It’s not about having talent, it’s about having scouts in the stands when you display talent.
— NameTagScott
In other words, it's not enough to do good work. Nor is it sufficient to have people who know your good work (fans). You must know people who can do something about it when opportunity knocks (talent scouts).
Build your network accordingly.
Most people will never know what they want. I don't know what I want. "What do you want?" is too imprecise to produce meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about.
"What are your goals?" is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork.
The better question is, "What would excite me?" Just as the opposite of love is indifference, the opposite of happiness is boredom.
The cure to boredom is excitement, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. What would excite you?
—Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Work Week
Thirty one days in January – Thirty-one chapters in Never Eat Alone. Coincidence? I think not.
Let's kick off the new year with a refresher course on the power and practice of networking. Rizers is hosting a virtual book club for a reading through the month of Janaury. As I have written in a review of this great book, Never Eat Alone is a handbook on how and why to build a powerful professional network. Each of the thirty-one chapters is short (average 6 - 8 pages) and is packed with great ideas on building a network.
Here's how virtual book club will work.
- What stood out for you? (at a recent event)
- What do you most care about?
- What's the change been like for you?
- What do you see your role being?
- How are you feeling about that now?
- What's holding you back? (not to find fault)
- What would you want to see come out of this?
- How can I/we help you achieve your objective?
- How do you know that's true? (not asked in a challenging tone)
- What comes next? (the next part of this is 'Where do you think we should go from here?')
I have to admit that I am completely baffled by the people who are obsessed with obtaining followers on Twitter, actively seeking connections on LinkedIn, or somehow dismayed that they have been “de-friended” on Facebook. Why do you care?
The answer, I suppose, depends on how you use social networking tools. As a career tool, LinkedIn works best when it is a reflection of your real-life network. Ditto for Twitter. I reserve my LinkedIn connections for people I know well enough to recommend with confidence.
What does Gratitude have to do with your career?
In a word, everything. The most successful people we know, regardless of their level or role in the organization, find ways to share their wins with others. And we have seen a few who made time to regularly and physically thank those who have helped them. It's not as hard as one might think.
John Beeson has written a terrific article on feedback: understanding it, getting it loud and clear, and using it to focus your development efforts. The article is long, but worth the read. It makes explicit the ways in which feedback is 'coded' (or just plain confused) and must be deciphered.
Nice summary of the research behind the new book Big Shift by John Hagel and John Seely Brown at Harvard Business blogs. This book outlines some longer-range metrics of business performance, and highlights some interesting trends with respect to American corporate business competitiveness.
To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial-era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift.
Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era's fast-moving digital infrastructure.
Our favorite workforce trend analyst, Tammy Ericksen, over at the Harvard Business blogs, has just posted two terrific articles about the impact of the recession on the workplace of the future.
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work — on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself — it must be organized for constant change.
Peter F. Drucker
Copyright © 2009 Rizers. All Rights Reserved.