Build Your Personal Brand at Work with Dorie Clark, Executive Education Faculty at Columbia Business School

n the last few decades." So I do agree that learning some AI skills is incredibly important.

Do you wanna expand on the idea? What sort of stuff do you need to know in order to help you keep your job? 

Dorie Clark: In this early stages, obviously this is evolving really fast, but a big part of it is honestly familiarizing yourself enough with AI to know what AI can do and to understand the tasks where it can be helpful.

And there, there's the term out there, the jagged frontier. There are still some things that seem ridiculous that AI still has trouble with. I tried to create a skill in Claude Cowork about it snapping screenshots of certain LinkedIn posts, and that just it just boggled its mind.

Like it took hours. It couldn't figure it out. It's oh my God, it would, you'd do a thing and it would cut off somebody's head, and it's no, that's not the point. A human can still do that better. I think it will be corrected fast, but for now, all right, that's beyond it. But understanding where it can excel is so important.

I will give you an example. I was talking with my chief of staff the other day. I gave him an assignment where I wanted him to go through Notion and look for, in a few scripts of videos that I had made, a few particular things. And he w- wrote back to me, he's "Oh, I think this is gonna be a huge project because Notion doesn't have an easy search functionality for it."

He didn't know that Notion plugs into Claude, and so I asked Claude to do this, and I answered two emails, and while I was doing it, it created a fully formatted output spreadsheet with all of the information. And so I was able to just message him back and say, "Here you go." A thing that felt almost impossibly intimidating to him was able to be done instantly by AI.

We need to understand what the difference is. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah, I think that's often the tricky part, right? You mentioned like something that seems like a really simple task for a human about taking screenshots of posts, and then it turns out Claude doesn't have that skill somehow ironically, when you're talking about Claude's skills.

And then something that seems difficult, yeah, e- easy peasy for AI. So figuring out the difference, I think there's a lot of trial and error there. But yeah, do you have a sense of, like, how you approach deciding which tasks AI should do then in order to figure out what is it gonna be helpful for and what it isn't?

Dorie Clark: Unfortunately, AI has been created in such a way that there is not really a spec sheet. There's not really a manual because previous software was always done in this top, top-down format, whereas, here's what we're trying to build and here's the protocols, and okay, therefore, here is the manual the operating manual of how it works.

You can read the operating manual and figure out exactly what it can do and what it can't do. AI was built from the ground up, and so because it was created, these large language models, it's a very iterative process, and the only way to find out is to just test it and see what it can do and what it can't do.

So the frustrating answer is that you just have to fiddle around with it a lot to try it and see, oh, it's good for this, it's not good for that. And you know that the answer is diff- gonna be different two months from now. The answer most likely is that the things where it's good will get better and the things where it's bad will get passable.

But it's it's a process of rolling up your sleeves and Iterating which not a lot of people wanna do because they're busy and it doesn't feel productive. It feels incredibly unproductive, in fact, to mess around with things. I was trying to create a skill to help it ma- allow me to create PowerPoint decks faster in my style, and I thought, "Oh, if I can get this going, if I can create a deck in three minutes, and just have it do it, that would be so great."

It probably took me hours to mess around to create the skill, and now it actually does work, but it was an extraordinary waste of time upfront learning how to do it. So I think that's the distinction. How are you personally experimenting with AI, Richie? What are you doing? 

Richie Cotton: Yeah, I have to say I've experienced similar things, so trying to figure out what the upcoming AI trends are in order to try and figure out, "Oh, who should I have on my podcast?

What should we talk about?" And it turns out to be very difficult to get it to do good research around what are the trends. I like, I give it plenty of content links and oh, what is it? Going from something that's okay or getting something okay is easy. Getting something that's really good and coming up with cool new ideas, incredibly difficult.

And you're right, there's a lot of a time sink in building these things. So actually, do you have any advice on dealing with that? Like, how do you approach being able to put in the time to, to make stuff work? 

Dorie Clark: I don't know if I have great advice. I can just tell you what I've done, which is this has possibly been the most-- the busiest spring of my life because I have spent...

I've worked basically every day, and I have been spending my weekends learning about AI and experimenting with AI. That is not a fun answer, and it means I've been burning the candle at both ends. But I feel like it is so important and necessary in this moment, and there is the promise. And I think right now the promise is dangling out in front of us like a little carrot that, "Oh, it'll make things so much faster.

It'll be amazing." It-- Like anything, it is much, much slower before it gets faster because you have to just muck around with it and learn about it. But it is a kind of important muscle to build. I am coming to you right now, just before I got on this call, I spent minutes I counted, on the phone with my mother.

Her credit card expired, and so she needed to update her credit card in her phone because she had these Apple subscriptions and they were getting declined, and it was very upsetting to her, and she didn't know how to update the credit card. And this is a process that probably if I had been there in person would've taken seconds because I either know how to do it or I know how to fiddle enough that I can figure it out.

