Jeffrey Pfeffer: belief

Transcript context

…Great success from networking. Well done. When people hear about networking, it just feels like you said, very cringe. I don't want to go to these networking events and try to pretend to talk and care about people. Do you have any advice for just how to make networking feel less cringy? One of the exercises I give my students is I say, write a list of 10 people who, if you knew them and if they knew you, would be important for whatever you're trying to accomplish in your career. So maybe you're trying to get into biotech, you need to know 10 executives in biotech or whatever. Make a list of 10 people. Then for each person figure out how you are going to meet them. By the way, not necessarily in a network event. Maybe you want to do what John Levy does, which is hold dinners. In which by the way, the guests do the cooking, which is a very interesting idea. That of course taps into the IKEA effect. You always like something better if you participate in creating it. Maybe you want to hold dinners, maybe you want to try to reach out to them at lunch. Maybe you want to reach out to them and say, here's an article I think you'd be interested in. Here is somebody who I think you'd benefit from meeting. So recently, I'm not a particularly good networker, though I'm better I guess than some people. I recently met Esther Wojcicki, I'm sure I killed her name. She's considered the grandmother of Silicon Valley. She's Susan Wojcicki's mother. And she is interested in depression, particularly depression among teenagers. And I said, you should know Leanne Williams, who's in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Department, who has done probably 300 articles on depression and has invented something which is called Precision Psychiatry. So I connected them to each other. Just send an email. I think you ought to know each other. They got together. I get credit for knowing people and connecting them, but I also benefit them. Leanne needs to raise money. Esther's got money. Esther needs to understand the cutting edge research in depression and biomarkers of depression, which is what Leanne's specialty is, so they benefit. So this is not some icky thing. This is connecting people who benefit from being connected. That touches on something you teach in the book is, in your networking you want to become a broker, you want to be central. That's kind of what you want to work on. Can you talk a bit about what that means?…

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