YOUR INNER CEO: Thought For Food

Eating and deal-making often go hand in hand. We are more ourselves when consuming food; our guards are down, our comfort level up. Even if there is tension in the air about a prospective job or some friction between the companies represented at the table, there is automatically a more convivial atmosphere around sharing a meal. I have closed some of my most important searches in restaurants. And there’s nothing like nearly choking on a fishbone to elicit warm, protective feelings from clients. My simple rule: if you can get them to give you the Heimlich, they’re yours for life.

In a recent New York Times article, a profile of the 103-year-old Harry Rosen seems to indicate that fond memories of the boost we get from our successful business interactions in restaurants can sustain us well into retirement.  Rosen ran a highly successful custom stationery business in Manhattan, winning clients like the Walt Disney Company and the Hearst Corporation while breaking bread.

Now, the centenarian-plus-three continues to dine out on his own every night, using the profits from his company. He claims that allowing himself the luxury of this routine extended his life through the release of positive endorphins. He is also fairly certain that those endorphins come from reliving the joy he felt when wooing clients in restaurants all those years ago.

A football player has fewer chances to revisit the scenes of his former glory. Yes, rushing onto an NFL field to join a game in your golden years would get you a million hits on YouTube, but it would not be worth the three dozen hits to your collarbone.

A race-car driver would hardly have access to a track, let alone be able to take the tight corners after turning 80.  Perhaps a surgeon could continue to visit operating rooms for a buzz, but I suspect he or she would get in the way when leaning over the surgery team to observe. We would hate for an unlucky patient to end up with a pair of reading glasses stitched back into his stomach by accident.

But here is a readily available outlet for us businesspeople to stay vital and joyful for the rest of our lives.  And a clarion call to all of us, as well, to start treating every breakfast, lunch, and dinner business meeting as a prime adrenaline-charged experience; to see the beauty in the art of closing over minestrone; to begin associating the thrill of a competitive edge with the easy camaraderie afforded us by breaking bread with our colleagues. And, finally, to carry the traces of that experience with us, so that when the last business lunch is expensed, and we settle into eating without conquests to make, we can remember what we loved about people and food. And the wonderful new horizons they opened up for us.

And if you absolutely can’t pack it in, well, see what kind of deals you can still make at 103 years old.  And don’t think for a minute that waiter over there doesn’t know somebody who knows somebody.

You can link to Harry Rosen’s story in the New York Times here:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/a-nightly-dinner-out-thats-like-therapy.html?_r=1&