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The Social Capitalist: Keith Ferrazzi on the Power of Giving
“In service lies growth.” In this episode of the Social Capitalist, Keith Ferrazzi told us how that basic truth has transformed his life and business.
Keith, author of Never Eat Alone and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, joined host Sara Grace in an energizing,
action-‐oriented conversation on philanthropy and individual service as the keys to a successful, satisfied life.
This is an edited transcript from a live Social Capitalist event. The Social Capitalist is sponsored programming of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a change-‐management consulting and training firm. The interactive interview series is dedicated to delivering in depth discussion on relationship science with the best and brightest thought leaders in business and academia.
SARA GRACE: Welcome to today’s Social Capitalist. Today we’re here to talk about the power of giving, the idea that giving is growth, and how you can make service an incredibly enriching, change-‐making part of your life and also of your business culture. To show us how to do it we’re here with Keith Ferrazzi, calling in from Los Angeles. He, as most of you I’m sure know, is the best-‐selling author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back. He is the founder and CEO of the change management and leadership development firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, and he is also, most importantly for today’s conversation, the founder of Greenlight Giving, a non-‐profit that takes on collaborative change projects around the world using Ferrazzi Greenlight’s methodologies to help disadvantaged communities and change lives.
Keith, thank you so much for doing this and being patient through the technical confusion. So, Greenlight Giving, this is the 501c(3) you created. Can you tell me how it got started and how it developed to arrive at its mission today?
KEITH FERRAZZI: Well, first of all, Sara, thanks a lot for coming up with this idea for Social Capitalist. We’ve interviewed such awesome people and when you called and said that you wanted to interview me, I frankly thought it was just a cop-‐out to not have to do all the hard
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work for prep and then I realized how much work we had to do to get ready for this! It’s really an important subject for me, as you well know, and it’s exciting that we’re going to be sharing this with our community.
What we did, as you remember, a number of years ago, is when we launched Greenlight Giving, it was our non-‐profit focused on putting all of our intellectual property to work. A long time ago I had this belief that collaborative action and deeper relationships are what a big component of what is missing in society to advance social good. And part of that came about by talking with a friend of mine, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who many people know as Dr. Oz from the TV show, but you also may know him as an individual who’s a major social evangelist for health and wellness in the United States, and that’s a cause of particular interest to me as well.
So we put together an annual event called Big Task, Big Task Weekend. At the time we had Safeway as a client of ours. We also had a number of other folks who were interested in the health and wellness arena so we pulled together a group of executives who, individually in the foundations within their own corporations or individually within their foundation, cared deeply about the health and wellness cause. I’ve always felt that if they came together with greater collaborative action, deeper mutual commitment, higher degrees of candor in getting the real messages at the forefront, that collectively the consumer packaged goods companies, the beverages companies, the grocery store chains, the American Diabetes Association, the 24 Hour Fitnesses, those kinds of organizations could come together and make a bigger difference on a bigger task. So we launched Big Task for Collaborative Action.
Over the years we’ve put the same idea in practice. What I was really trying to do was take the work we were doing for corporations and bring that to life for individuals in need. So we started doing things like taking our intellectual properties that we would teach to consultants or financial advisors on how to deepen relationships, we would bring that same intellectual property and teach college students. I launched it at Yale University, originally.
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We called it CollegeCONNECT, where we talked to college kids in their sophomore year about how to deepen and build their networks in service of getting their internships for the summer. And we were able to increase the efficacy of those kids getting internships.
My personal story relative to Daniel, my foster son, was that he was such a touching and moving element of my life that we realized that one of the big challenges with disadvantaged youth, particularly in foster care, was that these kids had had abusive relationships as their primary relationships early on, and then as they went through the foster care system, these kids were treated transactionally—not intimately, not emotionally, not connectedly. And as a result these kids graduated at 18 and everyone was so focused on how, for these kids, they didn’t have any money or wherewithal, but, really, their biggest gap was that they didn’t have relationship skills.
So they found their families in gangs, they found intimacy in prostitution, and I believe that if we taught these kids relationships skills early on we could graduate these kids as more functional members of society. You know, 80 percent of the U.S. prison population came from foster care. So we started creating curriculum for disadvantaged youth.
We created curriculum for high school kids, and we’ve now just launched a program where we’ve created curriculum for vets who were returning from service needing to build relationships and relationship skills to get back into the workforce.
