Old School Business Networking

An amazing article was recently published by Katherine Rosman of the Wall Street Journal. In “What Facebook Can’t Give You: Over 52 Years, These Men Have Evolved Into Movers and Shakers—Together,” Rosman writes about The Wednesday 10, a group of men who gathered every Wednesday in Manhattan. She opens the piece this way:

Before there was Facebook, there was the Wednesday 10.

In 1957, as men in their late 20s, they began meeting—initially over breakfast, then over dinners held at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel or at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. Few were born to means. Many were sons of immigrants. Most went on to become luminaries in their fields—presidents of television networks, partners at banks, editors of magazines.

The article (take the time to read it!) goes on to show how their trusted relationships evolved into invaluable business relationships, and she goes into anecdotes about the group and her time meeting with them. It’s an extraordinary testament to what a small group of trusted relationships can do, when cultivated and put to work, with ambition but also with discretion.

These are the kind of trusted relationships we want Jute to help people to build.

We live in a time of hype about the power of social networks. We live and work in time where Facebook blurs the boundary between personal and professional relationships. But we can’t forget that Facebook also blurs the line between the people with whom you have close relationships, and the people you barely know. My family and closest friends can see pictures of my mountain biking trip, but so can some of my clients, and some people I barely remember from high school.

Today, people find their customers, clients, business partners and sometimes even their lovers online. In most cases, the people they meet online are strangers, who evolve into trusted relationships. On occasion, one person makes an email introduction because she thinks that other two people ought to know each other.

But rarely to we get to have a lot of insight into the close relationships of the people we already know. Rarely do we really know “who knows whom and how.” It’s not only that this is a tremendous amount of information to collect and remember, it is also a social challenge to ask people who they know and how well they know them. So we learn little bits and pieces at a time about who knows whom and how.

In amazing, influential networks like the Wednesday 10, one of the things they know is who knows whom, and how. At least, that tends to be the case. That information is shared throughout the group. Introductions are made, and new relationships blossom.

With the type of networks that we analyze and visualize with Jute, we can see large portions of people’s networks of relationships. This transforms the process of learning who knows whom and how from a lengthy, social process to a rapid, business intelligence process.

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, Jute is focused on trusted and often valuable relationships.

In a perfect world, the use of a tool like Jute could help people form thousands of groups of people who have an “enlightened self interest,” like our old friend the Swamp Fox talks about all the time.

Dec 07, 2009 | Categories: Blog, Jute NRM | Tags: business networks, old school business networking, process improvement, wall street journal, wednesday 10 | Leave A Comment »