213: Surviving and Winning Office Politics with Dorie Clark

Pete Mockaitis
Dorie, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dorie Clark
Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was so intrigued in reading a little bit about you.  So not only do you do some adjunct professoring and book writing, but you’ve also directed a documentary film and produced a jazz album that won a couple of Grammys.  How do you do it all, how does this all tie together for you?

Dorie Clark
Well, thank you.  One of my mottos in life is that I like to try to optimize for interesting.  And so, if there is an opportunity to just try something that is intriguing or something that I’ve kind of always wanted to do or that will just make a good story, frankly, I’m usually game to try it – and so, making movies or being involved in music or things that from the time I was a teenager I thought would be pretty awesome.

And I think for me, fortunately, opportunities presented themselves, but I think that this is the case for many of us, if we are open to them.  For instance, the way that I ended up directing the documentary film, was I was actually a communications consultant on a political campaign, and one of the people who was supporting our candidate was a woman who was an environmental activist, and I got to know her through the campaign.

And a campaign volunteer decided that this woman’s story was amazing and needed to be told, and she was really passionate about the idea of creating a documentary film about her.  But she had never made a documentary film, didn’t know how to do it, and so she came to me and asked if I would be involved in it and if I in fact would direct the film.  And to have an opportunity like that, I went for it.  I had never directed a film before but I said, “You know what?  This is the moment.  Let’s make it happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good, that’s so good.  Did you get to wear a beret?

Dorie Clark
You know, I didn’t.  We were mostly filming in the summer and it was pretty hot outside.  But otherwise for sure I would have done a beret.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s kind of the first thing that I would think of, is the chair and the beret.  And then all the artistic stuff I would need a lot of help with.

Dorie Clark
Yes, I feel you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I bumped into you actually not so much from your fantastic books, which is really cool – they’re doing well – but rather it was through the Lynda course about managing office politics, and that’s something that’s come up for listeners.  So, I’d love it if you could frame if up for us, first of all, just how important are office politics.  And some would say, “Oh, I hate politics.  I’m just going to put my head down and do a good job.”  How should we be thinking about it?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, actually one of the reasons that I got into writing about office politics was in fact my previous career.  I do mostly marketing, strategy, consulting now, but I used to work in politics.  I was a press secretary on a governor’s race, I was a communications director on a presidential campaign, and then consulted for a lot of different other races, including the one that spawned the documentary film.

And it occurred to me over time that there were a lot of parallels between how office politics is conducted and how electoral politics is.  And I realized that if we could use election strategies to win campaigns, we could do the same thing to win at office politics.  And once I had that insight and started writing about it and talking about it, I realized that that was actually kind of an empowering frame, because a lot of people feel like office politics happens to them, that they just get into a situation and there’s these shady operators that are always trying to take the credit for everything and have these Machiavellian maneuverings.

And if you realize that you don’t have to just opt out of office politics and have things done to you; instead there are ethical, proactive ways to think about office politics, then you’re a little bit more in the driver’s seat and you realize, “Okay, I can actually begin to shape my career and get the things done that I need to.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is a nice healthy reframe there.  And so, can you share, maybe first of all, just a couple of those parallels you see, like in the campaign world and in the spokesperson world, that you see kind of transfer right over into the workplace?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, I think that one of the most important things is, in electoral politics, of course everyone is very clear on the goal.  We all know it’s to win on election day.  And so you have your deadline and you know exactly what your goal is, and you work backwards from it.  So you say, “Okay, we expect that X number of people are going to be voting, so that means we need to get Y share of the votes.  How do we account for that?”  And you create an action plan.

I think that a problem that a lot of professionals have is that they are not so strategic when it comes to office politics; they just think, “Oh well, Jenny’s a big bully, and so blah blah blah.”  Instead, it pays to have your focus on the ultimate outcome, just as you would with a political campaign.  And so specifically, it involves getting clear on your goal – maybe it’s winning a promotion to become a manager, become a vice president, and then – this is a really critical part – understanding who is necessary to make that goal happen.

