Personal Branding #5 – Personal Branding & Networking

“A network has to be wide and deep. You need to know people from different domains and some of them should be known to you well enough to just call”

‘My network is quite good’ said the Coachee. I asked him to create a diagram of all his top 10 network connections and their connections with each other. It transpired that what he called a network was nothing but a collection of his current and past colleagues. I pushed him hard and asked him if he attended any networking events in his industry, which incidentally was notorious for having multiple industry conclaves and seminars. He ‘pooh poohed ‘the idea of attending any such events ‘I don’t want to distribute my visiting cards to random managers’. Okay, I said. Let us try and see how wide and deep is your network. ‘Wide and Deep?’ was the question from my coachee. Yes I replied. A network has to be wide and deep. You need to know people from different domains and some of them should be known to you well, for you [or them] to pick up the phone and ask for a favour.

I then explained how young college drop out Bill Gates landed a contract to do the disk operating system for the to be launched IBM PC in the year 1981.

The legend has it that Bill Gates’ mother Mary Gates who was a very successful banker was also on the governing board of a not-fo- profit organization called United Way. There she got to meet a diverse set of business leaders. One of them was a senior manager from IBM, John Akers. It was John Akers who asked Mary Gates what her son was up to. ‘Having dropped out of college, he is in the garage doing something he says is called ‘software’’ was the answer from Mary Gates. ‘Well we may need folks like him. Ask him to come to New York and I will get him to meet with our team that is working on a new IBM personal  computer’ said John Akers. And as they say rest is history. When I checked last month Microsoft’s market cap was almost 30 times that of IBM. And it all started with the MS DOS that Microsoft developed for IBM PC in 1981. And the introduction happened through the network of Mary Gates, who had a wide and deep network.

If you want to build your personal brand to achieve a greater level of success, networking is not something that should be ‘pooh poohed’. List fifteen people who you think are in your network, who you can call for a spot of help. Are they very ‘self similar’: same kind of education, same kind of job? Then your network is not wide enough. Time to go out there and expand the network. Join a local running club. Go play golf. Join a not-for-profit. Be active in your alma mater. There are so many ways to expand your network. But remember, you need to be sincere about what you are doing. Showing up one day only to disappear for the next year is not the right way. Happy networking. Happy personal brand building.