Conversation

I love this picture of my mother, Beatrice, and her best friend, Ethel. I took this picture sometime in the 1960s or 1970s at our dining room table in Sacramento. That's my dad's hand in the foreground. My mother and Ethel were both school teachers and they were always talking about education, politics, and the system. It is such a great picture -- of two people talking and listening and sharing. It is the essence of human connection. I'd much rather do this than network, wouldn't you?

Resources

I give a popular workshop called "I Hate Networking!" in the San Francisco Bay Area. To get the blog started, I'm going to list some of my resources that others find helpful.

The first of these are some online communities you might like to check out: LinkedIN, which I belong to; Bay Area Link Up, which I also belong to; Ryze; Friendster; Tribe; My Space.

Networking, when done well and done right, is about developing relationships. It's about connecting and listening, and helping out. It's about exchanging value. I'll talk more about these ideas as the blog develops, but for now, think of networking as listening and paying attention -- not as selling and spewing your 30 second elevator speech.