So the whole intent, originally, was to take our IP, our intellectual property, and put it to work in society. And what we found all along is that the advantage to our company has been extraordinary, the advantage to me personally, the advantage to our people and to our friends who we’ve invited in to participate, has been off the Richter scale recognizing that, as we say at Ferrazzi Greenlight, within service lies growth. And I think that that’s why we wanted to bring this to this audience in the recognition of how powerful service has been in the
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transformation of the lives of the people that have been of service.
SARA GRACE: That’s definitely one of the things I really want to hit on, and really two sides of it, one, giving people ideas based on what you’ve done at Ferrazzi Greenlight about how to create so many synergies between business and service actions, so we’ll go down that line. But two, I also want to talk about what you just brought up, which is this idea that the power of giving comes back to you twofold.
So let’s actually start there, let’s talk about this idea of “giving is growth” or in service lies growth, which is listed as one of the missions of Greenlight Giving. How has that made you a better leader personally? How has that changed your life in terms of what you bring to the office everyday or what goes on at home?
KEITH FERRAZZI: I’ll tell a little bit of a story about myself and then I’ll move from that to some of our clients and then I’ll take that out to our employees at Ferrazzi Greenlight as well.
So on a personal basis, we woke up a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago. Around Christmas time every year we go to these amazing conferences, like the Renaissance Weekend, and etc. And we talked so much about changing the world at these conferences, and that’s fantastic. But as you well know, Sara, our whole focus at Ferrazzi Greenlight is about behavioral transformations, and action. We don’t give a damn that you went through a training course. What we care about is that you applied it in your life and you made a difference and that that difference is measurable. That’s all we care about. That’s the ruthless focus of our organization. And to that end I realized I wasn’t living it myself as much as I would’ve liked to.
I also recognized that to some extent I was applying my philanthropic outreach, I think, too much at the time for the sake of my professional gain. You know, it was about giving free speeches to big organizations. It was about being on boards where there were networking opportunities, and I had to take a
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reflective look at my goals for the year a few years ago and say, “Where am I being of humble service?”
My whole family and I started doing Meals-‐on-‐Wheels, where on Sundays we would just go around and we would serve people in the Meals-‐on-‐Wheels program. I’ve got to tell you how touching it was to show up at a little old lady’s house where she had woken up early that day and put on her lipstick. Right? And she was getting up, waiting for us to come, because that was the only connectivity she had that day. And that was so touching to me, and it became infectious.
We tend to go to church not as regularly as we’d like, and that’s a commitment this year, to go to church more, but I began to find that within my service I was unleashing my sense of spirituality and it was very powerful to me and very powerful to our family. And it was non-‐religious based. It was just opening up your soul to another human being. And I realized that I became softer through my service.
Now, like church, of course, just as preachers talk about the Sunday to Monday drop-‐off, I can be wonderfully soft and open, and by noon on Monday, depending on what’s going on, I’m back to being Keith Ferrazzi again, right? So I knew I needed to bring more constancy into my life and my service.
And so in thinking about that, we also started thinking about how we spent our vacations. There’s a wonderful organization in San Antonio called Cultural Embrace, which I reached out to. They had never done high-‐end travel before, because what they did is they put college kids to work in service in third-‐world countries as a part of vacations and outreach.
I reached out to them and said, “Listen. You know, I’m unlikely to be taking a month off and sleeping in a shack, my business can’t afford that right now. But what I would like to do is, I’d like for on the next trip I do internationally, whether that’s to China, whether that’s to Tibet, wherever I happen to be going for business purposes, I would like you to find disadvantaged youth that I can go be of service to. Go find orphanages. I’ll raise money, I’ll go
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there, I’ll work with the kids, even if it means I’ll just extend my trip a weekend, right?
And what’s interesting, we decided to go down to Guatemala one year. And we showed up there and it was such this… it was an amazing situation. We showed up and we were prepared for an entire trip where we lived in this wonderful little city called Antigua in this gorgeous old mission hotel, one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve ever been in my life for, like, 200 bucks a night, right? And every day we would forage out into the community and work with kids that ate every other day. And we raised money among our Ferrazzi Greenlight family, our fans from Never Eat Alone, etc., like “a couple of hundred bucks, folks,” and were able to transform these kids lives for a year. It educates them, it feeds them, it houses them, it gives them medication. Two hundred bucks, right?
