Last night I was the guest speaker at the inaugural Commercial Technology Network. CTN is "an initiative to foster collaboration between entrepreneurs, service providers, suppliers, and most importantly, customers."
I was asked to speak on how I came to be involved in the founding of mValent and the role networking played.
Besides the actual telling of the story (starting all the way back at my childhood entrepreneurial endeavours) I tried to stress the importance of individual relationship building and, in particular, individual contributions to one's "tribe", particularly through a willingness to share knowledge.
One of my heroes, Tom Peters, has long talked about loyalty to one's network and recently, I've been reading the Tim Sanders book Love is the Killer App where he argues that "nice, smart people can win business and influence friends by sharing generously."
It was certainly a great honour that Michael Kyriacou and the other members of the CTN steering committee asked me to give the inaugural talk. It seemed to be well received.
The original post was in the categories: entrepreneurship speaking but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.