Transcript: Leading Without Authority with Keith Ferrazzi from Ryan Serhant
Original video at https://join.ryanserhant.com/ferrazzi-interview-replay40044532
Book "Leading Without Authority: How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break Down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration" : https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Without-Authority-Co-Elevation-Collaboration-ebook/dp/B07XCG3BQM
Transcribed by https://otter.ai Some minor corrections by Serge ))
Keith Ferrazzi
I have to say that the remote element of a book tour is actually extraordinary. What used to be 25 cities and a dinner and all the other crap that I had to do to be all over the world and to get your mission out there. You can literally do that now, sitting around, so I'm enjoying that.
Ryan Serhant 0:20
Yeah. Nice. Who else have you been talking to today? what's the what's the book tour been like today?
Keith Ferrazzi 0:00
Oh, gosh, you know, a lot of the conversations today have been inside a large organization we're doing we're coaching the turnaround at Delta Airlines right now and General Motors. Spending a lot of time at Verizon. And so today was heavily that. We also have our own community of C suite executives. I started, we should talk about it. It's called "Go forward to work". And I've got a 85 Chief HR officers, 50 CIOs. And we're trying to redefine what business will look like. Post these three months of transformation. We call it "Go forward to work" as in, don't go back to work go forward until I need defining the business landscape by extracting best practices from this group of people. So it's been a lot of interesting conversations around.
Ryan Serhant 1:19
That's awesome. Let's, let's definitely talk about that. And what I've told all of them I tell anyone who ever meets me is that you are one of the guys who helped me get started and you don't even know it. With your book, "Never eat alone". You're a two time New York Times bestseller if anyone doesn't know who's coming in, but I think everybody knows who you are, that told everybody to read your books. And who's got your back. You're a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School. The former CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels, you actually became the youngest CMO of the Fortune 500 at a time 32.
Keith Ferrazzi 1:53
Right. Yeah, it was pretty young. It was kind of stupid, but yes.
Ryan Serhant 1:59
We'll get to that. You went on to start for a Ferrazzi Greenlight, a strategic consulting firm. And now you advise top C suite executives to empower talent, adapt, change and deliver results. So, but I want to go back, you know, to the beginning to the low before we get to your book that you're on right now and I see it all behind you. They're leading without authority, which I think is awesome idea. It's a great true line and I have a lot of questions for you about it. But "Never eat alone" really helped me jumpstart on for everyone on here who is a salesperson, either selling real estate or selling advertising, selling insurance selling cars selling themselves all day long. You know, the idea that, you know, relationships are the currency right are the most important thing to me. And that's the biggest thing that I took away is that relationships are all about giving and never about taking and that's such a hard hard thing to teach people.
Keith Ferrazzi 2:57
Particularly when your back's up against the wall, you're scared shitless, you're from a scarcity mindset because you might have been brought up or all that stuff. It's so easy to think about "what can I get from this person? How do I make it? How do I get by?" and yet to fight that, to focus on really a combination of two things to focus on the generosity as you've mentioned, but also the authenticity, just that vulnerability, that that allows people to connect authentically with each other that gives you a, gives you permission to sell.
Ryan Serhant 3:28
Yeah, your book was the reason that I first started trying to buy first class airline tickets, right. Like I had no money to buy first class tickets. I was like, No, if I put myself in situations where other people that I want to surround myself with are in and I can talk to them and I can meet them. I should never get off an airplane without having said hello to this person. This person would come out with some sort of relationship and a follow up meeting. And to do it not in an harrassing way, not annoying way and I've met so many people on airplanes now. It's amazing what you can do with your entire life just by saying, "Hey, my name is Ryan, what do you do?" Like, it's crazy to me. It's completely, completely, completely crazy. And before we get to "Leading without authority", I want to ask you one question that keeps coming up from all of the members, everyone here who may or may not be a member in our membership community, you are, I want to say be the king of networking. How do you keep track of everybody? Do you keep them in your your Notes app? Is it just contacts? Do you have a CRM like what do you you know, like I said before, I think before people got on your I think assistant told us you have your 30 zooms today back to back to back to back to back to back to back. How do you what is what is it like inside your brain? How do you keep track of all these people so that you can give and give and give and give to give.
