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By Caroline Dell, Co-Founder and CEO of Goodword
Susan McPherson has been introducing people to each other for most of her life. She is the founder and CEO of McPherson Strategies, the author of The Lost Art of Connecting, and an angel investor in Goodword. I sat down with her to ask the question I keep circling back to: as more of our work gets handed off to AI, what happens to the part that cannot be handed off?
Her answer was that the advantage which survives automation is the set of people who will take your call. Building that set has very little to do with volume and almost everything to do with intentionality.
Here is what she taught me.
Networking is walking into a room and meeting as many people as you can. Connecting is walking into that same room already thinking about how you can be useful to the people in it.
“I wrote a book called The Lost Art of Connecting,” Susan said, “and there’s a reason I didn’t title it The Lost Art of Networking.”
Her definition of connecting: “Leading with how we can be helpful, how we can be supportive, listening twice as much as we talk.” Her definition of networking: “Shaking hands, exchanging cards, and then maybe a year or two later pulling up the card and being like, who did I talk to?” Connecting is led with curiosity, which is also what takes the ickiness out of it for the many people who dread the whole exercise.
Susan built the habit out of necessity. At four foot ten, she was invisible in 1990s boardrooms, so she asked questions instead of competing for airtime, then followed up afterward. “When you talk to people, ask them questions and listen, and then follow through, you are meaningfully connecting.”
The mechanism underneath it is not complicated. People like talking about themselves, and hardly anyone is actually listening to the answer. “The greatest gift we can give to one another is truly listening,” Susan said. “Listening, not just hearing. And making note of that, whether it’s jotting notes down, recording it, or jumping on your mobile device before you get home and reminding yourself of the follow-up you need to do.”
When Susan landed her book deal she had to name the method she had been running on instinct for decades. She calls it Gather, Ask, Do, and it is designed for moments of transition: a job search, a move, a graduation, a fundraise.
Gather. Work out who you want to connect or reconnect with, and get honest about your own superpowers. “We all have superpowers. Every single one of us,” she said. “And it doesn’t have to be a PhD in chemistry.” Knowing the best hummus in New York counts.
She gets asked a version of the same question constantly by people early in their careers: what could I possibly offer someone who has been doing this for thirty years? Her answer is two words. “TikTok. If you could help them master TikTok, you are a superstar. I mean, it could be Claude, it could be Gemini, it could be whatever the flavor of the day.”
Gathering also means breaking out of what she calls our hermetically sealed bubbles and deliberately seeking people who do not look, sound, or think like us.
Ask. Learn to ask meaningful questions of other people. Then learn to ask for help yourself, which is the harder half.
Do. Follow up, follow through, become the person others can rely on. This is the step almost everyone skips, and Susan said so without hesitation when I asked which one people forget. Her own example of a Do was writing a check to Goodword after I told her what we needed. We are lucky to count her as an angel investor, and prouder still that it happened the way it did: not a pitch, but a Do. Most Dos are an introduction, or recommending the hummus place you know someone would like.
Accomplished people are usually far more comfortable giving help than requesting it. Susan traces that back to upbringing and to a professional culture where admitting you needed something could cost you standing.
Her reframe is powerful. Withholding your ask takes something away from the person who would have wanted to help.
“If we are afraid to ask for help, we’re not letting those people be helpful,” she said. She has spent years inside women’s communities watching people trip over each other to answer a single ask. “You are giving people the opportunity to help you when you ask for help.”
Do your research before you write. Reference something specific and recent. Lead with what you can offer instead of what you want, and hold the ask until a relationship actually exists.
Skip “how are you,” which Susan says reliably produces nothing. She borrows a framing from Brené Brown and asks people to tell her in three or four words how they are today. “When somebody says they’re okay, you have nothing to go on.”
She also gave me a word for the thing we have all lived through and never had a name for. Someone accepts your LinkedIn request and is pitching you something within the hour. It’s called pitch slapping, and once you hear it you cannot unsee it happening to you. Susan’s fix is almost embarrassingly simple: “Take a few minutes, look at something that they posted. And when you reach out to them, make mention of it.” One post, one honest reaction, before you ever ask for anything.
This is the idea Susan has been writing about in her Substack, Dear Connector. Her essay We Made Connection Frictionless. That’s Why It Stopped Working. is the fullest version of the argument.
