Presto! You're now a knowledge broker. After you get the swing of it, you might want to send out a monthly Big Idea Cliffs Notes e-mail. Turn it into a newsletter. If one month you don't have the time, you could forward some particularly helpful article you read. Or, if the book is particularly interesting and you really want to make an impression, send the book itself.
It's easy enough to make knowledge brokering a habit. Let's say, for instance, someone mentions over lunch or in the minutes before the start of a meeting that they are having a hard time dealing with their teenage son or daughter. You should hear "problem." As a practitioner of social arbitrage, you think "need to find a solution." If you don't have any personal advice, the solution will come from asking yourself, "How can my network of friends and contacts help? Which one of my friends has teenagers?" It probably won't take long before you come up with someone you know, maybe your own parents, who handled their own teenage kids in a constructive manner. Get on the phone and ask them if they have any advice, or if they used any books or articles to help them through the process. Now pass it on.
Or let's say you're a real estate agent but you aspire to be a clothing designer. I don't know too much about clothes, but as with just about any subject, I'm sure others do (one of those people has almost certainly written a book about it). Do a search on Amazon.com, and find something that seems helpful to someone looking to become a clothing designer. Then send the aspiring clothing designer a link or even the book itself, or broker a direct conversation—that would be real value.
Yes, this kind of reaching out takes time and a certain thoughtfulness. But that is exactly why it's so appreciated. Facilitating all those connections, all that knowledge, and ultimately all that happiness is what being a truly modern-day "power broker" is all about.
To paraphrase Dale Carnegie: You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people's success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.
Vernon Jordan, dealmaker extraordinaire, former Clinton advisor, and Washington super-lawyer, currently sits on ten corporate boards, including American Express, Dow Jones, Revlon, and Xerox. He's the Senior M a n a g i n g Director for Lazard, an international investment bank, and also a high-ranked senior counsel at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akin Gump. Fortune ranked him ninth on its list of the most powerful black executives.
According to Time magazine, Jordan earns a seven-figure income from a " l a w practice that requires him to file no brief and visit no courtroom, because his billable hours tend to be logged in posh restaurants, on cellular phones . . . making a deft introduction here, nudging a legislative position there, ironing out an indelicate situation before it makes the papers." He doesn't just talk a good game. He makes things happen.
It's hard enough, in this life, to hold down just one job in a highpowered organization. But Jordan has made himself so valuable—so coveted—to so many employers that he actually works for several at once—and none of them seem to mind his vocational polygamy.
Along the way, Jordan has become one of Washington's most networked individuals, a man w h o seems to have friends and influence in every quarter and province. He's connected Lou Gerstner with IBM. He approached Colin Powell about replacing Warren Christopher as Secretary of State. He helped James Wolfensohn become President of the World Bank.
How has he done it?
Jordan has used social arbitrage to make himself indispensable—he is, in every sense of the w o r d , a modern-day power broker. But he wasn't always at the vortex of everything that happens in Washington. He didn't even live full-time in Washington until Akin Gump hired him in 1 9 8 2 . By the time he arrived there, he'd done enough in his career—having built up several decades of contacts made and favors done—to know that, before long, he'd become a man of influence in his new town. Akin Gump knew it too, which is one reason they hired him: "I knew he would fit into the Washington legal community and come to be a dominant figure in it," said Robert Strauss, a senior partner. "This is a town built on the use of power and on relationships, and Vernon is about as good a people person as I know."
Jordan became a household name to all Americans in the 1 990s because of his relationship with Bill Clinton. But long before then, Jordan was well known to the black community.
In the ' 6 0 s , Jordan was an active civil rights lawyer in Atlanta. Later, he became a field secretary for the NAACP, fighting for school integration and registering black Georgians to vote. In
1 9 6 4 , Jordan left the NAACP to head the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project (VEP). His role was to find volunteers w h o could organize voter drives, and to raise money for the project. Raising money compelled Jordan to travel throughout the South, pitching wealthy foundations on w h y they should grant money to the VEP. It was this position that allowed Jordan to gain respect as a man w h o could fight for the cause from within the establishment. His Rolodex began to expand as he forged connections with both the heads of foundations and the VEP supervisors in Washington, D.C.
Jordan first ingratiated himself to the Fortune 5 0 0 community w h e n , in 1 9 6 6 , he was invited to President Johnson's White House conference on civil rights, which was attended by hundreds of CEOs. For the remainder of the '60s and ' 7 0 s , he traveled as a plugged-in member of both corporate and civil rights circles. His involvement in one circle made him all the more valuable to the other. Favors done and friends made in one circle could be leveraged to do favors and make friends in the other.
Jordan's full-time jobs allowed him to keep one foot in each w o r l d . In 1 9 7 0 , he became executive director of the United Negro College Fund. In 1 9 7 2 , he became president of the National Urban League, a pro-business civil rights organization—a job he held for ten years. Both posts allowed Jordan to gracefully expand his personal network, to the point where, in 1 9 8 2 , Akin Gump paid him quite a hefty price for his services. "Vernon did not come c h e a p , " said Strauss. "But I told him: 'We'll carry you for a few years until you figure out what it's all about here, then you will carry us for a long time after that.'"
Jordan's career is a wonderful example of the opportunity that comes from bringing different people together from different worlds and different organizations to do good things. When Jordan became a public figure during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, he was challenged on his claim that it was normal for him to help a virtual stranger like Monica Lewinsky find a job. His network once again came to his aid. Washington attorney Leslie Thornton detailed in the Wall Street Journal how Jordan had gone out of his way to help her and others. She revealed what many young black and white professionals had long known privately: Jordan had been opening doors for people of all colors and creeds for decades.