Never Eat Alone

by Keith Ferrazzi

  Once you've landed an anchor tenant, finding the right mix of people is critical. For me, the invitation list needs to be a mix of professional folks I want to do business with today, contacts I aspire to do business with down the road, and those I call "light attractors"—guests who are energetic, interesting, and willing to speak their mind. Of course, a local celebrity or two never hurts. And it goes without saying that you should have your friends and family present, as well.

  Political columnist Arianna Huffington is one of my favorite dinner guests. She's gracious, fun, and always outspoken. How did I land her? Through an intro from my friend Elana Weiss, who knew someone in Arianna's office, I sent her an e-mail. I told her I was a big admirer and that I threw these very fun dinner parties in Los Angeles and she'd undoubtedly make them better. She showed up only for cocktails at first, had a great time, and has become a regular and a dear friend.

  While these kinds of dinners can often cinch an important business deal, be careful not to include too many business associates on the invite list or business agendas in the discussion. Talking about budgets and other management mumbo jumbo all the time will ensure a dull evening. These events are about building relationships.

  Six to ten guests, I've found, is the optimal number to invite to a dinner. I usually invite fourteen now, but that's after a lot of practice. I also invite an extra six or so people to pop in before or come after for drinks and dessert. This group should be closer friends who won't get offended for not being at the main event but will appreciate being part of the group nonetheless. Generally, when you invite someone to dinner, you get a 20 to 30 percent acceptance rate because of scheduling difficulties. When someone says they cannot come because of another dinner or engagement, I often suggest they come before the dinner for drinks and appetizers, or even after, for dessert and drinks.

  These "bonus guests" will arrive a little before dinner has concluded. I'll have folding chairs at the ready so they can pull up next to the dinner table, have dessert, and chat with the guests. Just when most dinner parties tend to slip and people begin to look at their watches thinking about what time they have to get up in the morning, the energy level spikes with a whole new group. Suddenly, the dinner turns raucous again.

  At about this time, the music that's been playing on the stereo gives way to a live piano player. I don't announce this. From the dining room or deck where I serve dinner, guests slowly pick up on the fact that the music coming from the living room has changed. Sometimes it's not only the piano. I may hire a singer, invite a bunch of young vocalists to come show off, or do a bit more research and find out if there are some local alumni who used to be part of Yale's renowned singing group, the Whiffenpoofs. For a reasonable fee, the kids are happy to belt out a few old tunes for an old alumnus.

  As dessert is being served, the Poofs start singing. The afterparty guests arrive, and now the night is swinging. Some people stay at the table, while others adjourn to the living room to sing along and hang out. The next thing I know, it's one or two in the morning and I'm closing down another successful event.

  If you like to eat and you enjoy the company of others, you can pull off your own version of a dinner party that will work beautifully whatever the setting.

  My friend Jim Brehm is one of the most elegant designers in New York. He had a beautiful studio apartment downtown where he used to host a party every other Thursday. By the way, Thursdays are wonderful days for dinner parties. It doesn't cut into people's weekend plans and yet folks are willing to go a little late knowing that they have only one day left in the work week.

  I marveled at Jim's ability to make simplicity so elegant. I found the same quality in Jim's architecture and designs. His studio had a long bench covered in velvet along one wall and a few black leather cubes to sit on. We'd be served champagne. Light jazz music would play in the background. The dinner guests tended to be a fascinating mix of artists and writers and musicians.

  To eat, we'd walk five steps to a small simple wooden table with no tablecloth, adorned with two silver candles. The chairs were fold-out. Each plate had a big bowl of homemade chili on it and a torn-off piece of fresh bread. For dessert, he would serve ice cream and more champagne. It was simply perfect, and perfectly simple.

  Anyone can throw a dinner party. Let me give you an example—my former business manager, Mark Ramsay. I first met Mark when he was an accountant for another business manager who specialized in entertainment clients. He was an unhappy camper back then, and he wanted to break out on his own. After mustering enough courage, at the age of twenty-five, he opened his own operation. I became his first client.

  Mark became a regular at my dinner parties in New York. As a client and a friend, Mark would return the favor by inviting me out to dinner or to see a show. After a few years, however, I asked Mark, "So what's up with not having me over to your home for dinner?" A meal at someone's home, after all, is what I enjoy most.

  His answer was all too common, especially among the younger people I mentor. He told me, "I could never do a dinner party like yours. I don't have that kind of money and I live in a run-down studio. I don't even have a dining table."

  "Dining table! Who needs a dining table?" I said.

  With that, I convinced Mark to give it a try. I told him I'd be his anchor guest and suggested that he invite four others for dinner. I told him to get some simple wine, but plenty of it. For appetizers, set out chips and salsa, or dip with vegetables. Buy a foldable round tabletop that one can easily find and place it on the coffee table. Voila!—you've got yourself a grand dining table.