But walking my mother through it where she's like describing random things and, "Oh, the screen says this," and, "I don't know," and, "Oh, no," and, "I tried to enter it and now it's erased." It was minutes, and so I don't want to be like that. And I, my, my poor mom, there's been lots of technology updates, so I can understand it.

But we collectively don't wanna be like that with AI. We've gotta build the muscle now so that as things change, we can become conversant enough that if we can't figure out whatever the metaphorical equivalent is of "Oh, I have to update my credit card We want it to take seconds and not minutes, and those are the muscles we have to build now.

Richie Cotton: I think you just tapped into a universal fear of people turning into their parents. But yeah, a-agreed. You do need to be patient with yourself in terms of if something is new, it's gonna take a long time, and yous gotta, yeah, put in the effort and be patient and trust that things will work out eventually.

But you mentioned the idea of tinkering with new s- that seems like maybe the new superpower. Are there any other kind of soft skills that you think are important here when you're trying to get yourself used to working with AI? 

Dorie Clark: One of the things that has been most interesting is, and again these are gonna vanish soon, but in the early days it's useful, is playing around enough to understand its...

to guess about its limitations. People really railed against Sam Altman when he was making the metaphorical comparison about people were saying, "Oh, it's so expensive to run AI." He's it's so expensive to raise a child." And to educate them and whatever.

But it's interesting because one of the first mistakes that I made when I was learning Claude Cowork was I was trying to get it to do some things, around these PowerPoint decks, and it's intensive inter- when it starts doing things with images, it takes a lot of, tokens, a lot of power, and it was just taking forever.

And I'm like, "Why is this taking so long?" But I let it run and run, and I didn't understand that it was stuck. And so I've learned that one of the things you have to do periodically is if it's taking a really long time, you have to stop it and just be like y- ask a question, "Are you stuck?"

And then it hasn't, bizarrely, it doesn't have enough self-awareness to get unstuck, but it'll say, "Oh yeah, I was in a loop. Wait, let me try again." And so you have to call it on it. And sometimes you even need to preventatively say, "Can you summarize this conversation for me to, so that I can move it to a new window, because I think you're getting tired?"

And it, it'll be like, "Oh yeah, that's a good idea." Because it degrades, a-as we've heard, right? The conversation degrades if it goes too long. So these are just strange artifacts that I'm sure will vanish, but we need to be aware of them now so that we don't get stymied in these nascent days while things get worked out.

What are the biggest use cases for you in terms of AI? Like, how are you applying it in your own life, Richie? Oh, man. Yeah. So I feel like- Dealing with marketing copy is one of the greatest use cases for me. I can talk about AI and technical things all day. Writing marketing copy is the bane of my life

Richie Cotton: Outsourcing all that, and I think in general, outsourcing tasks that you don't want to do is maybe the best motivator for actually using AI. Just automate what you hate, as the saying goes. 

Dorie Clark: That is for sure. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. And oh so you mentioned the idea of just dealing with things when it's stuck and being able to say, "Okay, get it out get it out of a problem."

This feels like a management skill, and do you feel there are any similarities between managing AIs and managing humans? 

Dorie Clark: Yeah. To, to the point that I raised about the parallel with children, it's almost like how do you give the kid a snack before they get hangry and have a fit?

And it's it's very similar. It's "Oh, you seem like you're slowing down. You seem like you're getting a little tired. Maybe let's give you a break. We'll go, we'll go take it somewhere else." So yeah, I think you do evolve a kind of intuitive sense over time as you're familiarizing yourself with a tool of, when is it on and really going fast and hard and performing the way it should, and when is it getting a little boggy and it starts, coming up with plans that are not such great plans and k- and just being really slow about executing things in a way that it shouldn't.

Richie Cotton: Okay, and so to continue the thought, you've been making use of AI for automating a lot of your work. Like, how far do you think you can push this? 

Dorie Clark: I think that a person could push it really far. The issue for me, and the reason that I don't, is that, again, I'm, I am sure that as a society we will find better pathways around this, but I am very concerned at the moment about security and about mistakes and things like that.

And y- there's a lot of examples of all of this, but ultimately, if you-- there's a lot of discussion in legal circles, but there's unanimous agreement that if your agentic AI does something completely screwed up and it causes a problem, you are the person that is ultimately responsible for that.

And so to just blithely let it run wild, it could-- There are bad things that could be done to you. For instance, it could delete your data. Recently there was headlines about a company that that it deleted their, entire database. They were using a cursor tool that was running on the late- the latest Claude model, and in nine seconds it deleted their entire database.

