Flip the Script Read online

  With the clock ticking and my repeated attempts to get in touch with John coming up short, I was close to losing my commission while making quite a few people angry. If you’re in sales or have ever had a big deal lined up, you’ve probably been at this point before, where your hopes of success are dwindling and suddenly you’re open to new suggestions or doing some things that seem a little out of character. That’s how I decided to attend the unusual sounding Altitude Series conference, which was part music festival and part business meet-up, and not my normal cup of tea. But a reliable source had told me John was possibly going to attend, and that was all I knew. The situation didn’t sound very promising, but I was down to try anything.

  While typical business conferences are usually held downtown at a large hotel near the convention center, the address for the Altitude Series took me up Benedict Canyon to a mansion in the North Beverly Hills. The founders of Altitude were rule breakers. After all, they had once asked me to help them buy an entire mountain ski resort, which I did, and which is how I knew them in the first place and was able to get an invitation. As I pulled up to the gate, I started to enter a different and unfamiliar world, as you’ll see in a moment.

  Cars were parked up and down the street, but according to my invitation I had “VIP access” and “on-site valet parking,” so I hit the call button, announced myself, and the enormous gate creaked open. I pulled my car onto the circular drive and up to the private residence, which was the size of a country club.

  As I pulled to a stop by the fountain in the center of the cobblestone driveway, a young valet stepped toward my window with his hand outstretched for the keys. The car I was driving might not look like much to you, but my red 1971 Alfa Romeo Sprint GT is an enthusiast special and I spent three years restoring it. Nobody touches it but me. I rolled down the window to tell the valet what I always tell valets: I want to park it myself, no offense, happy to tip you, just point me to an open spot.

  “Oh yeah, I figured you’d want to park it yourself,” the kid said, talking fast.

  But what he said next, I wasn’t expecting at all. “I just was curious whether you had the dual-Weber carb-kit, because it sounds like you’re running a set of four-valve, flat-top, forged pistons.” That immediately caught my attention. He continued, “I bought a 1969 Sprint last year and had Simon at Alfaholics blueprint the motor with that same setup. . . . ”

  Those forty-two words acted like a secret code to let me know this kid was on a completely different and higher level of the social layer cake than I’d initially thought. In about eight seconds I went from thinking, This random college kid is going to dent my car, to This fine young man can hook me up with Simon at Alfaholics! Clearly he was an enthusiast at my level, and probably even higher.

  Without a second thought I tossed my keys to the kid, along with fifty bucks. He smiled and slid into the driver’s seat of my prized Alfa, as I walked toward the garden entrance. “I’ve got a safe spot on the other side,” he shouted. Perfect. I never looked back.

  THE CONFERENCE

  Think for a moment about the last business conference you attended. Exciting? Probably not. Most conferences are tiresome industry events you want to leave as soon as the main speaker has wrapped up, but I knew Altitude was different and special the second I walked in because to the left and right, the famous and nearly famous packed the entire backyard and house. Live musicians played in small alcoves. Celebrities mingled with other beautiful people at cozy bar stations. Small stages had been erected at the outside perimeter of the garden for speakers to hold forth on various topics like climate solutions, artificial intelligence, energy, and space. I’d come here to talk to John King, but I was getting distracted by all these casual conversations between some of my favorite movie stars and musicians around every corner.

  Hungry, I grabbed a tempura roll from a bar off to the side. Not more than twenty seconds later, a guy who looked a lot like John King passed right in front of me, then angled off to the right and into the dense crowd. I darted after him, catching another glimpse as he slipped into the main house, which was packed with people. It was King for sure. Though his net worth was rumored to be $2 billion, there was no mistaking his signature outfit: 501 jeans and Rush concert T-shirt.

  I dashed into the foyer, but King was gone just as fast as he’d come, and I was left scanning a sea of smiling faces. Where did he go? I realized then, it wasn’t going to be easy to find a man who didn’t want to be found.

  I kicked myself as I thought about the drawer of concert T’s I had back home and was wishing I’d brought one of my own Rush shirts. It would have been an easy icebreaker for the eventual moment I would come face to face with John. But it’s critical to keep in mind that shallow similarities and shared interests do not deliver the powerful kind of status alignment you need to create influence, persuasion, and inception.

  ACHIEVING STATUS ALIGNMENT

  If you want to understand the power of status alignment, a good place to start is at the opposite, or status mis-alignment. For example, have you ever put in a call to customer service (maybe for a credit card charge you didn’t recognize) and found yourself on the phone with an agent who doesn’t have enough power to solve your problem? As your frustration grows, you insist, once again, that you be transferred to a manager. Nothing else will do.

  Sure, you could just keep talking to the helpful-sounding agent who is patiently listening to your situation, earnestly trying to solve your problem. But you won’t stay on with them long, because the moment you realize this person is not going to be able to help you, they become irrelevant. Even if they’re trying to make helpful suggestions, dutifully explaining the company’s policy, you tune them out completely, staying on the line for only one reason: to get bumped up to a manager who has some real juice and can quickly fix your problem.