So I started giving away every year at Christmas to all my clients the gift of having taken care of an orphan, having taken care of a little kid. And then I started giving these little pictures … you know, what I would do is I would take a picture of that kid they helped holding up a sign that says, “Thank you, Mehmet,” right? And I sent it to them. Then they’d call me and they’d say, “That was beautiful. Can we go with you next time?”
All of a sudden clients and friends started coming with us, and they experienced the same thing I experienced, which was just transformative. My heart melted, my friends’ hearts melted, our kids started coming with us, and then every night we started having dinner parties while we were there. And those dinner parties that we have while we were there became opportunities to share our experiences with each other, to talk about our lives. The kids would talk about how they started seeing the world in a different way as a result of the service that they were doing. We started setting goals together at these dinners.
Then I started doing my natural Keith Ferrazzi thing, and I said, “Well, who are the most powerful and important people in Guatemala? Let me have dinner with them while I’m here.” Right? But at the same time, I was out there in these communities
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working with social entrepreneurs, women who had given over their huts to 20 orphans in the community who were sleeping there full-‐time, and she was feeding them as best as she could, and, of course, I invited her to dinner, too. And as a result I had the wealthiest families in Guatemala having dinner with the poorest social evangelist in Guatemala, along with these American executives.
And the weirdest thing started to happen. The collaborative action that I started at Big Task began to come alive in Antigua accidentally, and I realized, holy #@$, I was doing the same thing there that we had done at Big Task. We’ve created collaborative action in Antigua and those wealthy people were getting these social entrepreneurs funded that they didn’t even know were there.
Then, all of a sudden, I said, “Wait a second. We’re doing this—why don’t we take our training down to Guatemala? Why don’t we teach these social entrepreneurs how to build networks to be more effective?” And then, because I wanted more and more of the wealthy people to come to help these social entrepreneurs, I started doing free training sessions for the wealthy elite in Guatemala with all of our IP that we would charge thousands and thousands of dollars for. I’d give it away but the little secret thing that I would do is I would put them all at the same tables with these social entrepreneurs. Right? And by the end of the day of doing the training they had created partnerships and they were working with each other. Right?
And now what we’ve done, and this is really kind of crazy, I’m so excited about going back, we got a massive donation, a confidential donation I’m not allowed to talk about, we got a donation of 3,000 pairs of kids shoes, new shoes that we’re taking down with us. And what we’re going to do is with every pair of new shoes, we’re going to give out a two-‐pager for these kids. And depending upon the age range, we’re going to give out a two-‐page thing written in their local languages, a little tutorial about how to build the kind of relationships that they need to break out of their cycle of poverty. Interestingly enough, even these very
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poor kids, many who travel miles and miles to school, are on Facebook. So we’re opening a Facebook page and we’re running a contest for these kids. Whoever takes the shoes and the flyer and puts it to use to help themselves, and then puts it to use to help someone else, and shares their stories on Facebook, we will have a scholarship grant for the kids who do it the best. And not only are we going to do that but when we come back we’re going to pull together all of the kids who have been doing well and have been writing on Facebook, all of them will get to come together and we’ll host a one-‐day event for them where we’ll introduce them to the wealthy elite and get them internships and jobs.
Now, my bigger dream is to take the Yale CollegeCONNECT program where we’re teaching kids the life skills that they need in college to get their internships, we’re now migrating that to Belmont University and to Colgate University. This, by the way, is a free curriculum offered to any college in the United States, sponsored by TIAA-‐CREF, and I want to begin to bring these college kids together at the various schools. The ones that are kicking butt and doing the best, we’re going to cull them out and anoint them in a community called Greenlight Givers and they’ll be part of an annual event. And we’ll also, then, take some of the kids down to Guatemala to meet the local indigenous kids who are also Greenlight Givers. And then we’re going to take the returning vets and the ones that are applying the philosophy the best, we’ll anoint them as Greenlight Givers and we’ll have them helping other vets, and then meeting the college kids, and then among the disadvantaged inner city youth, we’ll have all of these communities who are Greenlight Givers coming together, using our IP to both advance their own lives but also using the IP to advance others and serve and grow. So these kids will be of service, these kids will be teachers and this community of Greenlight Givers I’m so excited about, this idea, and this has become the formative element of our foundation.