It’s often not just one person that has a vote or veto power over that; often times it’s a collection of people.  And so coming up with a strategy so that over time you are building relationships so that the people you need to influence know who you are and like you, have a favorable assessment of you, understand what your strengths and competencies are – that’s playing the long game, so that you can get in front of those people, spend more time with them and ultimately, two years down the road, when it’s time for you to come up for that promotion, they’re saying “Yes” to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good and I’m having a flashback right now to when I had my dream internship.  I was at Bain & Company and I was chatting with the person I worked with most often, and his role was a senior associate consultant in the hierarchy there.  And I had known that it was the manager who’d made the decision about whether or not I got the offer.  And so I was having some back and forth chats with Kyle, was his name – he was awesome – about what I should do and be improving upon.

And then there was a light bulb that came over me and I said, “Oh, wait a second.  I’m supposed to be dazzling you?” And he said, “Well yeah, I’d like to be dazzled.  Yeah, the manager makes the decision but it’s primarily based upon my input.”  It was cool we could just be candid.  I was very green in my career.  And we could just have the conversation straight up.  And I was like, “Oh, okay.”  And so you’re right – I think we can overlook that even if you do know the goal clearly, you don’t know who are all the critical influencers along the way.

Dorie Clark
That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right.  And often times it’s people that in the hierarchy, you wouldn’t necessarily expect.  This is where the secretaries come in, this is where the assistants or the junior employees come in.  We might be so narrowly focused on the power players and actually, as is the case in your example, often times they are paying cursory attention and really they are just delegating and saying, “Okay, who do you think we should promote?”  And so, there can sometimes be huge pockets of power in unexpected places.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes.  Well, now tell us, how do we kind of decode that or get a sense for who’s got the influence and how it all unfolds.

Dorie Clark
Well, I think that one of the things that we can do is conduct what in the world of politics is known as “power mapping”.  And so the way that power mapping works is that literally on a sheet of paper you start to write down the person or people that are most influential in making a given decision.  So maybe it’s a promotion decision, maybe you have a project or a program that you’re trying to get green-lit, and so you need to figure out who the decision-makers are.

In a literal sense you probably know that part, but something that requires a little bit more detective work, and this is things like looking at who’s sitting with who at the lunch room; it’s listening carefully to what people are saying and seeing who they’re quoting and who they’re citing; it is going through people’s LinkedIn profiles and understanding, “Oh, these two people might be different functional areas now, but they actually were in sales training at the same time.  They probably really have a history with each other.”

It’s that secondary level of analysis that enables you to understand who the people are who are influencing the decision-makers.  And if you can’t get to a decision-maker directly, influencing the influencers can become very valuable.  And even if you can get directly to the decision-maker, if you are creating an echo chamber in support of whatever your goal is, if you have a bunch of people around that person saying, “Oh yes, that’s right.  You should definitely promote him, you should definitely promote her” – that can make a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, create an echo chamber – that’s a great turn of a phrase, yes.  Okay, so we’re kind of getting that detective work and I guess sometimes you can probably just flat out ask who are the key people who are going to be in the meeting, what is the process by which promotions are determined, and the timing and and all of that.  And so sometimes it’s the explicit asking, and sometimes it is the the detective work, observing LinkedIn, etcetera.  Do you have any other favorite tactics to put the power map together?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, so as you’re thinking through the power map, the other thing that is critical is, in addition to understanding who the people should be who are on it, is quantifying your relationship to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Quantifying.

Dorie Clark
Yes, so one strategy for this – and I discussed this in a Harvard Business Review article that I did a while back called A Campaign Plan for Your Career, is that you can color code each relationship on there.  So for instance, if there’s someone who is a decision-maker that you have a really good relationship with, they would be color coded green on the map.  If there’s someone that you have an okay relationship with or maybe you don’t know them that well, they could be a yellow.  And if there’s someone that either just does not even know who you are or there’s for some reason a negative relationship, that person would be red.