  This is a very specific kind of failure where a person of high status and one of low status try to work together, and it doesn’t work at all. It’s the feeling you experience whenever you’re talking to someone who is in the wrong part of the dominance hierarchy, either too low or too high. At first, it’s frustrating. The more you talk to them, the better you come to understand they will not be able to help you. As frustration mounts, you reach a point where you tune them out and look instead for someone at the right part of the food chain to connect with.

  That frustrated feeling you experience on the phone with a customer service representative who can’t help you is the same feeling someone else gets about you when they feel you’re not on their level and you don’t understand their issues.

  You cannot get the full attention of a decision maker to listen to your idea if they think you’re on a different level of the dominance hierarchy than they are. When you’re going to press someone toward an important decision, you first need to be sure he or she feels they are in the right place at the right time with the right person. To accomplish this, you must create Status Alignment.

  Status Alignment comes when you’re in front of a decision maker and you have perfectly raised or lowered your own status to match the decision maker’s view of himself. Armed with this understanding of how the dominance hierarchy works, I make sure to carefully staff each of my business deals with a talent stack that any other dealmaker can recognize and easily plug into. My talent stack usually looks like this, starting at the top and in order of importance:

  Me (the dealmaker)

  Financial Officer

  Marketing Officer

  Sr. Analyst

  Legal

  Client Relations

  Jr. Accountant

  Assistant

  Eight people for one deal. Why stack up all this headcount and expense? Because when the deal is underway, it’s essential to get my team members to match up correctly with the other side’s team. I need my analyst to talk to their analyst, my lawyer to ta
lk to their lawyer, and my finance person to talk to their finance person, leaving me to talk directly to their CEO or decision maker—as equals. These are the correct matchups. It has to be this way because “bad matchups” create an out-of-whack dominance hierarchy where the wrong people are covering one another, assuring the deal will go sideways and eventually blow up.

  The idea of bad matchups couldn’t be more true in business than it is in sports, military, or other professions. So it’s useful to think about this in context of making a deal or orchestrating any high-stakes sale. Even if you’re a salesperson or a one-man shop, you still will benefit from having a working team of virtual assistant, technical person, and an accountant. Not to impress others. Not to showboat or hotdog. The simple purpose is to lighten your workload and most importantly to create alignment.

  To maintain Status Alignment, put yourself in the lead position, keep yourself scarce, and only do things that are consistent with your status on the team and as the one in charge. The easiest and best way to influence a decision maker is when you are in Status Alignment.

  Here’s another example to help make the point. Imagine you’re visiting your brother in the hospital. You don’t have to know the nurse’s name and life story in order to understand her position in the dominance hierarchy, because she has a uniform and badge to signify it. When she asks you to step outside the room so that a medical procedure can happen, you obey. Humans have no trouble accepting that something symbolic, such as the uniform and ID card, can signify position and power in the hierarchy.

  But could a nurse ever tell you what to think or what you should or shouldn’t believe in? In other words, would you change your attitude about something important because a nurse ordered you to? Probably not. Only someone on your level, such as a close coworker or friend, can truly and deeply influence you in a way the nurse never can.

  This is the difference between obedience and influence.

  When the nurse orders you to head to the waiting room, you do it—you’re obedient. When a judge tells you to report for community service, you do as you’re told. In these situations it’s easy to see how the other person is above you in the dominance hierarchy. Accordingly, you follow their orders. But neither the nurse nor the judge has really influenced you or changed your beliefs in any meaningful way.

  Influence, and particularly Inception, is most effective when the person you are speaking to feels like he or she is on the same level of the hierarchy as you. This is where Inception is strongest and works the best. Before you can implant an idea in someone else’s mind, you need to create a feeling of Status Alignment. That’s what happened with the valet at the front gate of Altitude. In less than thirty seconds I realized he wasn’t an average parking attendant; he was a car enthusiast and at my level in the sports car world. I immediately felt he could be trusted. It’s a simple example, but perfectly illustrates the feeling of Status Alignment. And that’s exactly what I was about to do to one of the biggest real estate investors on the planet.

  But first I had to find him.

  IS ANYONE IN CHARGE HERE?

  As “cool” and “hip” and “unique” as the vibe was at the Altitude Series, it was still a business conference, and conferences are never great places for getting deals done because there are so many distractions going on from minute to minute. You barely have anyone’s attention for thirty seconds before they are pulled away to the next most important conversation. But there is one huge advantage to conferences: Your target is always easy to find because everyone wears a brightly colored name tag highlighting their name, industry, and position.

  I quickly ran into a problem at Altitude, however: There were no name tags, there was no information booth, and nobody seemed to be in charge. Now, I was standing stiffly, like a big confused dummy looking for “Hello My Name Is” tags or colored badges on lanyards or just a shirt that said STAFF. But there was nothing even close. I was starting to get frustrated because John had to be nearby—after all, I’d just seen him a few minutes earlier.

