Vanessa Van Edwards studied hundreds of Shark Tank pitches and spent nearly 20 years on her new book, Conversation. Her verdict on smart founders is blunt. Here is what her playbook says about winning the room, and how she built a business where the book is the smallest piece.
Vanessa Van Edwards walked into a PTA meeting at her daughter's school and saw the problem in one glance. Every parent in the room was staring at a phone.
"Now my conversation is competing with their feed," she told me.
"How's the weather?" loses to Instagram every time. To win, her opener has to beat the feed today and give the other person a reason to stay off the phone next time, too.
Van Edwards founded Science of People, teaches at Harvard, and wrote Captivate and Cues, an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. More than 75 million people have watched her on YouTube and in her TEDxLondon talk. Her new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count, came out from Portfolio on October 6. Vanessa told me that she researched the book for almost 20 years and kept holding the manuscript back. Then AI arrived, and she rushed to publish. We talk to our technology more than we talk to each other, she argues, and we have become "conversationally flabby."
She calls conversation skills career insurance in the age of AI. Master conversationalists get remembered faster, she told me. When an idea, an opportunity, or an invitation comes up, their names come to mind first.
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