The Fake Business Friend

affable, smiley and mostly full of sh*t

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I’ve been in the business world for the last twenty years now, and one thing that consistently horrifies me is how one’s social network, a thing of beauty that should grow gently and organically, has turned into a transitive verb that has led to horrifyingly inauthentic and just plain crass behavior.

Let’s network! So excited to network at this conference! Pumped to make more connections!

What a disaster this has been. 

• Shoving cards in people’s hands.

• Unsolicited LinkedIn connection requests.

• ‘Can I scan your badge?’ at trade shows (and then spam them with cold sales e-mails). 

• Forced conversational move-ins at live conferences. 

• Aggressively extended hands.

• ‘Bro circles’ denying entrance. Sis huddles mocking the Bros.

• Unsolicited DMs from people wanting to partner. I get these almost monthly now. I know people who get them daily. I can’t even imagine.

I’ve been following you on LinkedIn and love your posts, man. Do you have time to discuss my latest (purely conceptual) venture? I think you’d be a great partner…would love to see if there’s a fit…

I’m “out” as soon I read ‘partner’ in a message from someone I do not know. Why? The younger readers here ask. Well, let me explain. There’s a homeless guy at the corner of Sabino Canyon and Tanque Verde Roads here in Tucson whom I know better than the guy in the message box. At least I know the homeless guy’s actual financial situation. I’m pretty sure he needs money desperately as he talks to me. Who knows what smoke the guy in my LinkedIn message box is blowing my way?

I’m not here to defame cold-calling or cold-DM’ing. When I allude to the crass forcing of partnerships or relationships in business, increasingly, this involves feigning friendliness to initiate a rapid, transactional business arrangement, almost always an arrangement weighted in the aggressor’s favor. And without any thought about what you, the target of the friendliness assault, will get in return.

As opposed to letting a business relationship develop, gasp, organically, over time through a normal process of exchanging kind, but not sycophantic, words which progress to questions and answers (with no agenda) and move on from there to - behold! - a peer relationship that might be worthy of the word’ friend.’

I routinely have rich white men come into my DMs to get access to my brain for free under the guise of an ‘intro call.’ Sometimes, they’re just trying to sample the intellectual goods (even though I have a bestselling business book that allows them to do this without wasting my time). Other times, they believe they are entitled to my thinking based on no relationship at all, just a referral from someone I know better. And most of the time, these annoying folks are super friendly on the phone when we talk. Affable even. Lots of smiling bullsh*t.

Let’s dive into two business scenarios that happen every day in American corporate life.

Fake Friend Scenario #1 — The Business Intro

A business introduction is one of the most common theaters of the fake friend performance in modern business. I don’t mean to imply total malevolence or outright fraud behind the millions and millions of “mutual intro” e-mails occurring yearly in American business. The motives are usually sincere enough. It’s just that the tone taken by so many has become overtly friend-ist.

Here’s an example from my LinkedIn inbox:

Yo, James—I just had a conversation last week with a startup that is looking to target the CPG space. I’d love to connect them with you—send me your email address, and I’ll introduce you! Thanks—[The Dude]

You have to admit that the tone there is….friendly! What is absent from this yo-friendly outreach is any evidence that this former colleague of mine knows anything about what I’m doing right now. He hadn’t looked at my services page, where I clarified that I don’t work with companies under $5 million in sales (i.e., not startups).

But, more importantly, I hadn’t spoken to [The Dude] in about eight years when I got this e-mail. I only worked in the same office with him for about nine months. That’s about as weak a ‘weak tie’ as possible. But the real problem with these kinds of intros is that the weak-tie “intro” e-mails are amazingly lopsided, loudly advocating for the needs of a third party with whom the author is friendly but failing to understand, let alone respect, the interests of the person (the fake friend) being pitched.

This fake friendship performance is designed to benefit a stronger business alliance by turning you into a mere ‘resource.’ We know this by inference because no thought was put into how you might benefit given your business model.

