When Women In Information Technology wanted to empower its members to have better working relationships with colleagues, this organization invited David Nour, managing partner of The Nour Group, to be a guest speaker. At the time, Siemens, Marriott, and IBM have also sought out his consulting services. Nour's firm helps organizations develop relationship-centric goals and objectives, as well as to train people to improve their human interaction skills. Nour calls this more sophisticated, version of social networking relationship economics. In fact, John Wiley & Sons published Nour's book, Relationship Economics.
Nour's work goes beyond how to leverage existing relationships to get things done. He's working on a concept called influencing without authority which would enable line managers to get help from their vice president's team. Nour's consulting work also extends to e-social networking. He has written a guide to LinkedIn and is taking Second Life very seriously.
Nour has racked up some relationship economics kudos. In 2005 he was named to Georgia Trend’s 40 Under 4", Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Up and Coming and Who’s Who in Atlanta Technology Awards. Articles about Nour have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Recently, enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Nour to learn more about how IT professionals can apply some of his relationship economics methodologies. Here's what he had to say:
EL: Why should professionals, such as CIOs, be concerned about relationship economics?
DN: I recently spoke before 200 people at the National Association of State CIOs about the strategic value of social networking. Of the 50 state CIOs in the room, the 40 who I spoke to told me that they had never thought about social networking as relationship economics.
Specifically, relationship economics is the art and science of relationships. It can help you, as an individual, as a team, or as an organization more efficiently and more proactively to identify, to build nurture, and to leverage relationships to get things done. Improving other people's lives provides the foundation for this process. It can yield a real economic outcome you can quantify. For example, on any given day at work, you could talk with 50 different people. You don't have the bandwidth to invest in all of your relationships equally. How do you prioritize which relationships you want to invest in?
EL: What are the different ways people approach social networking?
DN: I talk about three types of networkers: givers, takers, and investors. Givers do things out of altruism. Takers reach out to you when they want something. For example, if a CIO is looking for a job, he or she will actively network to find influential people who can open doors. Once this CIO gets a job, you might never hear from this person again. If you hear from someone like this several years later, don't be afraid to call them on it by saying, 'When was the last time you called to see how I was doing?' The investor takes the time to cultivate a relationship. We call this relationship currency because you give your knowledge, your talents, your time, or your access to an influential resource.
Although many people might invest in a relationship, they face the challenge of how to identity, to measure, and to leverage about investments. Relationship economics provides the discipline process they need as a relationship investor.
You wouldn't pick a stock in a company because you liked the logo design. Most people walk into a relationship blindly. They do very little due diligence of the relationship bank. They also do a terrible job leveraging those relationships to get things done.
EL: How can CIOs begin to nurture relationships with leaders in business units?
DN: I've written about the top 10 reasons why most networking doesn't work, and what five relationship-centric mistakes most executives make. CIOs, like other professionals, need to realize that relationships aren't a standalone concept. Instead, relationships can enable things. Most relationship development doesn't work because it's haphazard and reactive. You don't go through the process of what's your purpose for doing this. You don't ask yourself these questions: What are my goals? What's my plan for nurturing, building, and investing in this relationship?
You have to first identify the purpose for your relationship-centric goals. Why are you trying to build relationships? For example, you might say: 'I need to improve the relationship with a divisional leader who is the biggest customer for IT.' Now you have a purpose.
EL: What questions should CIOs be asking themselves?
DN: When faced with a challenge, most CIOs ask the following questions: What do we need to do? How are we going to do it? What's the process?
On the other hand, they also need to ask about who they need, who they know, and how do they leverage both of their internal and external relationships to get things done. How do they go about doing this? They can start by identifying what some of those relationship-centric goals. They need to start identifying for what purpose, and for what goals -- as an individual, as a team and as an entire organization -- they need to nurture and to build those relationships.
We call these resources pivotal contacts, those individuals who can help you to accelerate and to achieve your goal. They've walked in your shoes, and might have experienced the pitfalls you might encounter. Many CIOs come into a new role or into a new project thinking they can reinvent the wheel. If you start by asking whom do I need as pivotal contacts, you have just saved yourself a lot of time, resources, and wasted cycles.
EL: Why do most professionals have a terrible time reaching out to people whom have played an important role in some aspect of their life?
DN: We operate under the premise that most people do a terrible job getting their arms around and analyzing their existing or past relationships. For example, you spent several years working with key executives at a Fortune 100 company. Why can't you use them as your own board of advisers? I'm still in touch with my college professors, and people at IBM I worked with 20 years ago. Most people make the big mistake of allowing those incredibly valuable relationships to fade. Most people also do a terrible job of analyzing and measuring their relationship bank.
EL: Why do a few people benefit from professional organizations, while many others see them as a waste of time?
DN: Many professionals don't think about return on involvement. They miss the best asset in their portfolio of relationships. Diversity! It has nothing to do with how many people you know. It has everything to do with how diverse your portfolio of relationships is. If you keep hanging out with the same few people you've always known, that's about as far as you're going to get.
You can determine quality by business stature, rank, and influence. Some people call this influence map. You need to focus on constantly raising the bar on the business stature of the people you engage. This process is key to that relationship bank analysis.
Some people belong to several professional organizations, but they seldom show up for a meeting, or they show up when the program is just starting. If they showed up an hour before the event started, they would've had the chance to engage the audience that's there. Most people gather for two reasons: content and community. Ask yourself: Why am I going there? What am I going to get out of it? Who else is going to be there? How can I get the most out of this investment of time and effort? Most people show up, put on a badge, and then wonder why they aren't getting anything out of it.
EL: So how what can you do to get more out a professional membership or a professional venue?
DN: You need to pick fewer organizations, and get deeply involved with then. As a CIO, you can take a leadership role by getting your team involved on a subcommittee to research a particular topic. You need to do this without a hidden agenda. If you work hard, the spotlight will shine on you. The well-established people in the organization will thank you for your contribution. They will want to know more about you and, in turn, you will get to know them. An officer might even ask you to be on the organization's board of directors.
EL: What is your feeling about Web-based social networking?
DN: We researched 400 different social networking sites in nine different categories. Social networking technologies have the potential of defining the basic tenets of business-to-business interaction moving forward. For example, LinkedIn has 15 million members from 150 different industries. Some senior executives of Fortune 500 companies have profiles on LinkedIn.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were 200 auto makers in the U.S. E-social networking today faces a similar challenge of too many players with little value-added differentiation. Besides LinkedIn, you have Zoom Info, Spoke, JigSaw, and Visible Path. Some of these companies have clever niche applications or tools, but a tool doesn't make a platform and a platform doesn't make a company. Eventually, we'll see either a mass consolidation of them or their demise. Some of these companies were poor investments. Kleiner Perkins put a lot of money in to Visible Path. This company has had about four CEOs, and has changed business models several times. Venture capital firms can't continue to throw money at companies that don't have a viable revenue model.
EL: How do you feel about Second Life as a networking vehicle?
DN: This interesting one will allow people to collaborate. That's the real value of Second Life. The technology has moved from the gaming industry to the business use of building avatars and having an alter ego. Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, pulled the plug on its big moneymaking porno offering, and is now focusing on business users, such as IBM and Xerox. These companies want to leverage Second Life for things such as simulation-based training. Members of Generation Y won't focus very well if they have to sit through a 14-page case study analysis. However, they will get involved in an online simulation. Armed with a library of business scenarios, you can change that simulation and put them in difficult situations, almost like what medical professionals so through in surgical simulations.
Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
