Basic Assumption #2: Generating Referrals is Your Work

The second assumption, flowing from the first, is that generating referrals is your work.

I can't count the number of people who have said, I can't network because I have work to do. Well, I have news for those people. Unless you're a hermit vegetating in a cave, connecting is our work.

As Keith Ferrazzi said during a recent talk, it's with and through people that we accomplish things.

My first graduate school advisor said once, when we were discussing faculty unionizing, "I succeed by my wits," that is by his own efforts. Well, I didn't say so right then, because it would have been rude, I didn't think he was right then, and I still don't think he would be right, now.

He never succeeded by his wits alone, which is what he meant. He had people all along the way that helped him. Parents, professors, guidance counselors, mentors, etc. We are not alone.

No one succeeds by their wits alone.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writers. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

Basic Assumption #1: Your Business is Based on Referrals

The first assumption of referral Based Branding is that your business is based on referrals and word of mouth. America is basically a referral economy built on trust.

I suppose if you're Boeing, which sells jets to the federal government, maybe not. But just about everybody else has a referral based business. That is, the success of your business is based on people referring other people to you.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.The

Generosity: Adam Smith was right!

We're working toward a theory of connecting that, if followed, will deliver more result than traditional networking approaches.

So far we have established networking as connecting, and the process guided by the mental metaphor of farming rather than hunting.

Adam Smith is widely quoted for the concept of the invisible hand. Many have interpreted this to justify their primal urges to acquire money and wealth. Greed is good, they think Smith said. Go ahead, steal as much as you can. Run over everybody in the process. Manipulate and abuse everyone around you to get what you want.

Here's what Smith, as quoted in Wikipedia, actually wrote:

Many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Sorry, I couldn't find the page reference when I needed it, but you can go to the Wikipedia article and follow a link to the complete text.

What Smith actually meant was that people, acting in their own self interest, but from a spirit of generosity and good will, will actually do what is best for the whole society.

It doesn't say that greed is good. It says that people acting in their own interest can do the good of society.

What this means for us as connectors, is that we need to reach out to people with their good in mind. If we help them we help ourselves and we help everybody. If the invisible hand led us to do what is in the interest of others, we are acting in our own self-interest.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

A better metaphor: Farming.

There's a better metaphor than hunting. It's farming. Farming staking out the ground you will farm, it's deciding what to plant, it's preparing the soil, it's sowing the seeds, irrigating, nurturing, fertilizing, shaping, thinning, replanting if necessary, and finally reaping.

When you've done it well and worked hard, oh what delicious stuff you have reaped. You might even get some volunteers in there, plants that got dropped by a bird or seeds that came in with the wind and took root in the fertile soil you provided them, that you didn't expect but taste wonderful.

When you hunt, you manipulate and exploit. You take what nature has worked hard and you grab it and take it away. You don't give back. You don't improve the environment in which your enterprise lives.

When you farm you don't get food right away. You build a world in which your crops can flower and prosper, and you along with it. When you farm you realize the connections to the world around you and the connections between the elements of that world. When you connect, you build an enterprise. You develop people around you. You making them better.

Sure, if Peter finds a customer at his networking event, great. But if he doesn't no big deal. I wasn't the expectation anyway.

More about this next time.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

Mental Metaphors Continued: Hunting

Based on my observations over nearly 30 years of attending networking events, the predominant mental metaphor which drive people to these events is a hunting mentality. Mental metaphors help us understand what we should be doing in various situations.

This metaphor has been hardwired into the oldest part of our brains. It's firmly attached in there by a thread of emotion that tells us, if you don't find food for today we will have to go hungry. It calls up the image of some fur-wearing, slack-jawed, dull-eyed, mangy hair looking humanoid, not unlike the cave men in the Geico commercials, launching a spear against a woolly mastodon more than 10 times his size.

Take an attendee at one of these meetings. Call him Peter. Peter is probably send there, if Peter works for a company, buy a hunter-oriented boss, call him Stanley, who has the same mental metaphor that defines what Peter should be doing as Peter does. Peter wants to find that customer in the room who will buy his widgets so he can eat. Peter could just as easily be Petra.

Peter arrives at the venue, parks, straightens his tie and smooths his suit, signs in and puts his name tag on. It could be one of those adhesive things that always come off after 30 minutes of handshaking or a pin-on that stays but puts a tiny hole in your suit coat, mounts his spear, or his cards, and girds for battle.

Peter sights a target, greets this person with a firm handshake, a smile, and good eye contact, just like he's supposed to, tells them what he does and how his product can help theirs, listens to his target's spiel, exchanges his card for the target's, and ends the conversation with something lame like "Well, if you ever need widgets, give me a call," and goes on to the next.

As the event closes, he reconciles himself to the fact that no one fell all over themselves to get his product and tries to figure out what he's going to tell Stanley in the morning when Stanley asks him, "Well, Peter, how did it go? Any sales? Any leads at least. You know that event cost us $200 and it would be nice to show management that we got something out of it."

Or, if Peter is self-employed, he's going through the same self-talk with the maniac he works for--himself.

What a nightmare. It doesn't have to be this way.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

Mental metaphors

Our mental metaphors describe, define, and control what we do. Metaphors are direct comparisons between two things without using "like" or "as."

If you use "like" or "and" it's a simile, not a metaphor. You may hear someone say about a young girl, "She's such a peach," or about a serial killer, "That guy is a monster." They're using metaphors. If they had said, "Her personality is like a peach," or, "It's almost as if the guy is some kind of monster or something," they would have been using similies. (Someone said a similie is a smile with two eyes in it.) Metaphors are much more powerful.

In both cases, the speakers don't think the girl she's talking about is big delicious fruit. Or that the man looks like Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Rather they're making comparisons to elucidate meaning. These are metaphors that people use to communicate how they feel toward another person's personality.

When we do things, we may not be aware of these metaphors. They don't say, they're going to do "X" because if forms with their mental metaphor. These things are unconscious. We might not even be aware of them, but they're there, and they're powerful, and we can figure them out when we look at the things that we do every day.

Too many people, when they go "networking" are using the wrong mental metaphor, and it guides them down the wrong path. I'll go into it more next time.

I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It's all about Connecting

Networking, with Keith Ferrazzi, is a misnomer. It's been overused and overly abused. What we mean is really connecting. We're connecting with others to increase the space we occupy in the world. That's all for now.

Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.

It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my writing go. For my ideas on writing go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.