Old School Techniques in the Connected Economy
Posted by Puneet Tandon in Networking on September 30, 2010
Despite the pervasiveness of LinkedIn, various Internet tools, and entrepreneurial and startup mixers that are held in every city, people tend to forget the power of networking in “Professional Groups.”
It is extremely critical to attend local professional interest groups to develop your contact base and open up doors for new opportunities, even if you’re employed. Of course this even more important if you’re employed. In the summer of 2002, while I was running my nonprofit, I was debating whether I should look for more stable employment or continue to bootstrap my venture. I literally scoured the Boston Globe online under the “Events” section within a now defunct area called “Digital Mass.” I made a note of every relevant professional group meeting taking place in the next three weeks and made sure to block off my calendar in order to attend them.
In the process, I attended a meeting of the Boston E-learning Society, a nonprofit group which at the time was dedicated to connecting professionals and individuals with an interest in and experience with e-learning. My prior work at Mainspring, a strategy consulting firm, had given me a significant amount of exposure to the field as I had helped to incubate a new e-learning division for one of country’s oldest publishers. More importantly, it had given me a platform of conversation that I could use at the meeting.
One trick to making an effective impact at networking functions is to arrive early when there are no more than just a handful of folks in attendance. Why is this important? First of all, you can make the maximum impact with the group’s organizers and present yourself in a more extensive and detailed light than if you are making rounds at a cocktail hour where everyone is simply paying attention to the food and alcohol. Secondly, and just as importantly, the organizers will most likely know some regular attendees at their meetings with whom they recommend you speak.
This is exactly what happened to me at the Boston E-Learning Society Meeting. I arrived early and met the group’s organizing committee, and in particular, an extremely talented ex-publishing marketing manager by the name of Phyllis. Phyllis had become an independent consultant and in the process was very well connected in the industry. We engaged in a discussion around the publishing industry and the competitive dynamics that were taking place. I could tell that I had made a good impression on her as she offered to introduce me to a few of the more notable attendees who were registered to come. I casually mentioned that I was thinking of entering the publishing field directly and she took it from there.
She gave me the name and contact information of a former colleague of hers at Houghton Mifflin. She also made it a point to tell me that she rarely refers anyone, so clearly I had done my job and made a strong impression. When I called the contact to introduce myself with her name, I was given immediate attention. The contact, Andy, a Marketing Director at Houghton Mifflin, happened to be a former colleague of Phyllis’s. He asked about my relationship with Phyllis and how I must have impressed her in order to get a referral. Moreover, he mentioned, “Well Puneet, your timing couldn’t be better. I’m just filing to get approval on a new job requisition reporting in my department.” While I did not receive an offer through the interview process, I learned the value of taking an initiative at the Boston E-Learning Society meeting, without which, I would have never uncovered this opportunity.
Keep a Daily Diary
Posted by Puneet Tandon in Career Development on September 27, 2010
Maintain a daily diary within your current job. Every meeting you attend, every project on which you work, and every analysis that you complete, should have some mention in your daily diary. You simply need to capture a few bullet points at the end of each day in a MS Word document.
I actually wrote down positive feedback from people regarding my comments during meetings. This is critical for several reasons. One, it serves as a great reference as you prepare for your manager reviews. You have the input and evidence easily accessible to refer to as you complete your review. Second, and more importantly, as I had alluded to earlier, it provides you a place to capture the portfolio of new skills that you are developing in your internship.
You should be tailoring your existing experience to ideally give you the skills and bullet points on your resume for your ideal role or your next one Let’s take Sony as an example. Suppose that you are interested in working in corporate strategic planning at Sony. Presumably this role encompasses market research and segmentation, customer penetration strategy, financial modeling around growth opportunities, and significant interaction with cross functional teams. Now your focus over the next year should be to obtain each and every one of those prerequisite skills on your resume through the course of your work.
One of the most disciplined methods to keep track of this is through a daily diary. Be thinking of how you can reposition a meeting, project, or analysis to align with your fulltime tasks. For example, if you are interviewing potential customers for a new product launch and are capturing that data, you most certainly can develop market segments from the output. Even if your sample set of interviewees is already within a predetermined segment, you may be able to find out more information about them that would allow you to segment them even further. This can be placed on your resume. The same can be said for the next bullet point and so on. The daily diary allows you to encapsulate all of these skills to help build your new resume and get you one step closer to being on a closed interview invite list or to having your initial contact responded to from the target organization.
