Lunch with Sandra Day O'Connor

Keith Ferrazzi

I was out in Aspen recently at the Fortune Brainstorm conference, which is right up there with TED and Davos in my book, and I had the fortune to lunch with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As soon as she asked about Ferrazzi Greenlight and I explained our focus on helping organizations and people grow through deeper relationships, she said, “I have to tell you something. I can’t imagine anything more important in my career than relationships.” Here are a few of her thoughts.

She said the most important thing they ever had to do in the court was to make sure they sustained dialogue among the justices. She sort of mandated that everyone would be friends, and she dif things like facilitating putting contests and asking everyone to have lunch together to make that happen. She mentioned that when Clarence Thomas joined the bench he said he wasn’t going to do the lunches (she thought the reason might have been a little residual bitterness about the confirmation process he went through). But after he skipped the first lunch, she went downstairs and told him, “Listen, I want you to come up to lunch. We need you to come up. We want to be friends.” And he did.

She also told me, “It doesn’t matter who you are. We’re all human. Frankly, it’s easy to become more likeable, you just have to work at it a little.”  

She said Congress has been a challenge. Whenever she noticed particular members of congress who didn’t like the Supreme Court justices, she invited them over and cooked lunch for them herself.

She feels that one of the biggest problems in Congress today is that they don’t put in the time to forge relationships across the aisle. They all go home on the weekends, don’t get in until Monday, leave on Thursday, and force so much work to get done in between that they don’t even eat lunch with their staffs. Her suggestion is to change the rules and make them have lunch three times a session.  

Maybe it’s time to send a certain orange book to your senators and representatives.  ;-)