And you hear a story like that and you think, "Oh my gosh that's insanity." So you have to be wary of things like that. There is a certainly a non-zero chance that if it is roaming the web with impunity and then coming back into your system, that there could be sophisticated viruses that get brought back into your company.

There's even the possibility, depending on we, we've seen even in data that Anthropic itself has released, which I'm glad that they've released it in terms of full disclosure, that they have evidence that, when the model is threatened, the model will take action to protect itself.

And so you can see situations where A model might decide that it is in its own best interest to commit crimes or, blackmail someone or do these things that we don't have a handle on yet. And so I am keeping my AI use currently relatively gated in terms of permissions and me being the man in the middle and saying, "Okay, you can do this for this.

I'll allow this time. I won't allow globally." And so it slows it down, honestly. And I wish that I could just, go off and drink margaritas while it did all my work for me. But I feel that at present that is unwise. How are you thinking about security issues and and things like that rogue AI, all that?

Richie Cotton: Oh, yeah. I've heard so many horror stories. You do have to be careful. And one thing at DataCamp there was some recent discussions on if we have all of our conversations, all of our Zoom meetings, whatever, recorded, and then we provide access to these in Claude, then what happens if people start discussing salaries or other HR issues and things like that?

And there are so many subtleties of trying to figure out who has access to what could go wrong if you've got all this data available and people that shouldn't have access to it get access to it. So there's quite a lot of careful subtleties in terms of that enterprise implementation before you even start thinking about what can we use this for?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. 

Richie Cotton: I guess we agree we've got to be careful about this sort of thing. Now I actually want to segue a little bit into the other thing I want to talk you, to you about, which is personal branding. I know this is a specialty area of yours, and then we can maybe tie it back to AI. So I guess to begin with, just talk me through what's personal branding and why is it important?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Personal branding in general is how are you known? How do people think about you? How do people talk about you? And I think the understanding of personal branding has evolved over time. In the earliest days of personal branding, I think sometimes people thought of it as a weird shameful egotistical thing that you were, like, narcissistically worried too much about what people thought about you.

But I, I think that a new, more nuanced discussion has developed. I wrote this book now years ago. It's called "Reinventing You," and in that time, I think people have come to understand that yeah, actually, your public reputation is important. It does matter, and it doesn't mean being obsessed with it, but it means recognizing that your options will be limited, sometimes unfairly limited, if people have the wrong perception of you.

And so it is in our interest then to at least at a baseline level know what they're thinking and make sure that it is what you would hope that they would be thinking. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. I love that idea of concentrating on what other people think of you as well, and maybe not being too obsessed by it because feels rather narcissistic.

Who do you think needs to have a personal brand? Like, when do you need to worry about this stuff? 

Dorie Clark: I think realistically all of us have one, so you know people think something about you, whether it's just your spouse or, your coworkers or what have you. Certainly people who have a more public-facing job or aspire to, it gets heightened because there's more people that know you and therefore more people that do have a perception of you.

But even in the micro, even if you were just a sort of regular work-a-day person, it is advantageous if people see you in a positive light, presumably in the light to which you would like to be seen. So I think that it bears at least some degree of scrutiny for almost everyone to understand, okay what is it they're saying, and are there misperceptions I need to correct, or are there small things?

This is clearly not about refurbishing your personality or trying to project something fake, but are there small things that I could do that would make it more likely that people would see me the right way? 

Richie Cotton: Okay. Do you have an example of some of these small things that you can do just to make sure people do see you in the right way?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that for me is a very favorite low-hanging fruit is at a very basic level, if somebody hasn't seen you in a while, a question that almost certainly they are going to ask is some variation of, "So Richie, what have you been up to lately?" You know that question is coming, and yet almost no one prepares an answer for that question.

And w- whatever. If it's your buddy, fine, but if it's in a work context, it would be helpful... what people often do is they default to the thing that literally is the first thing on their mind. So it'd be like, "What have you been up to lately?" "Oh, I just saw this Netflix show over the weekend, and let me tell you about, this reality show or something."

Or they'll-- or even worse, those are just like, "Oh, nothing. How about you?" And it's "Oh, really? You've been up to nothing? That doesn't sound great." Instead, you could pick something accurate and true that you've been doing, but that at least leads the conversation in a more positive, workplace-focused way.

Maybe the answer is, "Oh, last month I went to a really interesting conference about trends in AI, and that's been really cool because I've been spending a lot of time learning about that. In particular, I was interested about XYZ." That moves the conversation in a useful place so that people think, "Oh, Richie's keeping up.

Richie has interesting things to say about AI." And that begins to compound just by answering the question in a slightly different way. 

Richie Cotton: That's actually just blown my mind. I feel like I've been asked that question of what you've been up to hundreds or maybe thousands of times. And yeah, often it's just, I guess now I've got the eye patch, it's just "Oh, piracy, searching for treasure," that sort of thing.