SARA GRACE: I want to talk about Teach and Grow, because that’s also a core value, it’s something you’ve built into the learning culture of Ferrazzi Greenlight and also, clearly, it relates to what you just said about Greenlight Giving. Can you talk a little bit about how
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that works and how other people might bring that to their company?
KEITH FERRAZZI: Well, the first time I realized Teach and Grow was real was when I woke up and said, “Listen, Keith, you can’t stand on stage every day and give lectures and talks and work with clients about how to be a better leader and engage more deeply with your employees who can then turn around and engage customers….you can’t train folks in this intellectual property and not have realized that if you’re not moving in that direction every day more and more yourself, you’re a damn hypocrite.” Right?
In part, it’s core to my DNA, I never stop growing. I have to grow, and I’m constantly looking for new ways to be a better leader, and that’s an assumed position for me. But what I have found is that if an employee of Ferrazzi Greenlight goes out to an inner city school and teaches our intellectual property, they own it more than they ever did before. If they’re going to go out and teach inner city kids how important it is to build relationships to get out of their cycle of poverty, then they better come back and realize that they have to put their own Relationship Action Plan into place.
And so what we’ve done is, for instance, at General Motors, we began to take our clients into inner city schools. At GM, we’re helping district managers to open up “Trusted Advisor” relationships with the dealership, which is all about creating a deeper partnership, helping that individual do a gap analysis on their business, closing that gap analysis by heightening employee engagement, all in service of increasing customer satisfaction. So when we take those same district managers to inner city schools, they’re teaching that to kids to advance in their own ways with their relationships with their peers, relationships with their teachers, relationships with their parents, etc. They’re putting their own Relationship Action Plan together, doing their own gap analysis on where they are in their lives.
And so again, what we find in this work, is that you can’t stand in front of an audience and teach something without it impacting you.
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One of the things that’s very important to me is, as you begin to learn something about our intellectual property and the reason why we, as an organization, are better than most at human behavior change, is that we don’t just teach stuff. We change habits, we change addictive, old, bad behaviors. And a part of that is an immersive, an experiential, or what we call “mission-‐based” learning system which forces people to do stuff. And part of what we tell people to do is that, to finish learning it, you’ve got to go teach it, and if you can’t teach it then it’s really never going to solidify in your soul. Does that make any sense?
SARA GRACE: That totally makes sense. And I think that it’s a key for people as they think about what in their business might be something that they can use to give back to the broader community.
On that line of thinking, what do you recommend for anyone on this call who might be thinking, “How can I make service a bigger part of my life or a bigger part of my business?” How do you recommend that people choose a cause? Is this an area where it’s okay for them to be purposeful, or is it something that should be completely driven by passion?
KEITH FERRAZZI: I think they have to be driven by passion. Look, at Ferrazzi Greenlight, we have made a commitment that employees will spend 10 percent of their time in service. And we’re still working out the details of how that works and what that looks like, but that’s real money and that’s real time. I think about all the time that I spend on the foundation—it’s an extraordinary amount of time, getting ready for Guatemala. I mean, when we do Big Task it sucks down at least a third of our organization for months in advance, and you can see the bottom-‐line impact at the end of the year is significant when we do Big Task. It hurts our bottom line, but it’s a compulsion for me, and it’s just what I have to do. I love it. It’s deep in my soul. It’s why I’m on this earth. I wake up because I want to make a difference.
I do love making a difference at large corporations, because large corporations have opened up, in a sense, the pulpit of their organization to me to transform people’s lives, which is fantastic. I’m so blessed to do that, but there’s a hell of a lot of people out
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there who need this kind of work even more than a district manager of an automotive company. Right? So it’s become a compulsion for me.
Now that said, I have found just natural and elegant ways to integrate it into our business life. I mean, the people that I take with me to Guatemala, the fact that we’re taking GM employees into inner city schools, the fact that it is some of our friends… I may turn around and have a conversation with an executive and have that individual invest in our inner city kid program where we teach kids rap music to help them tell….you know, it’s interesting, we have translated myGreenlight, which is a mission-‐based online program to help you transform your life through people-‐based skills and networking and people relationships, we’ve translated myGreenlight into the language of rap music. Like, instead of the 30 weeks of curriculum that is in myGreenlight, we’ve got three months of curriculum all wrapped around rap music because that’s the language of those students. We’ve translated the language for vets into vet language, for college kids into college kid language—but it’s all the same skills.