  For food, I told him, forget about cooking. Get some salads and a roasted chicken from the deli. For dessert, buy some cookies and ice cream, and keep the wine flowing.

  The party was a huge success. Mark invited a potential client, me, and a friend I brought along. All four of us are now his clients.

  You see, there's only one real rule to these get-togethers: Have fun. All right, there are a few other rules that might help you along the way. Among them:

  1. Create a theme.

  There is no reason that a small dinner party should not have a theme. One simple idea can help you pull the food and atmosphere together. You can build a party around anything, really. It could be your mother's meatloaf recipe, a holiday, black tie (used rarely, as we want people to be totally comfortable), vegan food, specific music—whatever you like. People will get jazzed when they know you're being creative.

  I remember one example of a theme being put to good use that comes from an article I read years ago in the Washington Post, about a woman named Perdita Huston. When President Carter appointed Huston regional director of the Peace Corps for North Africa, the Near East, Asia, and the Pacific in 1978, she started her weekly For Women Only dinner parties.

  The dinner parties filled a void for Huston, who explained how she came up with the idea. "Because of the size of the region I administered for the Peace Corps, I was obliged to do much traveling.

  "When I wasn't out of town on Peace Corps business, I thought it important to be at home with my son, Pierre, who was then seven years old. Also, because of my travels, I began losing touch with many of my friends, but instead of trying to see people one-on-one in restaurant situations, I devised this scheme of giving weekly dinner parties.

  "Right about that same time, I also came to realize there were a lot of women in my situation: single women in high-level jobs whose professional lives were presenting certain problems and often overwhelming their private lives. In many ways, the women in the Carter administration were pioneers who needed supportive networking, so I decided to limit my guests to women only.

  "What I did was simply expand my Sunday cooking to include preparations for a Monday-night meal for twelve. I would often make couscous or a lamb-based soup, which is used during Ramadan in Algeria to break the fast at sundown. It's called chorba, which means soup; in fact, it's called The Soup. It's very spicy and good enough to be an entire meal.
Often I would just prepare a huge tureen of it along with hot bread and a big salad. Desserts were simply fruit and cheese.

  "The response to my Monday-night For Women Only dinner was really overwhelming," she continued. "I always used my finest china and crystal and silver candlesticks. In other words, I treated these occasions the way most hostesses treat conventional male/

  female dinner parties.

  "Our dinner-table conversations are unusually candid. We talk—or argue—about U.S. foreign policy or discuss problems common to women in management positions, such as how to combat stereotypes or sexism in the workplace.

  "We get a lot of feedback from each other and, because of our experience, can suggest various people to see, organizations to contact, or strategies to develop. Because they are so supportive, these dinners have become very important to many of us."

  Huston's weekly parties became an institution in the Washington, D.C., area where she lived. It brought like-minded women together who bonded and supported one another through the similar trials and tribulations each was going through. There's no reason you can't do the same thing. Creating a theme around a point of commonality—be it race, religion, gender, occupation, or anything else—can infuse your get-togethers with added purpose, and help you attract others.

  2. Use invitations.

  While I'm all for slapdash impromptu parties, the dinner parties that will be most successful will be those you've devoted some time and energy to. Whether by phone, e-mail, or handwritten note, be sure to get your invites out early—at least a month in advance—so people can have a chance to plan accordingly—and so you'll know who is and who is not coming.

  3. Don't be a kitchen slave.

  There's no sense in a party being all work. If you can't hire a caterer, either cook all the food ahead of time or just use takeout. If the food is good and the presentation snazzy, your guests will be impressed.

  These days, I usually opt for a caterer. But you can have a simlarly elegant party for much less if you're willing to get creative and spend some time preparing. The key to low-budget dinner parties is to keep it simple. Make one large dish, like a stew or chili that can be prepared a day or two ahead of time. Serve it with great bread and salad. That's all you need.

  Well, maybe not ALL you need. My other expense is alcohol. I love—love!—great wine. I always go a little overboard with the vino. And really, could God have blessed us with a better social lubricant? It amounts to the finest party favor ever created. But again, everyone has their own predilections, and I'm sure you can pull off a perfectly fabulous dinner party with just soda.

  4. Create atmosphere.

  Make sure to spend an hour or two gussying up your place. Nothing expensive or out of the ordinary, mind you. Candles, flowers, dim lighting, and music set a good mood. Add a nice centerpiece to the dinner table. Get a young family member to walk around serving drinks if you don't have a bartender or waiter. The point is to give your guests all the signals they need to understand that it's time to enjoy.

  5. Forget being formal.

  Most dinner parties don't call for anything fancy. Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Silly). Good food. Good people. Lots of wine. Good conversation. That's a successful dinner party. I always underdress just so no one else feels they did. Jeans and a jacket are my standard fare, but you judge for yourself.

