Tweet What is the most important question you should answer before you contact someone? It is of course: “What can I provide this person with that is of value to him/her?” It is very easy for your brain to drift towards the kind of information this person could provide you with (instead of thinking the [...]
Tweet In a previous post, I advocated the use of phone over email when contacting someone for the first time. As usual, this is not a rule written in stone! In some cases, it might be best using email. One such case, happened to me just hours after posting that previous post… A colleague sent [...]
Tweet A very good research report from the University of Virginia deals with some of the techniques and pitfalls when building your network within a big corporation (“How Top Talent Uses Networks and Where Rising Stars Get Trapped”). Some of the findings also apply to general networks (non-intra-corporate networks): More-is-not-necessarily-better. “They need to know how [...]
Tweet I might be old-school. I like phone calls. At least when contacting someone for the first time, use the phone. And especially if that phone call is intended to get a face-to-face meeting. This is particularly true when you are building a network in a new area or industry and you are still unknown. [...]
Tweet There was a very good “one page comment” at the back of the October 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). Well, it is in fact a three paragraph comment on a 2007 HBR article… The main point is how some leaders are afraid of giving recommendations because the recipient of the recommendation might [...]
Tweet Good networkers keep everything in their heads, right? Wrong. Some people have an excellent memory and do not need to keep notes. Unfortunately most of us are not among them. I need to keep notes of who introduced me to whom and so on. Some studies suggest that most people have trouble remembering more [...]
Tweet First things first… How do you grow a network? By adding relevant nodes. The word “relevant” is very important and I will deal with it in another post. For now let’s concentrate on the “adding” part and in particular on the occasions when someone (the Adviser) recommends that you (the Networker) contact someone else [...]
