Obviously, the trusted advisor, customer experience, etc. A lot of those have to do with stronger relationships with customers. My marketing background, has dovetailed very nicely into that. So we find ourselves doing talks around that as well. So if I think about it, it's always at the core, it's about how people do business differently. But it's also how do you get people to do business differently, the change management and the behavior change. And how do we get people to do business differently with customers as an extension of that also becomes an important element of what we're focused on. So we haven't deviated from our core, but our research and our team is much bigger now. I mean, we've got, you know, at any given time upwards of 50 folks at the company and transforming some of the largest, most prestigious companies' behaviors around the world. It's an exciting time to be at Ferozii Greenlight and really proud to be the ambassador out there on big stages talking about our research and our work. And I appreciate our partnership for sure.

Oh, that's awesome, Keith. And it's just been great for me watching you and your company grow and just watching your influence continue to expand. I love the spirit of— I love your spirit and the spirit of everything you're doing. So, I'm honored to be connected and again, grateful for you spending some time here today.

Pleasure. And thanks a lot for having me. Cheers.

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