Tweet Interviewing executives for an article in a trade magazine will give you an excellent reason to meet the most unapproachable people. This could prove extremely useful when you are building your network in a new industry or new country. Your main objective is not the article or its publication. It is conducting interviews with [...]
Tweet Have you ever been trapped in a converation during a coffee-break? Most of us have! What do you do when you are having a boring conversation with someone that seems determined not to let you meet anyone else? Most networking books provide tips for such situations. However, I would like to focus today on [...]
Tweet Sometimes it seems very hard to find ways to offer something that the other person will find helpful. Your mind keeps drifting towards how the other person will help YOU. If you are stuck in such a situation one mental trick might help unblock your thinking. Close your eyes; take two deep breaths and [...]
Tweet In the previous post we saw the benefits of moving around the corporation during your first days in the job. Be careful not to be perceived as a “wanderer”. You are not casually walking around the corporation or killing time. You have a very specific and work-related objective (better understanding the corporation). The following [...]
Tweet Today is your first day in the new job at a big corporation. Congratulations! You should go to other departments to bump into new people. You will start building valuable bridges across the corporation that will help your career advancement. Armed with a big smile and your self-introduction you should explore the corporation by [...]
Tweet “The email is a great working tool. The phone is a great networking tool.” Last month I ran a workshop at an executive MBA program of a Spanish business school. One of the ideas I emphasized is that email is such a great working tool that we tend to forget the phone as a [...]
Tweet Robyn Henderson, the Australian networking expert, recently wrote an excellent post on how our language can be our worst networking enemy: “Stop Sabotaging And Start Networking”. She points out how important the words are that we use in our self-introduction. It’s via your self-introduction that you l generate the other person’s interest. If you [...]
Tweet “Hello, my name is Jordi, I water companies to help them blossom, I work as investments director at XGr Ltd.” This would be my self-introduction when attending investment or entrepreneurial events. A self-introduction is a “memorable” single sentence that you can say to people when meeting for the first time. It needs to be [...]
Tweet If networking is hard for you, if you feel similar to that country town person from the previous post: please practice, practice and practice some more. Do not jump straight away into real business networking. You should practice first within “safe environments”, be they within training sessions or within settings you create yourself. A [...]
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 [...]
