Synchrony is a marker of rapport; if two people click, they unconsciously adjust their posture and speech rate to each other. Bernieri strongly suspects that charismatic people are natural "attractors" who get others to synchronize to them. An Oprah, for example, controls an audience with her keen sense of timing, repetition and rhythm. "They play the crowd like improvisational jazz."
How can you get in touch with your inner Oprah? Synchrony can't be faked through forced mimicry, says Bernieri. He maintains that, like jazz, charisma itself can't be taught. But it can be approximated through communication techniques that will ideally become second nature.
Magician Steve Cohen, author of Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma and Showmanship, says he used to have great sleight of hand but no hold over his audience. "I learned to figure out what is going to be interesting to people at every moment," he says. Now he draws gasps, aahs and laughs at his weekly sold-out show in New York's posh Waldorf-Astoria hotel. "The trick itself is never important; it's having a presentational hook."
The idea of charisma may be stronger than its actual effects, though. Rakesh Khurana, associate professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, finds that when American companies look for new leaders, they seek charisma above all other qualities—but the bottom-line results of this hiring practice are often disappointing, even disastrous. Under uncertain market conditions, charismatic CEOs are good for one thing: They temporarily boost their company's stock prices. But the improvement is usually short-lived. That's because charisma may have more to do with a person's image than with his or her innate abilities. Just as leaders in primitive societies wore masks that conferred upon them special status, Khurana says, CEOs embellish their auras with private planes and corner offices.
Steve Cohen learned this lesson when he started handing out his bio to audience members before his magic show. The biographical information mentions that he has privately entertained numerous corporate titans and TV personalities. "The audience's reaction to me was immensely better," he says. "They think, 'I better pay attention to him because these people have.'"
CHUTZPAH: Oh, The Nerve
When biologist Craig Venter was 7 years old, his hobby was racing planes on his bicycle as they took off from the San Francisco airport. Pilots shook their fists at little Craig while the passengers looked on, aghast. "Eventually they built a fence around the runway," he says. "That was my contribution to airport safety."
Venter grew up to be a bad boy of science, whose unconventional ideas attracted biotech investors even as he alienated colleagues with his brash outspokenness. In 1998, Venter announced his plan to sequence the human genome on his own, breaking from the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Venter would furiously bicycle against a behemoth again, this time using his quicker (if less accurate) method of sequencing DNA.
In May of 1998, three dozen top researchers from the Human Genome Project convened with Venter. They were irate: Venter's project might threaten their funding and compromise the quality of the most important biological endeavor of the 21st century.
Did Venter quell their concerns? No. He suggested that he would go ahead and map out the human genome while his distinguished colleagues could do a very nice job sequencing... the mouse.
Chutzpah makes our jaws drop because it openly challenges our conformist tendencies. It is a behavior that crosses a social norm, not merely to get away with something, but rather to purposefully challenge convention. Venter embodies what Solomon Snyder, director of the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, calls the audacity principle. Snyder believes that a person who possesses the crucial ingredients in great scientific achievement—originality and simplicity over a bedrock of intellect—still needs chutzpah to deliver on his or her potential. "It's about not only having an original idea, but having the insight to know it's important," Snyder explains. "This insight in turn gives you conviction to pursue your idea, even though the world punches you in the nose."
Venter says his chutzpah helped and hurt his career: "The perceived audacity of what I've done drives some of my critics to behave correspondingly badly." (To wit: For a time, founding father of the Human Genome Project James Watson referred to Venter as "Hitler.")
Chutzpah indeed elicits a mixed response. In the mid-1990s, Erin Brockovich was a scantily clad file clerk at the law firm Masry & Vititoe when she noticed a suspicious pattern in the medical records of Hinkley, California residents. When she pursued the case and took the Pacific Gas and Electric Company to the cleaners, we admired her brashness on behalf of a community subjected to environmental toxins. "I never cared about being fired," she says. "I knew I was doing the right thing." But if we perceive that someone is using chutzpah to advance her own cause, we feel either jealous of her for taking a bigger piece of life's pie or contempt for her selfish gall.
Publishing maven Judith Regan is convinced that envy motivates her critics. "I have this incredible career. I've had great love affairs. People look at me and ask, 'Why does this bitch have all this?'" she says. "I have it because I went for it, and they are afraid."
Tags:
brains talent,
brockovich,
Charisma,
chutzpah,
circus ringmaster,
exuberance,
first glance,
joie de vivre,
Kay Redfield Jamison,
larger than life personality,
law degree,
legal victory,
mysteries of the universe,
nobel laureate,
perons,
personality,
positive energy,
present moment,
revolutionary hero,
Richard Feynman,
sidney poitiers,
success,
theoretical physics