But yeah, probably a workfo- a workplace-focused answer is gonna be a lot more helpful, if I'm speaking to colleagues. Okay, and in general, I do love the idea of preparing for conversations. This is like a great thing for podcasters in particular. It's oh yeah, you have to know where the conversation's going before you have the conversation, and things go a lot more smoothly.

But yeah, good life skill in general. Personal brands are often associated with content creators. So is this do you need to create content in order to show off your personal brand? And what sort of content might you want to create? 

Dorie Clark: Yes. So the answer is yes, you do need to create content, but it does not need to be content creation in the way it gets talked about a lot, which is oh, you've gotta be, an influencer on social media or something like that.

Content creation is important, however, because People need to know what your ideas are. This is literally true for anybody who's a professional, for anybody who has a professional job. I have spent a lot of time studying this. I dev- I developed something I call the recognized expert formula, and specifically it's this question of if you wanna be known, if you wanna be respected in terms of your, you're in your company or in your field as someone who knows what they're talking about, how do you do it?

And there's three levers. One is your network, one is social proof, so meaning like what it what are, what is the markles- markers of credibility that you have around you so that people know to take you seriously, and the third is content, so that people know what your ideas are. So of course, one, one way to do it is to share content on social media, that's fine.

But more locally, anybody could be, quote-unquote, creating content by doing a lunch and learn at their company to say, "Hey," let's say you're in sales, "Hey, I developed a new technique that's really helpful. It's helping me close a lot more. Let me share it with all of you guys so that we can all benefit from it."

Like that would, that's a great form of content. Another one is in meetings. What are you contributing? Are you mostly staying silent in meetings, or are you asking thoughtful questions? Or are you making thoughtful points that help advance the conversation? Maybe it's starting to present more at industry conferences.

Instead of just going, maybe you could present a workshop or s- be on a panel or something like that. There's small things we can do, but they often can be very effective. 

Richie Cotton: I love that idea that even just having a conversation in a meeting is a form of content creation, and that just being able to speak up for yourself, being able to put across interesting points, that's gonna really benefit things.

Okay. All we w- we started this conversation talking about AI, and at this point you can have AI generate a lot of content for you. So how is that gonna affect your personal brand if you start outsourcing things to AI? 

Dorie Clark: I think that eventually over time, using AI is going to be the equivalent of using a computer, right?

It's like a tool. No one is gonna be mortified or offended if it's like, "Richie, this report that you wrote, this book that you wrote, did you use a computer?" Oh, it's not legitimate unless he hand-typed it or hand-wrote it. I think that AI is going to become fairly ubiquitous.

The question, though and we-- when we were talking about this, you alluded to it earlier does it, quote-unquote, "sound like AI?" That's a different matter. Sounding AI right now is a slur, but I think that what it actually means is it doesn't sound like you. It sounds fake. It sounds boilerplate.

It sounds average and boring. And that is something that would be offensive whether you're using AI or not. It's "Oh, you didn't put any thought into this." It would be equally offensive if you hired a human ghostwriter to do it, or it would be equally offensive if you did it yourself but did it when you were, like, totally checked out and watching television and you're like, "Yeah, whatever, this'll do."

And I, I think that using AI per se is not going to be a problem. I think that the question is can you tune AI so that it sounds distinctive, thoughtful it's your ideas, it's your voice. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. I have to say, when I've tried to get AI to generate things like LinkedIn messages for me, it puts a load of emojis in there, and that's not really my style.

It takes a bit of work to make it be authentic to myself. So do you have any tips on achieving that level of authenticity when you are making use of AI? 

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Honestly, in the early days, it's if you're using AI, you almost have to spend as long editing AI as you do w- writing the post in the first place.

That being said I'm certainly a big fan of AI training because if you are doing an improvement loop- Where you're not just doing the same thing every time, but you are, for instance, honing like a Claude skill or something like that and saying, "All right, here are the changes I made. Analyze these changes, write them down, and then incorporate them into the master memory document so that next time they're captured."

Hopefully, the, the second go around, the third go around, it will be much more refined, and it'll be avoiding a lot of the common mistakes. It's probably never gonna be perfect, but if you can get it to say, "You know what? Richie's voice is no emojis. Just like zero emojis." Okay, great.

We've ruled that out. And then in the second pass, you're like, "You know what? I don't actually say quietly times in a -word article, so maybe let's not do that." Oh, okay. And I think it will improve over time. Training-- the whole point about what enabled AI to take shape was that finally the training data pool got large enough, and it's, it's-- That was true at the global level of what enabled LLMs, large language models.

It is also true at the micro level that we individually will need to have enough data to train AI on our voice. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. And so I do love the idea of having this iterative loop where you gradually make things better. So I love the idea. It should be fairly straightforward to have a prompt to say, "Okay, please don't put any emojis in this message you're creating."