Fake Friend Scenario #2 - Hiring ‘Vendors’

I worked for 15 years at a market research firm. As a bottom-feeder of ‘insights’ into massive companies, the standard of client service at a market research firm is more or less servile, fawning, and medievally craven. Unless you are one of the top companies with a global reach, then, and only then, will a client approach you like a rational business person. These leading research firms also have the leverage to avoid any kind of friendliness idiom. Zero-bullshit negotiation is what they do every day.

This ethos of servility is more present when a research firm offers custom research as its core service. ‘Custom,’ in the world of market research, is code for complicated, risky, messy, non-standard,nonstandardally risky for the lowly client who commissions it. I recall custom projects being the ones with the biggest asshole clients or the clients who lost their shit midway through an engagement because some even more aggressive executive pulled the rug out from under the study’s assumptions/objectives midway through.

Despite everything, we had to smile and ‘take it’ in the friendliest possible ways. Re-drafting surveys under crazy deadlines. Inserting scientifically inappropriate questions that contaminate data collection. And on and on.

If you ever pushed back and suggested that, mid-way through, we can’t just change the research objectives because we’d have to start over at our own labor expense, suddenly, the ruse of ‘friendship’ evaporates immediately. Your client will brand you as rude and uncooperative. Shouldn’t you be grateful to be working with General Mills? No, but I would be grateful to get off this fucking phone call.

Then it becomes clear to you, the lowly service provider. You’re not a bad friend. You’re an insubordinate vendor, which is what you always were, my friend. Ouch.

The likability of a market research firm’s contact person is often the only reason this or that firm will get hired for complex, nonstandard work (when multiple qualified firms are available). This logic is similar to picking bottled water based on its branding (e.g., Liquid Death) and no other reason.

Excessive client friendliness is often one of the critical behavioral signs that the hiring party insists on screwing over the hired party. It’s a huge red flag that fools many young client service folks at service provider firms as projects unfold. This behavior demands a significant interrogation right away before a contract gets signed.

Clients who play this are probing for the most exploitable, sponge-like vendor they can find among various competent choices.

Business Friends vs. Real Friends

Sadly, as actual reciprocal friendships have declined in America, with real adult friends primarily becoming sources of sporadic conversational entertainment, the reciprocal component of friendship has drifted into the business world in a desiccated, zombie-like form that mocks its actual social origins (among people who had NO capitalist agenda with regard to each other). Business friendships often make light of any need to feel an obligation to a financially subordinate ‘friend.’ One reason for the latter is the exploitative logic - “If you help me excessively now, it’s entirely possible I might reward you later.” Yeah right.

Broadband internet and on-demand, single-serve coffee makers have joined forces to empower us all to seek our greatest possible internet opportunity way too quickly. LinkedIn is a perfect laboratory to study all of this. LinkedIn has probably accelerated the fake friend thing because it has made it way, way too easy to approach ‘skills,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘resources’ online with minimal actual social context available to either party (beyond your dubious profile). Resumes were always partial, but LinkedIn resumes are quite comical (if you know the person well and see what they’ve concealed). 

Those who get approached by the fake friend type quickly get themselves in trouble or at least squander wads of time talking to people who are often one or two steps from bankruptcy, being fired, losing their mind, etc.). Let’s be honest. You have no context about these people. You have nothing but a highly edited CV on a networking site. Think of how thin your evidence pile is about this person approaching you. Talented folks don’t network for partners hastily like this.

Fake friendships work best for sociopaths. Sociopaths thrive on dyadic relations with minimal background context. They can fill in all that biographical ‘white space’ very deftly. They are masterful liars and hyperbolists—benders of fact into fiction. Feigning friendship is simply an essential skill in their lives.

Sadly, friendship and performative friendliness have transformed into manipulative negotiating tools in business life. It also reflects how little we think of real friendship that we are willing to copy the interactional idiom of friendliness and debase it this way.

The highly formal, no-nonsense Germans reading this essay are all nodding in agreement.

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