Facebook Vs Facetime

Cynthia Carroll, a middle-aged American executive, came down for breakfast at the World Economic Forum in Davos at 7am. There was only one other person there: a white-haired stranger in his sixties. She sat down next to him. They chatted. Within a year the stranger, who turned out to be Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, had appointed her chief executive of Anglo-American, South Africa’s biggest company.

If we are to believe the statistics, such encounters make the business world go round. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 75 per cent of US executives land positions through contacts. The Law Society says that the British legal profession gains a fifth of its new business by referral or recommendation. And now networking seems to be intensifying and becoming more organised. The boom in online social networking (MySpace, facebook) is being shadowed by an explosion in online business networking (Linkedin, ecademy. com) and real-life business networks such as BNI, most of which are also online.

However, the explosion in contact-making has not necessarily corresponded with greater understanding of why networking is important and how to do it…

Read atTimes Online