"Sometimes miracles can be very small indeed. Sometimes as small as a pretty pin inside a broken box."
Marley Rides
Network selectively. Nothing says “business newbie” like shotgun networking. “You never know when someone might say yes” is marketing for dummies. Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them. Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer. Almost any profile is better than “anyone with a pulse.”
Rolodex power. Your power is almost directly proportional to the thickness of your Rolodex, and the time you spend maintaining it. Put bluntly the most potent people I've known have been the best networkers -- they "know everybody from everywhere" and have just been out to lunch with most of them.
One reason (among many) that women may well take over the world of "virtual enterprises" is that they seem to have a greater instinct for networking. And the unfettered-by-machismo males who have taken to networking will do better than those who shun it as "sissy stuff." But truth is, it has always been the age of "networkers"; and in an era where organizations depend more and more on tenuously connected outsiders to get the job done, it will only become so.
In Creativity Cafe, "Strangers are just friends who haven't yet met!"
The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.
Poverty, I realized, wasn't only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.