I did just that at Genuity, a pubic telecommunications services firm at which I was a Product Manager. As a product manager, one is exposed to not only a variety of functions and tasks, but also to a multitude of groups within the organization. Incidentally, my daily diary provided some excellent content for business school essays. However, the real value from the diary came from my ability to sift through its content years later and help re-position my resume and create new bullet points depending upon the job or role to which I was applying. Take the time to make a daily professional diary and you won’t regret it.
Sometimes Saying “No” Pays Great Dividends
Posted by Puneet Tandon in Networking on September 27, 2010
During the business boom of the dot-com period, I interviewed with a number of firms after graduate school. One in particular was a startup company called Edu.com, which was founded and populated by a number of young business school alums. Along with receiving an offering from a strategy consulting firm, I received an offer from Edu.com for a position within business development. I debated the offer and eventually decided that consulting was the best option for me at that point in time.
The difficult part of turning down this offer was that I had a wonderful conversation with the head of business development at the time, and in fact felt a strong connection with him. I made the call and turned down the offer, but did something else, uncharacteristic for me at the time. A few days later, I called up and spoke to “Prakash,” and said that while it was a tough decision to turn down the offer, I was actually interested in keeping in touch with him. I said “I know this sounds unusual, but I felt that we had quite a bit in common professionally, and I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again.” As a turns out, Prakash stated that he kept his professional and personal life very separate and would be happy to stay in touch with me.
While it took nearly a year for us to finally meet, we actually developed a good relationship. Our wives met for dinner, and Prakash introduced me to some of his other friends from business school, with whom I developed some peripheral relationships. Prakash happened to be very well respected not only amongst his classmates, but also amongst the entrepreneurial startup community in the area. So knowing him, and mentioning his name on occasion to people actually opened doors for me. He introduced me to other people as the years went on and helped open doors for me. My decision on applying to business school, where to apply, and which school to select were areas where Prakash was a terrific mentor. Had I not taken the bold step of reaching out to someone I had initially turned down, I would not have built new contacts or a new friendship.
Manage Your Networks or They’ll Manage You
Posted by Puneet Tandon in Networking on September 25, 2010
While it’s been overstated that networking is the key to finding a gig in this environment, not enough has been said about how to manage your existing contacts and friends to help your search.
It’s critical that you educate and manage your networks within companies. Every contact, with whom you have a close relationship, should be aware not only of the type of positions within firms that interest you, but also how he or she may best of use to you. Oftentimes, one of your contacts may say, “Well, I don’t know anybody in Strategic Planning (or insert any department of your choice here) at Pepsi.” Your response to this should not be one of defeat, yet one of further probing and exploration. You should follow up to this comment with, “Well who exactly do you know and in what department?” Then educate the person as to why that other department may still be useful to you. Explain to your contact that his or her contact may have exposure to folks in the Strategic Planning department. Moreover, don’t rely on your contact to go and have a conversation and probe his or her contact for you.
For example, if you friend knows someone in the Finance department who works with the Strategic Planning team, don’t have your friend talk to his finance contact asking for contacts into Strategic Planning for you. Get your friend to set up a conversation between you and the finance contact, after which you can plug the finance contact for referrals into Strategic Planning. This way you have also developed a more close relationship with the Finance contact, have more closely controlled how you are positioned, and can better navigate through Pepsi as opposed to being a few degrees away from your target group.
In conjunction with managing your networks, it’s absolutely critical that you educate them as well. They should be keenly aware of your elevator pitch and should be able to succinctly deliver it to another person for you in an introductory email or conversation. If your contact doesn’t understand how you want to be positioned, or worse off, positions you incorrectly, he or she has proved to be detrimental as opposed to beneficial.
This is exactly what happened to me with my foray into New Balance nearly a decade ago. My friend Steve, is an ecommerce software developer at New Balance and has had some periphery encounters with people in various Strategic Marketing and Business Development Groups at the company. When I told him I was interested in a Business Development type role, he said he knew some folks and could certainly talk to them for me. While this was positive, the mistake I made was not educating and managing Steve as he presented my background. He said to his contacts, “This is my friend Puneet who’s very good at market research.”
I was very unhappy when I learned that Steve said that. Immediately his contacts thought that I was simply a research professional without any ability to strike partnerships or any other strategic capabilities. Moreover, even if they got my resume, in their minds they have the strong perception that I’m a market research person since they received that message from Steve, despite my resume demonstrating that I had other valuable skills. Naturally, I did not get called in for an interview. First impressions are critical and this was one first impression that I could not change. Had I managed Steve better, and educated him on my elevator pitch, or better yet provided him one, I would have had a better shot at coming into the company.
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