Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“The fundamental idea in the book,” said Matt Kohut, co-author of Compelling People, “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,” he added, “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.”
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.”
David Brock
The book party for “Compelling People” was hosted by Nancy Bagley & Soroush Shehabi, Mary Pat Bonner, David Brock, Ebs Burnough, Stephanie Cutter, Kate Damon, Jill & Nathan Daschle, Karen Finney, Ilyse Hogue, Juleanna Glover, Heather Podesta, Susanna & Jack Quinn, & Kimball Stroud for authors Matt Kohut, Founding Partner, KNP Communication and John Neffinger, President, Franklin Forum at the incredible modern home of Media Matters David Brock.
“John and Matt have been working in Media Matters for a few years now doing media training and booking programs that has been economically successful. We’ve just recently spun that off into its own organization, The Franklin Forum, that John is running,” said Brock when introducing the authors.
“I’ll plug my own book,” he added taking advantage of the timing. “I published an ebook with Raven Hawk last week on Bengahzi. The book was done and then I spent a little time with John. Basically I said, “What does this book mean? What am I going to say about it?
He crystallized it beautifully. It’s basically the theory of the trends. Basically the book is about how others view you and how you can change that for the better. John was one of these people that you worked with who I learned something new from every time we talked. So, I wasn’t surprised that I learned on every page of this book something new.
I was a little surprised and jealous that it’s beautifully written. It’s just a real treat to read and I congratulate them both on just a great piece of work.”
John Neffinger with his mother
“Where does this {book} come from? How did this come to be,” asked John. “So there are a lot of people looking around this room who if you cast your mind back to 2004, other than Red Sox Fans, everybody else didn’t have the best year necessarily in 2004. And out of that, out of the ashes of that campaign a lot of really interesting things happened.
One of maybe the smaller ones, at least at the time, Matt and I were both working at the Kennedy School. When we looked at what had gone down in 2004 we were struck by one particular thing which was that John Kerry was a war hero, somebody I had worked with in the past, magnificently principled – all of these things – but had a lot of trouble connecting with average people. And then that was one of the many things that we maybe could do a little bit better going forward.
So that led us former speech writers on a bit of a journey, to see if we could get the people out there behind the podium and on TV delivering their messages in a way that actually connected people, that was a little bit more persuasive. So we were trying to figure out as we started working with people, what is it that we look for in each other when we size each other up?”
“Like maybe at a cocktail party,” he suggested, “where you just met somebody who you hadn’t see before. What is it that makes us warm to some people and not warm quite as much to others? Is there a way that we could figure out what’s going on there so that we could do that a little bit better?”
“When we started working with our first client – and they were in some sense guinea pigs for us – we started noticing there were these two patterns,” responded Matt. “There were these two kinds of problems we’d see again and again. On the one hand, we’d see these people who were very cool to the point of aloof or arrogant. They were extremely confident, extremely intelligent, but they weren’t so relatable. On the other hand, we had these people who were just falling all over themselves with a lack of confidence. They are the nicest people in the world, but they just couldn’t get out of their own way.
So, we found ourselves giving two kinds of advice again and again. It led us to this conclusion about 2006, early 2007, that there were two things that work. Those things were qualities that we were looking for in people so we coined the term strength and warmth to describe these things. It turned out that when we looked at the social clients that there was actually a whole body of social psychology going on. We really looked at this and identified these qualities. They looked at them slightly differently than we did. They talked about strength in terms of something narrowed that was called competence, which doesn’t quite address the willfulness or the assertiveness that we look for in strength in people.
We wanted to describe these qualities and then found that yes in fact there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that these are the things that we make character judgments on. We size people up not unlike John is saying. When you meet someone in a party and you’ve never met them, you’re looking for these two things and did this person matter? Did they have something to contribute? Can they affect the world in some way?
Then, is this person somebody whose a bird of the feather or somebody who sees the world the way I do? Do they have something in common with me? Do we have a shared set of understandings, a shared world view, shared concerns and interests? Are they kind of existing in attention with each other because everything you do that makes you seem strong and in some way important, makes them seem like a little bit of a jerk? Conversely, everything you do that makes you seem warm and sort of opening the doors for people and doing favors people people make them seem a little bit of a pushover?
These things are in this tension and the people who we truly find compelling, as we say in the book, are admirable ….. the people who balance this tension and they master it so that they seem both strong – they can get things done – and they’re warm. They want the same things we want. These are people who care about things we care about. Now we’re shifting to use their strength on behalf of the things that we want too. And these are the people we admire and we call the leaders. We kind of rest easy at night because they’ve got our backs.”
Neffinger and Kohut
“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.
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.
Hollywood on the Potomac chats with John Neffinger:
