From Wallflower to Expert Networker

An introvert emulated the communication styles, dress and approaches others use to make good impressions

The ad agency’s flamboyant culture was a shock. “I was one of those button-down engineers who was quiet and held himself in the background,” Mr. Aradhya says. At his first client pitch meeting, a colleague from the creative department showed up in a pirate shirt. Another wore leather pants.

“They held court with clients, and they were completely respected,” Mr. Aradhya says. “I thought, ‘Hey, this is a new world.’

People trained in technology often have to sharpen their social skills to move into jobs that require selling, communicating or managing others. Mr. Aradhya made the shift by learning to explain technology to non-techies and polishing his image and conversational skills.

He traded his dark suits and button-down shirts for stylish shoes and bright-colored shirts, says Tonny Wong, his supervisor at Digitas. Mr. Aradhya also learned to talk about his complex work without making others feel intimidated, says Mr. Wong, now chief consulting officer at HackerAgency, a Seattle marketing company.

Introducing himself to strangers didn’t come naturally when he began attending events. “I had to force myself,” he says. Without a network, he says, “it’s impossible to scale or build anything valuable.”

.. You must “entertain, enlighten or enrich” people to attract positive attention to a brand, he says. He tries to do the same for people he meets, so they’ll remember him and help when they can.

 ..Mr. Aradyha began window shopping and researching men’s fashions online to figure out how to project a confident, successful image. He swapped his dark suits for jackets of crushed silk or woven with metallic thread, and wears exotic-looking designer shoes by Zota or Fiesso. The look shows he’s not afraid of taking risks, and tends to attract people who are curious and capable, he says. At many events, “I don’t even have to start a conversation,” he says. “People will ask, where did you get those shoes?”
.. His style makes him a standout at tech gatherings where “the men are in rumpled shorts and man buns and T-shirts, and you’re tempted to ask them, ‘Have you done your laundry in a month?’” says Diane Darling, author of “The Networking Survival Guide.”“He’s a very memorable figure,” says Lexington, Mass., public-relations executive Bobbie Carlton.

.. He also says something outrageous now and then. The audience was dozing off at a late-afternoon program recently where he was a panelist. He was the last to introduce himself, and he jolted listeners awake by identifying himself as “the king of India” who also happens to run Novus Laurus. “He definitely woke everybody up” and drew a laugh

The Hoarding of the American Dream

the top quintile of earners—those making more than roughly $112,000 a year—have been big beneficiaries of the country’s growth. To make matters worse, this group of Americans engages in a variety of practices that don’t just help their families, but harm the other 80 percent of Americans.

.. if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.

the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions:

  1. income and wealth,
  2. educational attainment,
  3. family structure,
  4. geography, and
  5. health and longevity

.. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives.

They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a “glass floor” under their kids.

  • They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes,
  • provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force,
  • help with internships,
  • aid with tuition and home-buying, and
  • schmooze with college admissions officers.

All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder:

  • legacy admissions,
  • the preferential tax treatment of investment income,
  • 529 college savings plans,
  • exclusionary zoning,
  • occupational licensing, and
  • restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.

.. As a result, America is becoming a class-based society, more like fin-de-siècle England than most would care to admit, Reeves argues. Higher income kids stay up at the sticky top of the income distribution. Lower income kids stay down at the bottom. The one percent have well and truly trounced the 99 percent, but the 20 percent have done their part to immiserate the 80 percent, as well

Reeves offers a host of policy changes that might make a considerable difference:

  1. better access to contraception,
  2. increasing building in cities and suburbs,
  3. barring legacy admissions to colleges,
  4. curbing tax expenditures that benefit families with big homes and capital gains.

.. Expanding opportunity and improving fairness would require the upper-middle class to vote for higher taxes, to let others move in, and to share in the wealth.

.. Prying Harvard admission letters and the mortgage interest deductions out of the hands of bureaucrats in Bethesda, sales executives in Minnetonka, and lawyers in Louisville is not going to be easy.

The Extraordinary Intimacy Between the Ultra-Rich and Their Wealth Managers

For the one percent, a good advisor acts as a bookkeeper, a confidante, and, on occasion, a fishmonger.

.. While retaining legal counsel or consulting a financial adviser now commonly leads to short-term relationships, wealth managers maintain clients over the long term, sometimes amounting to lifetime employment.

.. It is not uncommon to find wealth managers working with the children or grandchildren of their original clients.

.. As one manager put it, the client has to “undress” in front of the wealth manager.

.. As a fiduciary, the wealth manager is bound to protect clients’ wealth from risk: This includes not just financial risk but the threat of spendthrift heirs dissipating the family assets or of family members with embarrassing secrets who might be targeted for blackmail.

.. one manager in Dubai described her client relationships in terms that emphasized the emotional labor and caring involved: “They’re asking you to take care of their family. You can’t just think of it as another piece of business … It’s not just a matter of signing documents; it’s the whole concept of doing the right thing for that family. You have to be able to say, ‘Mr. A., don’t worry—your kids are all going to be put through university. It’s all going to be okay.’ You have to be very businesslike. But also family-like.”

.. An English wealth manager based in Dubai explained that such outlandish requests are surprisingly common in the profession, in part as a way of testing whether the practitioner is “worthy” of the client making a long-term investment in the relationship:

.. And they don’t like change: they want to go to the same doctor all their lives, the same dentist, and the same lawyer or fiduciary.”

.. I said, “I’m your wealth manager, not your fishmonger.” And the client said, “Well, today you’re a fishmonger.”

.. Clients may also have a pragmatic reason for posing these tests: They allow the client to discover whether the wealth manager possesses the kind of social networks and influence necessary to provide extraordinary personal service.

.. a study of 19th-century British lawyers showed how their familiarity with clients’ business dealings allowed them to create whole new industries, such as the country’s railroad system; the professionals established a kind of private market, accessible only to the upper crust of British society.

.. Several specifically mentioned helping clients get treatment for their drug-addicted children—a particularly common problem in wealthy families.