So it’s been so extraordinary, to see how once you’re open to it the business elements have just blended—which, again, you guys, remember Never Eat Alone. In one chapter I say, “Don’t live a balanced life. Live a blended life.” If you try to live a balanced life, which means I’m going to spend so much time at work, so much time in planning to be, so much time with spirituality, so much time with my friends, so much time with my family, so much time with whatever, no one piece of that time will ever be big enough, ever, to be great. But in this I’m blending it all. My family, my colleagues at work, my clients, my desire to feed my spirituality, my desire to feed my true humble sense of philanthropy. And guess what?
Along the way I have oddly… it has helped my business. We just recently brought on a couple of new managing directors and senior folks at our firm. One of them, Brian, who’s sitting behind me, and Walt, sitting over here, and I can guarantee you, or I suspect, and I’m seeing heads nod, that a chunk of why they
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decided to go with this company is that we’re mission driven. Brian spent time in the Peace Corps, he’s mission-‐driven. I know Walt feels the same way at this stage of his life, he wants to make a difference. And that’s been one of the biggest things where, from a recruiting perspective and I hope and believe from an employee engagement perspective, we see impact.
I’d love to tell a story about what happened at our employee offsite this year where I gave everyone in the company a little stack of $5 bills. We were down in Venice at my beach house, and everybody in the company in small teams of – I guess it was like four or five people – we sent everybody out in teams to give away that stack of $5 bills to people of need. And I knew that Venice is a place where we have homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes, you have all these individuals living on the street. I knew that there would be, unfortunately, an abundance of people in need. And I sent the group away with these $5 bills and said, “The only commitment is that when you come back you have to bring back with you their stories.”
I wanted to teach my folks “Serve and Grow” in a light manner, where they had to go out and touch another human being in need and engage in a dialogue, not just in writing a check. And I have to tell you it was so touching to me when JP, one of our managing partners, called me at Thanksgiving, all choked up—and mind you, this happened back in August, right? He wanted to tell me that he just got back from delivering two bags of groceries to the couple that he met in August at their homeless hut that they created down in Venice. He lives up in Bel Air. Right? And that’s a schlep down to Venice to go shopping for those folks, to find them and to give them those groceries, and to sit with them over at Thanksgiving and talk to them about how their life was and where they were. That meant so much to JP. He was grateful for the experience. That’s Serve and Grow. And that’s how you integrate and balance your philosophy, your philanthropy, your service, your spirituality, and your business. That’s, to me, the joy of this philosophy.
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SARA GRACE: A fan had asked on your blog, “What’s the best way to get employees engaged with these kinds of CSR programs?” I think the implication being that sometimes the leader might have the compulsion, but it’s harder to kind of get the troops to kind of open their eyes and connect. The story you just told, I think, is a great example of how to kind of give them the opportunity to experience it and connect them that way. Do you have any other tips for getting other people, especially employees, as inspired around these ideas as you are? We will go to Q&A after this question. Just want to give everyone a heads-‐up to chat questions so that we can ask them to Keith in a moment. Sorry, Keith, go ahead.
KEITH FERRAZZI: First of all, Sara, it starts with who you hire. I mean, I was touched by Brian’s need to serve and his desire to make a difference in the world. Annette Templeton, who we brought over from Gallup, why did she leave the Gallup consulting practice and come to Ferrazzi Greenlight, which is significantly smaller in size? Why? Because of the mission-‐driven element of it. And so it’s who you hire, is number one.
Number two, just make them, dammit. Right? I own a set of time of a person’s life that we give and donate to our clients and our time, etc. And if I say that we’re going to spend 10 percent of our time in philanthropy, then we will, and that’s what we’re paying people for. So that’s done. I mean, they can choose not to work here if they don’t want to do that, but it’s one of the biggest gifts I think we give people.
Now, how do you make that really work? Ten percent is a lot—is that the right number? How are we making it work? How do we compensate people for it? How do we reward people for it? All of that is to be worked out. If anybody is really interested as an entrepreneur and you control a business, to think about how we’re doing it, give us a call and Brian and I will spend some time talking about how we’re operationalizing that.
