Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert's Guide to Making Connections That Count - Hardcover

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Silicon Valley veteran Karen Wickre is the former Editorial Director at Twitter, where she landed after a decade-long career at Google. An advisor to startups and a lifelong information seeker, she is a member of the Board of Visitors for the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, and serves on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, the News Literacy Project, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has been a featured columnist for Wired.com and is a cofounder of Newsgeist, an annual conference fostering new approaches to news and information. She is the author of Taking the Work Out of Networking and lives in San Francisco.

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Taking the Work Out of Networking

Foreword

by Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

When you think “tech company,” images of computer networks or server rooms might pop into your head. Your first thought wouldn’t be about human beings supporting each other, chatting over coffee, or making new friends. Yet one of the biggest open secrets in Silicon Valley is that the tech industry runs on personal networks more than it does on computer networks.

Whether or not you work in tech, this tends to be true. Many of us struggle with the same questions about the people in our professional lives: How do you choose who to work with when you barely know a person? How do you know who to trust? How do you nurture something real when your “friends” number in the thousands?

Our relationships matter. They are more than just runways we light up to land a new job, or close a sale. Relationships are what make us human, in a world where machines often outdo us. So: what could be better than becoming more expert in how to connect with one another?

More than any other industry I’ve seen—and I’ve worked in government, for nonprofits, at a Fortune 500 corporation, in universities, plus cofounding a little company, and now as a startup investor—Silicon Valley knows how to answer these people questions. After a meeting at our venture capital fund, a visitor quipped, “For folks who invest in technology, you sure do talk a lot about people.”

The author of the book you’re now holding—a seasoned veteran of the tech industry—is therefore the perfect person to tell you how to build and keep your personal network. Based on her years at startups, big corporations, and long stints at both Google and Twitter, Karen Wickre has become an artisan of the Silicon Valley–style relationship building.

Karen’s keen eye for the tradecraft of building a relationship makes her, like me, a student of the details of how we meet one another, what we have in common. The venture capital fund I lead focuses on investing in the future of work; we obsess over these nuances. What’s the right subject line for an introduction email? (Pro tip: A one-word subject line like “Intro” will get lost in everyone else’s inbox.) When should you text someone versus sending them a DM? What’s the right order for several names in a calendar invitation?

As Karen will tell you, the tech world is famously fluid. There’s no harm and no foul in moving often between companies or roles. Because technologies themselves evolve so quickly, and because tech loves a good reinvention (and, yes, “disruption”), this constant motion makes people in tech rely on our connections—a network of allies, colleagues, and friends—more often and more deeply than we rely on our (current) employer.

This Silicon Valley way of building relationships is about giving: It’s about starting with what the other person needs, instead of what you want from them. It’s about planting seeds and getting to watch them bloom and outgrow you.

And networking in this way just feels more natural than pressing your business card into someone’s hands at a conference. It feels less slimy, less transactional, than the way most of us think of “networking.” It’s the opposite of the smile-and-look-over-your-shoulder move you see at party after party.

Karen’s book encapsulates this networking-by-nurturing approach, and offers nugget after nugget on how to make it your own. In this paperback edition, Karen also helps us navigate life inside a company. She reminds us that—as companies get bigger and the tidy org chart’s boxes and lines blur—we should be just as giving to our colleagues as we are to customer prospect or “contacts.”

Even if you’re obligated to go to a crowded work to-do, Karen can show you how to survive trauma-free. She turns being the quiet person at the party into an engine for earnest empathy. Or relishing the fact that social media works beautifully for people who would rather avoid chitchat. (On the internet, nobody knows you’re an introvert.) And I respect how candid she is about her age and the accumulated value of being in this game for many years.

Karen also understands that if we’re going to honor our relationships, we need to take care in how we relate to people outside of our insular communities. We can either fall into the addictive traps that many social networks—including some where Karen has worked!—set for us, or we can fashion our own way of doing things. We can choose to start by giving, limiting our exposure to the less generous, and getting “curious before furious.”

Read this book to see that forging connections isn’t about you “getting out there,” or forcing yourself to eat a meal with a stranger when you’d rather have time to think, or breaking your phobia of starting a conversation. It’s about us: about seeing the best in each other and showing each other that we notice.

When Karen asked me to write a few words for the book you’re holding now, I was unsure which of us was doing which the favor. Was she giving to me, or me to her? And then I remembered, as Karen herself points out, favors can be mutual.

At the risk of making your eyes roll, this is a book about networking. And even so, you’ll see the best of how to be human at work on every page. Nothing in our evolutionary programming—rooted in small tribes, knowing a few people deeply—has prepared us for the modern way we connect with each other. Silicon Valley has figured this secret out. This book shares that secret with you.

Roy Bahat

San Francisco

https://also.roybahat.com

Taking the Work Out of Networking

— 1 —

Unleashing the Introvert’s Secret Power

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.

—Susan Cain

The notion of networking as needing to be “on”—to shake every hand and capture every soul (for a minute, anyway)—is something we tend to think extroverts do well, and introverts—not so much. But when it comes to making connections, introverts may have the upper hand. You don’t have to change who you are or concoct a phony-feeling persona to meet people easily.

Let’s take a moment to review what “introvert” really means. In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed his theory of psychological types, noting that “Each person seems to be energized more by either the external world (extraversion) or the internal world (introversion).” Much more recently, the Urban Dictionary built on that idea: “Contrary to popular belief, not all introverts are shy. Some may have great social lives and love talking to their friends but just need some time to be alone to ‘recharge’ afterwards.”

That part about recharging is key. As Jung observed, extroverts typically gain energy from being in a crowd—a party, a game, concert, hopping from one gathering to another. Those of us at