I'm about a third of the way through the book, "The Virtual Handshake" (see blog)
by David Teten and Scott Allen, and I find myself bookmarking
practically every other page because the book is full of practitioner
info, research studies in universities, stories, and unique
perspectives from different walks of life.
The topic of the book is opening doors and closing deals online. The book is not targeted at programmers. In the words of the authors:
Our
book is particularly relevant to people in roles that depend on
relationships: professional investors seeking deals, CEOs seeking
business partners, investment bankers seeking capital, salespeople
seeking customers, and jobseekers searching for their dream job.
"Quality
or Quantity?" is the title of a section in the book concerning personal
relationships and networks. This section captures a key value
proposition to online technology use. The closing paragraph of the
section reads:
"Technology now allows social
networks to make a quantum leap forward in breaking the old trade-off
between quality and quantity - you can now increase both, without
compromising either one," says Contact Network Corporation CEO Geoffrey
Hyatt. Learning to write more effective e-mails will help you increase
the Strength of your ties, without spending too much time on those
relationships. Building a large mailing list similarly allows you to
increase the Number without spending significant additional time. Using
technology to expand your number of weak ties is a theme we will return
to repeatedly in the book.
Does it sound unbelieveable? To be frank, it does on the surface. How one get more of both quality and quantity?
Although not a perfect analogy, I liken the virtual handshake
concept to a virtual marble concept that engineers used when inventing
the concept of error correcting codes (e.g., Reed Solomon codes) for
encoding compact disk information. Fill up a container, say a jar, with
marbles. There will be a limit to the number of marbles that can get
into the jar. There will be spaces in-between the marbles that
constitute deadloss space. One can get more virtual marbles
into the space by mathematically allowing the marbles to merge, blend
and overlap given certain rules. As it turns out, under certain
conditions, there is not a tradeoff between space limitations and the
number of marbles one can get into the space (there is a new
mathematical bound of course). You can get more of everything by
eliminating and better understanding the structure of deadloss space.
The rules have changed in some sense.
Concepts are remotely similar (but much more tangible) in the book
"The Virtual Handshake". How can you increase quality and quantity of
contacts? Though technology. The email concept above is just one of the
concepts that may work for you. Or if one is not comfortable with that
concept, perhaps there may be twist of the concept or another concept
in the book that works for you.
I'll be blogging more about this great book. As a person who hates
blogging and email to some extent (this may be a surprise to people),
my next topic (Internet Stop 2) will likely highlight some differences
between offline and online networking. Stay tuned.
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