“So I'm clicking through my own list of values and where they REALLY overlap with Frances. I think number one is the value of relationships. I had a great mentor named Bill Lazier who died a few years ago. He co-authored my first book with him; just a wonderful man, brought me in to teach at Stanford when I really had no business doing so and he said to the administration, ‘I'll take responsibility if Jim messes up,’ and I had this great chance to teach there—a turning point in my life, and Bill had this wonderful way of looking at the world and he said, ‘So look, basically the whole world breaks into two ways about people.’ There's multiple ways but two in particular he wanted to talk about is, ‘Those of you, life is a series of transactions, and those who build relationships.
You need to sort of decide which side of this coin you're on. Are you going to be a transaction person? Are you going to be a relationship person? And in the end, you're gonna have—everything comes back to relationships at some level.’ That somehow went into my brain and it went deep into my core—the idea of Relationships with a capital R.
And I think that is absolutely part of Frances's core. If you wanted to use almost an exemplar of, ‘It's not transactions, it's relationships.’ And it's not relationships as a means, that's the whole key—a very [Immanuel] Kantian idea, right? Of—it's not, you know, the categorical imperative you never view another person as the means to an end, they are an end in themselves. And that idea that you come at everything as a relationship—that is deep in the way that Frances operates and I think we connect very much on that level.”