Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

by David Burkus

  The dinner routine follows a strict format. It begins with invitations. Each guest receives a fairly vague email from Levy’s assistant inviting them to an event called “the Influencers Dinner.” Levy is most often a stranger to the guests at the time of the invitation. (However, the guests have often been referred to Levy by his former dinner attendees.) Levy has also ensured, as best he can, that none of the invited guests have met each other before.

  Upon arrival at Levy’s Upper West Side home in New York City or at one of the venues in other cities where he hosts dinners, guests are informed that they will be cooking their dinner together and are broken up into teams. The meal preparation is not complicated; no cooking experience is required. What is required, however, is strict adherence to one rule: as they prepare the meal, no one is allowed to talk about who they are or what they do for a living. Guests are only allowed to use their first names and are not allowed to make any other inquiries about each other’s names. Yet despite this rule, participants bond quickly, and the crowd of strangers becomes a room of fast friends.

  When the meal is ready, participants sit down to eat and play a quick game. One by one, the diners take turns guessing each other’s real identity and profession. This game of delightful surprises—where finding out you are wrong is almost more fun than guessing correctly—occupies most of dinner. When it’s over, everyone pitches in to do the dishes. Often the small dinner opens up to a larger gathering as previous dinner guests arrive for a cocktail party and salon that follows. That party can last into the early hours of the following morning and has been known to include world-class magicians performing illusions, world-renowned musicians sitting down at the piano and leading a sing-along, and thought leaders and scientists sharing their latest discoveries.

  After years of conducting dinners (over 120 and counting), Levy has built a community of over 1,000 dinner guests, all of whom, whether they are famous or not, are influencing society. “There’s only a loose connection between being famous and being influential,” Levy explained. “The stylist for a couple of well-known celebrities probably has more influence on the fashion industry than the celebrities themselves.”2

  But it’s the network that is the true goal of these dinners, according to Levy. He believes that bringing together a community of diverse, influential people will almost inevitably lead to new partnerships and collaborations that make a positive impact on the world. And he’s got proof to back up that belief. Levy’s community has launched start-ups, produced television shows, and even kindled a few romantic relationships. The network has also made a positive impact on Levy’s career.

  Levy developed the initial idea for the Influencers Dinner between 2008 and 2009. He was attending a seminar when the program leader shared his belief that “the fundamental element that defines the quality of our lives are the people we surround ourselves with and the conversations we have with them.”3 That remark triggered something in Levy. He was no stranger to the power of interactions and to gatherings of influential people. He had a solid job, working as a digital marketing consultant for a variety of companies. But when Levy examined his own life in the light of that statement, he realized that his experiences weren’t quite as extraordinary as he might have hoped.

  He started small, spending almost a year thinking about the exact format a community event would take. With a professional background in the study of behavioral science and influence, he knew that the details of the event would dramatically affect the outcome. He also started with a smaller guest list, at least in terms of influence. The first few dinners were mostly just his influential friends and their referrals, but even then he was reaching for influencers on a larger scale. “Often I would just embarrass myself because I didn’t know how to communicate with people who operate at that level, and so it was a bit of a train wreck at times,” Levy said. “I just kept doing it and doing it and learning how to express it better and more effectively each time.”4

  But to create the best experience with a guest list of ever more accomplished people, Levy also realized that he would need to tweak the format of his dinners. “Everyone was too accomplished,” he said. “The moment they started talking about their careers, they would act overly important and it would lack the experience, community, and bonding that I was hoping for,” Levy reflected. That’s how the rule that would come to define his dinners was born. Levy insisted going forward that no one could share who they were or what they did until sitting down to dinner. “As a result, everyone has to drop their perfectly rehearsed introduction and learn how to connect without giving away their normal role.”5

  Levy believes that the secrecy also changes the behavior of attendees for the better. “When people don’t know your traditional role, there’s no expectation about how you should act,” he believes.6 And when attendees act less like they think people expect them to, they act more like themselves and form a more cohesive network.

  Since starting the Influencers Dinners, Levy’s own career has grown immensely. The network he’s built has provided him with job opportunities, an expanding consulting business, a book deal, and numerous speaking gigs. But to Levy, none of this came from trying to extract value from the network. Instead, it’s the result of trying to invest more and more value into the Influencers community.

  Elsewhere in New York City (elsewhere in the Upper West Side actually), entrepreneur Chris Schembra is doing something similar, but a bit differently. Like Levy, he’s found that he has a passion for connecting others and that hosting dinners serves as the group activity that works best. Schembra’s 450-square-foot studio apartment, with furniture pushed up against the walls, serves as the venue for his “747 Club” dinners.