And you gradually work from there, and you can build enough examples of, okay, this is what a good post looks like and it's gonna get good over time. We're back to just being patient and gradually making things better. Okay. So beyond this I know one of the strategies you're a big fan of in terms of improving your personal brand is around social proof.

Do you wanna talk me through how you achieve that? 

Dorie Clark: Yeah. So social proof we were mentioning earlier as one pillar of the recognized expert formula, and the basic idea there is that all of us are so overloaded this, these days. It's much easier generally to say no to someone or something than it is to say yes because Yes requires a lot of intellectually laborious vetting.

It's oh, like you probably get pitched a million people on your podcast, right? It's just no is easy, whereas yes is oh are they credible? Are they gonna embarrass me? Who is this person anyway? And it takes a while to do enough research. They might look credible on the surface, but then you look at their social media and it turns out they're a psycho or something.

So much easier to say no. The problem for us as individuals is we need people to say yes. So how do you create a shortcut in that process so that it becomes easy for people to say yes? And there's a few, we can kinda call them hacks. One, the best hack, of course, is to become widely known enough that everyone has already heard of you so that it's an instant yes.

Oh, okay, you're a business celebrity. You're whatever. You're like the head of Google, you're the head of Apple. You wanna come on my show? Sure, you can do that. But for people who are not, having a super prominent job or they don't have million Instagram followers, how do you do it?

The answer is Strategically cultivating affiliations, accurate, truthful affiliations that signify to people that you are pre-vetted, and so therefore they can relax their vigilance and say yes to you without having to think so hard about it. So the way to do that would be things like being featured in certain media outlets, writing for certain media outlets, having books that are published by reputable publishers.

It would be giving talks that are on respected stages. It would be winning awards that are important in your industry. Maybe it's guest lecturing at universities or teaching at certain universities. Having certain clients that everybody has heard of, whether those are individuals or companies. These are some of the things, and all of those, if you are strategic, can be tackled.

And it, it certainly takes work. You might say, "You know what? Such and such company is my dream company." And you have to work really hard. But you-- it might be messaging, two dozen LinkedIn connections or whatever to try to get in, to get a meeting, whatever. But you can strategically hunt it down and make that company your client, and you do that with enough social proof points, and eventually you have a kind of bulletproof credibility.

Richie Cotton: I love that. Lots of great tips on things you can do there. As long as we... And I feel like this is what a lot of companies do. There's okay, I have these customers, so there's like case studies on who the customers are, and you go, okay these are the big names. And we're working with these cool companies, so we're obviously cool as well.

But for an individual, it sounds like some of those things are pretty tricky to achieve. You can't go straight to, okay, I've just been published in the New York Times or something. How do you get started with this? 

Dorie Clark: So there is a concept called the ladder strategy, where it's just sequentially laddering up.

And I'll give you an example from my own life because yes, you, you don't immediately get published in The New York Times or written about in The New York Times. When I was starting my business, which now is years ago I was like, "I need credibility. I need social proof." And in my case, it's just start where you are.

So I was living outside Boston at the time, and so I got-- I was able to get published in the Somerville Journal which I don't even know how many readers it had. It probably, it might've had readers or something like that. I was able to get published in the Boston Business Journal. The- these were j- like small publications, but at the time they were influential at least locally.

I was able to, to marshal local credibility. Across the country, people wouldn't have known about them, they wouldn't have cared, but it was something. It was a stepping stone. And eventually you get that, and the people that you approach who are at more national publications, they might not be bowled over that you're in the Somerville Journal, but they're like, "Okay she's at least published something in a publication that is not controlled by, her mom or something.

And so presumably she can write a little bit, so I'll take a look." And you eventually land that and keep laddering up. And you do have to work at it. I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand the machinations behind the scenes, or they assume that someone is just tapped.

But when I decided that I really wanted to get serious about writing for a national publication, I really only had local credits to my name in terms of, contributing around business stuff. And so I made a list over over like the holidays of about two dozen publications, and they were target publications.

They were all national news publications or national business publications or res- I'll call them respected regional publications. Like maybe it's like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or the San Francisco Chronicle or something like that. And so I made this list and I just went through systematically.

Now it'd be so easy with AI. But I went through and I was like, "Okay, do they have contributors on their website that are non-staffers? Do they have, outside freelancers? And does it seem like a regular thing where people can do this?" And so then I went through, and if the answer was yes, I researched online to try to find the person that I thought would be closest to the person responsible.

If somebody was a web editor or something like that, I would target that person. I just made my best guess. And I tried to find that person's email address, and I just cold pitch. I cold pitch and I cold pitch. And out of two dozen Now mind you, I was a former professional journalist offering to write for free, so you'd think this was good.