And your goal as you work through this process is to try over time to change the colors on the map closer and closer to green.  You want it to be as green as possible, especially if you have a reasonable time horizon.  Let’s say that you’re planning for something that’s coming up in a year or even two years – that’s plenty of time if you are assiduous to build relationships, to build connections, to come up with ideas and ways to get closer to people.  Maybe it’s just choosing, “Oh, I should sit next to this person in the meeting so that in the five minutes before the meeting starts we have the opportunity to chit chat a little bit and I get to know them a little bit better.”  It’s just these small incremental moves over time and repeated, have a large net effect.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that.  And so, Dorie, I’ve got to sound the voice of the skeptic there – it’s like, “Oh but Dorie, isn’t that, you know, inauthentic, or like I’m using people?”  How do we navigate that one?

Dorie Clark
Well, I think that it would be inauthentic or using people if you really just didn’t care about them at all and you were just like the Terminator saying, “Promotion, promotion, promotion.”  But ideally, the spirit that you want to go into this with is just getting to know people as people, building a human relationship, because there’s multiple steps along this pathway, right?

Number one is they have to at least just know who you are; they have to literally know, “Oh, that’s Pete.”  Number two is they have to like you, have some kind of a favorable feeling: “Oh, Pete.  He’s a nice guy, yeah.”  And then third and finally it’s, “Oh, Pete’s really good at his job.  We need to promote him.”

And so, going through those stages it’s not a disingenuous thing if you want to meet someone who is powerful in some way; they’re probably an interesting person.  You have a limited time and focus, and so just introducing yourself, just letting them know who you are as a human being and making a little small talk – so maybe you hear about their family and they hear about yours – that’s not using somebody; that’s actually just building a nice relationship so that if you see someone in the hallway, they’re like, “Oh, hey Pete!  What’s going on?”  That actually makes life nicer for everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect.  I love that.  And so then, let’s talk about some of those upgrades for the colors, as well as those little steps when it can come to sitting next to someone, starting some small talk.  Have you found, are there any sort of particular, I don’t know, topics or questions or opportunities that seem to come up frequently, in terms of being a nice relationship upgrade approach?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, absolutely, and this is something that I talked about in my first book, Reinventing You.  Something that I thought was a really terrific idea, which I think has maybe gotten a little bit lost to the sands of history, so I want to resurrect it, is in the 1980s there was at the time a well-known business author named Harvey Mackay.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Dorie Clark
And yeah, he had some great stuff – one of his books was called Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive – great title.  And he had something that he did called the “Mackay 66”.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Dorie Clark
Yeah, I love the idea of this.  The deal with Harvey Mackay before he wrote books, his claim to fame was that he was the owner of an envelope company.  And this is the ultimate commodity business.  Who really cares about what kind of envelope you’re going to buy, right?  And so he knew this, and he realized that his salesmen were only going to be successful if they could differentiate not on the product but on their relationships, the quality of the relationships with their customers.

And so he gave each of his salespeople this sheet called the “Mackay 66” – he had 66 question on there, and it was just everything you could think of about a person: Are they married?  Do they have kids?  What are the names of the spouse and the kids?  Where did they go to college?  Did they go to grad school?  If so, where?  What sports teams do they root for?  What hobbies do they have?  All the things.

Now the trick of course is that no human being is going to sit there and be interviewed and answer 66 questions – that’s ridiculous.  But Harvey Mackay’s goal was he told his salespeople, “At the end of the year, you need to have this sucker filled out entirely, but you don’t do it by sitting there and grilling someone.  You have to spend enough time and have enough high-quality conversations with the person, so that organically you get this information and can fill it out.”  I think that’s a really good test and a really good way to think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is really good.  That is good.  And so now I’m wondering, with the Mackay 66, and you’re right – resurrecting is good – I’ve heard of it but I haven’t thought of it in a couple of years.  So that’s great stuff.  And then when it comes to the questions, that it’s not a grilling, but it’s a natural conversation unfolding that occurs.  So then, I guess I’m wondering, do some folks just not feel like engaging you on these, like, “I don’t care to tell you these things.”  So, any thoughts for how you play that?

