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It’s not just who you know…
By peter | Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
We’ve been discussing the issue highlighted by this posting internally. I think that the question boils down to this:Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?
In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…
It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual – eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?
Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.
Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.
Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.
Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers – say a case at a time – and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.
However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.
These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.
I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.
This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships – it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Organisations & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “It’s not just who you know…”
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peter this is absolutely right. i can not agree more with you. in the example of banking i think the future will be about making your client aware of all the skills and know how within your bank. sales have relationship but client will be allowed to look directly in to your bank via phone web or something else. It is how you can present all and most of services available within the bank to your client the way forward. the clients know their needs. in order to cut the adverse selection you sales has to be able to show all services available and direct client to the appropriate people that owns the skills set need, as fast and as effective as possible (time will be a crucial element)
considering knowledge as proprietary will increase adverse selection and personal profit of someone at the expense of the majority. i would call it the dark side of globalization, some one/some group of people has a knowledge and will affect(take profit) the rest of society without the rest of society knowing about it till is too late(16th century is full of such examples……….)
lets leverage each one knowledge for the absolute value creation (absolute value creation = value creation for society in the long run)
trampoline is embracing the concept of sharing core know-how of individuals for absolute value creation (it has not to be necessarily $$$)
Roberto you have hit several nails on their respective heads.
Secret socieities are very private means of preserving artifiicial scarcity, through obfuscation, of whatever it is that those people trade in.
Class-based constructs like nobility are very public means of preserving artifiicial scarcity through the retention of economic power backed by violence and slightly more subtle societal pressures like religon.
Were we members of those societies we would quickly find that they have their own internal truly social networks where the rules of “how” are just as important as “who”.
Everyone within the right social set may have known lord so-and-so, but if he held the the contracts to specific trade routes then who he was willing to do new business with was the important thing.
This is valuable and good, exactly what we discussed at the NYC Gurteen Knowledge Cafe last week [November 08]. Visible nodes give off the most energy and attract more of the same.