I can tell you out of publications did not reply at all. They're like, "No we really don't care." No, no interest whatsoever. Three got back to me with an initial message of interest. Two of them, after I replied again, ghosted me and were no longer interested. One of the said yes, but that was actually all I needed, and so I got started writing for them.

In this case it was Forbes, and I ended up over a three-year period writing about articles for them. But it really required the legwork up front. 

Richie Cotton: Wow. Yeah. This seems to be like a common theme of this episode is just like you need to put a lot of legwork up front in order to get the benefits.

And actually, I used to live in Somerville, so I think I may have read the Somerville Journal as well. I'm not sure whether I read one of your articles, but 

Dorie Clark: yeah. There we go. I love it, Richie. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah great local newspaper. Okay I love that idea of just putting in a lot of legwork, doing a lot of outreach, and eventually, maybe you get your break, and once you've had a break, then that enables you to get bigger breaks and gradually you work your way up there.

It sounds like a lot to do on your own. Can you get any help from friends, colleagues, other people you know? How might you use your own network to im- make the situation easier? Yeah, certainly on the research front AI is gonna be a godsend here, 'cause I was doing all this manually, and now I think it would be relatively easy to let AI loose online to to do research about things like, oh, okay which, which are the major publications and do they have outside contributors, et cetera?

Dorie Clark: So that part would be great. But always it is easier if you have a warm lead, a warm introduction. I ended up getting into Forbes from a cold pitch. That was, I think, a lot of luck in the sense that they were at an, a moment where they were just starting to expand their contributor network, and so they were actually looking for people, and I was at the early wave of it, not out of any great brilliance, but just I, emailed -plus outlets and that was the right time for them and not for other people.

Another thing that did happen was I started writing around that same time I was looking for outlets to contribute to, and I started writing for The Huffington Post, which at the time was a super prestigious get. It was very sexy to write for The Huffington Post. And the way that I got that was from a warm introduction.

I had to essentially mount a campaign because I had about a half dozen colleagues who wrote for The Huffington Post, and I kept asking people, "Will you introduce me? Will you introduce me?" And it turned out to be way more complicated than normal and a sign of things to come with the media. Al- many of them I think were conceptually willing, but they didn't actually know their editor.

They didn't even know who their editor was, which was very strange because they didn't interact with anybody. They just uploaded things to the internet and then it magically published or something. So they didn't, e-even as a contributor, they didn't know who to send me to. So I had to ask about a half dozen before I got to a person who finally did know somebody and was willing to connect me and that happened.

But that became helpful and influential to me in terms of, again, marshaling additional social proof that then led me to other, greater opportunities over time. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah, th- in general, this does seem like a good business strategy. If you can get like a warm introduction where you know someone there, then that's better than just cold outreach on LinkedIn or trying to figure out who the right person is to speak to and just sending a message completely blind.

That's wild that people didn't know who their coworkers were, like, so they didn't know who was gonna make decisions about things. Maybe, yeah, as to a sign of the odd state of media at the moment. But I feel this leads to a more general question about networking. Like, how do you decide who's gonna be helpful?

Who should you network with? Do you have a strategy for this? 

Dorie Clark: Oh, Richie, I have many strategies. This is this is one of my favorite questions. So my most recent book is called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, and I have a whole chapter in there about networking because I do have a very particular philosophy.

One key and this ties into this question about getting warm introductions and things like this, is I have a concept that I call no asks for a year. Because I think one of the most common/worst mistakes that people can make in networking is asking too soon, because it really sours a relationship, I think oftentimes permanently, if people don't know you very well and they perceive that you are predatory, we can say, with your asks.

So if I've just met you and we're forming a connection, and you somehow know in advance or discover that I know somebody that you wanna know, to be clear, this is like a high status person. You're like, "Oh, hey Dorie, do you think you could introduce me to so and it feels weird because you wonder, "Oh did Richie even wanna get to know me at all?

Or did he... Was this just a ploy to use me to get to this other person that he really wanted to talk to?" And so you're not gonna give the person much of a chance after that. Instead, you can ask for plenty of things in the first year of knowing somebody that are not about transactional relationship gets.

"Can we hang out?" That's a great thing to ask because you're getting to know each other. "Hey, I like your sweater. Where did you get your sweater?" That is a great thing to ask. It's not like it costs them anything. But I'm talking about asks with political capital. Those I suggest you wait at least a year because you wanna solidify a relationship and really show the person that genuinely you are committed to getting to know them, that you don't have an agenda.

So that's one piece. But broadly speaking I would say A mistake that people often make in networking is they do it way too much with people who have an obvious, clear, immediate benefit to them, so people in their company or maybe people in their industry. They very rarely make an effort to network with people who don't have a direct impact on them in the near term.