  Schembra’s dinners take place at a small table with paper plates and plastic cups. Needless to say, guests cook and eat in close quarters, but they form close connections as well. The events started from a realization that he wanted to build a better network, that the best way to do that was by building a community—and that he could cook a delicious pasta sauce. “I invited fifteen of my friends to my home, fed them my sauce,” Schembra said. “I delegated tasks and empowered them to be a part of the process. They liked it, and they liked meeting each other.”7

  Cooking isn’t the only aspect of the process that Schembra’s guests are empowered to be a part of. “Every minute for three hours is perfectly placed and structured,” Schembra said. When they arrive at his home, Schembra greets guests at the door and welcomes them into a completely open apartment, with no tables or chairs in sight. There are just some guests, drinks, and a few hors d’oeuvres. But it’s all part of the plan. When the last guest arrives, the dinner prep begins. Schembra starts boiling the water and assigns specific tasks. Guests not only help with cooking and making dessert but set up the table, lay out place settings, and (most importantly) begin to talk to each other as they work together. The name 747 Club comes from Schembra’s meticulous attention to the steps involved. “It takes thirteen minutes to cook three and a half boxes of pasta al dente,” Schembra said.8 Dinner is always served at 8:00 P.M., so cooking starts at 7:47. By the time dinner is served, Schembra has structured a series of activities to ensure that no one is sitting next to a stranger.

  The conversation continues for about twenty-five to thirty minutes, at which point Schembra turns up the heat a bit more. “At 8:32, I stand up and I tell a joke, to lighten everyone up, but then I transition into sharing something more personal, which gets them comfortable with being vulnerable.” He shares a piece of his own story, taking the first step toward being vulnerable, and then facilitates the conversation as it travels around the table and everyone shares—usually something remarkably personal given that it’s only been ninety minutes since everyone there met for the first time. “I consider it a failure if I don’t see at least two people cry during a dinner,” Schembra joked, a reflection of how quickly bonds are made during these dinners—every time. “The feelings generated don’t change regardless of who i
s at the table. That impact is a scalable product.”9

  And scale it has. From the sixteen-person dinners with friends and friends of friends, Schembra has scaled the 747 Club dinners into a variety of shapes and sizes for corporate clients. He has taken the format, and the same pasta sauce recipe, on the road and organizes team-building and connection-fostering events for a variety of companies. Typically, a corporate 747 Club format is a series of individual small dinners over several nights, followed by a large salonlike event where individuals reconnect with their fellow dinner guests and trade stories about their experience with guests from the previous nights’ dinners. Since 2015, Schembra and the 747 Club have fed over 3,000 people and sparked more than 100,000 relationships. Beyond corporate clients, attendees at Schembra’s personal dinners have grown into a community of their own and even refer new members. “The first time you come, you come alone,” Schembra said. “The second time, bring a friend. After that, you’re eligible to nominate a new guest.”10

  Jon Levy and Chris Schembra designed their dinners through trial and error, but insights from social science reveal why their dinners work so well and why they have created unlikely communities across all sorts of unlikely sectors, with these two hosts at the center of the network. While sharing meals has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years, more recent research suggests that it’s not just compiling a remarkable guest list and breaking bread that’s bringing people together.

  It’s the cooking.

  Working Together Brings People Together

  To fully appreciate why forcing attendees to cook their own dinner brings them closer together, we first have to examine what doesn’t work when trying to make network connections and then revisit an old idea in its smaller form. What doesn’t work for making network connections is exactly what so many people rely on for meeting new people: traditional networking events.

  Most people have been to a networking event or mixer—a group of people standing around high cocktail tables, talking to each other and hoping to make just the right connection. To an introvert, these events are terrifying, but it turns out that these events aren’t all that effective for extroverts either. Research suggests that mixers, parties, events, and even regular dinners that attempt to foster new relationships work poorly for precisely the same reason they were designed to work well: new relationships. In other words, when we focus solely on networking or meeting new contacts, we most often end up heading home from these events with far less useful relationships than we had hoped for.

  The reason for this is what the network science researcher Brian Uzzi calls the self-similarity principle. Uzzi (whom you’ve met in previous chapters and will meet again) asserts that when we are seeking to make new contacts, we tend to choose people who disproportionately are very similar to ourselves, whether in terms of job type, industry, experience, training, worldview, or something else. If this sounds a bit like the phenomenon of homophily, that’s because it is essentially homophily in a smaller form. It’s the micro-homophily that drives so much of the macro-homophily we see when we look across an entire network. According to Uzzi, we tend toward self-similarity for two reasons: comfort and efficiency. It’s easier to put our trust in people whose worldview is similar to our own, and it’s easier to feel comfortable with these people because they will not challenge our worldview. It’s also far more efficient to have a conversation with people whose backgrounds are similar to ours, as we mutually recognize concepts, analogies, and other jargon. While comfort and efficiency are important, the problem is that chasing either or both yields relationships that are far less likely to provide us with new information or challenge our thinking about issues. If our network doesn’t think that differently from us, then we won’t be pushed to expand our thinking or to question our reasoning. Self-similarity gives us positive feedback even when that’s not what we may need.