But look, the other issue is, lead by example. I really haven’t asked the question of whether or not there’s anybody in the firm who just by virtue of my passion has picked up on that passion and is
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doing this themselves. But I know that JP’s trip to Venice was precipitated by the experience that he had over the summer that was a part of work—he didn’t have to spend any time of his Thanksgiving away from his family going down there and doing that. Right? So I think it’s leading by example, and giving people opportunities. Just like when we change human behavior. You don’t change by knowing, you change by experiencing. We call it “small eye-‐droppers of change,” over an extended period of time. Enough drip, drip, drip of the service message with your folks, but giving them then the experience, too.
You’ve got to curate time for this. If I didn’t take a chunk of my offsite to do this then they would have gotten the taste. When we’re trying to teach people how to be a better, more collaborative team, we hijack the staff meeting and force the staff meeting to be more collaborative. And so that’s giving people a taste of this stuff. You’ve got to give people a taste in order for them to have the same addiction that I have relative to the contagion of needing to be of service almost compulsively now.
SARA GRACE: Giving people a taste, that’s a good comment because it totally reflects back Ferrazzi Greenlight’s entire behavioral change philosophy. All right, a couple of questions from the room. The first one is very interesting and I feel like I’m going to have to give it an explainer, although I think you’ll know what it’s about. So Burning Man. Burning Man is, just for anyone in the call who isn’t connected or familiar with it, it’s an art festival and an alternative community that happens once a year in Nevada. The event runs on something called a gift economy, and the idea is that you don’t buy water or dinner or a place to sleep, if you don’t have one— rather, it’s given to you as a gift. And people bring just a ton of generosity to the event that makes it work. The question, and I may have stolen some of the answer, but the question is, what’s your take on this “gift economy”? And what is that place without commerce? How does that fit in with this idea of humble service? And also I’d love to know if that’s been in any way inspirational to you, or something that you’re connected with.
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KEITH FERRAZZI: Well, for those who don’t know what Burning Man is.... There are certain iconic events that occur around the world, and I only know a few of them personally. I’ve often talked of Davos and the World Economic Forum. People know that I’ve been a Tedster and I go to the Ted Conference and have for years and years and years. I talked about Renaissance Weekend. There’s the kids at the Summit Series, which is basically the next-‐generation social entrepreneurship conference that they do. I put Burning Man in that group, and maybe it’s more like the events like Art Basel. But it’s an escape from the map, a place created by folks who have a very different philosophy. It’s escape from the capitalistic way in which we live. You’re not allowed to buy or sell anything there, and you go there and everything you need or want you trade or gift. There are some people that try this social experiment where they show up with literally nothing but clothes on their back, not even food or shelter or clothes enough that they would get through the first cold night. And they spend a week there and they end up at the end sitting in a little camp with everything they possibly need. Part of the gift that they gave could’ve just been walking into a camp and singing a song, or walking into a camp and being generous with offering to clean up or do something or just being a lovely person, right, being of generous spirit.
Now, I take executives to it, and that is a very interesting experience. The way we do Burning Man is we fly in on our private jet into the playa, which is ridiculous. We have 25 RVs, we take 25 staff, we have a sushi chef … I mean, it is crazy what we do. But what I want to do is to give executives who would never dare go to Burning Man—and like myself, I would’ve never gone to Burning Man—I wanted to give them the opportunity to show up for two or three days and witness and see this environment. It’s one of the most beautiful art exhibits, movable art, fire art, everything is art while it’s there. It’s like six or five thousand people, each of which is walking around in costumes that are art, every car has to be an art car. It’s just a crazy interesting wonderful experience.
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Look. It is for those who believe that there is a social utopia possible. They try to create this. Right? It’s very much ’60s-‐driven, you know, coming from the Bay area where it was all created.
It was funny, because I was sitting there watching the man burn, and one of my guests looked at me, and I said, “This is really beautiful.” And they said, “Do you realize we are the man?” And I said, “Yeah, I kinda get, that but let’s put that aside.”
Look, the answer is it’s an experience. It’s experience and, I have to say, there’s nothing particularly service-‐oriented at that event, although there are major service elements to it. There’s an art element, beautiful and important, I think, that part of society.
But it is an experiential dose of something like what I’m trying to do in Guatemala. Like what I do when I take some of the interns into the inner city school. It’s something that you get immersed in and you grow from the immersion. You don’t read about it, you don’t watch it on TV, you go put yourself in the middle of it. I have taken the chief marketing officers and CEOs of many iconic companies because I’ve said, “I don’t know what you’re going to do with this, but you’ll experience something, and do something with it.” And that’s, to me, how we learn.
