18. Health, Wealth, and Children
What do you really want? Side by side, those five words may be the most universally resonant in the English language.
As I discussed in the chapter "What's Your Mission?" the answer to "What do you really want?" determines all that you do and all the people who help you accomplish it. It provides the blueprint for all your efforts to reach out and connect with others. Likewise, when you understand someone else's mission, you hold the key to opening the door to what matters most to them. Knowing that will help you create deep, long-lasting bonds.
In my initial conversation with someone I'm just getting to know, whether it's a new men tee or simply a new business contact, I try to find out what motivations drive that person. It often comes down to one of three things: making money, finding love, or changing the world. You laugh—most people do when confronted with the reality of their deepest desires.
Get comfortable with that reality. Learning to become a connector means in some sense learning to become an armchair therapist. As you continue down this path, you'll become a keen observer of the human psyche. You'll have to learn what makes people tick and how best to satisfy whatever tick that may be. It means calling something BS when you see people being less than honest with themselves.
The most successful relationship builders are, indeed, a nifty amalgam of financial guru, sex therapist, and all-around dogooder.
Connecting is a philosophy of life, a worldview. Its guiding principle is that people, all people, every person you meet, is an opportunity to help and be helped. Why do I place so much importance on mutual dependence? For starters, because, as a matter of necessity, we are all social beings. Our strength comes from what we do and know cumulatively. The fact is, no one gets ahead in this world without a lot of help.
Eliminating things like intimidation and manipulation, there is only one way to get anybody to do anything. Do you know what it is?
This is far from a trivial question. Business is, after all, the ability to motivate a group of individuals to move an idea from concept to reality; to take a theory and make it a practice; to gain the buy-in of your employees and colleagues; to encourage others to execute your plans.
If you're still not sure what the answer is, take heart; many people don't. There are hundreds of new books published each year grappling with how to engender loyalty and motivation. Most arrive at the wrong answer.
They get it wrong because of the assumptions they make. It's in vogue for people to exclaim: Everything is new! Everything is different! Business has changed! The answers, people suggest, must be found in technology or new forms of leadership or funky organizational theories. But is there anything really new or different about people? Not really.
The principles of how to deal with other people are the ones Dale Carnegie espoused over sixty years ago that have proven to be universal and timeless.
The only way to get people to do anything is to recognize their importance and thereby make them feel important. Every person's deepest lifelong desire is to be significant and to be recognized.
What better way is there to show appreciation and to lavish praise on others than to take an interest in who they are and what their mission is?
There is an added nuance to discovering what matters to people. Helping someone accomplish his or her deepest desires is critical not only to forming a bond with someone but to keeping that bond strong and growing. Loyalty may be the forgotten virtue of the modern age, but it remains the hallmark of any strong relationship and a value many companies are working hard to bring into their day-to-day practices.
Loyalty, to me, means staying true to someone (or something, like a brand or a customer segment) through thick and thin. Loyalty is a marathon rather than a sprint. As any good brand manager knows, you don't win customer loyalty quickly. It has to be earned. How?
Let me tell you a story about Michael Milken: yes, the financial and deal-making guru but also a man who is a philanthropist and deeply insightful human behaviorist. Through Entertainment Media Ventures (EMV), Mike was an investor in the start-up company I joined after Starwood. And, during my recruitment as CEO, I made it clear to him and my friend Sandy Climan, who led EMV, that a big motivation of taking the job would be to learn from Mike while running the company. I had already gotten to know Mike independently a few years back while acting as an advisor to DuPont, when the company was starting a consumer soy-milk joint venture. Mike was someone I had always wanted to meet—one of my early aspirational contacts. I had discovered through some articles I had read about him that he had a great deal of interest in soy and its curative effects. He had suffered a bout with prostate cancer, which he turned into a passion for health care and the importance of preventative medicine. To Mike, diet was an integral component in that mix, and it became a personal and philanthropic passion.
From the beginning of my tenure as CEO, I sought to build the company and further my relationship with Mike. He, in turn, took me under his wing and opened his world to me.
If he was going to New York for one of his many CapCure fundraisers, which support scientific research to find cures for prostate cancer, or traveling to someplace to give out recognition and money to exceptional teachers through the Milken Family Foundation, I would try to catch a ride. My only goal was to watch how he worked and perhaps glean a few insights in the process. I made it a point to identify customers or prospects at whatever destination city he was going to, so it was time well spent for YaYa as well.
Most of the time, we would sit quietly working. He would plow through one of the ten bags of reading he lugs with him wherever he goes, and I, of course, would be pounding away on my computer, e-mailing and connecting with abandon for YaYa revenue generation and business development. There was much to be learned in simply watching what he read and how he thought or reflected.
On one trip in particular, Mike and I began to talk about people's passions, what really mattered to people. It was then that I received profound insight about people and loyalty. You see, Mike, in addition to having a brilliant quantitative mind, is also a relationship artist.
I have seen him spend hours talking to people you'd never expect him to take an interest in: secretaries, the very old and the very young, the powerful and the powerless. He loves people, their stories, and how they view the world. When I mentioned that to him, I was reminded of what Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him." Everyone had something to teach him.
This focus on people was the reason so many of them showed so much loyalty to him. I feel that same loyalty. I asked how so many people became so invested in their relationship with him. What did he know that others didn't? Mike paused for a moment, as he does when he particularly likes (or dislikes) a question. Then he smiled.
"Keith," he said, "there are three things in this world that engender deep emotional bonds between people. They are health, wealth, and children."
There are a lot of things we can do for other people: give good advice, help them wash their car, or help them move. But health, wealth, and children affect us in ways other acts of kindness do not.
When you help someone through a health issue, positively impact someone's personal wealth, or take a sincere interest in their children, you engender life-bonding loyalty.
Mike's experience was, in fact, backed by research. Psychologist Abraham Maslow created a theory outlining human beings' hierarchy of needs. We all have the same needs, Maslow believed, and our more basic needs must be satisfied before our higher needs can be addressed.