Here I am on Flight SQ 245 out of Singapore to Brisbane, Australia.

And in meeting after meeting last week in Singapore I really started toget how wonderfully important this 4-word phrase ‘ Less communication –more connection’ really is.

One is about presence – the other is not.

Right now I’m experiencing the presence piece on the Singapore Airlines flight. Singapore Airlines is absolutely my favourite airline. They get ‘connecting’. From the simple use of my name at every possible point to the simple and gracious way they seem to give. This is not a job – it’s an opportunity to serve is the feeling I get from the cabin team.

Sure, it’s possible to ‘act’ like that. But here you get the real sense here on board that it’s actually who they are.

Back to those meetings for a moment. Whether the meetings were with government people or with business owners, it was the same. We’d begin by being ‘present’ (a gift in itself with no pun intended). Then we’d communicate more deeply. Then we’d get to Buy1GIVE1 and then we’d ‘connect’ with people doing the most wonderful things without being asked – just volunteering this introduction or this process.

And yet so often you see the reverse. There’s obviously a ‘sale’ going on. Somebody doing something to someone else – someone handling objections – someone asking someone to buy. I think it was Larry Wilson who wrote’ “People love to buy, but they hate to be sold”.

I got another example of that in the Australian Newspaper on the flight. There was a piece that took me back to that really old Monty Python sketch where a burglar knocks on John Cleese’s door.

“Hello, I’m a burglar,” he says. “Oh thank God you’re not an Encyclopaedia salesman. Come on in,” says Cleese.

But I digress.

When B1G1 founder Masami Sato took off on her flight to Japan this morning, we had a dialogue about ‘Connection’. She’d seen a piece about Cause Marketing I’d tweeted on yesterday. It was a piece that mentioned how a Cause Related MarketingB1G1 is about cause marketing, it isn’t at all. In fact I don’t like that term at all and we should stop using it,” she said powerfully.

website had mentioned how giving opens up the heart. “You see,” she said, “even though you sometimes think 

“B1G1 is about one thing: giving. It’s not about marketing causes. It’s about a process that simply makes giving more sustainable, more efficient, more effective and much more a part of who we really are. That’s the real power of B1G1 transaction-based giving. Where a little piece of each transaction goes back to a cause. And that’s what we do. Giving. Period.”

“But,” I said, “don’t we know that giving in this way where the customer is involved through the transaction actually connects with that customer more and so then bonds the customer to the company more?”

“Sure,” she said. “But that’s not the point. The point is simply that the business has found a better, more effective way to give. Period. And as a result, they’ve connected with themselves.”

Ah. Isn’t that precisely the connection we sometimes forget most of all? And giving opens us up to really see that.

Maybe the team on this flight is connected to themselves first and then to me. Maybe that’s the  lesson. It's a lesson to share and a movement to join at B1G1.