  In addition to our tendency to choose new relationships with people who are similar to ourselves, we also have a tendency at networking events to gravitate toward existing relationships. In a notable study of networking events from Columbia Business School professors Paul Ingram and Michael Morris, those executives who claimed to desire more opportunities to meet new contacts most often failed to utilize those opportunities as much as hoped. The researchers organized a networking mixer as part of the executive MBA program at Columbia. Many of those invited were students who had actually been lobbying Columbia to put on more social events as part of the curriculum, so that they could benefit from the rich and diverse network of colleagues. In total, about 100 executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and bankers gathered together for food and drinks on a Friday evening. Prior to the event, Ingram and Morris surveyed the executives to learn who among the invited guests they already knew and what their intentions and objectives were for the event. Besides having fun, 95 percent of the attendees said they wanted to meet new people during the event.

  When they arrived, the researchers outfitted each attendee with an nTag, a small electronic device that registered each conversation and tracked how long it lasted. Besides being asked not to remove the nTag, attendees were told: “Act normally. Talk to whomever you want to, while enjoying food and drinks.”11 The attendees did just that. Unfortunately, the “whomever” they liked talking to tended mostly to be people they already knew. Despite knowing an average of only one-third of the people in the room, the executives spent about half of their conversations talking to people they were already friendly with.

  While it’s encouraging that they spent the other half of their time having conversations with new people, that percentage is far short of their previously stated intent. Even taking a random approach should have yielded more conversations with new contacts than most of the executives actually had. In addition, those new conversations tended to be with others who were most like themselves. That is, the consultants talked to consultants, and the bankers talked to bankers. In terms of both new conversations and diverse connections, the most successful networker at the event turned out to be the bartender.

  If even the best-intentioned executives failed to meet enough new people, clearly the pull of self-similarity is strong. So how can we avoid that pull? It turns out that the best strategy might be to just stop trying to meet new people. Instead, we are more likely to develop new relationships with a diverse set of individuals by focusing more on activities to participate in rather than relationships themselves. Like guests cooking alongside each other, participating in shared activities allows more random collaborations to happen and makes those collaborations more likely to become real relationships. Brian Uzzi also has a term for this phenomenon: he calls it the shared activities principle.

  Based on Uzzi’s nearly 100 sociological and social network studies, the shared activities principle states that “powerful networks are not forged through casual interactions but through sharing in high-stakes activities that bring together a diverse set of participants.”12 In other words, schmoozing at a mixer is far less likely to lead you to a powerful network than jumping into projects, teams, and activities that draw a diverse set of people together. One of the primary reasons for this is that, in a shared activity, there is little room to stick to prescribed roles, which makes interactions more genuine. “In sociology, we have a concept I call ‘the script,’” Uzzi explained. “In a script, every interaction you have with someone is governed by a certain set of expectations for what is appropriate or inappropriate—about the things you can say and do around the other person.”13 A shared activity allows participants to drop the traditional script, however, and pick up a new one that might be more useful for demonstrating the qualities others need to see to establish a connection. Recall how much more powerful Levy’s dinners became once he instituted the “first names only, no talking about work” rule. Levy was forcing dinner guests to leave their scripts at the door.

  According to Uzzi, “shared activities are an engine for building these powerful networks rich in s
ocial capital.”14 Shared activities stand the best chance of developing potent new network connections when they satisfy three qualities: they evoke passion, they require interdependence, and there is something at stake.

  Evoking passion is important because individuals usually find a way to make time for activities they are passionate about. You may not be inclined to go to dinner with strangers, but when your friend raves about a particular dinner and then the host contacts you with an invite, you are much more likely to find the time to go. Interdependence in the activity then speeds up the process of building trust among the guests. You might have your guard up when you arrive, but when you and a random partner are handed utensils and given a task, you pretty quickly realize that you need the other person’s cooperation. And having something at stake both heightens that realization of interdependence and provides opportunities for celebration or commiseration. So whether the meal is a success or a failure, sharing a stake in the outcome provides a chance to generate the bonds of loyalty that sustain relationships over time.

  As Levy and Schembra have found, it’s not the dinner itself—not the sharing of a particular meal or drink—but the act of participating in the meal together that truly generates the connections needed to build a diverse network. Whether it’s building a network that helps create opportunities for consulting, research, or other referrals (as in Levy’s case) or taking the participatory dining model to companies and helping them build their internal network (as in Schembra’s), the shared activity is indeed a potent tactic.