Dorie Clark
Well, it’s true – there are some  people that are just totally non-communicative.  You could say, “Hey Pete, so what was your weekend?  Did you do anything interesting?”  And there’s always going to be the guy that’s like, “No.” And okay, great.  You have your little power map.  If there’s a person on the power map that’s just not playing along, they hate humanity, they’re misanthropic, they don’t want to get to know you – okay, that’s fine; there’s 7 billion people – you move on.  There’s probably another person you can befriend, there’s probably another way to accomplish what you need to do.

But the vast majority of people are actually pretty open to it, if you’re just friendly, if you’re cordial to them.  I think that almost anyone, “Oh, what did you do this weekend?  Anything interesting?”  They’ll say, “Oh well, I took my kids to the movies.”  “Oh really?  How old are your kids?  Oh, eight and six – what great ages.  Nice.  What are they into for hobbies?”  You have a little chat, and every time you get to know a little bit more about a person, the next time you see them: “Oh, how is Josh doing with the soccer?”  And it just keeps building that layer of intimacy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent.  And so now I’m thinking, boy, if there are 66 questions and many people, you’ve probably got to track that somehow, ’cause our fragile memories are going to explode trying to hold all of that.  So, any best practices for that?

Dorie Clark
It’s true, it’s true.  Clearly you can’t be doing this with everybody that you meet, but at a very basic level a strategy for when you’re meeting people at cocktail parties or things like that, people talk about writing information on the back of business cards if you’re meeting somebody for the first time.  Not in front of them, obviously, but at the end of the night, so that you still remember who the name is, who it’s associated with, but before you put it in your pocket and forget about it until the next Monday morning.

You just write down, “Jeff is the one who was the water skier.”  Or whatever.  And then that way you can capture it.  For these kinds of things, I would say – similarly, pretty shortly after the conversation you do want to write it down somewhere – it could be on paper, some people use database systems, Contact Management Systems of some sort.  For a long time I was using one called Contactually; lately I’ve been experimenting with one called Zoho, so there’s a lot of options out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh Dorie, that’s fun.  I went through this whole rigmarole of looking at CRM systems.  I ended up choosing ProsperWorks, if you’re still experimenting; it’s pretty mind-blowing how it auto-completes things from email.

Dorie Clark
Oh, nice.

Pete Mockaitis
So, there’s a free plug for ProsperWorks, everyone.  So that’s cool.  Alright, so you’re having real conversations, you’re learning some things, you’re capturing that so you don’t forget about it.  Great stuff.  Now, you also talk a little bit about the principle of social proof.  Can you tell us a bit about that and how to build it?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, definitely.  So social proof is a concept that I explore extensively in my most recent book, Stand Out.  And essentially, this is a term that is borrowed from psychology.  If we’re thinking about in a big picture, basically social proof means your credibility – what is it about you – it is signaling to other people that you are a credible person that should be listened to and taken seriously.  And so, there’s a lot of possible ways that you could do this, but it is about finding ways that you can leverage that is just short of a shortcut.

One of the best is to piggyback on the credibility of others, who folks have already heard of and trust.  So for example, if you get involved and become an officer in your local professional association, that’s a great way of doing it because, “Are you a good marketer?”  “Well, she’s the secretary of the New England Chapter of Email Marketers, so yes, she must be very good.”  Leadership confers a kind of status, so that’s one possibility, is professional associations, civic associations, etcetera.

Certainly alumni connections are another way.  If you’ve gone to a prestigious school or a school that has a good alumni network in your community – that can be a great way to establish social proof.  Yet another one is starting to share your ideas and write for blogs or publications that people might have heard of.  Also, places that you’ve worked for.  I was looking at your bio, Pete – you’ve done this nicely.  You’ve consulted for people at the United Nations and all of these very prestigious organizations.  And that’s the reason that people put that in their bio, is that people look and they say, “Wow, if Pete’s good enough for the UN, then clearly he’s good enough for me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great, that’s great.  And so, when you make the point about the stages of the relationship, in terms of first I’ve got to know who you are, and then they have got to like you and think you’re swell, and then they’ve got to have an impression that you’re great.  I want to talk a little bit about the them thinking you’re great perspective.  Now, you don’t want to brag, like, “Well, you know, I’m hot stuff because I did this or that”, but at the same time you’ve kind of got to get that information out there a bit.  What are some of the savvy ways to make that happen?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, yeah, exactly.  One strategy that I share in Reinventing You is something that I call the “wingman strategy”.  And this is actually taken from research done by Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Robert Cialdini of Arizona State.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love Cialdini.