Her parents spent every morning at the breakfast table with five or six newspapers spread open, clipping articles that made them think of someone they knew, typing short notes on manual typewriters, and mailing them out. Her mother, who did PR for public television, would travel from near Albany down to Manhattan for work and then go around the city collecting good bagels, smoked salmon, and Molinari sausages to carry back to newsrooms upstate. She was not pitching those journalists anything. She was making their long days better, so that a relationship already existed by the time she had a story to bring them.
“Her empathy was listening to these journalists to understand what it was that was going to help them get through their long workday,” Susan said. “The friction was schlepping around New York City.”
We have since optimized the friction out of nearly everything, and Susan’s argument is that intentionality went out along with it. “We are the most connected we’ve ever been in human history. But the intentionality is what has been gone.”
She is careful to say she is not anti-technology. Platforms are very good at meeting and greeting. What sustains a relationship is what happens afterward, offline. She has been to weddings of people she first met on Twitter in 2007, and the reason those turned into friendships is that they did not stay on Twitter.
Someone in the audience asked the practical question sitting underneath all of this, which is how much time friction actually costs. Susan’s answer was that it does not fit into a five-minute window. “You have to allow yourself an hour, two hours,” she said. “Make sure you spend enough time with the person so that you both feel seen.”
The discomfort we engineered out of connecting is the same discomfort that makes disagreement possible. You cannot remove one without also losing your tolerance for the other. Susan pointed to Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble on how easily we sort ourselves into rooms where everyone already agrees with us, and to Priya Parker’s new book The Art of Fighting, out September 8, 2026, which makes the case that healthy disagreement is what builds understanding, not what threatens it.
None of this is really about the apps. Susan is careful not to let technology take the entire blame, and she is right not to. The pandemic accelerated a loneliness that predates it, and an entire generation raised digital-first never got the years of ordinary, unremarkable socializing the rest of us took for granted. But there is a correction underway, and it is a genuinely good sign: adult summer camps and mahjong clubs are filling up, and not only in New York. People are going looking for the friction again, on purpose.
People assume Susan runs some enormous master spreadsheet. She does not. Every morning over coffee she texts, WhatsApps, or occasionally calls a few people for no reason beyond letting them know she was thinking of them. The habit grew out of the pandemic. When people ask how she finds the time, she points out that she finds time to brush her teeth. It works like a muscle. If three to five people a morning is too many, start with one.
That habit is why she invested in Goodword, and why she signed up the afternoon of our conversation. “When I learned about Goodword, I was like, oh, there’s finally a technology that I can utilize,” she said.
We are building a feature in her honor. One person, one nudge, delivered as a text in the morning: here is someone worth reaching out to today. You choose how often it arrives, from every weekday to once a week. It is technology keeping the human at the center and supplying only the prompt.
One attendee said something in the Q&A that I suspect is far more common than people admit out loud. He puts pressure on himself to provide value on top of value on top of value, and when he feels he has run out, he quietly removes himself from the ecosystem of connection altogether.
Susan’s response was the lightest thing she said all hour, and possibly the most useful. “It doesn’t have to be more than, hi Amanda, I’m thinking of you. Or hi Julie, it was great seeing you last week. Don’t overthink it.”
I asked Susan for parting words and she gave the whole conversation in two sentences. “We all have something to offer. So whenever you walk into a room, lead with how you can be helpful to others. It will come back in spades.”
What is the difference between networking and connecting? Networking is meeting as many people as possible and treating volume as progress. Connecting means leading with how you can be helpful, listening more than you talk, and following through afterward. Susan McPherson draws this distinction throughout The Lost Art of Connecting.
What is the Gather, Ask, Do framework? It is Susan McPherson’s three-step method for building relationships during a life or career transition. Gather means identifying who you want to connect with and naming your own superpowers. Ask means asking meaningful questions of others and learning to ask for help yourself. Do means following through on what you said you would do. Do is the step most people skip.
How do you reach out to someone you have not spoken to in years? Research them before you write, reference something specific and recent, and lead with a way you can be useful rather than with your ask. Avoid opening with “how are you,” which gives you nothing to work with, and never pitch someone within an hour of connecting.
Does AI make professional networking less important? The opposite, in Susan McPherson’s view. As more work becomes automated, the relationships that cannot be automated carry more weight. The people who will take your call are the part of your professional life that AI cannot replicate.
Where can I read more from Susan McPherson? She writes Dear Connector on Substack and is the author of The Lost Art of Connecting. She is also the founder and CEO of McPherson Strategies and an angel investor in Goodword.
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