The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,14

are Connectors.

One of the highest scorers on my acquaintance survey was a man named Roger Horchow, who is a successful businessman from Dallas. Horchow founded the Horchow Collection, a high end mail order merchandise company. He has also enjoyed considerable success on Broadway, backing such hits as Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and producing the award winning Gershwin musical Crazy for You. I was introduced to Horchow through his daughter, who is a friend of mine, and I went to see him in his Manhattan pied-à-terre, an elegant apartment high above Fifth Avenue. Horchow is slender and composed. He talks slowly, with a slight Texas drawl. He has a kind of wry, ironic charm that is utterly winning. If you sat next to Roger Horchow on a plane ride across the Atlantic, he would start talking as the plane taxied to the runway, you would be laughing by the time the seatbelt sign was turned off, and when you landed at the other end you’d wonder where the time went. When I gave Horchow the list of names from the Manhattan directory, he went through the list very quickly, muttering names under his breath as his pencil skimmed the page. He scored 98. I suspect that had I given him another 10 minutes to think, he would have scored even higher.

Why did Horchow do so well? When I met him, I became convinced that knowing lots of people was a kind of skill, something that someone might set out to do deliberately and that could be perfected, and that those techniques were central to the fact that he knew everyone. I kept asking Horchow how all of the connections in his life had helped him in the business world, because I thought that the two things had to be linked, but the questions seemed to puzzle him. It wasn’t that his connections hadn’t helped him. It was that he didn’t think of his people collection as a business strategy. He just thought of it as something he did. It was who he was. Horchow has an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. He’s not aggressive about it. He’s not one of those overly social, back slapping types for whom the process of acquiring acquaintances is obvious and self serving. He’s more an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating. When I met with Horchow, he explained to me how he won the rights to revive the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy as Crazy for You. The full story took twenty minutes. This is just a portion. If it seems at all calculating, it shouldn’t. Horchow told this story with a gentle, self mocking air. He was, I think, deliberately playing up the idiosyncrasies of his personality. But as a portrait of how his mind works—and of what makes someone a Connector—I think it’s perfectly accurate:

I have a friend named Mickey Schaenen, who lives in New York. He said, I know you love Gershwin. I have met George Gershwin’s old girlfriend. Her name is Emily Paley. She was also the sister of Ira Gershwin’s wife, Lenore. She lives in the Village and she has invited us to dinner. So anyway, I met Emily Paley, and I saw a picture Gershwin had painted of her. Her husband, Lou Paley, wrote with Ira Gershwin and George Gershwin early on, when Ira Gershwin still called himself Arthur Francis. That was one link....

I had lunch with a fellow called Leopold Godowsky, who is the son of Frances Gershwin, George Gershwin’s sister. She married a composer named Godowsky. Arthur Gershwin’s son was also there. His name is Mark Gershwin. So they said—well, why should we let you have the rights to Girl Crazy? Who are you? You’ve never been in the theater. So then I started pulling out my coincidences. Your aunt, Emily Paley. I went to her house. The picture with her in the red shawl—you’ve seen that picture? I pulled out all the little links. Then we all went to Hollywood and we went over to Mrs. Gershwin’s house and I said, I’m so happy to meet you. I knew your sister. I loved your husband’s work. Oh, and then I pulled out my Los Angeles friend. When I was at Neiman