Dorie Clark
He’s so good, he’s so good.  And so they teamed up for a study and what they discovered is that number one, if you are perceived by other people as bragging about yourself, no one’s going to listen, they’re going to tune it out pretty fast.  Most people can imagine that that’s true.  But the interesting part, the corollary, which I think has been explored very little, is that if someone else is saying those exact same things about you, if they are praising you and complimenting you, then other people are going to listen and they’re going to say, “Wow, she sounds amazing.  I have to meet her.”

And so this is something that happens accidentally plenty of times – sometimes you might get lucky and someone says something nice about your to boss for instance; but it’s also something that we can engineer, we can be strategic about this.  And so if you have a trusted friend or colleague, you can go to that person and say, “Look, let’s make a pact.  At the next conference or the next networking event I will focus on talking you up if you do the same thing for me.”  And this is especially good for people who are nervous about personal branding or self-promotion.  Your job, your mission is just to help your friend shine, and they could do the same thing for you, and it ends up benefiting you both.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so simple and makes a lot of great sense, in terms of how that unfolds.  So, I guess the key is you just need to find those folks who you really do believe in, so you could authentically say great things about them and vice-versa.

Dorie Clark
Absolutely, yes.  It certainly matters that you have to legitimately respect the person.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.  Oh Dorie, this is so much good stuff.  Tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we talk about some of your favorite things?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, thank you, Pete.  One thing that I will mention for folks who are interested in just getting clearer on their unique special source that they bring to work – what is it that’s special and distinct about them and their ideas – I actually do have a free resource.  It is a 42-page Stand Out self-assessment workbook that I created and folks can download that for free off of my website at dorieclark.com.  So I wanted to be sure to mention that, in case folks wanted to work through that and to begin to think about how to apply some of these concepts to their own lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you.  Well now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dorie Clark
Yeah.  My all-time favorite sort of inspirational quote comes from Theodore Roosevelt, and he liked to say, “In any moment of uncertainty, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing you could do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well said, thank you.  And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Dorie Clark
Well, we talked him earlier; we were kvelling a little bit.  I will say Robert Cialdini, who is the author of the famous Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  He was one of the case studies that I profiled in Stand Out, and he did so many amazing studies.  But he was really the first person to do field experiments in psychology.  Before him, and still very commonly today, you’d hear about psychology experiments and it was always just random stuff about, “Oh, a bunch of undergraduates did this in a lab, where there was this completely artificial experiment, and they did this.  Blah blah blah.”

And you never really know if those findings actually translate into the real world.  But Robert Cialdini did experiments in the real world and he actually went out and showed things like, what can you do to influence people to recycle more or to not steal wood, petrified wood from national parks?  Or things like that that actually were interesting and mattered.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good.  And how about a favorite book?

Dorie Clark
Well, a favorite book of mine… I will cite a recent one that I just read.  This is the most recent book in a while that was just a real page-turner for me.  I powered through it in like a day and a half, which is saying something ’cause it’s a fairly long book.  But it was really terrific, it was by a friend of mine named David Jaher and it’s called The Witch of Lime Street.  And it was a very, very meticulously researched book about Harry Houdini and his efforts to discredit a woman in 1920s Boston who was possibly a sort of psychic, medium-type person.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, interesting, thank you.  And how about a favorite tool, something that you use to be awesome at your job?