Keith Ferrazzi 4:51
So, I mean, I can actually answer that not in a quick way, but I can answer that in a deliberate way.If you'd like me to give a quick tutorial on how to build a system that allows you to scale the most powerful relationships of your life, you're gonna take the five minutes to do it?
Ryan Serhant 5:10
Yeah, that's the most important question I'll ever ask in my entire life.
Keith Ferrazzi 5:14
All right. So I mean, I can, I will repeat what I told a CEO of a Fortune 10 company today, this was a coaching call that I had with a CEO of a Fortune 10 company. He's actually I'm coaching his team that he's added on a project where I'm actually going to be facilitating the answer to the following question, "Who are the 500 most important people to the growth of X company, the second this company grows, right? So who are the 500 most important people to the growth of x company? And by the way, I could say who's the 500 most important people, you know, to the growth of Marc's life. So here's the, here's the way to think about "FTD OR"
The first question you have to ask yourself before you start networking is FOCUS. What are you trying to do? Who are the most important people to achieve what? It's not just for the sake of nothing. It's it's for what? So if you're selling something, and then your targets are certainly more understandable who they might be, right, but there's other aspects of your life, there's joy. I have made a habit out of collecting comedians as good friends. They are hysterical. Now, most of them are all warped and insecure humans. They are they're terrible humans, but they are hysterical to hang out with. So for me to have currency in my life, I've gotten to know some of the most prominent comedians. I mean, I've had dinner parties for God bless him, Robin Williams, when he was still alive, etc. So who are the most who are the most interesting people? That's that's the thing. I haven't be single, like I'm single now for the first five years. You all know what a wingman is?
So that's you know, you need to start identify who are the individuals you need to want to be hanging out with, to have anything you want to have in your life.
So that's focus, right? Get your goals
TARGET, who are the who are the constituencies? So I go to constituencies first, what are the types of individuals? And Ryan, I know you already teach this if you're a real estate person and constituency is a mortgage broker constituency is a lawyer constituency is that this that or the other thing? There's always this thing called connecting with connectors? connectors are constituencies, you know, but who are the people who are going to what are the categories of people that will be your your entree into the people that you're interested in speaking to? So that's FOCUS, than TARGET. Now what you do then I'm gonna give you a little bit of a system. You draw, I'm just looking to see if I still have the piece of paper. I literally was drawing this for the CEO of this company. I said, Oh, here it is. I said draw a Bullseye, right. So this is by the way, this is the way I coach for a million dollar contract. I'm literally scribbling pieces of paper and showing this to the CEO of a Fortune 10 company. So I'm saying, look, here's what you need to do. Draw a circle, and then every segment so here's the segment of MEDIA. You know, among the 500 most important people to this CEO, what portion of them are MEDIA, it's a thin portion, right? What portion are "other C suite prospects"? Okay, what portion are, um, I don't even know what it's a VCs because I wanted, they're a technology company. And I want them to be affiliating with people who could, with smaller companies they might acquire, right? There might be disruptive technologies. So I've been really going through and this is this is an exercise I want you to sit with your peer to peer support group and really think about what are the constituencies of people that you're going to fill your life with? Ryan is one of them.
So I have a full time person in my company who manages my network for me and this individual has one constituencies called "influencers". And Ryan is on that list. Right? So you get a constituency, right? And then you decide is Ryan an A, B or an a C? Right? You've got to decide now A, B or C has to do with your focused attention today. Right? What is your focused attention today on that individual? Now, there are two metrics I want you to put on every one of these individuals. The first metric is, as you grow your relationship with them, you put a RELATIONSHIP QUALITY SCORE, most people don't even think about this. Relationships are crucial. You should be measuring the efficacy of your relationships with people. So Ryan and I were at zero, pretty much prior to this. We didn't know each other, right? But now all of a sudden, I would put him down as a two or three, it's on a scale of zero to five. Now, his associate, who's an incredible young man, I would have put him at like a three or four because I had met him in another life when he was at NBC. Right and he is a he is a influencer of Ryan so I might even had him somewhere on my list. If Ryan was important enough for me to really work hard to get to know, connecting with gatekeepers.