But those are the things that can become most transformative over time because you don't know how you will evolve. You don't even know how you want to evolve, and it's often the people who are farther from what you're doing right now that can help guide you and give you ideas to get into that new space.

So I like to encourage people to be very ecumenical in their networking. 

Richie Cotton: Okay, I love that. So basically the idea is talking to strangers and it can benefit your life. A big fan of this. I think it's scary for a lot of people depending on what culture you're from. It's okay especially here in New York, no one talks to strangers 'cause usually strangers are just trying to ask you for money.

Do you have any tips on how you go about this? How do you go about approaching people that you don't know at all, maybe from a different background? 

Dorie Clark: Sure. And to be clear talking to strangers is a good metaphorical frame. In a literal frame, oh my God, I wouldn't do that either. Like I, ah.

I like this person at the bus stop or whatever, that's just weird and uncomfortable for me. So I would certainly not recommend it. Although I do have a colleague named Jenny Wood who o- one of, one of her commonly shared and very illustrative stories that she likes to tell because she prides herself on being a very bold person, is that there was a guy that she saw on the subway in New York City that she thought was cute, and she literally, like he, he, she was kinda hoping that they could connect, but he got off, at the platform before she had kinda psyched herself up or found a way to do it.

And so she decided "Okay, this is the moment." So she jumped off the platform too to get off with him and gave him her number and was like, "Call me." And th- this is like very bold with a stranger, and actually it went so they're now married and have been married over a decade.

So it can work, but I can tell you that it would not work for me. I get very nervous about that. When I say, broaden your network, talk to strangers, really it's about strangers within a confined w- area. A perfect example is friends of friends. So These are people you don't know. But a thing I like to do is co-host dinners.

I've done this with many different friends. You can say, "You know what Richie? Let's have a dinner. I'll make a reservation for eight people. You bring three friends, I'll bring three friends, and then we can all have dinner together and cross-pollinate." That is a really nice way to expand your network and get to know people that you wouldn't otherwise.

But it's it's constrained. You obviously have something in common. You're a friend of Richie. Great, I know Richie. Let's ta- How did you meet Richie? There's some things that, that we can talk about. But it opens up new vistas. Also, making a point of going to conferences that are more ideas conferences type thing.

I'm a big fan of that as well, and it draws a lot of people from different fields. Okay. Yeah, I have to say I love the kind of sliding doors style story about the subway. Bold one for our listeners to try. But yeah, in general, I think connecting with friends of friends is easier than total strangers, so maybe y- you broaden your network that way by default.

Richie Cotton: Okay I guess relating to this, before you were talking about speaking up in meetings and feels like meetings are a good opportunity to share your ideas and basically, connect with people. And also, we spend way too much of our time in meetings, so I'm always keen for tips to improve them.

So talk me through yeah, what strategies do you have for or tips do you have for doing better meetings? 

Dorie Clark: One of the best tips for meetings is to avoid them whenever humanly possible. That's honestly the best. They rarely go that well. The second best tip for meetings is if you have to be in a meeting, run the meeting.

Because when you are at the mercy of other people are probably not as good as you and have not thought as much as you about the importance of good meetings. Many people, especially in corporate life, will just replicate the pattern of what they have seen before about how other people have run meetings.

They'll say this is how that's done." How it's typically done is terrible, and so you should not strive to replicate what has been done before. We should try to improve it. All right, let's say we have to have the meeting. Let's say you are running the meeting. What do you do? What do you control?

I think number one a regular recurring meeting is usually very damaging because you just get habituated to giving people very banal updates. "Oh I've been doing this, I've been doing this. I called these people. I'm waiting." It's not necessarily even information people need, but it is performative delivery of information so that people look busy.

I try to schedule meetings only when they are specifically necessary to convene and connect around a certain decision that needs to be made or information that absolutely has to be transmitted and have a conversation about. If it's just one-way transmission, an email is fine. But if you have to have a conversation about something, sure, have the meeting Try to keep it as short as possible.

Try for minutes, not Try for minutes, not an hour. And make sure that everyone is extremely clear about what is the goal of the meeting. If you know the goal up front, it's less likely that people will ramble or get off track with it. And I think we need to just model as the moderator, as the convener of the meeting.

People often, even if they're the one that called the meeting, they often abdicate responsibility for it. And the truth is, if you called the meeting, it is your responsibility to make sure it is a good meeting, and so you need to be aggressive. So if s- and it can be uncomfortable, but if someone is rambling, if someone is not adding value, you need to cut them off nicely and say, "Thank you so much, Richie.

That's really great. I think we need to recenter things back on blah, blah, blah, but, thank you for mentioning that. Okay, moving on." You gotta keep it sharp for people. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. I agree that a lot of meetings, you can end up, th-they're banal and you get into the routines of things going horribly wrong.