  I stood on a small ledge to get above the crowd, scanning for John a little too conspicuously by moving my head back and forth like a broken radar dish. I was soon drawing attention from some other conference goers. An attractive woman said, “You look so tense.” Her companion said, “Relax . . . Altitude is a special place to meet new friends, find empowerment, and connect with yourself.”

  I didn’t want to connect with myself. I only wanted to connect with John King.

  The women locked their arms with mine and swung me firmly in the wrong direction toward a bar in the corner of a patio. They insisted I have a drink, so I asked the bartender what beers she was serving. “Heineken, Budweiser, Corona,” she said. “What’ll you have?” Well, that was definitely not the greatest selection. “C’mon,” I said, leaning in closer. “Did I walk into a bar mitzvah by mistake?”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not my call.”

  I’ve found that if you accuse a bartender of serving “bar mitzvah beer” you’ll get one of two reactions. About half will stare at you blankly; they have no idea what you’re talking about. In this case your bartender is a college kid picking up some extra change by working a conference. But the other half will roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, tell me about it . . . this beer selection was not my call.” These are real bartenders who know their stuff.

  As my bartender rolled her eyes, I said to her, “I’m always looking for a low-sediment hop in a skunked mash, high final gravity with long head retention. Last event I went to they had a few bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin. Probably the last few bottles on earth.”

  “No way!” The bartender’s pupils dilated.

  Tactical Nuclear Penguin, or TNP, sounds like a joke, but it’s one of the top ten beverage brands in the world and a holy grail of the beverage industry—in other words, the rarest and hardest-to-find beer on the planet and completely unforgettable by name and reputation. At 64 proof, TNP is the strongest beer ever made, and just 500 bottles were produced in 2009. Today, each bottle goes for more than $1,000 on the black market.

  Now the bartender’s eyes were locked with mine. “How was it?” she asked.

  “Truthfully,” I replied, “it tastes like shit. But that’s not the point. I had to honor the fact they even had it!” Then I asked conspiratorially, “Hey, you’re not holding one back there are you?”

  There was a moment of silence in which the bartender looked at me in a new way—then she broke into a laugh almost as if I really existed to her now for the first time. She leaned in toward me, as if to reveal a new conspiracy. I had achieved Status Alignment with a Los Angeles bartender at a busy event, an almost impossible task under any conditions.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she whispered. “I’ve got something for you in the kitchen, be right back.”

  A minute later I had in my hands a bottle of Founders Breakfast Stout, a truly fantastic drink, just as my new friends pulled me away toward an alcove where a group was gathering.

  We sat on some logs on the grass in a mini-amphitheater as a guitarist took the stage to play with a small celebrity trio. This guy was artful. He pulled off the most insane crosspick I’d ever heard—which is the fine art of using a tortoiseshell pick to create a distinctive and beautiful cascading musical effect. He down-picked from the bottom string, ascended, playing three notes at a time, and then immediately up-picked. I had to admit, the guy was beyond good. But what I was really focused on was what he was wearing: a Rush T-shirt. There was no doubt: I had found my Guitar Hero and his name was John King.

  THE SCIENCE OF THE STATUS TIP-OFF

  If you were a gorilla, there would be only one way for you to achieve Status Alignment with a fellow member of your species. You would have to be roughly the same size and age and physical condition. That’s because in the old dominance hierarchy your position was determined entirely by who
could physically dominate who.

  The new dominance hierarchy doesn’t work this way. Humans respond to status indicators so small they are nearly imperceptible to outsiders. In fact, we quickly and easily respond to invisible status indicators that are entirely verbal, like “I’m agent Smith, LAPD.” Those four words will make you pay attention quickly.

  After noticing this phenomenon, I’ve spent years investigating it with my private research team, and we have discovered the most efficient way to achieve Status Alignment at the start of any conversation or negotiation with any other person. I’ve gradually honed this approach, using it in many large deals across various industries. It works perfectly every time when you follow a specific pattern using a three-sentence phrase called a Status Tip-Off.

  Think about high-stakes situations in movies—for example, a first meeting between two spies in Moscow’s Red Square, exchanging stolen missile blueprints. One spy will ask a question of the other that nobody else could possibly know the answer to—for example, “Do you know the way to the Blind Monk Tavern?” when no such tavern exists. The right answer is like a password.

  The same strategy is also used in body-swap stories in TV or film, when characters become trapped in completely unrecognizable bodies. For instance, in the original Star Trek series, episode 24, Dr. Janice Lester, who was once Kirk’s lover, traps the captain into a life-entity transfer, allowing her to take over his body and leave him trapped in her body. Janice (in Kirk’s body) becomes captain of the ship, leaving Kirk (in Janice’s body) locked in sick bay trying to convince Spock that he’s actually Kirk. What does he say to prove to Spock that he is the real Kirk?