Gatekeepers can actually go in your list. If someone's really important, you put the name of the person who will help you get there to that individual in your list. So you put an RQ score next to the individual Relationship Quality. The other thing you focus on is what is the BI score. Business Impact. So I was talking to this guy this afternoon, I said, "Look, you know, Bill Gates is on your list, his RQ is a three for you. His BI is is a five he's incredible, a BI score is a five, but I said, "What's your priority with Bill?" And he said, you know, be honest with you. It's a C, because I'm not really you know, I don't need that relationship with anything right now. I'm not going to prioritize that relationship. It's a co-oppetition kinda relationship. So C means it's not that important right now, it doesn't mean the BI isn't high, doesn't mean the RQ isn't reasonable, but the priority of where you're going to spend your time is not C. So all of that I just talked about is called Focus Target "FT". Right.
Next step, we still ready to go Rian?
Ryan Serhant 11:11
I'm never leaving. Keep going.
Keith Ferrazzi 11:14
Alright.
So FTD "D" is DEFINE. Define what you can do for them. This is the this is the Golden Nugget not what do you want to get from them define what you can do for them. Your job is to figure out how you can make these people want to play with you. You know, Rodney Dangerfield used to say that his mother tied a pork chop around his neck in order he was so ugly that his mother had to tie pork chop around his neck to get the dog to play with him. Right. So what is your pork chop? Why? What are you going to do? That makes somebody want to play with you? How do you serve them? Excuse my language? I swear on this? I mean, you gotta serve these people like a motherfucker. I'm serious. You serve, serve serve. You go overboard to serve these individuals. I want you to serve them so much that they don't believe they can, they can exit you from their relationships in life.
So when the pandemic hit, right, I work for Fortune 100 organizations. Right now I'm starting to create info products and I have books and I have training courses and those kind of things, right. And I've coaching and whatever, but most of my businesses up there, what can Keith Ferrazzi do, one guy, for Fortune 100 companies? Well, you know, look, these folks have the most brilliant economists, they have the best McKinsey advisors, they have all these things. I just said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start hosting forums of 20 C-suite, Fortune 100 leaders together, and I will facilitate them sharing their best practices with each other to create value among them.
You understand that? So I'm not pretending I have any value, other than being a generous host, recognizing that the audience has value with each other. You got what I'm saying? They don't want you they want each other. So you throw a party with a group of folks to basically have them.
So FTD and I could spend hours on helping you define currency, what is your currency with these individuals, part of your currency becomes your network. FTD. A, if you need to align to individuals who have deep networks, this is the chapter called "connecting with connectors". So I just got off the phone with them. There's a global marketing association with the largest Chief Marketing Officers in the world that are members. In the olden days, I used to get paid $60K to come and speak to that group. Right. But today, I'm more interested in giving my time away for free for them, because they're going to connect me to a bunch of Chief Marketing Officers, they'll be valuable to me. So I got on the list and I said, Hey, listen, let's talk about got a new book. So that association is a connector to important individuals, right?
You know, like I said, being single, right? Who are the individuals that happened to know a lot of people that I might want to date? That's connecting with connectors. So the A is you're spending, you're aligning yourself disproportionately with people who can connect you to people you want to get to. And that is a lot of time curating those relationships.
"O", is your "outreach strategy". You know outreach is about meetings. It's about events that you're hosting. This is an event you can host events. I hosted an event of C-suite folks.
And then there's this thing called Pinging. One of the things I have is I have a list of 500 individuals and that are RQ score three or above that are all VIPs. And depending upon their A, B or C price, let me just make it simple for anybody. You must have 20 people that really matter to you on your list. 20 good people that are level three or above. You probably have their cell phones. Put them on a list and agree, with a certain respectable cadence, you're going to text them to see how they are. That's all you're doing. "Hey, how you doing?" You know, you know if they're, if they're regionally oriented, oh, hey, I heard, you know, is "we're okay, for this weekend?" You know, "how's your mom?", whatever you know about them, right? But this is just a damn check-in you're not asking for anything. You're Pinging. It's staying on the radar.
