Observed

How does a rainmaker make it rain?  How do these dinosaurs manage to walk into a room and suddenly, magically seem to own it…and leave with a satchelful of new clients?

First, there’s nothing sudden or magical about it.  In all likelihood, it has taken:

• Years of hard work. Mike O’Horo, Malcolm Gladwell and lots of others have spoken about the years of constant practice it takes to master anything — including business development.
• Vulnerability. Along the way, that means kissing a lot of frogs.  The typical rainmaker has become conditioned to dislike taking the hit (at least a little) and doing it anyway.

There’s more.  And, sure, there are the exceptions, the tireless extroverts who edited the law review, thrive on rejection and delegate easily.

A silver bullet?

For now, however, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no silver bullet.  It’s not, as O’Horo and Dave Waldschmidt argue, about working smarter.  “To grow your book,” Mike wrote, “you must get out there and compete.”

Which brings me to Frank Bruni and Phil Libin.  The former writes for The New York Times, and the latter is the autocrat founder in charge of Evernote, a company that peddles note-taking and archiving technologies.

Mr. Bruni recently noted that under-25s had better pick more marketable college majors and get some help making the mountain of debt many take on look more like a molehill.  Otherwise unemployment or underemployment in their ranks will continue to top 50 percent (according to the Associated Press based on 2011 data).

What he and his hundreds of commenters (as many as I had time to read) failed to mention, however, is that finding work also takes time, hard work and a bunch of flexibility.  Especially the most rewarding kinds of work.

As for Mr. Libin, he boasts that he banished landlines on a whim when he set up shop in Mountain View, Calif., in 2008.  (The company also has an office in Austin, Texas.)  He says,

We thought, why do you really need a phone?  If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it.  Everyone’s got a cellphone, and the company pays for the plans.  There are phones in the conference room.  We’re not a sales organization, so we’re not making a lot of calls, either.  If you’re at your desk, you should be working.  And that’s actually worked really well. I don’t think anyone misses phones.   Even though it’s one big room, it’s actually fairly quiet because no one is sitting there talking at their desk. The culture very much is that if you want to talk, you go 10 or 20 feet in some direction to a quiet area.

Hey, I have news for anybody who buys the bit about we’re not a sales organization.  We’re ALL sales organizations.

First, we all have relationships inside and outside the company with people we’d better be treating as if they were our customers…or, we’d better be OK kissing those relationships good-bye.  And second, no one can express or accurately read the range of emotions it takes to sustain a relationship without hearing a voice and, even better, seeing a face…in person.  At least occasionally.

Add these up and you get sales.

Ramping up to a point about competitive advantage

Banishing landlines — and the conversations that they nurture — is nothing new or surprising.  Mr. Libin just happens to be one of the more flamboyant examples of the digitally cocooned of our times.  (He also deploys a robot surrogate with telepresence when he’s not in the office.)

In a recent article, Sherry Turkle recounts a scene in a Boston law office described by a senior partner.

Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.”  With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

Ms. Turkle, an MIT professor and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, also notes that we “seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”

As Ms. Turkle notes, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.”

The silver lining in this cloud (finally!)

In a world that texts and wears headphones (or earbuds), fortune favors the exception, anyone willing and able to pick up a phone and carry on a conversation.

So, that’s how.  That’s how (OK, one of the hows) a rainmaker gets to be (and to stay) a rainmaker.

PS:  If you have some thoughts about how, I’d love to know.  Call me.

When I connect with clients and others at Kentucky Derby time instead of (or, in addition to) the Christmas holidays, I'm being asymmetrical. The better to get noticed and remembered...something I learned a long time ago from Jim Durham.

The calendar says The Holidays are still eight months away.  For business development purposes, however, you might want to try a strategic re-frame.

Over the past few days, for example, I’ve been leveraging one of the times of year that makes Louisville (my home town) Louisville.   I’ve sent a bunch of cards and gifts to clients, prospects and referral sources that follow a Kentucky Derby theme.

When I do this, I…

1. Stand out from the crowd. While I call or write clients and others during the holidays, I understand that I’m probably lost in the deluge when I do that.  Not so when my people get a quirky note or Derby tschotske from me in late April.
2. Brand myself. Most of my clients are on the coasts in major markets.  It helps me to be known as That Writer from Kentucky.  I mean, where else can you claim Hunter Thompson, Robert Penn Warren, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingsolver, Louis D. Brandeis, Marsha Norman, Silas House, Ed McClanahan, Sue Grafton and a poet by the name of Muhammad Ali?
3. Show some flair. Hey, it’s Derby!

You get the idea.  When the objective is to Get Found, make it easy.

PS:  This one’s for you, Jim.

As a business writer, I like to think I'm a LEED-certified Dunkin' Donuts. I want to make my customers feel welcomed and engaged...and eager to come back.

What kind of building are you?  Or, better said, what kind of architecture best represents the way you express yourself — particularly in business communications.

I got to thinking about this after I recently wrote an article about a new Dunkin’ Donuts store in Louisville’s vibrant and upmarket Highlands neighborhood.  (Really.  I’m not kidding.)

The Dunkin’ is a descendant of the street-loving polemics pioneered 50-plus years ago by Jane Jacobs.  It’s the kind of building that does a great job of connecting with its surroundings, including the tons of people walking up and down Bardstown Road, the commercial heart of the area.  The new Dunkin’ fits in while a few of its neighbors — including a nearby Dairy Queen from an earlier generation of commercial architecture and urban design — step away from street like little islands in an asphalt pond.

So, think about it.  Are you inviting in the way you write?  Do you engage your readers in the way a doorway or porch might invite a building’s users to come in or to set a spell?

Or, do you surround yourself with stiff and difficult words?  Do you present a turgid monolith or long, dense blocks of copy, or do you format your content to be more accommodating?

Just wondering.