Networking — why quality emerges from quantity
Whenever business people get together and talk about networking and how it might improve their business, one of the more emotive topics will always be quality versus quantity. The quality brigade will insist that it is important to know who it is you’re talking before making a connection. They are looking for the right match to their requirements.
To those who know me, it will come as no surprise that I prefer making random connections and that I have no limits on the number of connections I’m prepared to make. In my working lifetime, I have met with 23,000 people and connected online with thousands more. Not all of those people have become close friends or even regular acquaintances but enough have for me to believe that quality can emerge from quantity.
“Technology can help you maintain a high touch relationships with a large number of people. But just how large should that number be?” ask Scott Allen and David Teten in a Fast Company article in January this year. Their conclusion is that “the number of your relationships and the average strength of your relationships end up being inversely proportional. The more people you know, the less well you know them. If you want to build stronger relationships, you’re going to have to do so with a smaller number of people. You can spend all of your time with your close friends and family (strong ties, low number), or spread yourself across a wide number of people (weak ties, high number). However maintaining both high strength and high number is physically impossible”.
Christian Mayaud, a expert networker and Venture Capitalist in the US, categorises your network into PANs, CANs and FANs. In his blog “Sacred Cow Dung“, Mayaud explains that PAN = potentially active network; CAN = currently active network and FAN = formerly active network. He argues that the CAN for most people will be around 200 to 300 people whilst ” my FAN rose in normal course of working with different people and companies at different times in my career (currently about 50K), it’s my PAN that I don’t mind growing online (I never presume to know a priori whether or not I can be helpful to someone someday about something that comes up ie I don’t feel I have any basis to judge the “quality” of a potential relationship a priori).
Often the difference between meeting someone and connecting with them can be a matter of the state of mind of one or both of the parties. Being open to connection is about being interested in the other person and finding out as much as you can about them. There are questions you can ask that will help identify how you can help them. For example “what is your expertise?”, “what projects are you working on a present?” and “what contacts are you looking for to help you develop your business?” In an initial meeting, concentrate on the needs of the person in front of you and ask for nothing for yourself.
Maybe you believe that you have the network you need and have no need of further connections. You may be right but it is important to remember that stagnant networks occur when there is no new blood flowing through them.
Despite those who would seek to convince you that it is all about the apparent quality of the person you are connecting with, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it is really all a numbers game. Reed’s Law suggests that each new addition to the network (node) increases the potential connections within that network exponentially. So, arguably, everybody gains from having a larger network. The money, as I have often said before, is in the links and not the nodes.
The person in front of you also brings with them a variety of friends and contacts who by definition are unknown to you on first meeting. So when someone talks about a quality contact, you have to ask yourself if they mean the person themselves or that person’s contacts because neither judgment is one that you can make that quickly. “Like a tree”, notes Roger Hamilton of XL Results Foundation, “fruit only grows on the outermost twigs” which may be 2 or 3 degrees removed from the person in front of you.
Thomas Friedman notes in his 2005 book “The World is Flat” that technology has made it possible for companies to do more with less employees by outsourcing and offshoring their businesses. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse and more people will find themselves as what the new Internet lending and borrowing exchange Zopa refer to as “freeformers”. These are people who have chosen, or have had to choose, a portfolio career working often from home. As more professional workers find themselves working alone, the importance of a place where they can meet, talk, support each other and develop teams to bid for business together increases.
Ecademy is a place where you can develop your skills in networking both at local events where you can meet people face-to-face and also online where a different set of skills will be needed. It is perfectly possible to make friends with people online and to share important and intimate information with them, without “seeing the whites of their eyes”. In fact, this ability will be crucial as the world continues to flatten with the development and availability of technology. With tools like Skype and Avecomm, it is possible to telephone, videoconference, share applications and whiteboards for low or no cost worldwide. When these tools are combined with your profile on one of the Social Business Networks like Ecademy, a very productive conversation and relationship can follow.
This article can be found at http://afriendineverycity.com/. The author has chosen to accept comments from fawning lickspittles only. This blog provides some balance.
Technorati - ecademy - blackstar - marketstar
To those who know me, it will come as no surprise that I prefer making random connections and that I have no limits on the number of connections I’m prepared to make. In my working lifetime, I have met with 23,000 people and connected online with thousands more. Not all of those people have become close friends or even regular acquaintances but enough have for me to believe that quality can emerge from quantity.
“Technology can help you maintain a high touch relationships with a large number of people. But just how large should that number be?” ask Scott Allen and David Teten in a Fast Company article in January this year. Their conclusion is that “the number of your relationships and the average strength of your relationships end up being inversely proportional. The more people you know, the less well you know them. If you want to build stronger relationships, you’re going to have to do so with a smaller number of people. You can spend all of your time with your close friends and family (strong ties, low number), or spread yourself across a wide number of people (weak ties, high number). However maintaining both high strength and high number is physically impossible”.
