A while back I was thinking about advice for younger professionals so I read a few networking books. (I thought I had read them a long time ago, but apparently I picked up the essence without ever actually reading the books. I corrected that.) Anyway, I highly recommend, Give and Take. A related book is The Heart and Art of NetWeaving which is similar to Give and Take, but not as good. However, it does have a few very good questions that can be used in business networking situations to get past superficiality and see how you can really help someone (my paraphrases/versions of the questions):
- Some version of, “How do you make money?” We all tend to ask people what they do, but if you can get to how they actually get paid it’s much more insightful.
- “What’s your biggest problem/obstacle/need/opportunity?” As I envision a networking situation, I might ask, “What’s the hardest thing about what you do?”
- “What’s your strategic/comparative/differential advantage (aka USP)?” Again, as I envision this, I would probably ask, “What makes you different from your competitors?”
He also throws in a personal one which is perfect for a financial planning discussion with clients or prospects: “If you weren’t doing what you are today, and money were no object, what would you be doing (and why)?” This is a more concrete version of, “What’s your passion?”
Both of those books reflect our approach to business: Be helpful to folks and you will be successful. I didn’t say be helpful to be successful. This isn’t mercenary or strictly reciprocal. But I think if you just try to maximize total societal outcomes it works. Let me see if I can explain that better. Some people see the pie size as fixed (and sometimes it is): if your portion is bigger, then mine is necessarily smaller. But often you can increase the size of the pie and everyone can win. I go a small step further and will have my piece a little smaller if it makes the whole pie much larger. Let me give a few examples:
- Fixed-pie situation: I can help someone, but they can help themselves/do it themselves as easily as I can (and we are equally busy, etc.). I’m not doing that. There is no net win. I lose, they win by exactly the same amount.
- Grow-the-pie situation: I can help someone easily and they can help me easily. We help each other and both win. This might be undefined. I might help a co-worker right now and then they sort of informally owe me a favor to be used later. This is usually really loose, but assuming conscientious folks, it works out fine. Outside the workplace this is just being neighborly.
No one is “keeping score” (at least I’m not) on any of that, but it probably all comes out at least even, but I think in aggregate everyone probably wins.
- Grow-the-pie with karma situation: I can easily help someone a lot but they almost certainly can’t do anything at all for me. I probably help anyway. Examples:
- Pro-bono advice for people with low incomes and trivial net worth, no connections to any prospective clients, etc.
- Coffee with young people needing career advice or connections, etc.
We’re pretty happy to help with all of that even though there is a small cost (primarily time) to us. The help to them is (hopefully) very large so the total pie is still bigger (our slice is a little smaller, but theirs is so much bigger it’s larger at the aggregate level).
Regarding, the fixed-pie vs. variable-pie views above, Paul Graham also wrote an excellent piece on this topic years ago. I highly recommend that motivated young people read this and internalize the key factors of leverage and measurement.