Hero's Code

Your best network contacts?

Take a minute to write down the names of your five best contacts.

When you've done, scan the list and notice if they belong to particular groups or categories.  For example, are any of these five your family?  Or are they famous? Are they work colleagues? Do all five belong to a particular group?

Now I didn't give you a definition for "best" so you had to make some assumptions of what best meant to you.   When you reflect on the assumptions you made, notice what this tells you about this particular network grouping.

Now add your next best five names to your list.

When you have done, once again notice the groups that all ten belong to.  How many subgroups are there in all?  Is this group of people that know you very diverse or just representative of one or two groups?
As we will see in future posts, it is often not the size of a network that counts but it's diversity or structure.

Taking your original list of five names, count the number of connections amongst your connections.  They all know you, but how many of these five know each other.  The maximum number of relationships amongst these is 10.  How many did you score?

If none of your contacts knows each other this is an example of a very open or entrepreneurial network.  If all of these contacts know each other your network is very dense.  Neither of these situations is particularly or necessarily bad - it really depends on what you need your network for as we will see in future posts.

Happy Campers

Imagine a scenario in which an outdoors-loving President  gets together with three of the most powerful industrialists in the Western world at a campsite in the mountains of Western Maryland, where the three ride horses, shoot rifles, chop wood and eat and sleep in tents beside a babbling brook.

This is just one of the kinds of things that happened during the years earlier last century (1916 - 1924) when Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone — accompanied by naturalist John Burroughs — went out on annual summer camping junkets.  These trips took them through most of Eastern America and on which, on any given day or evening, they never knew just what route they would be taking or where they would end up.

Norman Brauer's book, There to Breathe the Beauty recaptures, in anecdote and photograph (275 of them), the spirit and record of those remarkable trips during which these giants ignored the demands of their industries and their "normal" lives to cavort like boys over the rough roads and open terrain of an America on the edge of the automotive age, enjoying a series of adventures so rash and delightful that it is almost impossible to imagine any four such powerful and famous men duplicating the feat in this overpopulated, hyperfast, media frenzied, stressed out age of ours.

Can you imagine the fireside chats they might have had?

The Worlds Worst Networker

Keith Ferrazzi is a great networker. That's clear. 

If there were a sliding scale of networking ability, Keith would be at the 100 percent point and I always saw myself at about 10 percent.  Although I am not quite a match for Keith yet, I have a much better idea of how to get up to that 100 percent - and I am well on my way.  I can now read his book and take what I need from it with enthusiasm.

I put myself into a position where I just had to learn. This works for me - no running away.  By committing to offer a workshop on "Relationship Capital" or Valued Relationships, to Scottish business, I had the opportunity to research the science and practice of networking. Along the way, I also discovered that far from being a poor networker, I was actually pretty good. 

The problem was that my network was actually an accident - a matter of chance rather than design.  I just wonder, when you think about it, if you really "know" your network any better than I knew mine.

For much of my professional life I looked on networking events as a necessary but not particularly attractive proposition.  And you know what, the recent fashion to hold speed networking events did not help me form a more positive perspective.   

So - I will attempt to post my findings and observations in the days to come.  These posts will look at the attitudes and beliefs that hold many people back from networking excellence.  I want to give you some guidance on how you might get an honest perspective on your level of relationship capital right now.
And what really matters about a network? How can you really feel good about networking?

After all, heaven forbid, if all your money were gone then all you might have left are your relationships.