  6. Don't seat couples together.

  The essence of a good dinner party lies in seating everyone properly. If you seat couples together, things can get boring. Mix and match, putting people together who don't know each other but perhaps share an interest of some kind. I like to set placeholders where I want people to sit. Each placeholder is a simple card with the guest's name on it. If I have the time, I love to put an interesting question or joke on the back of the card that guests can use to break the ice with one another. Or you can go out and buy funny greeting cards just to make things interesting.

  7. Relax.

  Guests take their cues from the host—if you're having fun, odds are that they will, too. The night of the party, your job is to enjoy all the fruits of your labor. That's an order.

  IV. Trading Up and Giving Back

  22. Be Interesting

  I remember when being a marketer was simpler. Essentially, marketers were expected to create an ad, get it to the consumer through one of the few available media sources, and then sit back and wait.

  Those days are good and gone. The way the world speaks and listens has changed radically. And the tools we use to communicate are changing at a similar pace. As access to consumers grows, so does consumer power. They can choose from hordes of entertainment venues, use software tools to filter out unwanted messages, and shoot down surviving messages with a heightened sense of cynicism. It's just not as easy to be heard. Brand loyalty is tougher to achieve. Conventional advertising and marketing just won't cut it—and neither will traditional thinking among those who want to get their message across. The CMO of today and tomorrow must be a strategist, a technologist, creative, and always focused on the sales and financial return on his marketing investments. Not a lot of individuals, consulting firms, or agencies combine all those traits. As a result, the life of the CMO is a lonely one, and the life of the CEO who expects all this is too often a frustrated one.

  My growing sense of these changes, along with conversations with respected marketers, is the main reason I founded FerrazziGreenlight, to focus on marketing strategies and programs that push the marketing spend closer to actual sales. To count less on big broadcast advertising and more on building personalized loyalty between clients and their customers. That might mean creating a loyalty program for a retailer similar to what we operated at Starwood Hotels. Or designing an infomercial for a complex new product launch. Or facilitating an "ambassador's program" for a large engineering firm that targeted just 500 customers, prospects, and infiuencers in the United States.

  I hope it's not a surprise that I see effective marketing as just building relationships with customers and prospective customers.

  Let me translate this macro trend to a very personal scene that repeats itself over and over again when I give lectures at colleges. It will take place just before or after I've given my talk. A student will muster the nerve to approach me, and admiring as I am of such initiative, I'll be very receptive. Then, remarkably, nothing will be said beyond, "Hi, I'm so-and-so and your talk was great." Perhaps I'll ask what they got out of it or how they see what I talked about playing out around them in the world. Too often, my attempts are met with comments like "Oh, I don't know," or "I just think what you said was great. I'm not sure I could ever do all t h a t . . . "

  Oh, wow, I'd think, it was fantastic talking with you, but I've got some bathroom tiles that need cleaning. Not to be too rough here, but how can you talk to someone when they have nothing to say? How can you offer your company or your network anything of value if you have not thought about how you want to stand out and differentiate yourself in building that relationship?

  Marketers and networkers alike take heed: Be interesting! All that you've read thus far doesn't relieve you of the responsibility of being someone worth talking to, and even better, worth talking about. Virtually everyone new you meet in a situation is asking themselves a variation on one question: "Would I want to spend an hour eating lunch with this person?"

  Consultants call it the airport question. In the lengthy interview process that that industry has become famous for—a peppering of complicated case studies and logic-testing puzzles—the one question consultants use to choose one person over a pool of equally talented candidates is the one question they ask only of themselves: "If I were trapped in John F. Kennedy Airport for a few hours [and all travel-weary consultants inevitably spend too much time in airports], would I want to spend it with this person?"

  Have you mentioned in conversation your large jazz collection, or the time you spent in the Ivory Coast, or your contrarian views on some political debate? Squeeze a
little time into your schedule to keep up with what's going on in the world. Pay attention to interesting tidbits you hear, and work to remember them so that you can pass them on to people you meet. Get a daily subscription to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Remember, people don't only hire people they like, they hire people that they think can make them and their companies better. That means someone with an expanded view of the world. It means you need to be aware of your intellectual property, and what you have to say that others might benefit from. It shows you're interested and involved in the world around you.

  What happens when you don't have a platform of ideas to defend? When you're running for office, you lose an election.

  In my sophomore year at Yale, I ran for New Haven City Council. The party in New Haven wanted an outspoken, presentable candidate to run against the less-than-exciting opposing candidate. I had been known through my involvement in the Political Union as a very young chairman, having started one of the first fraternities on campus (Sigma Chi), and therefore had some name recognition. When offered the opportunity, I jumped at it. I didn't have a thought as to what I had to offer or why New Haven might want me as its representative. This was more ego than forethought.