Remember, go back to our core, we are a behavioral transformation organization. Behavioral transformation is the core of our DNA. What makes Ferrazzi Greenlight special and what makes Greenlight Giving extraordinary is that we bring behavioral transformation to life – in people and in society, for disadvantaged, underserved communities and disadvantaged and underserved causes, like foster care, like health and wellness, like returning vets, like disadvantaged youth, like third-‐world towns outside of Guatemala that even the rich of their region have turned their backs on. But you’ve got to do it experientially.
SARA GRACE: All jokes aside I would be amazed if that experience hadn’t changed some of those CEOs or CMOs, which, like you said, is an incredible gift. So another question…
KEITH FERRAZZI: One of the executives came back and reorganized how his creative services organization, which was a big part of his
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company, was managed. Everybody out there at Burning Man is some free spirit and he realized that the free spirits in his creative division needed something different than what he needed as an operationally, engineer-‐oriented executive. So he came back and he freed up the management of that group in ways that he’d never thought of before. So yes, it does make an impact.
SARA GRACE: A question from Jeffrey Howell. It’s an interesting one because Jeffrey has taken a step that I think many people take to get themselves started in service and in connecting their business to service. For his Christmas cards or Christmas gifts this holiday he used Heifer.org, which is a great organization where you can give a donation that I think purchases a family a farm animal, if I remember correctly. But what he found was that he didn’t really feel like he got much of a reaction. He just felt like it was underwhelming, or people just didn’t get it. So do you have suggestions on how to engage others? You know, maybe something as simple… okay, go ahead. Let’s hear it.
KEITH FERRAZZI: We found the same thing. Even now I’m still disappointed. Like, I love this little course of things that I try to do, but usually they don’t work. One of the things I tried to do was to a $200 gift at the holidays, putting the money in service of a kid, and sending a note that it was in their name. And I thought, if I did this, aren’t they going to want to then turn around and pay it forward the next year? Aren’t they going to be so touched? And, it was interesting, I got very underwhelming response. So what I learned, though, was that...in fact, do you remember this was in that book, Sara, that I asked you to read after I had read it and I loved it, it was a book about… oh, gosh, now I’m embarrassed because… anyway. It was a book about advertising and marketing.
SARA GRACE: I think it’s The Power of Yes. It’s…
KEITH FERRAZZI: I was thinking that’s what it was. I think it is The Power of Yes but for some reason…
SARA GRACE: I have it.
KEITH FERRAZZI: Yes, it is. It is The Power of Yes.
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SARA GRACE: I have it on my shelf.
KEITH FERRAZZI: Yup. In The Power of Yes, one of the things that it talked about was the importance of putting an individual face to a contribution like that. So if you look at Sally Struthers, right, and those advertisements, it wasn’t about “you can help children.” It was you can help Daniel here, you can help Sally here. And what I realized was that it wasn’t about helping a cause, because causes are overwhelming to us. We know society is challenged, we know that kids are starving, we know that children are abused….we know, we know, we know. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I know. I got my own problems. I know.
So what we started to do was taking pictures of a child, a single child, holding up a sign saying, “Thank you, Mehmet.” “Thank you, Lisa.” And I would send those pictures along, and for some individuals I’ve actually – and I do this with maybe about 10 percent of them – I actually print the pictures out, and I send them in a frame. That picture sits on their desk and that makes an impact.
This is all to make the personal connection, with empathy. I’m not suggesting that building a playground is a bad idea, as service. It’s an awesome idea. I’m not suggesting that Habitat for Humanity is a bad idea. It’s an awesome idea. But it doesn’t transform the soul in the same way as sitting with a kid who’s hungry, who’s giggling and loving his life because you’re there. That is… that’s life changing. Being of service to a human, sitting with a homeless person and hearing their story, you know, even if they’re ranting because they’re on drugs, sitting and being empathetic is what changes us. And that’s what allows me as a leader to sit in a room and hear the criticism of my leadership skills. And that’s what allows me, when I can get the noise out of my head about the success, or the lack of success, or the growth, with the impact and the numbers—when I clear that out and there’s a person sitting in front of me and I’m connecting with that person…you know, that Bill Clinton-‐esque capacity to stand with someone in a cocktail party, and the world melts and that person thinks that Bill Clinton is just focused on him, because he is? I don’t think I’d have that
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ability—I’m too insecure, I’m too worried, I’m too scarcity-‐minded to have that deep connection and empathy—if I didn’t do these things.
