Photo credit: Janet Donovan
If you had to be a compelling person to be a host for the book party for Matt Kohut and John Neffinger’s “Compelling People” at Baby Wale, then they got it right: Aniello Alioto, Roshanek Ameli-Tehrani, Mary Pat Bonner, David Brock, Matt Butler and Shaunna Thomas, Julia Cohen, Kate Damon, Trevor and Meredith Fitzgibbon, Karen Finney, Elizabeth Glover, Scott Goodstein, Ryan Grim, Ilyse Hogue, Charlie Honig, Michael Huttner, Bruce Kieloch, Brian Komar, Anna Lefer Kuhn, Alex Laskey & Rachel Farbiarz, David Mercer, Shannon Roche, Nicole Rodgers, Kimball Stroud, Brian Wolff and Septime Webre.
Pamela Sorensen, Kimball Stroud and John Neffinger
“As a spouse, I would say it is a most torturous process,” said Ilyse Hogue, spouse of John Neffinger. “I never saw my husband for seven months, although it was actually seven years in the making.”
Sex and Eggs:
“It occurred to me that you are a hard act to follow,” replied John whose book has been named Amazon 2013 Book of the Year.
John Neffinger and Matt Kohut
Hollywood on the Potomac interviewed the co-authors at a previous book party at the home of David Brock.
John Neffinger one on one:
“The fundamental idea in the book,” said Matt Kohut, “is that when we’re judging people, when we’re sizing people up – what happens at a party like this is that we are looking at two things: We’re looking for a sense that they matter, that they are strong in some way and also that they are warm, that they are people who relate to us in a way that seems like they are somebody like us – they have our same concerns and interests, they’re ‘our kind of people’ so to speak.
These two qualities sort of exist in tension together because people who are strong don’t seem so warm and people that are warm don’t seem so strong. The book’s about striking that balance. What we see in people that is truly compelling is that they have both these things going on at once.”
Garance Franke-Ruta, Kiki and Tim Burger
We asked Matt about instantaneous judgments: “Yes, everyone does that, that’s part of what we talk about in the book – that judgments really do happen in the blink of an eye. In a way, our book picks up where Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink left off. Malcolm Gladwell talked about the nature of these thin slicing judgments, but he didn’t actually talk about what we were judging. What we were looking at in the book is what the judgments are about and they’re about these two qualities of strength and warmth and then we explore how you can affect those judgments. Judgments are mostly gut judgments, they are mostly emotional judgments.”
“Pick up the book,” continued John, “and what you’ll see is sort of an inventory of all the different ways that we all send these signals out the way that we are judged. And it will help you think about how the world has been reacting to you all these years, and how you could maybe do that a little bit differently. That’s the serious part. The fun part though is a website that is connected to the book and attached to that is a fun little tool now called strengthandwarmth.org.
Tom McMillen and John Neffinger
And if you go there, we’re just going to leave it there and people can go and play with in because what’s going on there is … and this is the caddy part …. Are you ready for the caddy part? This is a good day. You can go on there and find your favorite public figures and rate them – strong, warm. And then see how everybody else rates them too. Not to make too big of this town thing out of this, but try not to rate anybody in the room. Let’s just keep it to the famous for now.”