So I guess, is there a strategy for learning how to do better meetings then? Do you need to train yourself on how to become a meetings expert? 

Dorie Clark: I don't think that necessarily it's, this crazy intensive process. I think, It's largely a golden rule-based you know, h- host, host the meeting that you wish to be part of.

But there are some good books. I have a friend named Mamie Kanfer Stewart who has written great work specifically around meetings and how to run better meetings. So she has a book that can be helpful to people. But yeah I think it's just really recognizing how precious people's time is both in the sense of just a, a moral responsibility to not waste people's time, but also literally people in organizations do not compute the fact that, okay, everyone in that meeting has an hourly rate based on their salary.

So having this dumb meeting is probably costing your organization, what? $$$depending on the pay rate of the, and the number of people involved. And so you have to ask yourself, i- it's easy in consumer goods. It's gosh, do I wanna spend, $for a cone of ice cream?

Is that really worth it for me? We know that. That's very clear. But having a meeting seems free. It's not free. It's thousands of dollars. Is it worth thousands of dollars to sit there? 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. And particularly once you get these sort of all-hands type meetings where you've got hundreds or thousands of people in attendance, the cost of the meeting can really rack up a lot there, and then you get people not concentrating 'cause, oof, there's emails going on and whatever in the background.

So yeah. Okay. O- only have good meetings. I think that's maybe wishful thinking, but one, one day we'll get there. All right. Super. Before we wrap up what are you most excited about? We talked about AI, we talked about personal branding. What's driving you at the moment?

Dorie Clark: Ah one, one thing that I'm doing right at the moment, I'm intensely head down because the draft of it is due in about three months, so we're getting close to it, is I'm working on my next book. So that's gonna be exciting. It is called "The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Coach," and I'm co-authoring it with my colleague Alyssa Cohn and with Marshall Goldsmith, who is probably the most famous executive coach in the world.

And so that is exciting for me to really find good ways of codifying principles and helping people think about what good coaching is and isn't. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. That sounds amazing. Are you at the point where you can give us maybe one coaching tip? 

Dorie Clark: Absolutely. So in terms of in terms of coaching for just, a manager coaching employees or things like that?

Richie Cotton: Sure. 

Dorie Clark: All right. Ultimately when it comes to good coaching, one of the debates in coaching that's actually very interesting is is around when do you ask questions or when do you give advice? And so we we have a colleague named Michael Bungay Stanier that loves to, to point out that for leaders, their first goal is, i- you know, is almost always that they give advice.

Someone has a problem, okay, here's what to do. And it disempowers the person typically, because it's like they, they get trained to just come, "Oh, here's... Okay, great. I've been told what to do. I will do that." So I think that's right. I think that as coaches, we need, whether you're literally a coach or whether you're a manager acting as a coach, we need to ask more questions, because unless you have full information, your advice may not be accurate.

So that is an important question. I think sometimes within the coaching profession there, it- that's become a little bit almost too much of a gospel, where it's it's like the idea about an old-fashioned psychoanalyst where, oh, you're not supposed to give your opinion ever. You just ask and ask, "But what do you think?

What would you do here?" So I think that we need to be smart about the balance, and typically what that breaks down to is you need to ask more questions than you think, and ask questions even past the point where you think you know what the answer is, because you need to be not % clear. You need to be % clear about what is actually going on, and try to empower the person to to understand and come up with their own ideas.

And also, it is our responsibility as a coach that if you really know the answer and the other person is struggling, te- tell them what to do. But g- give them not just the answer, but why you came to the answer, and help parse it for them, and that's how they can learn. 

Richie Cotton: Okay, gotcha. This seems very close to the idea of teaching where you don't wanna give the whole answer to people in general.

You wanna make them think so they can come to the answer themselves rather than just yeah spoon-feeding them all the time. 

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. And also don't deny them. "No, I won't tell you." 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. At some point you just need to let them get on with their day and and get back to it.

So yeah. Brilliant. Okay. Look- looking forward to the next book then. Finally, I always want more people to learn from, so whose work are you most excited about at the moment? 

Dorie Clark: Oh, amazing. I have a good prop here. My friend Ron Friedman just came out with a book. It's a little bit shining in the sun here, but here we go.

It's called "Super Teams," and it's about how to how to be part of and how to run really great corporate teams. So it's a cool, very interesting, well-written book. So I would recommend that. 

Richie Cotton: Amazing. I have to say, I love that you've got all these books to hand very convenient in front of you.

I'm gonna have to 

Dorie Clark: look at books- You, you would. Just just, like, all around me. 

Richie Cotton: Nice. Wonderful. Okay. Thank you so much for your time, Dorie. 

Dorie Clark: Rich, great to be here. Thanks.