This work is my training to be the kind of human I want to be. I’m not doing it as much as I should, which is why I will never give up doing this work. I have to. And so my suggestion to you is, if you personalize this work more and more and more, you will show up as the person you need to be, but you’ll also communicate it to those you’re giving this gift to. So that’s a very long answer. I think I answered a few things.
SARA GRACE: I think you covered that one well, though. I do want to give you one more question. I’d like you to use it as a kind of sign-‐off, as well, so people can get on their way. We have a question from Colleen Newvine. She wrote, which I thought was really good, a question about how to make sure that, essentially, that you are truly helping the people that you want to help. Because there’s a lot of people with good intentions who kind of dive in with both feet. Hold on, let me find her question because she actually worded it much better than I am. “People whose hearts are a hundred percent in the right place might not understand the community they want to help. So do you recommend finding a local organization to help guide your service? How do you recommend people get involved?”
KEITH FERRAZZI: Right. Well, I think that’s a beautiful question and it comes from such a gorgeous place of wanting to make sure that, you know, here we are—there’s not a single person listening to this call who isn’t deeply privileged. And I’m sure that there are people listening to this call who know that their Christmas may not be as prosperous as they want it to be and they may be in a challenged place. But we’re still all blessed. And I think that that question comes bound up with the question, will I insult, will I alienate, will I say the wrong thing. I can’t pretend to understand their experience but I don’t care—and neither will they if your heart is in the right place.
By the way, if you’re bounding frenetically, insecure and worried, and you’re bouncing off the walls and you’re trying to help, you’re
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trying to do this, you’re trying to do that, then guess what? You may rub some people the wrong way. But if you softly walk in with humility, with care, with empathy, and you get your head into the right mindset, they’ll guide you to what they need. If you get out of your own head… but by the way, this is true of us as leaders, isn’t it? And this is true of us as parents. If our heart is in the right place they’ll guide us in to how to serve. Our spouses will guide us how to serve, our employees will guide us how to serve and I wish… Thank you for that question because sometimes I need to take that advice. I need to let the people around me guide me on how to serve. But that’s about getting into a centered place, and I think the more you serve, the more centered you’ll be, the more you’ll be able to serve.
That’s why I’m trying to encourage people in our workplace, around our intellectual property, to serve more, because authentic leaders, authentic sellers, authentic anything, authentic creators will always be better. I mean, I think God kind of gave us everything we needed in our core. I don’t care if you believe in God or not, or some higher power, whatever it is, but in our core we got what we need. And so the question is, how do we tap into it? I find that service is the way. If you don’t know what to do, may I challenge everybody to do something. First of all, and I wouldn’t be Keith Ferrazzi if I didn’t ask, we could use some donations for Guatemala. So if you want to support a kid we’ll take five bucks, we’ll take 200 bucks, we’ll take 2,000 bucks, we’ll take whatever and we promise it goes right to the kids, there’s no overhead. So go onto GreenlightGiving.com. Come with us in May, by the way, we’re going for Memorial Day back to Guatemala again. Come with us with your family. It’s a powerful place.
But here’s what you can do. Do what I did not long ago, and what I do every holiday. My family and I go to McDonald’s and we buy $200, you could buy $20 if that’s what you have, worth of $5 Gift Cards. And we drive around Hollywood and we jump out of the car and we walk over and we hand the $5 Gift Card to the homeless or somebody who just looks like they could use it sitting at a bus station, and we just say that this is for them and to have a Merry Christmas. That’s a wonderful place to start, and you guys
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can all do it on your way home. Go to McDonald’s, pick up some gift cards and start passing them out. It’s a great way to begin this process, and I hope you catch the contagion that we have in our family. God bless everybody. Have a Merry Christmas. Sara, thanks for suggesting this.
SARA GRACE: Yes, and on behalf of everyone, Keith, a big thanks to you. Your commitment, or as you put it, your compulsion, to service is truly inspiring and really a model that I certainly hope to bring into my life in a big way in the next year. Thank you everyone for joining us. Again, thank you, Keith. Everyone, have a wonderful holiday and we’ll see you in 2013 with a new Social Capitalist series. Announcements about that will be coming soon. Thanks everyone.