So for me, I actually have this list of 500. And based on its A, B, and C level priority of those individuals, my my staff that's controlling my network will feed me any given day or week a list of 10 to 20. And it's actually they just texted me the list. It's the name. It's the number like it is click on the number, it opens up the chat room. I'd send them a quick text, and I let them know that I did it. So that it's in our CRM system, right? So I this is a Pinging System.
You gotta have a system the standard, because here's the thing with houses, for instance, I have I have used real estate agents because they were rep they were available. Like I had a friend for years like Bla bla blah. And, and I needed and I wanted to buy a new house I'm thinking what's that friend's name I couldn't remember. And just because of the shit of it, somebody was right there in an email and was like, Oh, fuck you. There it is. It's like, it's easy. If you're not on the doorstep, you are lost. So you're pinging strategy puts you on people's consistent doorstep, right?
Um, and R is, you will consistently RENEW this process. This is the thing you do every quarter. You look at the Focus, you look at the Target, you look at the Outreach strategy, you're Renewing this. This is your lifeblood, you are renewing this system on a consistent basis. And as you get richer as you get more successful, you hire people to help you. But for now, do it yourself or go hire somebody. I have set this I did this for Hillary Clinton. I set this up for Barack Obama, when they were both running for President. I've set this up for the CEOs, General Motors, Accenture, the most powerful companies in the world, the World Bank. This is a system that is foolproof. And I've taught this system to tons of people. There you go. Not 10 minutes, maybe that was 20 or 30. Sorry.
Ryan Serhant 17:22
FTD OR. Right.
Keith Ferrazzi 17:26
There you go. That'd be $60,000.
I love it.
Ryan Serhant 17:31
I love it. You know, one of the things when COVID started, we went out to everyone, we created an COVID-19 plan for salespeople to continue to network while you're stuck at home. And one of the things that we've done this entire time is the three five so it's 5x5x5. So it's every day, it's five tags, five calls, five emails, or DMS to 15 people that you otherwise would not have gotten in touch with. So we're all about the same thing right? You've got your core people. You've got your your RQ scores, got everything that you've taught all of us, especially me and to everyone else. If you haven't read his books you have to be for forever hold your peace, but just go read them now.
Because it's important to consistently get in front of new people, right to go into new ponds and new oceans every day. You never have any idea right? So you talk to somebody they say, Oh, good, thank you reached out to me because so and so was just talking to me about this that also this two bedroom I'm stuck in really sucks on a move when this is all over. And you never would have known that had you not just reached out and reaching out is free. Right?
Keith Ferrazzi 18:32
Exactly. It's exactly
Ryan Serhant 18:34
every alum right? You You're gonna eat anyway. You might as well do it with somebody else.
and make them.
Keith Ferrazzi 18:40
Look, I don't know you but I literally, I'm having Zoom workouts every day. I'm having Zoom dinners every day. Like I literally have a Zoom workout. I go upstairs on my roof. When my weights are and I call you know, somebody might say in advance, get a Zoom workout. You know, they're doing their push ups. I'm doing my push ups. It helps me anyway, but everything, all of these things need to be opportunities?
Ryan Serhant 19:02
Yeah, especially now that you're single, you got to do the zoom push ups, you know?
Keith Ferrazzi 19:06
Exactly. Well, half the people I'm zooming with are potential dates. So that's good. I gotta tell you Zoom dating is extraordinary. It eliminates the most ridiculous waste of time. I haven't been able to have I've been able to go from Tinder to a date in like minutes. And that date can be five minutes. I'm like, hey, let's grab a quick coffee and I could act quickly assess whether there's chemistry, and boom, I'm on to the next. So for me Zoom dating has been extraordinary. It's been amazing.
Ryan Serhant 19:36
And by "let's get a coffee" you like you go into your kitchen, you get a coffee, you sit there for your computer screen and you have a coffee.