Christian Mayaud, a expert networker and Venture Capitalist in the US, categorises your network into PANs, CANs and FANs. In his blog “Sacred Cow Dung“, Mayaud explains that PAN = potentially active network; CAN = currently active network and FAN = formerly active network. He argues that the CAN for most people will be around 200 to 300 people whilst ” my FAN rose in normal course of working with different people and companies at different times in my career (currently about 50K), it’s my PAN that I don’t mind growing online (I never presume to know a priori whether or not I can be helpful to someone someday about something that comes up ie I don’t feel I have any basis to judge the “quality” of a potential relationship a priori).
Often the difference between meeting someone and connecting with them can be a matter of the state of mind of one or both of the parties. Being open to connection is about being interested in the other person and finding out as much as you can about them. There are questions you can ask that will help identify how you can help them. For example “what is your expertise?”, “what projects are you working on a present?” and “what contacts are you looking for to help you develop your business?” In an initial meeting, concentrate on the needs of the person in front of you and ask for nothing for yourself.
Maybe you believe that you have the network you need and have no need of further connections. You may be right but it is important to remember that stagnant networks occur when there is no new blood flowing through them.
Despite those who would seek to convince you that it is all about the apparent quality of the person you are connecting with, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it is really all a numbers game. Reed’s Law suggests that each new addition to the network (node) increases the potential connections within that network exponentially. So, arguably, everybody gains from having a larger network. The money, as I have often said before, is in the links and not the nodes.
The person in front of you also brings with them a variety of friends and contacts who by definition are unknown to you on first meeting. So when someone talks about a quality contact, you have to ask yourself if they mean the person themselves or that person’s contacts because neither judgment is one that you can make that quickly. “Like a tree”, notes Roger Hamilton of XL Results Foundation, “fruit only grows on the outermost twigs” which may be 2 or 3 degrees removed from the person in front of you.
Thomas Friedman notes in his 2005 book “The World is Flat” that technology has made it possible for companies to do more with less employees by outsourcing and offshoring their businesses. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse and more people will find themselves as what the new Internet lending and borrowing exchange Zopa refer to as “freeformers”. These are people who have chosen, or have had to choose, a portfolio career working often from home. As more professional workers find themselves working alone, the importance of a place where they can meet, talk, support each other and develop teams to bid for business together increases.
Ecademy is a place where you can develop your skills in networking both at local events where you can meet people face-to-face and also online where a different set of skills will be needed. It is perfectly possible to make friends with people online and to share important and intimate information with them, without “seeing the whites of their eyes”. In fact, this ability will be crucial as the world continues to flatten with the development and availability of technology. With tools like Skype and Avecomm, it is possible to telephone, videoconference, share applications and whiteboards for low or no cost worldwide. When these tools are combined with your profile on one of the Social Business Networks like Ecademy, a very productive conversation and relationship can follow.
This article can be found at http://afriendineverycity.com/. The author has chosen to accept comments from fawning lickspittles only. This blog provides some balance.
Technorati - ecademy - blackstar - marketstar
posted by Ste Andreassen at 12:38 PM
3 Comments:
Amen,
Success in busines is something YOU create because your partners value your added value. Thank god there is still something like personality...
Here's another thought: If I have Tony Blair's email address because I need to provide research material to his staff, I am guessing Mr. Blair doesn't want me telling everyone I've got this information.
I am further guessing he doesn't want me to build a business around the fact he's in my Outlook address book and that I have "access" to the Prime Minister.
Some excellent comments above, most of which I agree with. Technology does help us manage our contacts and our relationships more efficiently, but as we said in our article, there's still a trade-off between the quality of your relationships (Jez - you're right on target about this) and the number of people you try to keep in touch with.
Thomas Power manages communication with such a large network by making his communication minimalistic. I would say that 90% of the correspondence I've received from Thomas that's directed to me personally is precisely one sentence long.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong, it's just a trade-off. Thomas is a professional networker. That's what he does all day. And he has a team of people who do the nitty-gritty of running Ecademy. And he only manages one-liners in order to keep up with all his communications.
I am NOT a professional networker. At the moment, I'm at a client 10 hours a day most days (not today), and writing (the book, About.com, FastCompany.com, etc.) on evenings and weekends. (Oh, and BTW, Charles, all of those clients are from referrals -- I don't advertise that business -- don't even have a website for it!)
I personally don't want to communicate primarily via one-line messages.
So that means:
1. I do very little "proactive" networking - I don't sit all day and run searches looking for people to connect with.
2. I'm very selective about who I choose to connect with electronically for referral/networking purposes (I just broke the 300 mark on LinkedIn).
3. I don't respond to everybody about everything. I have a mounting stack of communications that I would really like to get to, but simply don't have the time. I'm not rude, I'm not disorganized - I'm just busy, and I simply have more incoming requests than I have the bandwidth to handle.
That's my reality at the moment. The situation was different two years ago, or even a year ago. When you have a lull in activity and have time available, networking is a great way to spend that time. "Dig your well." But when you're in that situation, realize that not everybody else is. People who choose to limit their connections, or read but not post ("lurk") in discussion forums, or not reply to every single e-mail they receive, are not anti-social. And they're not "bad networkers". They just realize that other things are more important - clients, business partners, family, health, etc.
And last time I checked, there were still only 24 hours in a day.
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