The comments on yesterday’s post from Judy Heminsley and Nicky Kriel made me start to think a bit more about networking. What is networking? For many people it is turning up at an event, milling around trying to find someone to talk to, avoiding people who are desperate to sell them something, maybe eating an expensive breakfast that they didn’t really want and waiting with increasing dread to stand up and spout about their business for two minutes.
Some events or activities, Jelly for instance, are keen to stress that they are not networking events, presumably for fear that people will be put off participating or that awful salesman will turn up.
When I was in the corporate world I’d not heard of networking; well not in the sense we are talking here. But if we needed something doing in a hurry, something that maybe needed the ‘rules’ bending a little, I was your man. Why? Simply because I’d been around a long time, knew lots of people and hadn’t upset too many of them. Half a dozen phone calls would achieve a result.
Regardless of how and where we do it, isn’t that what networking should be about?