Keith Ferrazzi 19:40
Totally. I'm like, hey, let's get a coffee. Let's go go sit up. And I mean, I happen to be a gay guy. So you know, it's like, you know, let's get a tequila or something like that upside. You know, let's whatever it is. It's just chill and relaxing with that person. And, you know, I can find very quickly whether there's chemistry would have in the past, I would have had to drive down the hill by half an hour to get to a coffee shop. Have a date that probably took longer than I wanted to take. And I want to get the hell out of there and another half an hour to get home, I wasted an hour and a half, two hours of my time. Talking Zoom dates takes only 15 minutes. It's awesome.
Ryan Serhant 20:12
We don't have time to keep going into all the data history. But it's maybe the most interesting part. I want to get to your next book. Before we get to some to some questions and people are blowing. We got about 150 questions, which we're definitely not going to get to but "Leading without authority". I don't know how quickly you can tell the story. But I think it's really, really relevant to everybody. Especially right now if you could tell everyone the story about what happened when you were the CMO of Starwood that ultimately left you leaving the company.
Keith Ferrazzi 20:41
Yeah, let me and I apologize. I'm gonna take you a step back. The motivation behind this is important and then where it went. Sure. Yeah. If you guys know the backstory, poor kid from Pittsburgh, my old man was an immigrant, Italian steel worker. I watched the steel industry of the 70s crumble and my dad would come home and he would bitch about the fact that this foreman didn't give a damn about his opinion. And it was true. Back in those days, you didn't listen to workers, because workers were just cogs. And I grew and I said I was going to grow up someday and I was going to make a difference in the future of work, because I didn't want families to suffer like we suffer. I can't tell you how shitty it looks to have grown, you know, prideful man, out of work. It's just I never wanted to see that. My dad was a UAW steel worker. So I spent my life trying to figure this out and i and i really cracked the code. When I went to work for a British Chemical Company. It was all about, what I realized then peers on peers, peers, coaching peers. What Ryan has done for all of you this peer-to-peer support, this idea of a group of folks that won't let each other fail. I came up with a word for it a long time ago "Co-elevation".
I want you all to co-elevate with each other, go higher together. I want you to kick each other's butts, hold each other accountable, give each other energy, give each other ideas. I want you to co-elevate that's what Ryan's doing here. He created a co-elevating community among you, and all of you need to do that in your lives with the people that you want to co create great things with. So I knew that and I went to Deloitte and I said to the CEO, Deloitte, what's your legacy? Because someday I want to be at par with McKinsey, and Accenture. I was like, Okay, I went to Harvard Business School where I was at the time, and I said, I want to do a white paper on the future of professional services marketing. I call the Chief Marketing Officer McKinsey had called the Chief Marketing Officer Accenture, told him I was some kid into white writing a white paper for school. They gave me all their playbooks, and I sent it back to the CEO of Deloitte. I'm like, You don't remember me. I met you at a cocktail party, but you wanted to playbook for the future of marketing for the firm. Here it is. Here's what McKinsey and Accenture did. Here's what five other firms did. Anyway, I was 26. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte before I was 29. He had to make a special allocations and nominate me for partner. All right, all of Deloitte. Then moved over to become the Chief Market. And by the way, I had lead without authority. But my big head scarcity minded, fearful big head when I went over to start with hotels, thought I was a big shot now because I was the youngest Chief Marketing Officer in the fortune 500. My ego, my scarcity, my fear, I lead with authority there. I basically was telling everybody, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer, I've got the budget, and I crapped the bed, I told the head ofEurope I got to take your budget, because I know how to spend it better than you do. Well, at the end of the day, he became the new CEO. That didn't go over too well. He ripped apart my budget. And he told me I could you know, take this or get the hell out and so I got the hell out. But that was a huge lesson that turnaround. And what I want you all to know is your greatness, your greatness, everything you want to achieve in this world. Everything you want to achieve in this world is only as far as a fuzzy vision, a fuzzy vision and your ability to enlist some extraordinary people to join not your team. But to join their team. You take your vision for success, and you sell that vision to a group of individuals who want to join a team with you, not your team, to go be extraordinary and create great things. You're on your way to building a movement, not a company. I want you to build a movement. And leading without authority is the formula I've created to do that. And the other thing I'll say is, I feel so strongly about it, we probably should learn from Ryan and his team, but we created a free course around this as well. So you get the book and you can go on to Keith Ferrazzi, calm and get the free course. But I want you all to lead your own movements. And right now I want you to read social movements. I'm coaching. I'm coaching pretty prominent individuals right now trying to think about how do we eradicate systemic racism, and what does that look like? And that's building a movement. And it's using this book. So this book can be used for your company. But it can also be used for you making difference in society. I was coaching the Pope's team at the at the, at the Catholic Church in Rome, about how to apply this to reform the Catholic Church. So it's the same set of principles, whether it's business or whether it's anything you want to do in life.