Dorie Clark
Well, one of my favorites… I do a lot of business travel, and so I rely on something called Tripit Pro.  There’s a free app called Tripit and then I paid for the slightly fancier version.  It’s really great because if you have a lot of plane reservations, hotel reservations, car rental, that can be a nightmare to organize.  And Tripit makes it very easy to keep it all in one place and requires a minimum of work from you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I love it how it will auto-put it on your calendar even, in terms of the locations and the times associated with your check-in and all that.  So handy, cool.  And how about a favorite habit?

Dorie Clark
So, a favorite habit – I would say that I’m getting better at this – I would call it a habit – not necessarily one that has gone to the unthinking level, but one that I have built in regularly, about working out.  I have never been a very disciplined kind of exercise person, but I think it’s really important for all of us to understand our levers of motivation.

And so something that’s been really good for me is I’ve joined something called “class pass” where you buy a certain number of exercise classes every month and then it allows you to go to a variety of different studios to work out.  And it drives me crazy to waste the money that I’ve already spent, and so buying class pass is really good, because I will work out at least 10 times a month with these classes, because I have pre-committed essentially.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good.  And in your writing, and your speaking, and working with folks, is there a particular nugget that you share that tends to really resonate and get folks nodding their heads and taking notes and connecting?

Dorie Clark
Well, one of the things that I talk about, which I think resonates with a lot of people – I hear from people that they have tried it – is something that’s a strategy from my first book Reinventing You, and that’s called the “3-word exercise”.  And it’s just kind of a quick-hit version of a way to get a sense of what your brand is in the marketplace, and specifically what is it about you that other people think is most distinctive about you?

And so it’s really simple – your listeners can try this – basically what you do over the course of the next week or a few days is reach out to about half a dozen people that know you reasonably well and you ask them a very simple question, which is: “If you had to describe me in only three words, what would they be?”  And by the time you are getting to the third or forth or fifth person, you’re going to start to see patterns in what they are telling you, and it is in those patterns that you can begin to discover what it is about you that other people think is most unique and most distinctive, which is typically very hard for us as people to figure out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well Dorie, I’m going to put you on the spot – what are you three words?

Dorie Clark
I’ve heard that there seems to be some kind of commonality, where people will often say “curious” about me.  And I would agree with that; I think that’s a pretty good descriptive one, ’cause I used to be a journalist and I do like to… With the format of the podcast interview you’re the one asking me questions, but in typical things, typical conversations, I will often be peppering people with a lot of questions.  So curiosity is a big one.  The other ones that really matter to me a lot, just in terms of how I comport myself in the world – again, other people might pick other ones, but in terms of what matters to me I would say “polite” and “friendly”.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s a nice compliment, thank you.

Dorie Clark
Yes, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dorie Clark
Well, most saliently I should mention that I have a new book that is just being released.  It’s called Entrepreneurial You, and folks who are interested in monetizing their expertise, developing multiple revenue streams – that is the book for them.  And they can learn more about it, order it Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etcetera.  But they can learn more at my website – dorieclark.com.  And there’s also a variety of free resources there – there are more than 400 articles that I’ve written for places like Forbes and Harvard Business Review that are all available for free on my website, as well as the Stand Out self-assessment workbook.  So, I hope there’s a lot of material there for people if they want to dive in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh perfect, thank you.  And if you had one challenge or a call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs, what would it be?

Dorie Clark
Yeah, if people really want to be seen for their full value, their full contribution, one of the things that I think is actually important and not enough people do is, think about content creation.  And what I mean by that – this is not just about sending some tweets or whatever; what really sets you apart is letting people know your ideas.

And so whether that is having a thoughtful exchange on your company’s internal social network like Yammer, or starting to blog about industry trends maybe on LinkedIn or something like that – setting your ideas down in long form where you have to make a case, you have to argue for something, you have to have a point of view – it is a great discipline, in terms of helping you refine your thinking, but it also is critically important because if you don’t share your ideas, no one knows what they are or if they are any good.  And not a lot of people are really taking the time to do it, so it can distinguish you.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.  Well Dorie, this has been so much fun.  I wish you lots of work in professoring and writing and speaking and all you’re up to.

Dorie Clark
Hey Pete, thank you so much.