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Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder - 025 Gordon Curtis: Well Connected

11/09/12 • 47 min

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Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters
.

In today’s uncertain business environment, now more than ever, the best way to succeed is through partnerships—with colleagues, with vendors, with competitors, with anyone who might share a common goal and can help build mutual success.

Such partnerships require strong, meaningful relationships. In other words, these relationships require that you become well connected.

We asked Gordon Curtis, author of Well Connected to join us today to discuss his Right Person/Right Approach to social networking.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview...

From the show

As an executive transition coach for maybe more years than I care to share; over 18; I’ve helped hundreds, upwards to a thousand, clients advance their careers and businesses through the traditional teaching workings of inner work of assessment and integration of skills and interest values and experience but my focus has always been to then shift to the outer market facing actualization and work of identifying and approaching decision makers and what I refer to as critical enablers who are instrumental in accelerating client career business objectives to reality.

I’ve facilitated and witnessed thousands of key introductions and always been fascinated with the networking patters of success and true mutual value creation and I’ve also been amazed at the amount of on and offline social networking time and energy people expend with little or nothing to show for it. I always felt the vast majority of people walked away from networking exchanges on or off line leaving so much value off the table.

Over time in this analysis, a very distinct pattern clearly emerged of the seven elements or variables that I felt could easily be replicated for predictable exponential mutual benefit and exchange. I found the most successful networking exchanges all contained these elements and the less productive ones one or all of the elements of the seven were missing.

...a lot of reasons why this book is referred to; Well Connected and the sub title is A Genuinely Unconventional Approach to Building Genuine and Effective Business Relationships; the unconventional part about it is that I found that whoever dies with the most connections doesn’t necessarily win.

What I found is so much of the value that I received in my business came from a very select group of people.

To elaborate a little bit on that value, that sense that so much was left on the table came from countless comments from clients. How’d it go? They’d say well, we hit it off and promised to stay in touch but there was nothing to show for it. So I’m really interested in having measurable results that are true advances in my client’s objectives.

One of the biggest disconnects is someone might be lined up in all of these seven elements but if we’re not articulating exactly what it is that we’re looking for in language that they truly get, we’re often going to walk away with both parties frustrated because there’s not enough value to exchange so that gets right in to chapter one which is Articulating One’s Objectives.

If someone says I’m looking for a job, if you have any ideas let me know. Obviously I don’t know. I can’t help you. If you know of any funders, let me know. That could be a zillion different funders. Or I’m looking for a really good java programmer. That still narrows the field down to a million and on and on for every business objective.

Exactly. And that’s one of the key things that I try to accomplish in Well Connected; take the abstract and turn it in to the truly practical and relevant to each individual in to an application that one could confidently say I can do this.

If you do what I call a diagnosis of their needs and analyzing all of the different drivers to their situation, their busin...

11/09/12 • 47 min

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