Ryan Serhant 25:29
I love it, man. I'm taking notes at the same time, like right here. This has been awesome. Do you have time for two questions? I know I got two to five third. Well, I get you for two minutes each time. I you know,
Keith Ferrazzi 25:41
I don't know what I got. But the answer is always. Yes.
Ryan Serhant 25:44
Got it. One question. Now, just because we've got a lot of salespeople in this room. If you have a poor relationship with someone you work with, whether it's a client, other agents, you know your dinner CEO Where would you suggest you start improving that relationship so that you can lead with that person?
Keith Ferrazzi 26:08
It's in yourself. Chapter Two is identify the sticks ,deadly excuses that we all use to stop ourselves from building relationships with people who aren't behaving the way we want to behave. You do not nobody has to show up and behave, how you want them to behave. My foster son, my ex partner, and I had two foster children. We still do the straw boys, we co parent them. And when my young boy who was 12 used to behave like a jackass, I didn't have the right to say, when you act like my son, I will be your father. Yeah, I had to go 99.9% of the way until, you know because that's my commitment to God. That's my commitment to me. That's my commitment. My family, my son, you have to go 99% of the way if somebody is important to your success, you don't have the right to to abandon yourself and your mission. By being pissed off that they're not meeting you 50% of the way. That is irrelevant. Yeah. And so chapter two talks all about, how do you make sure that you, you it's really it's good, it's good, the chapters called it's all on you. What are the excuses that you use in your head that stop you from being successful?
Ryan Serhant 27:19
I love that. Last question. What do you say to salespeople who insist who insist that they work better alone? Are we bother they do their own thing work better alone, they're just more focused. They would have to tell everybody else what to do all the time anyway. When they work alone, I can be as successful as I want just because I do my own thing. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. When each person around
Keith Ferrazzi 27:52
it's easy. You're right. You work. If you interpret better as easier, you work easier alone. But you will be fucking mediocre. And I that's totally your call, I have no concern if you want to be mediocre, but you better damn well accept that that's what you will be. If you want to be extraordinary. You will lead with the most extraordinary people in the world. My team members a guy named Peter Diamandis, he's one of the most extraordinary futurists in the world, he wrote, wrote this great book abundance, etc. Peter, is, is you know, Peter, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, myself, we've gotten to know each other, and we're friends, and we coach each other and we kick each other in the butt and we hold each other accountable, we talk to each other, we invest together, and these people are not mediocre, and I'm not going to be mediocre. And so you lead with a team. You leave with an extraordinary team that you will be extraordinary. You decide you want to do yourself, you'll be mediocre or worse, and that's your call. You're welcome to be, but at least do it with your eyes open and don't bullshit yourself. If you want to be mediocre.
so hey, a couple of things. takeaways. Get the book, please. I mean, it's really I’m a passion-mission driven guy! get the book! Make sure you watch the courses. I'm trying to find. Maybe Ryan, you can help by sending all these guys. The link to the courses. I was trying to find it on my website. Yeah, I watch the courses and hit me up on Instagram. If you think you'd be you know somebody that I should date.
Ryan Serhant 29:18
I love it. All right. See you guys. Man. This is amazing, everybody. Thanks for watching Keith. This has been a pleasure.
Keith Ferrazzi 29:24
See you Ryan.
